"Because you, Mr. Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I'm a friend of Microsoft." – President Hu Jintao
"Leave it to open source hackers to debug and fix aging viral code so that it works correctly. And shame on the anti-viral industry, Kaspersky Lab in particular, for its attempts to deceive the public by passing off old code as something new." – Joe Barr
"I venture to guess that on smaller screen sizes, average consumers might not be wowed as much by the High Definition-DVD." – Peter M. Bracke
"Quite frankly, my direct comparison between the HD-DVD and standard DVDs of 'Phantom' was no contest -- the HD-DVD blew it out of the water. On a good home theater setup, it is would be hard for anyone to say HD-DVD doesn't offer a considerable improvement over standard DVD, at least with 'Phantom' as your demo material. 'Phantom's images are so smooth and free of any apparent imperfections that I almost couldn't believe it wasn't some new sort of CGI enhancement. (Maybe it is?) But however they did it, this film looks absolutely smashing, and is certainly worth watching just to see how good a HD-DVD disc can look." – Peter M. Bracke
"Much of the positive reaction [to Apple's Boot Camp], though, seems to stem from the mistaken supposition that having Windows on a Mac will make OS X look better by comparison, so people will flock to OS X. This is a dubious and dangerous conclusion for Mac heads to draw." – John C. Dvorak
"There's no disagreement about where we should end up - No DRM." – Lawrence Lessig
April 22nd, ’06
RIAA vs Hollywood In P2P Case
p2pnet
The RIAA has launched an anti-p2p file sharing lawsuit which, without exaggeration, threatens to take down the Net in the United States.
The case is Elektra v Barker, pending in Manhattan federal court before recently appointed Judge Kenneth Karas who is, by coincidence, a former federal prosecutor.
And because of its ramifications, it's possibly the most important file sharing case not only in America, but also in the world,
On first blush, there's nothing particularly different or unusual about it and in fact, it's the standard text the RIAA has churned out for more than 18,000 similar cases.
And it's not just because Tenise Barker, a young former social worker who lives in the Bronx, made a motion for dismissal - ie, she tried to stop the lawsuit on the grounds it would apply fully to ALL the RIAA's cases.
As Ray Beckerman says on his Recording Industry vs The People blog, it's because there are probably a dozen other cases pending in which the same motions have been made.
And that's set loud alarm bells clanging in Hollywood and elsewhere.
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), in its blind obsession with profit, has allowed greed to get in the way of intelligence, provoking a massive, unwinnable confrontation with Hollywood and its MPAA, the American Association of Publishers and the George W. Bush administration in the shape of America's self-described Top Cop, attorney general Alberto Gonzales, all of whom are lining up against not only Barker and all the other RIAA victims out there, but against the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the trade associations which represent most of the giants of the internet and computer industries, says Beckerman.
How did it come about?
Barker made a simple motion to dismiss the complaint, saying it didn't give her adequate notice of the infringement she's accused of.
In response, "the RIAA made its most shocking and outlandish arguments to date, claiming that merely having a 'shared files folder' on one's computer, and thereby 'making files available for distribution', is in and of itself a 'distribution' and a copyright infringement," says Beckerman, ie, "even if the recordings were legally obtained, and even if no illegal copies were ever made of them, the defendant is still guilty of copyright infringement".
The EFF, the Computer & Communications Industry Association and the US Internet Industry Association realized that if this "absurd argument" was accepted, the entire Net, "nothing more than a giant network of hyperlinks making files 'available'," might be forced offline in the US.
A win for the RIAA would have painful and significant repercussions for vested interests elsewhere in the world.
It was also abundantly clear that by herself, Tenerife Barker doesn't have the financial resources to protect the Net or to wage what would amount to a full scale, single-handed war against the rapacious corporate music industry, Recording Industry vs The People adds, so they were quick to file amicus curiae briefs pointing out to Judge Karas the absurdity of the RIAA's arguments.
Shortly after, the MPAA filed an amicus brief supporting the RIAA's argument, the American Association of Publishers requested permission to file a similar brief, and the United States Department of Justice wrote to the Court indicating the possibility of filing a "Statement of Interest".
And all to collect about $6,000 from a young woman who's now a nursing student and who lives in the Bronx?
Beckerman doesn't think so.
http://p2pnet.net/story/8552
CRIA Falling Apart
Drew Wilson
The CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) is going through hard times. It seems as though after several bold steps failed, the industry is paying the price for it. It may explain why their last press release was published on March 15.
The Sam Bulte incident last year may have kicked off the beginning of the Record industry troubles. As a result, an MP lost her seat and possibly her career. The incident was sparked shortly after the debate over two controversial reform bills ended.
The CRIA then conducted a study with Pollara. The CRIA then claimed that file-sharing is the reason for lost sales. The claims were then tarnished when the full report was publicly released. Michael Geist criticised the CRIA's claims. To his surprise, Pollara responded, defending the CRIA's interpretation. Michael Geist then responded to the criticism. Pollara's move may have backfired as it fuelled speculation about connections between the polling firm and the CRIA.
CRIA's Graham Henderson said that he would end the private copying levy. It's a move that would have many effects. The largest effect is the private copying collectives who receive the funds. One effect is the legal consequence of CD burning should the levy be removed. At the same time, Graham Henderson said "we don't want a private copying levy that, in effect, sanctions online theft." Many critics point out that this is confirmation that the private copying levy also applies to file-sharing.
The damage done by the two incidents ran far deeper then a PR setback. Shortly after, 6 of Canada’s leading record labels quit the CRIA. According to the article, "(CRIA is) looking out for their best interest, and their best interest is multinationals that are not Canadian," said Ric Arboit, president of Vancouver-based Nettwerk Records. Nettwerk is known for top Canadian artists (such as Sum 41, Swollen Members and Avril Lavign), Save the Music Fan and funding the defence of an RIAA lawsuit. Nettwerk Records, Aquarius Records, the Children's Group, Linus Entertainment, Anthem Records and True North Records (all class "B" labels) all quit with a letter that states, "It has become increasingly clear over the past few months that CRIA's position on several important music industry issues are not aligned with our best interests as independent recording companies".
The actions drew concern from the Copyright Board. According to Howard Knopf, a lawyer who defended against the CRIA, "The Board then did something quite interesting. Apparently out of concern for the Indies, it ordered CRIA to send notices to the Canadian Indies in the following language: “CRIA recently opted to change the scope of its representation of its members’ interests in the forthcoming proceedings before the Copyright Board dealing with CSI’ s proposed tariff for the reproduction of musical works by online music services. Subsequently, the Board ordered CRIA to advise you of the following:
1) In these proceedings CRIA has chosen to act only on behalf of (name of each member that CRIA represents).
2) As a result, CRIA will not be allowed to advance any argument or lead any evidence that relates to your situation in particular, or to the situation of any other member of CRIA that CRIA does not represent in these proceedings generally.”" The CRIA strongly opposed this.
Not only is the CRIA suffering a tremendous PR blow, but are also suffering commercial blows as well. One may wonder just how Canadian the CRIA is after so much Canadian music labels left. Michael Geist comments how the C is being removed from the CRIA. He even cites these incidents while talking about Canada's 'cultural deficit'.
With so much ailing the CRIA, it likely is the reason why the CRIA has been so quiet lately on the PR front. It's likely that the CRIA can't do much except go quiet and heal from this multiple disaster. Perhaps the last thing the CRIA wants to hear is 'MC Lars - Download This Song' at this point in time.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1154
In Moscow, Protest Over State's Grip On Media
AF-P, AP
More than 1,000 demonstrators rallied in Moscow on Sunday to protest government efforts to tighten controls over national media.
The protest in central Moscow was linked to the fifth anniversary of the takeover of the NTV television station by the state-controlled company Gazprom in what was widely viewed as a Kremlin-orchestrated move to stifle criticism of the government.
Several prominent television anchors, who lost their jobs amid the authorities' efforts to tighten control over programming, took part in the rally.
"Over the last five years, it became clear that the government only started with NTV and ended up dominating the entire information sector," said Viktor Shenderovich, a prominent NTV program host who was purged from the station by its new owners.
Protesters held posters saying, "Censorship Today, Dictatorship Tomorrow," "Channel One, stop lying!" and "Take TV remote control away from Putin."
Since President Vladimir Putin's first election in 2000, all nationwide networks have come under tight state control, resulting in blanket positive coverage of government activities and the disappearance of critical reporting.
While print media enjoy considerably more freedom compared with broadcasters, top national newspapers are also under pressure of owners who fear that critical reports could jeopardize their business interests.
"I have had enough of the lies on television," said Vera Valkovskaia, a housewife. "The government thinks it is king and we are its slaves."
Shenderovich said that Russia had changed a lot since the natural gas giant Gazprom, in which the Russian government is the main shareholder, bought NTV in 2001. He said the state's stranglehold on television was preventing the emergence of a strong opposition and an independent justice system.
"I hope that the Russian flag will once again symbolize a democratic country and not a KGB colonel," he said, referring to Putin's previous job.
Olga Romanova, a former presenter at Ren-TV who was fired in November after complaining about censorship, said TV news channels had become government mouthpieces.
"We worked hard so that Russians would understand what was happening," she said. "Today there is no more objective information on television."
The purchase of NTV by Gazprom was followed by the departure of many of its leading journalists and a dramatic muting of its famously critical coverage, particularly of the war in Chechnya.
Gazprom in June bought Izvestiya, one of the country's most respected newspapers, pushing the state's control of the media into the print press.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/16/news/moscow.php
French Bill Could Chill Open Source
Peter Sayer
On May 4, the French Senate will debate a copyright bill that is widely expected to have a chilling effect on the development and distribution of open-source software for digital rights management (DRM) or P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file sharing.
That's because the bill's provisions include a penalty of up to three years in prison and a fine of €300,000 for publishing, distributing or promoting software in France that is "manifestly intended" for the unauthorised distribution of copyright works.
The developers of the open-source multimedia player VLC, which can read DRM-protected DVDs, consider themselves targeted. But the legal uncertainty over the term "manifestly intended" makes the bill's coverage so broad that it could even cover the open-source web server Apache, which hosts over 60 per cent of websites, opponents of the bill say. Open-source projects are thought to be more vulnerable than commercial operations because they typically have few resources at their disposal to defend legal actions.
Open-source concerns
France has been a strong supporter of open-source software, with many publicly funded bodies either using it or developing it. Legislation that punishes development and distribution of open-source applications could weaken projects based there, and tarnish the image of the open-source movement with users.
The text of the bill, entitled "Authors' rights and related rights in an information society", aims to transpose the requirements of the European Copyright Directive into French law. France is one of the last countries to transpose this European directive into national law, a situation that prompted the French government to rush the bill through its first reading in the National Assembly using emergency procedures. The bill will have its second and final reading in the Senate beginning May 4, and then must be approved by the president and finally published in the government's Official Journal before it can become law.
Deputies gave their assent to the bill on the afternoon of March 21, and within hours it had claimed its first victim: the French "mirror" of the development site for the open-source file-sharing application Emule.
Emule falls
The Emule project is hosted by Sourceforge.net, a collaborative workspace for open-source developers run by OSTG. Sourceforge provides discussion boards, tracks source code changes and hosts downloads for around 100,000 open-source projects.
A number of web hosting companies around the world, among them OVH SAS of Roubaix, France, offer local copies, or mirrors, of the complete Sourceforge site to spread the load. But soon after deputies voted, OVH CEO Octave Klaba wrote to his customers to tell them: "We are going to remove Emule from our mirror of Sourceforge."
As well as announcing Emule's impending removal from the OVH mirror of Sourceforge, Klaba warned customers that they too face a fine or prison for distributing P-to-P software, and said the company will close down any of its servers found running or hosting such software.
Developers open application reservation
OVH's move has prompted French supporters of open-source software to open a "reserve" for endangered applications.
The legal threat posed by the bill is still imaginary until it becomes law, but the fear it is creating is just as damaging, according to Loïc Dachary, a spokesman for the Free Software Foundation France (FSF France).
"People are going to say that, to avoid risking prison, they're going to banish open-source software [from their servers]," Dachary said.
The prospect that no one will want to host open-source software in France if the bill becomes law has prompted FSF France to step in as host of last resort with a reserve for open-source software.
"Anyone who is afraid [of the bill] can announce that they want to host the software in the reserve," Dachary said.
The reserve is operated by another campaign group, EUCD.info, hosted on servers in France, but FSF France is taking the legal responsibility, promising to defend the right to host open-source projects in the courts if necessary.
The reserve is already home to a handful of applications. For instance, there's Azureus, a P-to-P client for the BitTorrent file-sharing system written in Java, and a number of other P-to-P applications including Emule, Solipsis, Maay and TinyP2P.
Is technology criminal?
But the campaigners have also placed the Linux kernel and the web server Apache in the reserve, a move which they hope demonstrates how ridiculous the bill's provisions could be.
"The Linux kernel contains a component necessary for any exchange over the internet: the TCP/IP stack. All the pirates utilise TCP/IP, and can't commit their illegal acts without this component. Are French publishers distributing the Linux kernel targeted by Article 12bis of the bill? Maybe, maybe not. We just don't know," the reserve's creators write, explaining its inclusion.
Putting a piece of software in the reserve is "a symbolic gesture" that challenges senators examining the bill to ask themselves whether they should really be driving development of open-source software out of the country, Dachary said.
Flee la France
"The law obliges us to flee French territory," he said.
Olivier Chalouhi, founder of the project developing the Azureus client for the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, believes the law will harm France more than it will hurt open-source projects like his.
"The law won't change anything for P-to-P software, as it is developed at an international level. The only thing is that really smart people working in France may go abroad, and that's not in the French interest," he said.
Other European countries are re-examining their implementation of the European Copyright Directive, with varying consequences for open-source projects. Denmark may require DRM vendors to provide the information necessary to make interoperable systems - a plus for the open-source movement as it would allow, for example, the creation of media players that can play protected copyright works on the Linux OS. Meanwhile, Germany may toughen the sanctions for individuals caught sharing copyright works without authorisation, increasing the risks for operators and users of P-to-P applications, whether open source or proprietary.
If these measures are being re-examined, could open-source software face the same threat elsewhere as in France?
"Today, that's not a worry for us," said Dachary. "The idea that other countries might change their law to introduce restrictions on open-source software seems unlikely."
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index...ge=1&pagePos=4
Has File Sharing Cost The Music Industry £1.1bn Over 3 Years?
Charles Arthur
Not according to a back-of-the-envelope calculation by Jupiter Research's Mark Mulligan, who reckons the true figure is closer to £290m. "Where's the extra £0.81bn?" he asks rhetorically on his weblog (
http://tinyurl.com/j3jtm).
Mulligan points out that UK music industry sales in 2002 were just over £2bn; in 2005, £1.85bn, a cumulative decrease that's a long way short of £1bn.
The British Phonographic Industry points out the figure, announced along with a new set of lawsuits against some of its customers reckoned to have been illicitly file sharing, was included in a press release (
http://tinyurl.com/z6klb). That quoted the independent research company TNS Worldpanel, which put the cost to British music in 2005 of people file sharing rather than paying for music at £414m.
Add to that the £278m drop in sales between 2002 and 2003, and another £376m from 2003-2004, and voilá: there's the BPI's £1.1bn figure for the loss to British music. Or, as it quietly adds, "approximately £650m at trade value" - that is, to the music industry rather than the industry and retailers together.
Mulligan is unimpressed: "The BPI should (a) know better than to infer that consumer survey data is national market revenue data; (b) accept there are many bigger reasons impacting on declining music sales - prices too high, physical piracy, competing expenditure on DVDs and games consoles, and so on."
He points out only 10% of UK internet users are file sharers, or just 5% of the UK population. If they were responsible for all that lost spending, they must have been very big spenders to have left a £1.1bn hole in the music business. "But they're not," Mulligan said this week. "They tend to be young and on low incomes. Physical piracy and the competition from games and DVDs is far more important."
The BPI responds that the methodology shows people who start file sharing end up cutting back on spending: "There are other factors but this looked at the behaviour of music buyers."
Mulligan says the BPI is hyping the numbers because it fears what will happen when young file sharers grow up - and are used to not paying for music; though studies show they do buy mobile ringtones. Might those compensate for the missing millions? Even there Mulligan has bad news: "The modern ringtones such as polyphonic ones are classified as cover versions - so the composer gets a cut but not the record label."
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...752260,00.html
Your Tax Dollars at Work ... for Viacom
Fred von Lohmann
The Washington DC legal newspaper, Legal Times, is reporting (sorry, subscription link) that Kevin Murphy, a legislative aide to Senator Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), has recently taken a job with cable and film giant Viacom. Senator Smith, you may remember, is one of the Hill's leading proponents of the broadcast flag. Smells fishy, you say? Legal Times thinks so, too:
In a potential conflict of interest, a legislative assistant to Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), who is currently sponsoring legislation limiting the use and distribution of digital broadcasts, has been hired by media giant Viacom Inc.
In January, Smith drafted the Digital Content Protection Act, which calls for wider use of "broadcast-flag" technology, a code inserted into digital audio or visual transmissions that limits the ability of consumers to redistribute that content. Broadcast-flag technology is opposed by many consumer groups but has broad support in the entertainment industry. The bill has not been formally introduced.
Keith Murphy, a legislative aide to Smith who has worked closely on the legislation, is scheduled to begin work for Viacom at the end of April. Viacom's subsidiary, Paramount Pictures Corp., is a member of the powerful Motion Picture Association of America, a forceful advocate for the broadcast-flag proposal.
Whether it's actually a conflict of interest or not, it sure has the appearance of impropriety.
Murphy, of course, is not the only government insider who has ended up working for the entertainment industry right after carrying water for the industry while in government. David Israelite, right before taking the top job at the National Music Publisher's Association (NMPA), was head of a DoJ task force that recommended stiffening federal criminal enforcement of copyright laws. And perhaps most infamous is Mitch Glazier, who turned up working at the RIAA soon after he shepherded a change into the Copyright Act's "work for hire" provisions that would have benefited record labels at the expense of song-writers.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004552.php
From October
Why Everyone Hates The Music Industry
Fredric Paul
I recently read a research report from Forrester Research with the provocative title "Music Lessons: Is Your Industry At Risk?" That's a very important question these days, as the recording industry struggles with falling sales and critical challenges from new technology. No one wants to be the next passenger on that train.
But as I leafed through the exhaustive, well-thought-out report, I started thinking that the authors—along with most observers—may have missed the most obvious, most important points.
Subtitled "Why Media Monocultures Are In Big Trouble," the report posits that media businesses that derive all their revenue from a single source tend to exhibit rigid monopoly-oriented thinking behavior that makes them vulnerable to technological and cultural changes. True enough, but if you ask me, that's not what wrecked the record companies.
No, the record companies' real problem is that everyone hates them.
He Hate Me
Musicians hate them for habitually sucking the creativity out of the music and the profits from the CD sales. Usually they do it legally, if not morally, but all too often naïve musicians with few options end up swindled out of their rightful earnings.
And music lovers—don't call us consumers; music can't be consumed—see the record companies as greedy, clueless profiteers quick to jack up prices while placing limits on what music gets released and how you can listen to it.
Record companies add little real value to the process of creating and distributing music, and technological advancements make their role increasingly irrelevant. Movie studios and publishing houses still stand for something, some artistic orientation, but the big record companies don't. These days, who knows or cares which label their favorite artists happen to have signed with?
The only people willing to defend the record labels seem to be a handful of superstar performers who have gotten rich on the blockbuster mentality pervasive in the music industry. Or in the film industry—movie studios seem determined to follow the same antagonistic path. Oh, and a smattering of radio DJs who rake in the payola to play what they're told to play.
Forrester report author Josh Bernoff (with Chris Charron, Jennifer Joseph, and Tenly McHang) acknowledges that the music industry "was out of touch with users," but that drastically understates the severity of the problem. It's not that vendors (musicians) and customers (listeners) aren't in touch with the record companies, it's that they know them and loathe them. And that was the rule even before the companies started suing thousands of their best customers.
The Five Stages Of Musical Death
Forrester's report argues that the music industry is finally coming to terms with its situation. Adapting Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' famous five stages of death and dying to track the music industry's suffering (no, I'm not kidding), it argues that the industry has moved beyond "shock and denial" (stage 1) over Napster to "anger" (stage 2) by suing file-sharers, through "bargaining" (stage 3) by offering digital music subscriptions and into "depression" (stage 4) when it realized that approach wasn't going to work. The fifth and final stage, "acceptance," comes as iTunes exceeds half a billion legal downloads and the industry tries new download services.
I'm not convinced. iTunes was a good start, but that service still has more digital rights restrictions than I'd like. And the companies are once again bickering with Apple over pricing and DRM issues. Plus, they're still suing listeners, and they still don't see their own culpability in their demise.
Making Money From Those Who Won't Pay
One positive sign: Universal Music, the world's largest record company, recently announced that it's "transforming itself into a broader entertainment company that derives more revenue from untapped sources like advertising and apparel," according to Reuters. The goal is to "tap into the enormous demand for free music, and generate revenue from those who can't or won't pay." Instead of being obsessed with controlling how people listen to music, a few record execs may finally be starting to recognize that they need a new business model, that selling recorded performances can no longer be the cash cow it was during the 20th century. (And really, is that such a bad thing? Most of the money from CD sales never reaches the artists anyway, and it makes more sense for records to be loss leaders for live performances and other merchandise. Mariah Carey might have to sell one of her houses, but she'll be OK.)
But most insiders still seem to want to finesse the rights issue. I recently chatted with Stefan Roever, CEO of Navio Systems in Cupertino, Calif. Navio supplies technology to record companies so they can "sell rights, and not just files." The idea is that these rights would offer more flexibility, because listeners could use the right to access the content on multiple platforms, for example, or to download the file again if your media was lost or destroyed. But I think that's putting the cart before the horse. People don't want "rights" to the music they buy. They want to own it. Only when everyone accepts that fact will we be ready to worry about what Navio is selling.
Don't Hate Me Because I'm Rich
It may be too late for the music industry. But what does Forrester's report tell us about other technology and media sectors? Well, I guess if your industry exists in a monopoly monoculture, heavily depends on a single channel and revenue stream, and steadfastly refuses to change along with advancing technology and cultural shifts, it's clearly time to start worrying. According to Forrester, that means TV networks, radio networks, and especially newspapers.
But I say all that stuff is just window dressing. If your vendors and customers hate you, you're dead.
Fredric Paul is Director of Online Editorial Development for CMP Media LLC, TechWeb's parent company.
http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/172300219
Unintended Consequences: Seven Years under the DMCA
April, 2006
[
Download a PDF of this Paper - 262K]
This document is version 4. Previous versions are still available:
version 3, version 2, version 1.
Contents
Executive Summary
DMCA Legislative Background
Chilling Free Expression and Scientific Research
Fair Use Under Siege
A threat to innovation and competition
DMCA Shoulders Aside Computer Intrusion Statutes
Conclusion
This document collects a number of reported cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been invoked not against pirates, but against consumers, scientists, and legitimate competitors. It will be updated from time to time as additional cases come to light. The latest version can always be obtained at
www.eff.org.
1. Executive Summary
Since they were enacted in 1998, the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. Congress meant to stop copyright infringers from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works and to ban the "black box" devices intended for that purpose. 1
In practice, the anti-circumvention provisions have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than to stop copyright infringement. As a result, the DMCA has developed into a serious threat to several important public policy priorities:
The DMCA Chills Free Expression and Scientific Research.
Experience with section 1201 demonstrates that it is being used to stifle free speech and scientific research. The lawsuit against 2600 magazine, threats against Princeton Professor Edward Felten's team of researchers, and prosecution of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have chilled the legitimate activities of journalists, publishers, scientists, students, programmers, and members of the public.
The DMCA Jeopardizes Fair Use.
By banning all acts of circumvention, and all technologies and tools that can be used for circumvention, the DMCA grants to copyright owners the power to unilaterally eliminate the public's fair use rights. Already, the movie industry's use of encryption on DVDs has curtailed consumers' ability to make legitimate, personal-use copies of movies they have purchased.
The DMCA Impedes Competition and Innovation.
Rather than focusing on pirates, many copyright owners have wielded the DMCA to hinder their legitimate competitors. For example, the DMCA has been used to block aftermarket competition in laser printer toner cartridges, garage door openers, and computer maintenance services. Similarly, Apple invoked the DMCA to chill RealNetworks' efforts to sell music downloads to iPod owners.
The DMCA Interferes with Computer Intrusion Laws.
Further, the DMCA has been misused as a general-purpose prohibition on computer network access which, unlike most computer intrusion statutes, lacks any financial harm threshold. As a result, a disgruntled employer has used the DMCA against a former contractor for simply connecting to the company's computer system through a VPN.
2. DMCA Legislative Background
Congress enacted the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions in response to two pressures. First, Congress was responding to the perceived need to implement obligations imposed on the U.S. by the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty. Section 1201, however, went further than the WIPO treaty required. 2 The details of section 1201, then, were a response not just to U.S. treaty obligations, but also to the concerns of copyright owners that their works would be widely pirated in the networked digital world. 1
Section 1201 contains two distinct prohibitions: a ban on acts of circumvention, and a ban on the distribution of tools and technologies used for circumvention.
The "act" prohibition, set out in section 1201(a)(1), prohibits the act of circumventing a technological measure used by copyright owners to control access to their works ("access controls"). So, for example, this provision makes it unlawful to defeat the encryption system used on DVD movies. This ban on acts of circumvention applies even where the purpose for decrypting the movie would otherwise be legitimate. As a result, it is unlawful to make a digital copy ("rip") of a DVD you own for playback on your video iPod.
The "tools" prohibitions, set out in sections 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b), outlaw the manufacture, sale, distribution, or trafficking of tools and technologies that make circumvention possible. These provisions ban both technologies that defeat access controls, and also technologies that defeat use restrictions imposed by copyright owners, such as copy controls. These provisions prohibit the distribution of "DVD back-up" software, for example.
Section 1201 includes a number of exceptions for certain limited classes of activities, including security testing, reverse engineering of software, encryption research, and law enforcement. These exceptions have been extensively criticized as being too narrow to be of real use to the constituencies who they were intended to assist.4
A violation of any of the "act" or "tools" prohibitions is subject to significant civil and, in some circumstances, criminal penalties.
3. Chilling Free Expression and Scientific Research
Section 1201 has been used by a number of copyright owners to stifle free speech and legitimate scientific research.
The lawsuit against 2600 magazine, threats against Professor Edward Felten's team of researchers, and prosecution of the Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov are among the most widely known examples of the DMCA being used to chill speech and research. Bowing to DMCA liability fears, online service providers and bulletin board operators have begun to censor discussions of copy-protection systems, programmers have removed computer security programs from their websites, and students, scientists and security experts have stopped publishing details of their research.
These developments will ultimately result in weakened security for all computer users (including, ironically, for copyright owners counting on technical measures to protect their works), as security researchers shy away from research that might run afoul of section 1201.
DMCA Delays Disclosure of Sony-BMG "Rootkit" Vulnerability
J. Alex Halderman, a graduate student at Princeton University, discovered the existence of several security vulnerabilities in the CD copy-protection software on dozens of Sony-BMG titles. He delayed publishing his discovery for several weeks while consulting with lawyers in order to avoid DMCA pitfalls. This left millions of music fans at risk longer than necessary.5 The security flaws inherent in Sony-BMG's "rootkit" copy-protection software were subsequently publicized by another researcher who was apparently unaware of the legal risks created by the DMCA.
Security researchers had sought a DMCA exemption in 2003 in order to facilitate research on dangerous DRM systems like the Sony-BMG rootkit, but their request was denied by the U.S. Copyright Office. 6
Cyber-Security Czar Notes Chill on Research
Speaking at MIT in October 2002, White House Cyber Security Chief Richard Clarke called for DMCA reform, noting his concern that the DMCA had been used to chill legitimate computer security research. The Boston Globe quoted Clarke as saying, "I think a lot of people didn't realize that it would have this potential chilling effect on vulnerability research."7
Professor Felten's Research Team Threatened
In September 2000, a multi-industry group known as the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) issued a public challenge encouraging skilled technologists to try to defeat certain watermarking technologies intended to protect digital music. Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten and a team of researchers at Princeton, Rice, and Xerox took up the challenge and succeeded in removing the watermarks.
When the team tried to present their results at an academic conference, however, SDMI representatives threatened the researchers with liability under the DMCA. The threat letter was also delivered to the researchers' employers and the conference organizers. After extensive discussions with counsel, the researchers grudgingly withdrew their paper from the conference. The threat was ultimately withdrawn and a portion of the research was published at a subsequent conference, but only after the researchers filed a lawsuit.
After enduring this experience, at least one of the researchers involved has decided to forgo further research efforts in this field. 8
SunnComm Threatens Grad Student
In October 2003, a Princeton graduate student named J. Alex Halderman was threatened with a DMCA lawsuit after publishing a report documenting weaknesses in a CD copy-protection technology developed by SunnComm. Halderman revealed that merely holding down the shift key on a Windows PC would render SunnComm's copy protection technology ineffective. Furious company executives then threatened legal action.
The company quickly retreated from its threats in the face of public outcry and negative press attention. Although Halderman was spared, the controversy again reminded security researchers of their vulnerability to DMCA threats for simply publishing the results of their research.9
Hewlett Packard Threatens SNOsoft
Hewlett-Packard resorted to DMCA threats when researchers published a security flaw in HP's Tru64 UNIX operating system. The researchers, a loosely-organized collective known as Secure Network Operations ("SNOsoft"), received the DMCA threat after releasing software in July 2002 that demonstrated vulnerabilities that HP had been aware of for some time, but had not bothered to fix.
After the DMCA threat received widespread press attention, HP ultimately withdrew the threat. Security researchers received the message, however-publish vulnerability research at your own risk.10
Blackboard Threatens Security Researchers
In April 2003, educational software company Blackboard Inc. used a DMCA threat to stop the presentation of research on security vulnerabilities in its products at the InterzOne II conference in Atlanta. Students Billy Hoffman and Virgil Griffith were scheduled to present their research on security flaws in the Blackboard ID card system used by university campus security systems but were blocked shortly before the talk by a cease-and-desist letter invoking the DMCA.
Blackboard obtained a temporary restraining order against the students and the conference organizers at a secret "ex parte" hearing the day before the conference began, giving the students and conference organizer no opportunity to appear in court or challenge the order before the scheduled presentation. Despite the rhetoric in its initial cease and desist letter, Blackboard's lawsuit did not mention the DMCA. The invocation in the original cease-and-desist letter, however, underscores the way the statute has been used to chill security research. 11
Xbox Hack Book Dropped by Publisher
In 2003, U.S. publisher John Wiley & Sons dropped plans to publish a book by security researcher Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, citing DMCA liability concerns. Wiley had commissioned Huang to write a book that described the security flaws in the Microsoft Xbox game console, flaws Huang had discovered as part of his doctoral research at M.I.T.
Following Microsoft's legal action against a vendor of Xbox "mod chips" in early 2003, and the music industry's 2001 DMCA threats against Professor Felten's research team, Wiley dropped the book for fear that the book might be treated as a "circumvention device" under the DMCA. Huang's initial attempt to self-publish was thwarted after his online shopping cart provider also withdrew, citing DMCA concerns.
After several months of negotiations, Huang eventually self-published the book in mid-2003. After extensive legal consultations, Huang was able to get the book published by No Starch Press. 12
Censorware Research Obstructed
Seth Finkelstein conducts research on "censorware" software (i.e., programs that block websites that contain objectionable material), documenting flaws in such software. Finkelstein's research, for example, revealed that censorware vendor N2H2 blocked a variety of legitimate websites, evidence that assisted the ACLU in challenging a law requiring the use web filtering software by federally-funded public libraries.13
N2H2 claimed that the DMCA should block researchers like Finkelstein from examining it. Finkelstein was ultimately forced to seek a DMCA exemption from the Librarian of Congress, who granted the exemption in both the 2000 and 2003 triennial rulemakings. The exemption, however, has not been a complete remedy, since it is limited to the act of circumvention, and does not permit researchers to create or distribute tools to facilitate research. 14
Benjamin Edelman has also conducted extensive research into flaws in various censorware products. Edelman's research also led to evidence used by the ACLU in its constitutional challenge to the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which mandates the use of censorware by public libraries.
In the course of his work for the ACLU, Edelman discovered that the DMCA might interfere with his efforts to learn what websites are blocked by censorware products. Because he sought to create and distribute software tools to enable others to analyze the list if it changed, Edelman could not rely on the limited DMCA regulatory exception. Unwilling to risk civil and criminal penalties under Section 1201, Edelman was forced to sue to seek clarification of his legal rights. Unfortunately, the court found that Edelman would have to undertake the research and hazard legal reprisals in order to have standing to challenge the DMCA. The case was therefore dismissed without addressing the DMCA's chill on research. 15
Dmitry Sklyarov Arrested
In July 2001, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was jailed for several weeks and detained for five months in the United States after speaking at the DEFCON conference in Las Vegas.
Prosecutors, prompted by software goliath Adobe Systems Inc., alleged that Sklyarov had worked on a software program known as the Advanced e-Book Processor, which was distributed over the Internet by his Russian employer, ElcomSoft. The software allowed owners of Adobe electronic books ("e-books") to convert them from Adobe's e-Book format into PDF files, thereby removing restrictions embedded into the files by e-book publishers.
Sklyarov was never accused of infringing any copyright, nor of assisting anyone else to infringe copyrights. His alleged crime was working on a software tool with many legitimate uses, simply because other people might use the tool to copy an e-book without the publisher's permission.
Federal prosecutors ultimately permitted Sklyarov to return home, but brought criminal charges against ElcomSoft. In December 2002, a jury acquitted Elcomsoft of all charges, completing an 18-month ordeal for the wrongly-accused Russian software company. 16
Scientists and Programmers Withhold Research
Following the Felten and Sklyarov incidents, a number of prominent computer security experts curtailed their legitimate research activities for fear of potential DMCA liability.
For example, when Dutch cryptographer and security systems analyst Niels Ferguson discovered a major security flaw in Intel's HDCP video encryption system, he declined to publish his results on his website on the grounds that he travels frequently to the U.S. and is fearful of "prosecution and/or liability under the U.S. DMCA law." 17
Following the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, Fred Cohen, a professor of digital forensics and respected security consultant, removed his "Forensix" evidence-gathering software from his website, citing fear of potential DMCA liability. Another respected network security protection expert, Dug Song, also removed information from his website for the same reason. Mr. Song is the author of several security papers, including a paper describing a common vulnerability in many firewalls. 18
In mid-2001 an anonymous programmer discovered a vulnerability in Microsoft's proprietary e-book DRM system, but refused to publish the results, citing DMCA liability concerns. 19
Foreign Scientists Avoid U.S.
Foreign scientists have expressed concerns about traveling to the U.S. following the arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov. Some foreign scientists have advocated boycotting conferences held in the United States, and some conference organizers have decided to hold events in non-U.S. locations. Russia went so far as to issue a travel advisory to Russian programmers traveling to the United States. 20
Highly respected British Linux programmer Alan Cox resigned from the USENIX committee of the Advanced Computing Systems Association, the committee that organizes many of the U.S. computing conferences, because of concerns about traveling to the United States. He also urged USENIX to move its annual conference offshore. 21
The International Information Hiding Workshop Conference, the conference at which Professor Felten's team intended to present its original SDMI watermarking paper, chose to break with tradition and held its next conference outside of the U.S. following the DMCA threat to Professor Felten and his team. 22
IEEE Wrestles with DMCA
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which publishes 30 per cent of all computer science journals worldwide, has also grappled with the uncertainties created by the DMCA. Apparently concerned about possible DMCA liability, the IEEE in November 2001 instituted a policy requiring all authors to indemnify IEEE for any liabilities incurred should a submission result in legal action.
After an outcry from IEEE members, the organization ultimately revised its submission policies, removing mention of the DMCA. According to Bill Hagen, manager of IEEE Intellectual Property Rights, "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has become a very sensitive subject among our authors. It's intended to protect digital content, but its application in some specific cases appears to have alienated large segments of the research community." 23
2600 Magazine Censored
The Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes case illustrates the chilling effect that section 1201 has had on the freedom of the press.
In that case, eight major motion picture companies brought DMCA claims against 2600 Magazine seeking to block it from publishing DeCSS, a software program that defeats the CSS encryption used on DVD movies. 2600 had made the program available on its web site in the course of its ongoing coverage of the controversy surrounding the DMCA. The magazine was not involved in the development of software, nor was it accused of having used the software for any copyright infringement.
Notwithstanding the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press, the district court permanently barred 2600 from publishing, or even linking to, the DeCSS software code. In November 2001, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court decision. 24
In essence, the movie studios effectively obtained a "stop the presses" order banning the publication of truthful information by a news publication concerning a matter of public concern-an unprecedented curtailment of well-established First Amendment principles. 25
CNET Reporter Feels Chill
CNET News reporter Declan McCullagh confronted the chilling effect of the DMCA firsthand. In the course of his reporting, he found four documents on the public website of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The website disclosed that the documents contained information about airport security procedures, the relationship between federal and local police, and a "liability information sheet." A note on the site stated that this "information is restricted to airport management and local law enforcement." The documents were distributed in encrypted form and a password was required to open and read them.
McCullagh obtained the passwords from an anonymous source, but did not open the documents, citing concerns that using a password without authorization might violate the DMCA. This is particularly ironic, as any foreign journalist beyond the reach of the DMCA would be free to use the password.
"Journalists traditionally haven't worried about copyright law all that much," said McCullagh, "But nowadays intellectual property rights have gone too far, and arguably interfere with the newsgathering process." 26
Microsoft Threatens Slashdot
In spring 2000, Microsoft invoked the DMCA against the Internet publication forum Slashdot, demanding that forum moderators delete materials relating to Microsoft's proprietary implementation of an open security standard known as Kerberos.
In the Slashdot forum, several individuals alleged that Microsoft had changed the open, non-proprietary Kerberos specification in order to prevent non-Microsoft servers from interacting with Windows 2000. Many speculated that this move was intended to force users to purchase Microsoft server software. Although Microsoft responded to this criticism by publishing its Kerberos specification, it conditioned access to the specification on agreement to a "click-wrap" license agreement that expressly forbade disclosure of the specification without Microsoft's prior consent.
Slashdot posters responded by republishing the Microsoft specification. Microsoft then invoked the DMCA, demanding that Slashdot remove the republished specifications.
In the words of Georgetown law professor Julie Cohen, "If Microsoft's interpretation of the DMCA's ban on circumvention technologies is right, then it doesn't seem to matter much whether posting unauthorized copies of the Microsoft Kerberos specification would be a fair use. A publisher can prohibit fair-use commentary simply by implementing access and disclosure restrictions that bind the entire public. Anyone who discloses the information, or even tells others how to get it, is a felon." 27
GameSpy Menaces Security Researcher with DMCA
Luigi Auriemma, an independent Italian security researcher, attracted the attention of GameSpy's lawyers after publishing details on his website regarding security vulnerabilities in GameSpy's online services, including a voice chat program, Roger Wilco, and online game finder, GameSpy 3D. Before publishing the information, Auriemma had informed GameSpy and public security mailing lists of the weaknesses. GameSpy, however, had failed to address the vulnerabilities.
In November 2003, GameSpy's lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to Auriemma, threatening civil and criminal penalties under the DMCA. According to GameSpy, Auriemma was publishing key generators and other piracy tools, rather than simply vulnerability research. Whatever the merits of GameSpy's claims, the invocation of the DMCA was likely improper in light of the fact that Auriemma resides in Italy and thus is beyond the reach of the DMCA. 28
AVSforum.com Censors TiVo Discussion
The specter of DMCA litigation has chilled speech on smaller web bulletin boards, as well. In June 2001, for example, the administrator of AVSforum.com, a popular forum where TiVo digital video recorder owners discuss TiVo features, censored all discussion about a software program that allegedly permitted TiVo users to move video from their TiVos to their personal computers. In the words of the forum administrator, "My fear with this is more or less I have no clue what is a protected system on the TiVo box under copyright (or what-have-you) and what is not. Thus my fear for the site." 29
Mac Forum Censors iTunes Music Store Discussion
Macintosh enthusiast website Macosxhints censored publication of information about methods for evading the copy protection on songs purchased from the Apple iTunes Music Store in May 2003, citing DMCA liability concerns. Songs purchased from the Apple iTunes Music Store are downloaded in Apple's proprietary AAC file format, wrapped in digital copy protection. As the webmaster for the site noted, even though information on bypassing the copy protection was readily available on the Internet at the time, republishing user hints on work-arounds risked attracting a DMCA lawsuit and harsh penalties. 30
4. Fair Use Under Siege
"Fair use" is a crucial element in American copyright law-the principle that the public is entitled, without having to ask permission, to use copyrighted works in ways that do not unduly interfere with the copyright owner's market for a work. Fair uses include personal, noncommercial uses, such as using a VCR to record a television program for later viewing. Fair use also includes activities undertaken for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research.
Unfortunately, the DMCA throws out the baby of fair use with the bathwater of digital piracy. By employing technical protection measures to control access to and use of copyrighted works, and using the DMCA against anyone who tampers with those measures, copyright owners can unilaterally eliminate fair use, re-writing the copyright bargain developed by Congress and the courts over more than a century.
Although the Copyright Office is empowered to grant limited DMCA exemptions in a triennial rule-making, it has repeatedly refused to grant such exemptions for consumer fair uses. 31
Copy-protected CDs
The introduction of "copy-protected" CDs illustrates the collision between fair use and the DMCA. Sony-BMG, for example, had released more than 15 million copy-protected CDs in the U.S. market as of early 2006. Although the momentum toward universal CD copy-protection faltered after the Sony-BMG "rootkit" scandal in late-2005, no major label has renounced the use of copy-protection on CDs.
These copy-protection technologies are certain to interfere with the fair use expectations of music fans. For example, copy-protected discs will disappoint the millions who have purchased iPods or other MP3 players, despite the fact that making an MP3 copy of a CD for personal use qualifies as a fair use. Making "mix CDs" or copies of CDs for the office or car are other examples of fair uses that are potentially impaired by copy-protection technologies.
Companies that distribute tools to "repair" these dysfunctional CDs, restoring to consumers their fair use privileges, run the risk of lawsuits under the DMCA's ban on circumvention tools and technologies. 32
Fair Use Tools Banned: DVD Back-up Software
We are entering an era where books, music and movies will increasingly be "copy-protected" and otherwise restricted by technological means. Whether scholars, researchers, commentators and the public will continue to be able to make legitimate fair uses of these works will depend upon the availability of tools to bypass these digital locks.
The DMCA, however, prohibits the creation or distribution of these tools, even if they are crucial to fair use. So, as copyright owners use technology to press into the 21st century, the public will see fair uses whittled away by digital locks allegedly intended to "prevent piracy." Perhaps more importantly, future fair uses will not be developed for restricted media, because courts will never have the opportunity to rule on them. Fair users will be found liable for "picking the lock" and thereby violating the DMCA, whatever the merits of their fair use defense.
Copyright owners argue that these tools, in the hands of copyright infringers, can result in "Internet piracy." But banning the tools that enable fair use will punish the innocent along with infringers. Photocopiers, VCRs, and CD-R burners can also be misused, but no one would suggest that the public give them up simply because they might be used by others to break the law.
Fair use of DVDs has already suffered thanks to DMCA lawsuits brought against DVD copying tools. There are many legitimate reasons to copy DVDs. Once the video is on the PC, for example, lots of fair uses become possible-film scholars can digitally analyze the film, travelers can load the movie into their laptops, and DVD owners can skip the otherwise "unskippable" commercials that preface certain films. Without the tools necessary to copy DVDs, however, these fair uses become impossible.
In the Universal v. Reimerdes case, discussed above, the court held that the DMCA bans DeCSS software. In another case, federal courts ordered 321 Studios' DVD X Copy product taken off the shelves for violating the DMCA. Major movie studios also used the DMCA to sue Tritton Technologies, the manufacturer of DVD CopyWare, and three website distributors of similar software. 33
Movie fans, film scholars, movie critics, and public interest groups have all repeatedly asked the Copyright Office to grant DMCA exemptions to allow the decryption of DVDs in order to enable noninfringing uses. For example, exemptions were sought to allow movie critics to post movie clips, DVD owners to skip "unskippable" previews and commercials, and legitimate purchasers to bypass "region coding" restrictions on their DVD players. Every DVD-related request was denied in both the 2000 and 2003 triennial rulemakings. 34 Even if an exemption were granted, however, the Copyright Office is powerless to grant an exemption to the DMCA's "tools" ban, which means that fair users would be left without the tools necessary to exercise any exemption that might be granted.
Advanced e-Book Processor and e-Books
The future of fair use for books was at issue in the criminal prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov and Elcomsoft. As discussed above, Elcomsoft produced and distributed a tool called the Advanced e-Book Processor, which translates e-books from Adobe's e-book format to PDF. This translation process removed various restrictions (against copying, printing, text-to-speech processing, etc.) that publishers can impose on e-books. 35
The Advanced e-Book Processor allowed those who have legitimately purchased e-books to make fair uses of their e-books, uses otherwise made impossible by the restrictions of the Adobe e-book format. For instance, the program allowed people to engage in the following fair uses:
read the e-book on a laptop or computer other than the one on which it was first downloaded;
continue to access the e-book in the future, if the particular technological device for which it was purchased becomes obsolete;
print an e-book on paper;
read an e-book on an alternative operating system such as Linux (Adobe's format works only on Macs and Windows PCs);
have a computer read an e-book out loud using text-to-speech software, which is particularly important for visually-impaired individuals.
Time-shifting and Streaming Media
As more people receive audio and video content from "streaming" Internet media sources, they will want tools to preserve their settled fair use expectations, including the ability to "time-shift" programming for later listening or viewing. As a result of the DMCA, however, the digital equivalents of VCRs and cassette decks for streaming media may never arrive.
Start-up software company Streambox developed exactly such a product, known simply as the Streambox VCR, designed to time-shift streaming media. When RealNetworks discovered that the Streambox VCR could time-shift streaming RealAudio webcasts, it invoked the DMCA and obtained an injunction against the Streambox VCR product. 36
The DMCA has also been invoked to threaten the developer of an open source, noncommercial software application known as Streamripper that records MP3 audio streams for later listening. 37
embed and Fonts
In January 2002, typeface vendor Agfa Monotype Corporation threatened a college student with DMCA liability for creating "embed," a free, open source, noncommercial software program designed to manipulate TrueType fonts.
According to the student: "I wrote embed in 1997, after discovering that all of my fonts disallowed embedding in documents. Since my fonts are free, this was silly-but I didn't want to take the time to... change the flag, and then reset all of the extended font properties with a separate program. What a bore! Instead, I wrote this program to convert all of my fonts at once. The program is very simple; it just requires setting a few bits to zero. Indeed, I noticed that other fonts that were licensed for unlimited distribution also disallowed embedding.... So, I put this program on the web in hopes that it would help other font developers as well."
Agfa Monotype nevertheless threatened the student author with DMCA liability for distributing the program. According to Agfa, the fact that embed can be used to allow distribution of protected fonts makes it contraband under Section 1201, notwithstanding the fact that the tool has many legitimate uses in the hands of hobbyist font developers. 38
5. A threat to innovation and competition
The DMCA has frequently been used to deter legitimate innovation and competition, rather than to stop piracy.
For example, the DMCA has been used to block aftermarket competition in laser printer toner cartridges, garage door openers, and computer maintenance services. Apple Computer invoked the DMCA to chill Real Networks' efforts to sell music downloads to iPod owners. Videogame hobbyists have been sued for trying to improve or extend the capabilities of their favorite game titles. Sony has threatened hobbyists for creating software that enables Sony's Aibo robot dog to dance, and has sued to block software that allows gamers to play their PlayStation games on PCs.
In each of these cases, it was legitimate competitors and innovators who suffered, not pirates. 39
DMCA Used to Lock Cell Phones to Carriers
American cellular phone subscribers have long suffered with phones that are artificially "locked" to a particular carrier's network. This creates a variety of burdens for consumers, including high roaming rates when traveling (by preventing the use of prepaid SIM chips from local carriers) and barriers to switching carriers. In addition, these restrictions make locked phones harder to recycle and reuse. "Locking" phones seems particularly unjustifiable in light of the "minimum term" and "early termination fee" clauses that guarantee carriers will recoup the costs of the phones they are so fond of "giving away" to lure subscribers.
Responding to consumer demand, phone "unlocking" services have become widespread. Unfortunately, carriers have responded by threatening legal action (and in at least one case, actually suing) under the DMCA. 40
Apple Threatens Real over Harmony
In July 2004, RealNetworks announced its "Harmony" technology, which was designed to allow music sold by Real's digital download store to play on Apple iPods. Until Harmony, the only DRM-restricted music format playable on the iPod was Apple's own "Fairplay" format. Although the iPod plays a variety of DRM-free formats, Real wanted to ensure interoperability without having to give up DRM restrictions, and thus developed Harmony to "re-wrap" its songs using the Fairplay format.
Within days, Apple responded by accusing Real of adopting the "tactics and ethics of a hacker" and threatening legal action under the DMCA. Over the following months, the two competitors engaged in a game of technological cat-and-mouse, with Apple disabling Harmony in updates of its iTunes software and Real promising to revise its technology to re-enable compatibility. In the end, however, Apple's threats of legal action led Real to give up its efforts. 41
Tecmo Sues to Block Game Enhancements
Enthusiastic fans of the videogames Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive 3, and Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball managed to modify their games to create new "skins" to change the appearance of characters who appear in the game (including making some characters appear nude). The modifications were add-on enhancements for the games themselves-only those who already had the games could make use of the skins. These hobbyist tinkerers traded their modding tips and swapped skins on a website called ninjahacker.net.
Tecmo Inc., which distributes the games, was not amused and brought DMCA claims against the website operators and tinkerers who frequented it. The suit was ultimately dismissed after the website was taken down and settlements negotiated with the site's operators. 42
Nikon's Encrypted RAW Format Blocks Adobe
In April 2005, the creator of Adobe's Photoshop revealed that camera-maker Nikon had begun encrypting certain portions of the RAW image files generated by its professional-grade digital cameras. As a result, these files would not be compatible with Photoshop or other similar software unless the developers first took licenses from Nikon. In other words, by encrypting the image files on its cameras, Nikon was obtaining market leverage in the image editing software market.
Adobe cited the prospect of a DMCA claim as one reason why it was unwilling to reverse engineer the format to facilitate interoperability. Nikon and Adobe ultimately negotiated an agreement, but that option may not be practical for many smaller software developers. 43
HP's Region-Coded, Expiring Printer Cartridges
Hewlett-Packard, one of the world's leading printer manufacturers, has embedded software in its printers and accompanying toner cartridges to enforce "region coding" restrictions that prevent cartridges purchased in one region from operating with printers purchased in another. This "feature" presumably is intended to support regional market segmentation and price discrimination.
The software embedded in HP printer cartridges also apparently causes them to "expire" after a set amount of time, forcing consumers to purchase new ink, even if the cartridge has not run dry. This "feature" of HP ink cartridges has lead to at least one consumer class action against the company.
HP has not yet invoked the DMCA to protect these anti-consumer tactics, but both HP's lawyers and its competitors are doubtless well aware of ways in which the DMCA can be used to buttress these tactics. 44
StorageTek Attempts to Block Independent Service Vendors
StorageTek sells data storage hardware to large enterprise clients. It also sells maintenance services for its products. Custom Hardware is an independent business that repairs StorageTek hardware. In an effort to eliminate this competitor in the maintenance services market, StorageTek sued under the DMCA, arguing that Custom Hardware had circumvented certain passwords designed to block independent service providers from using maintenance software included in the StorageTek hardware systems. In other words, StorageTek was using the DMCA to ensure that its customers had only one place to turn for repair services.
A district court granted a preliminary injunction against Custom Hardware. More than a year later, a court of appeals vacated the injunction, holding that where there is no nexus with copyright infringement, there can be no DMCA claim. Although this was a victory for competition, it illustrates the ways in which the DMCA continues to be used to impede competition, rather than prevent piracy. 45
Lexmark Sues Over Toner Cartridges
Lexmark, the second-largest laser printer maker in the U.S., has long tried to eliminate the secondary market in refilled laser toner cartridges. In January 2003, Lexmark employed the DMCA as a new weapon in its arsenal.
Lexmark had added authentication routines between its printers and cartridges explicitly to hinder aftermarket toner vendors. Static Control Components (SCC) reverse-engineered these measures and sold "Smartek" chips that enabled refilled cartridges to work in Lexmark printers. Lexmark then used the DMCA to obtain an injunction banning SCC from selling its chips to cartridge remanufacturers.
SCC ultimately succeeded in getting the injunction overturned on appeal, but only after 19 months of expensive litigation while its product was held off the market. The litigation sent a chilling message to those in the secondary market for Lexmark cartridges.46
Chamberlain Sues Universal Garage Door Opener Manufacturer Garage door opener manufacturer Chamberlain Group invoked the DMCA against competitor Skylink Technologies after several major U.S. retailers dropped Chamberlain's remote openers in favor of the less expensive Skylink universal "clickers." Chamberlain claimed that Skylink had violated the DMCA because its clicker bypassed an "authentication regime" between the Chamberlain remote opener and the mounted garage door receiver unit. On Chamberlain's logic, consumers would be locked into a sole source not only for replacement garage door clickers, but virtually any remote control device.
Skylink ultimately defeated Chamberlain both at the district court and court of appeals, but only after many months of expensive litigation. In the words of the court of appeals, Chamberlain use of the DMCA was nothing less than an "attempt to leverage its sales into aftermarket monopolies." 47
Sony Sues Connectix and Bleem
Sony has used DMCA to sue competitors who created emulation software that permits gamers to play PlayStation console games on PCs. In 1999, Sony sued Connectix, the maker of the Virtual Game Station, a PlayStation emulator for Macintosh computers. Sony also sued Bleem, the leading vendor of PlayStation emulator software for Windows PCs.
In both cases, Sony claimed that competitors had violated the DMCA by engaging in unlawful circumvention, even though the development of interoperable software has been recognized by the courts as a fair use under copyright law. Because courts have suggested that the DMCA trumps fair use, however, the DMCA has become a new legal weapon with which to threaten those who rely on reverse engineering to create competing products.
Neither Connectix nor Bleem were able to bear the high costs of litigation against Sony and pulled their products off the market. No similar emulation products have been introduced, effectively forcing gamers to use Sony console hardware if they want to play the PlayStation games they have purchased. 48
Sony Threatens Aibo Hobbyist
Sony has also invoked the DMCA against a hobbyist who developed custom "dance moves" for his Aibo robotic "pet" dog. Developing these new routines for the Sony Aibo required reverse engineering the encryption surrounding the software that manipulates the robot. The hobbyist revealed neither the decrypted Sony software nor the code he used to defeat the encryption, but he freely distributed his new custom programs. Sony claimed that the act of circumventing the encryption surrounding the software in the Aibo violated the DMCA and demanded that the hobbyist remove his programs from his website.
Responding to public outcry, Sony ultimately permitted the hobbyist to repost some of his programs (on the understanding that Sony retained the right to commercially exploit the hobbyist's work). The incident illustrated Sony's willingness to invoke the DMCA in situations with no relationship to "piracy." 49
Sony Attacks PlayStation "Mod Chips"
Sony has sued a number of manufacturers and distributors of "mod chips" for alleged circumvention under the DMCA. In doing so, Sony has been able to enforce a system of "region coding" that raises significant anticompetitive issues.
"Mod chips" are after-market accessories that modify Sony PlayStation game consoles to permit games legitimately purchased in one part of the world to be played on a games console from another geographical region. Sony complains that mod chips can also be used to play pirated copies of games. As noted above, it is hard to see why an independent vendor of a product with legitimate uses should have to solve Sony's piracy problems before entering the market.
Sony sued Gamemasters, distributor of the Game Enhancer peripheral device, which allowed owners of a U.S. PlayStation console to play games purchased in Japan and other countries. Although there was no infringement of Sony's copyright, the court granted an injunction under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, effectively leaving gamers at the mercy of Sony's region coding system.
Interestingly, courts in Australia, recognizing the anticompetitive and anticonsumer potential of Sony's region coding system, came to a different conclusion under that country's analog to the DMCA. In Stevens v Kabushiki Kaisha Sony Computer Entertainment, the High Court of Australia held in 2005 that the regional access coding on Sony PlayStation computer games as implemented by the PlayStation console did not qualify for legal protection, as it did not prevent or inhibit copyright infringement. Sony, like all vendors, is free to attempt to segregate geographic markets. If it does so, however, it should have to bear its own costs for the effort, rather than relying on the DMCA, which Congress plainly did not enact to trump the usual legal regimes governing parallel importation. 50
Blizzard Sues bnetd.org
Vivendi-Universal's Blizzard Entertainment video game division brought a DMCA lawsuit against a group of volunteer game enthusiasts who created software that allowed owners of Blizzard games to play their games over the Internet. The software, called "bnetd," allowed gamers to set up their own alternative to Blizzard's own Battle.net service.
Blizzard has a policy of locking in its customers who want to play their games over the Internet-it's the Battle.net servers or nothing. Although access to Blizzard's Battle.net servers is free, the hobbyists decided to create bnetd to overcome difficulties that they had experienced in attempting to use Battle.net. The bnetd software was freely distributed, open source, and noncommercial.
Blizzard filed suit in St. Louis to bar distribution of bnetd, alleging that the software was a "circumvention device" prohibited by the DMCA. According to Blizzard, the bnetd software could be used to permit networked play of pirated Blizzard games. The developers never used the software for that purpose, nor was that the purpose for which the software was designed.
It is hard to see why a competitor should have to solve Blizzard's piracy problem before it can offer innovative products for legitimate owners of Blizzard games. Nevertheless, Blizzard prevailed on its DMCA claim, and the bnetd developers ceased distributing the software. 51
Apple Harasses Inventive Retailer
When Other World Computing (OWC), a small retailer specializing in Apple Macintosh computers, developed a software patch that allowed all Mac owners to use Apple's iDVD software, they thought they were doing Macintosh fans a favor. For their trouble, they got a DMCA threat from Apple.
Apple's iDVD authoring software was designed to work on newer Macs that shipped with internal DVD recorders manufactured by Apple. OWC discovered that a minor software modification would allow iDVD to work with external DVD recorders, giving owners of older Macs an upgrade path. Apple claimed that this constituted a violation of the DMCA and requested that OWC stop this practice immediately. OWC obliged.
Rather than prevent copyright infringement, the DMCA empowered Apple to force consumers to buy new Mac computers instead of simply upgrading their older machines with an external DVD recorder. 52
6. DMCA Shoulders Aside Computer Intrusion Statutes
The DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions have also threatened to displace "computer intrusion" and "anti-hacking" laws, something that Congress plainly never intended.
State and federal statutes already protect computer network owners from unauthorized intrusions. These include the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Wiretap Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), and a variety of state computer intrusion statutes. These statutes, however, generally require that a plaintiff prove that the intrusion caused some harm. The DMCA, in contrast, contains no financial damage threshold, tempting some to use it in place of the statutes that were designed to address computer intrusion.
Fortunately, the courts appear to be taking steps to reign in this particular misuse of the DMCA, ruling that the use of authentic usernames and passwords to access computers cannot constitute circumvention, even if done without the authorization of the computer owner. 53 Until more judicial precedents are on the books, however, the improper use of the DMCA as an all-purpose computer intrusion prohibition will continue to muddy the waters for lawyers and professionals.
Disgruntled Company Sues Former Contractor For Unauthorized Network Access
In April 2003, an automated stock trading company sued a former contract programmer under the DMCA, claiming that his access to the company's computer system over a password-protected virtual private network (VPN) connection was an act of circumvention.
Pearl Investments had employed the programmer to create a software module for its software system. In order to complete the work remotely, the programmer used a VPN to connect to the company's computers. Although the contractor created a very successful software module for the company, the relationship turned frosty after the company ran into financial difficulties and terminated the contractor's contract.
The company sued the contractor when it discovered the contractor's VPN connection to the its system, claiming electronic trespass, as well as violations of computer intrusion statutes, the CFAA, and the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. Pearl claimed that it had taken away the authorization it had previously given to the contractor to access its system through the password-protected VPN and that the VPN connection was therefore unauthorized. The Court rejected the company's electronic trespass and CFAA claims due to lack of evidence of any actual damage done. Even though the second server was not being used by the programmer at the time, and its hard drive had been accidentally wiped, the court agreed with Pearl that the existence of the VPN was a prohibited circumvention of a technological protection measure that controlled access to a system which contained copyrighted software. 54
7. Conclusion
Years of experience with the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the DMCA demonstrate that the statute reaches too far, chilling a wide variety of legitimate activities in ways Congress did not intend. As an increasing number of copyright works are wrapped in technological protection measures, it is likely that the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions will be applied in further unforeseen contexts, hindering the legitimate activities of innovators, researchers, the press, and the public at large.
EFF would like to thank the following who helped to create and update this publication:
The Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, Deirdre Mulligan, Nicky Ozer, and Nicolai Nielsen.
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/?f=uninte...sequences.html
Winternals Gunning For Best Buy/Geek Squads Pirates
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1. In what city and state was the Best Buy store or Geek Squad precinct that you worked in located?
2. Approximately when did you work at Best Buy or Geek Squad?
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3. While you worked at Best Buy or with Geek Squad, did you witness the use of unlicensed software?
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4. While you worked at Best Buy or with Geek Squad, did you witness the unlicensed use of ERD Commander or any other Winternals' software?
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5. Did someone at Best Buy or with Geek Squad provide you with an unlicensed copy of ERD Commander or other Winternals' software?
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6. Did someone at Best Buy or with Geek Squad provide you with training on the use of ERD Commander or other Winternals' software?
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http://www.winternals.com/survey/
BitTorrent Battles Over Bandwidth
Spencer Kelly
Nowadays, many of us have a lot of media stored on our computers such as software, music, videos.
In the last few years users have started to share that content with each other across the net, whether legal or not.
This is something that has plagued the music industry for several years. And now, mainly thanks to a system called BitTorrent, the movie industry could face the same struggle.
But BitTorrent could also be the solution.
Hollywood is definitely interested in distributing its movies over the net. King Kong is the first major film in the UK to be released as a download at the same time as on DVD.
Users on the web will visit a download site and pull the data onto their computers. Many users can be served at once but, if demand is huge, users will effectively have to queue up and wait their turn.
But there is another way to get hold of content and it has caused a nightmare for the music industry of late, with users sharing content amongst themselves, their peers.
Using a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program and a decent internet connection, a user can make all his files available to anyone else who is using the same program.
If you wanted to get hold of a particular song, your file-sharing program would hunt for that file on other people's hard drives. When it finds it, it downloads a copy to your own computer.
The more users who download the file, the more places there are for other users to get it. This reduces the likelihood of bottlenecks, and is a very efficient way of distributing files across the net.
Of course, it is illegal to share copyrighted material like that. But this has not stopped people doing it.
Larger files
More recent developments include being able to download different parts of the same file from different users.
But video files are much larger than music files and have slower upload times.
This is where BitTorrent comes in. It is an incredibly efficient way of distributing large files, like video, across the net, even when there is a high demand, and even when only one person has the complete file.
The key is that a user's computer does not need to wait until it has downloaded the entire file.
As soon as it has downloaded a chunk, it starts uploading it to any other users who do not yet have that chunk.
Similarly, your computer finds other users who have chunks that you are missing, and downloads many at once.
The group of machines sharing a file is called a swarm, for obvious reasons. And the torrent of data flowing between them is called a torrent. The more people in the swarm, the faster the file spreads.
Using BitTorrent is not particularly difficult. There are many different BitTorrent programs freely available for download.
These manage the uploading and downloading for you, maximising your internet connection, which can end up shifting gigabytes in a session.
Once finished downloading, it is considered good manners to stay online, allowing the program to continue sharing the file with other users.
Broadband 'hogs'
BitTorrent's efficient use of broadband connections has hugely increased the amount of traffic going across the net, because it runs all users' net connections flat out to deliver huge files.
Recent estimates say that around a third of all internet traffic is based around BitTorrent.
Some internet service providers think this is unacceptable. Recently BT began clamping down on so-called "broadband hogs", by starting to enforce a 40GB monthly limit.
Some ISPs go even further, breaking down customers' net usage into different types of activity, and discriminating against bandwidth-hungry file-sharers.
So-called traffic-shaping is part of an ongoing battle between ISPs and BitTorrent programmers.
As network providers look for smarter ways to identify torrent traffic, and reduce its impact on their network, more and more help sites are springing up showing users how to encrypt their data to avoid it being tracked and controlled.
Bulldog is one ISP which does not feel the need to traffic shape its data flow. The company's Gavin Young says this is because there are different types of ISPs.
He told Click: "Some ISPs are what we call infrastructure-based, and that means they build their own networks.
"But other ISPs, maybe just for example a brand, are paying money for the fibre, connectivity in that network, and maybe they can't even afford to buy a whole fibre and they're just leasing per megabit units of bandwidth. You're going to be more inclined to try to shape your traffic to keep your cost base down."
Jonathan Arber, a technology expert from Ovum, who specialises in file-sharing, believes ISPs are right to be worried about the amount of traffic that something like BitTorrent creates.
He said: "Certainly, you could see P2P as one of the killer applications for broadband. What that means is that, if users find that their broadband service is actually limiting the application that they most want to use, they'll simply go somewhere else."
New approach
According to Bulldog's Gavin Young, a recent online survey which asked people how ISPs should react to P2P traffic found most respondents wanted to slow it down. In other words to traffic-shape.
He added: "Basically this is a kind of a robotic application to a lot of people.
"They don't necessarily interact that much, they might kick off a download, and go to work or whatever, and so it's not like you're surfing the web, or expecting a response or an instant message.
"If something takes three hours instead of two hours, fine. I suspect as people are doing more with video, as opposed to music and songs, that kind of kick-it-off-and-walk-away approach is going to be more common."
But instead of traffic-shaping and limiting what could be the killer application for broadband, could not an ISPs just buy more bandwidth? After all, it is their business to provide this data flow.
Mr Young explained: "Unfortunately, if you buy more bandwidth, somebody has to cover the cost of that.
"What we're seeing is ISPs introducing tiered services, so for example, given the opportunity for light users to maybe have a metered package, who pay per unit at a time or per amount of data you download. So you can control your own costs as a user, and unlimited packages will inevitably cost a bit more.
There are many programs that use the BitTorrent protocol, but it is still not a completely user-friendly experience.
Ovum's Jonathan Arber said: "The various applications, while they are getting more user-friendly, still require a degree of technical knowledge in order to really get BitTorrent working the way it should.
"If you want to kind of get the kind of download speeds that people talk about, you're going to have to know a little bit about configuring the application, a little bit about configuring your own network as well."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ne/4905660.stm
Musical Breast Implants
Ananova
Computer chips that store music could soon be built into a woman's breast implants.
One boob could hold an MP3 player and the other the person's whole music collection.
BT futurology, who have developed the idea, say it could be available within 15 years.
BT Laboratories' analyst Ian Pearson said flexible plastic electronics would sit inside the breast. A signal would be relayed to headphones, while the device would be controlled by Bluetooth using a panel on the wrist.
According to The Sun he said: "It is now very hard for me to thing of breast implants as just decorative. If a woman has something implanted permanently, it might as well do something useful."
The sensors around the body linked through the electrical impulses in the chips may also be able to warn wearers about heart murmurs, blood pressure increases, diabetes and breast cancer.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm...=news.quirkies
In Silicon Valley, a Man Without a Patent
John Markoff
GEOFF GOODFELLOW is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came up with an idea that resulted in a $612.5 million payday. But he will never see a penny of it. He remains little known even in Silicon Valley and, perhaps most surprising, he doesn't really mind.
And herein lies one of the stranger tales about innovation and money in the world of technology.
A high-school dropout, Mr. Goodfellow had his light-bulb moment in 1982, when he came up with the idea of sending electronic mail messages wirelessly to a portable device — like a BlackBerry. Only back then, there was no BlackBerry; his vision centered on pagers. He eventually did get financial backing to start a wireless e-mail service in the early 1990's, but it failed.
So, in 1998, he moved to Prague and bought a bar. While he was there, the BlackBerry did come along. Tending bar, he believed that everyone had forgotten that he had initially come up with the idea of wireless e-mail.
Almost everyone had, that is, except for James H. Wallace Jr., a Washington lawyer for one of the companies involved in a patent dispute over Mr. Goodfellow's invention.
Mr. Wallace represented NTP, a company aggressively defending its patents for wireless e-mail. He flew to Prague two days after first speaking to Mr. Goodfellow in early 2002 to introduce himself.
Mr. Goodfellow says that NTP was concerned that his earlier work might undermine its patent claims, and the company wound up going to some lengths to ensure that it did not. "I kind of had a big grin on my face that someone had dug deep enough to find the person where it all began," Mr. Goodfellow recalled. "He basically wanted to hear my story."
On a subsequent visit a year later, as Mr. Goodfellow remembers it, Mr. Wallace introduced him to a travel companion by saying: "Geoff's the inventor of wireless e-mail. My client patented some of its implementation workings."
Mr. Wallace, in an e-mail response to a reporter's questions, disputed the quotation. But two things are certain. Mr. Goodfellow, an early participant in Silicon Valley's grass-roots computer culture, disdained the notion of protecting his ideas with patents. And Thomas J. Campana Jr., a Chicago inventor with no such qualms, patented the idea of wireless electronic mail almost a decade after Mr. Goodfellow's original work.
Mr. Campana, who died in 2004, was a founder of NTP, and his patent push yielded a bonanza for the company, which will receive $612.5 million in a settlement reached last month in its patent infringement suit against Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.
For legal and technology experts, the tale of Mr. Goodfellow's pioneering work is evidence of the shortcomings of the nation's patent system, which was created to reward individual creativity but has increasingly become a club for giant corporations and aggressive law firms.
Several legal experts suggested that Mr. Goodfellow's work might have constituted important "prior art" — earlier public information that is relevant to a patent application — that should have been disclosed to patent examiners and the courts by both sides in the dispute.
"I think there is a potential ethics issue," said Mark A. Lemley, a Stanford professor who specializes in patent law. "The basic key is the attorneys have the obligation to disclose everything they know about his prior artwork and make him available as a fact witness."
DESPITE what might have been, Mr. Goodfellow says he has no regrets. His scorn for patents is widely shared by many innovators in Silicon Valley, especially open-source software developers, whose technology competes with products from companies like Microsoft. But it remains a deeply divisive viewpoint.
"You don't patent the obvious," he said during a recent interview. "The way you compete is to build something that is faster, better, cheaper. You don't lock your ideas up in a patent and rest on your laurels."
The initial encounter with Mr. Wallace in Prague was only the beginning of Mr. Goodfellow's indirect role in the BlackBerry case. NTP, he says, seemed intent on neutralizing him as a complication to its patent case.
NTP hired Mr. Goodfellow as a consultant; invoices show he was paid $4,000 a day — about $19,600 in all — for several days' work in 2002, including two trips to meet with lawyers in Washington. As part of a formal contract, he signed a nondisclosure agreement, prohibiting him from revealing any information or consulting with any other parties during the period of the lawsuit.
At one meeting in Washington, when Mr. Goodfellow described his technology at a white board in a conference room, Mr. Wallace insisted that the other lawyers not take handwritten notes for fear of leaving a paper trail, Mr. Goodfellow says. Another meeting, he says, focused on which claims in NTP's patents were least likely to be compromised by Mr. Goodfellow's prior work.
In an e-mail response to a reporter's question about NTP's contacts with Mr. Goodfellow, Mr. Wallace maintained that Mr. Goodfellow was retained because he had been mentioned in news articles from the early 1990's "regarding a product called RadioMail" — his effort to commercialize the wireless e-mail idea — but that Mr. Goodfellow "could not locate any documentation beyond these articles regarding the product."
As it happens, he had documented his wireless e-mail concept even earlier.
In the early 1970's Mr. Goodfellow, then a teenager, was hanging out at SRI International here, generally getting under foot until he was hired in 1974 as an assistant computer operator in the laboratory of the pioneering computer researcher Douglas C. Englebart.
By the early 1980's, the Arpanet, the computer network that preceded the modern Internet, was being used by thousands of academics, scientists and military officers — and by Mr. Goodfellow, who realized that it was possible to relay a mail message from the network to a newfangled alphanumeric pager that had just been introduced by a nearby company, Millicom, of Sunnyvale, Calif., which called its service Metagram.
In 1982, he published his idea on a widely read Arpanet mailing list called Telecom Digest in a note titled "Electronic Mail for People on the Move."
The service, he wrote, "allows Arpanet users to send messages to people on the MetaNet without having to run and find a terminal with a modem on it or go through the human dispatcher, i.e., so you can now do fun things like be driving down the road and have a message appear that says: [YOU HAVE NEW MAIL]."
Mr. Goodfellow went on to become a founder of the world's second commercial Internet company, Anterior Technology (later renamed RadioMail), in his apartment here in 1986. Beginning in 1990, at roughly the same time AT&T hired Mr. Campana to develop pager technology into a wireless mail gateway, Mr. Goodfellow set out to commercialize his idea, ultimately receiving $3 million from financial backers such as Motorola.
RadioMail was introduced in 1991, and the next year Mr. Goodfellow embarked on a partnership with Research in Motion, a Canadian company, and Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications giant. But like a number of Mr. Goodfellow's projects, RadioMail was ahead of its time, and he left the company in 1996. During the height of the Internet bubble, Mr. Goodfellow, a self-taught software engineer, would speak caustically about the hype pervading the era, referring to the surplus of "zero-billion-dollar industries."
He walked away from Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom without the great wealth that it had afforded so many. But if he is miffed, it is because so much of the history has been forgotten.
"I don't want to sound bitter," he said. "I'm overjoyed that what I saw more than 20 years ago is now de rigueur."
Today, Mr. Goodfellow's invention and its fate are a curious but significant footnote to the bitter patent battle between NTP, whose only assets are the Campana patents, and Research in Motion, which has come to dominate the market for wireless electronic mail handsets.
Although the NTP patents have been tentatively invalidated by the United States Patent Office, a jury upheld NTP's infringement suit in 2002, and R.I.M. chose to settle the legal fight for fear of a federal court injunction against its popular service.
And Mr. Wallace, the NTP lawyer, rejects the idea that Mr. Goodfellow's work casts any further shadow over his client's patent claims.
Mr. Wallace said by e-mail that he was not aware of Mr. Goodfellow's 1982 article — though Mr. Goodfellow says he described his 1982 work in detail to NTP lawyers — and that NTP's patent claims turn on integration with a "destination computer," not a pager.
In any case, Mr. Wallace added, "the devil is in the details.
"Suppose I write something saying that teleportation is possible by merely converting matter to energy, beaming the energy to a distant location and reconverting energy back to matter," he said. "Does this mean that my statements compromise the patents of the first person to actually make such a system work? No patent attorney would argue such a thing."
Others take a different view. "The moral of the story is that for a long time now the patent system has been misused," said Mitchell D. Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Corporation, the software publisher, and an adviser to Mr. Goodfellow in the early 1990's. "If it had been properly used, NTP would never have been issued its patents, and they never would have had a basis to pursue a lawsuit against R.I.M."
DURING the court case, R.I.M. and NTP wrangled over three earlier developments: work by some University of Hawaii researchers; a Motorola patent; and work by TekNow, a company in Phoenix. Mr. Goodfellow's company and 1982 system were not mentioned. (R.I.M. executives did not respond to telephone and e-mail requests for comment.)
Although his role went unnoticed both by the federal courts and patent examiners, Mr. Goodfellow's invention is woven into the very fabric of the Internet. The computer network assigns different addresses, known as ports, now numbering more than 65,000, to different services like electronic mail or the World Wide Web. To this day, Port 99 remains set aside for Mr. Goodfellow's original brainstorm: pushing an electronic mail message to a wireless pager.
Mr. Goodfellow sold his bar in Prague in 2004 and returned to Silicon Valley to help his brother run an Internet photography business. He is now back in the thick of innovation, serving as the chairman of a start-up Eritrean company working on voice-over-Internet-protocol technology.
In his spare time he volunteers as a disc jockey at KZSU, the Stanford student radio station. He said his show, beat.net, is his way of continuing to look for the technology edge.
"I'm really interested in the intersection of technology and entertainment," said Mr. Goodfellow, who just turned 50. "These days I'm still trying to spend my time doing new things."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/te...erland&emc=rss
Write Free Software, Pay $203,000 to Patent Holder
Jackson Lenford
Ben Jacobsen, a model railroad hobbyist, wrote a bunch of software to let you connect your computer to your model railroad and control trains with it. He chose to not only give the software away for free, but to make the source code available as well, so that the model railroading/hacker community could improve it and customize it to their liking.
And then KAM Industries, maker of commercial software that serves a similar role, tried asserting their 'patent rights' over doing just that.
When the author of the open source railroad controller asked for additional information about what claims were being infringed, KAM sent him an invoice for $203,000, claiming that the 7000 or so users of his software resulted in damages of at least $29/each.
KAM then sent a request to the author's academic sponsor (unrelated to his independent model railroad work), requesting copies of all his email and other correspondence. This was obviously a dirty tactic meant to rattle Jacobsen more than anything else.
Several more threatening letters arrived. Finally, in January of this year, Jacobsen pointed out that he didn't believe their patent would withstand a challenge in court, noting that there was plenty of prior art, including his allegedly infringing software, which was available before KAM filed their patent application. He also pointed out that they must have known this all along. In February, KAM's lawyers responded by claiming that they know of no invalidating prior art, and that they still viewed Jacobsen's work as infringing on their patent rights.
This is all still ongoing. It isn't clear that KAM will cease harassing Jacobsen, even with the knowledge that their patents are likely illegitimate.
But it is abundantly clear that patents like this hurt the efforts of those trying to make the world a better place by producing tools for others to use (for free in this case). It is equally as clear that even small companies can use their patents as bludgeons against individuals.
The continuing saga (as well as all correspondence to date) can be followed at Jacobsen's website.
http://righttocreate.blogspot.com/20...203000-to.html
Lessons from the Browser Wars
The first-mover advantage is well chronicled, but it didn't help Netscape when Microsoft launched Internet Explorer. What drives technology adoption, and do browser upstarts such as Firefox stand a chance? A Q&A with professor Pai-Ling Yin.
Sara Grant
In a famous example of how first movers can lose their advantage, second-mover Microsoft won the Web browser wars from Netscape and continues to dominate the market today. But that competition was the subject of another "war," this one among researchers who study how technology is diffused into the market.
The debate was this: Did Microsoft win because its Internet Explorer was the technologically superior product to Netscape Navigator, or was Microsoft just more successful at the distribution end by convincing most PC companies, some argue by anticompetitive tactics, to include IE on every PC shipped in the late 1990s? Researchers line up on both sides of the argument.
A recent working paper by Harvard Business School professor Pai-Ling Yin and Stanford professor Timothy F. Bresnahan offers an answer. Looking at both the pace of adoption of new versions of the browsers and the brand choice made by users, "distribution played a larger role than did technical progress in determining the market outcomes," the scholars conclude in the paper "Economic and Technical Drivers of Technology Choice: Browsers."
The implications are significant. Browsers simplified access to the online world, transforming the Internet from a communications vehicle for academics into a mass consumer phenomenon. At the same time, the growing usefulness of the Internet drove sales of personal computers off the chart—the installed base of PCs doubled to 213 million computers between 1995 and 1999. Understanding the complex interaction between the two technologies and how a second mover was able to unseat the incumbent market champion will help innovators of all stripes learn how new technology gets diffused into mass markets.
In this interview, Yin discusses the results and implications for new browser upstarts such as Firefox and Camino. Do they stand a chance against Internet Explorer? Yin says Microsoft's entrenchment in corporate IT, the maturation of the PC market, and the technical difficulty many consumers have in switching to a new browser make it hard soil for new challengers to take root.
Sara Grant: Why did you choose to study Web browsers to look at the idea of diffusion of innovation in a market?
Pai-Ling Yin: Web browsers were the turning point in mass commercializing the Internet. They were the easy-to-use user interface that permitted the average person to access information on servers around the world.
As a tool for exploring how standards are set when new technologies hit the market, the browser wars exhibit many features we like to study: competition between two viable alternatives, rapidly improving technologies, the ability of firms to use strategic levers such as market power and channels of distribution, growth in demand leading to diffusion of the new technology through the population, and uncertainty. Thus, this is one example from which we can generalize lessons regarding the outcome of diffusion of innovation into a market.
Q: In your paper, you explain that your analysis of the "classical concern" in the diffusion of new technologies is based on technological progress versus economic resources. Can you explain this?
A: The classical debate in economics has been whether the market always produces the "best" outcome. Best can be defined in different ways. In one stream of the debate, "best" has been defined as "technologically superior" (again, a term that can be defined differently). So, does the market always lead the "technologically superior" outcome, or can economic actors take actions to influence the market outcome so that a "technologically inferior" outcome arises?
We conclude that while both technological progress (measured by releases of newer and better versions of browsers: version 1, version 1.1, version 2, etc.) and strategic actions (distribution browsers with PC purchases) increase the rate of diffusion of browsers into the population, the strategic actions (distribution or restrictions on distribution in the case of Netscape) are twice as important as technical progress.
Q: Your findings show that at the height of the competition between Netscape and Microsoft during the 1990s, Microsoft's Internet Explorer became the de facto browser standard. What does this say in regards to first-mover versus second-mover advantage, and about future browser battles?
A: What is interesting are the lessons we can learn about how a fast second mover can upset the normally strong barriers to entry that a first-mover advantage in a network setting can create. In short, the big lesson learned is that a window of opportunity exists for a second mover to challenge a first mover in this setting early on when the new technology has not yet diffused through the entire population—the second mover can try to influence new users rather than get the small installed base to switch over.
The second mover has to have some sort of asymmetric advantage, such as control over the distribution of a complement (in this case, the PC), in order to slow the build-up of network effects around the first mover and ensure that the second mover's product begins to build up a critical mass. A number of smaller strategic elements converge to generate this window of opportunity, but I encourage people to read the paper as well as a chapter on this phenomenon which is forthcoming in Shane M. Greenstein & Victor Stango (Eds.), Standards and Public Policy, Cambridge University Press.
As for the future of Web browsers, the standard has been set, and it will be very hard to displace IE. Although Firefox is touted as the new challenger, its share of end-users is only estimated at 10 percent, and end-users are less of a barrier to further market share than are Webmasters.
Q: What are the chances for browsers like Firefox and Camino for the Mac to become mainstream products?
A: Firefox and Camino claim only a small market share, and those users are on the tech-savvy end of the user spectrum. In particular for Mac-centric browsers, we still live in a PC-dominated world. Until IT managers in large enterprises are willing to support these browsers, they will not hit the mainstream in any major fashion.
Why won't an IT manager support these versions? The biggest headache with these browsers is that the majority of Web sites are optimized on IE. Try going to some of the major commercial airline sites, or to the Web sites of older and smaller companies. If you use Firefox, sometimes you will find missing menus, missing pictures, links that don't work, etc. Even Netscape doesn't work with all of our Harvard Business School applications.
But its Webmasters who are the real barrier to a late-to-the-game second mover in the browser market. Because different browsers require slightly different code to be viewable, it is costly for Webmasters to write for different types of browsers. They will tend to pick the browser that is most used by the majority of end-users. Thus, the source of network effects in this market is indirect. While end-users don't know which browser other users are using, the developers of the content that make the browser so useful do care that everyone is using a similar browser.
Q: So Firefox and other new browsers, no matter that they have new features and refinements that IE lacks, remain at a competitive disadvantage?
A: Game over. Firefox and the others have to get the installed base of IE users to switch to their browser, a much harder proposition than IE faced in the '90s when all it had to do was get new users to pick IE rather than Netscape as their first browser.
Either the innovations would have to be huge improvements over what IE can currently do, or a huge problem would have to arise with current IE use to create an opening for such a late second mover to make headway and lead people to go through the hassle of switching their browser.
Even with the security issues that plague IE, Microsoft has a huge amount of cash. If any browser really became a threat, Microsoft could easily imitate their innovation, or fix the IE problem with a patch. Indeed, IE successfully caught up to Netscape's quality by throwing a lot of money and manpower into IE browser development.
Q: What are you working on next?
A: Most closely related to the browser wars is research with professor Estelle Cantillon on how a second mover tipped the derivatives exchange market in the German Bund.
These works contribute to a more general theme in my research on how firms can change industry structure. The market tipping work addresses one part of that question: How can second movers break incumbent control? Casework and early-stage research attack a second aspect of that general theme: Can technology drive changes in demand? In a world of growing information resources, what are the drivers of search? How do people search, really? What would the answers to these questions imply for industry structure and business models in the next twenty years?
http://workingknowledge.hbs.edu/item...8&t=technology
Europe, Too, Takes Harder Line in Handling Terrorism Suspects
Katrin Bennhold
As his wristwatch edges toward 3:26 p.m., the 32-year-old Algerian moves his wooden chair closer to the back door. At 3:30 sharp, his leg needs to be inside his North London house. The man, whose name, by court order, cannot be divulged, wears an electronic tag around his left ankle and is allowed to leave his home just four hours a day.
He was arrested in London four years ago on suspicion of links to the Armed Islamic Group, an Algerian terrorist organization, and spent more than three years in high-security prisons before being put under partial house arrest in October. Now the British government wants to send him back to Algeria.
But no formal charges have been brought, and, he and his lawyer said, he has not been interrogated once, or informed of evidence against him. "Since the day they arrested me, I have never been asked any questions or told what the case is," the man said. "How can you defend yourself in a situation like that?"
Four and a half years after the Sept. 11 attacks, and after deadly bombings in Madrid and London since then, the troubled debate within Western democracies over how to weigh security against basic freedoms has only grown and spread, as the legal tools for dealing with terrorism suspects multiply.
The clashing of priorities has been clear in the United States, in the domestic debates preceding the renewal of the Patriot Act, and in the international uproar over prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay.
But many European governments, including some that had criticized the United States for its antiterrorism measures, have been extending their own surveillance and prosecution powers. Officials, lawyers and human rights experts say that Europe, too, is experiencing a slow erosion of civil liberties as governments increasingly put the prevention of possible terrorist actions ahead of concerns to protect the rights of people suspected, but not convicted, of a crime.
Most of Britain's new counterterrorism legislation, which outlaws the vaguely worded "glorification" of terrorism, came into force on Thursday. Italy and the Netherlands have relaxed the conditions under which intelligence services may eavesdrop. French legislation recently gave investigators broader access to telephone and Internet data. German legislation being drawn up seeks to allow intelligence services easier access to bank and car registration records.
"We are fiddling with rights that only a few years ago seemed untouchable," said Álvaro Gil-Robles, human rights commissioner at the Council of Europe, an intergovernmental group that monitors human rights.
The most contentious areas concern treatment of terror suspects, he said. Several European countries are extending the length of time suspects who have not been charged may be held or restricted in their freedom.
Some nations have been seeking ways to deport suspects even if torture is practiced in the suspects' home countries. That brushes uncomfortably against major United Nations and European treaties that forbid deportations if the suspect faces a risk of torture.
"Something pretty fundamental is going on," said Gareth Peirce, a lawyer at Birnberg and Peirce in London who represents the Algerian man under surveillance in North London and nine other Middle Eastern and North African men arrested without formal charges within months of Sept. 11.
"A number of countries have been trying to avoid their treaty obligations in relation to arbitrary detention and torture," she said.
As in the United States, defenders of tighter security say that international terrorism demands new approaches and that criminal law is ill-equipped to handle the threat.
"We always think about the rights of the terrorists," said August Hanning, Germany's deputy interior minister and a former intelligence chief. "But if there is an attack that you could have prevented, you also have to be able to look into the eyes of the relatives."
One broad trend has been the extension of police custody and restriction of legal representation.
In December, France increased its period of detention without charge for terror suspects to six days from four; it retained rules that have allowed uncharged suspects to be denied access to a lawyer during the first three days.
Italy last year extended custody to 24 hours from 12 and authorized the police to interrogate detainees in the absence of their lawyers. In 2003, Spain extended the period in which suspected terrorists can be held effectively incommunicado to a maximum 13 days, according to the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
Britain has gone furthest. The latest law doubles the period during which a terror suspect can be held in custody without charge to 28 days. It was just 48 hours in 2001, and Prime Minister Tony Blair fought for an extension to three months.
The new law followed one filed soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that allowed foreign terror suspects to be held indefinitely without charge. The House of Lords declared that measure unlawful in late 2004.
The government, scrambling to find a new way to deal with 10 men held under the provision at Belmarsh Prison in London, introduced a form of partial house arrest known as a ontrol order, which severely restricted their freedom of movement. Since last summer, Britain has also been seeking ways to deport eight of the men back to home countries that are known to practice torture.
One of them is the unidentified Algerian, who is allowed to leave his house only between 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. and may not venture more than a mile away.
He is not allowed to use cellphones or the Internet, and any visitor to his house has to be cleared by the Home Office.
Last week a British High Court judge, Jeremy Sullivan, sharply condemned a control order on another terrorism suspect, identified as M.B., as "conspicuously unfair," saying that suspects' rights are being determined by "executive decision untrammeled by any prospect of effective judicial supervision."
The government said after the ruling that it would appeal, and the Home Office issued a statement, defending its counterterrorism legislation as striking "the right balance between safeguarding society and safeguarding the rights of the individual."
In the Netherlands, a bill likely to pass in coming weeks would introduce something like the British control orders for terrorism suspects the authorities have been "unable to convict."
For a maximum of two years, such suspects can be restricted in their freedom of movement, be obliged to report to the police regularly and prohibited from contacting certain individuals.
In some countries, restrictive tools predate the Sept. 11 attacks, but their use has increased. In France, where a combination of Basque, Corsican and Islamic terrorism prompted the government to lay the groundwork for its antiterrorist legal arsenal as early as 1986, suspects can be held for four years on vague charges.
As of November 2005, some 80 suspects were being held under this provision, more than in any other European country, according to Alain Marsaud, who was France's chief counterterrorism coordinator in the 1980's and is now a lawmaker.
"We're not going to wait until the bomb goes off," said Mr. Marsaud, who wrote a recent parliamentary report on counterterrorism efforts. "That's why we give more power to the judicial system: to arrest people before they act."
The number of Muslim men arrested for "association with wrongdoers involved in a terrorist enterprise" has soared since Sept. 11. According to the French Interior Ministry, it increased from 58 people in 2002, to 77 in 2003, 101 in 2004 and 170 last year.
Lawyers say the British, Dutch and French practices are milder forms of the detention of "enemy combatants" in the United States.
"There is a clear parallel with what is going on in the United States," said Jacques Debray, a Lyon-based lawyer specializing in immigration and penal law, who has represented several terrorism suspects. "They detain people on administrative grounds, while we create a legal framework first. But the logic is the same: preventive detention."
The United Nations Convention Against Torture and the European Convention on Human Rights, ratified by all European Union member countries and the United States, ban torture and other cruel or degrading treatment.
They forbid the deportation of people to countries where they risk torture, and the admission in court of evidence possibly obtained under torture.
But several European countries have sought diplomatic assurances from countries with poorly regarded human rights records that if they deport suspects there, the suspects would not be ill-treated.
Sweden allowed two Egyptian terror suspects to be repatriated on a C.I.A. plane in December 2001 after Cairo gave such assurances. The United Nations Committee Against Torture subsequently said that Sweden had violated its obligations under the United Nations Convention.
Germany, the Netherlands and Austria have also sought to return suspects to Turkey and Egypt by obtaining such pledges.
In Britain, the government has received diplomatic assurances from Libya, Jordan and Lebanon, and was working on similar accords with Egypt and Algeria. Human rights activists say that such assurances are not reliable.
"Why should a country that fails to respect major international conventions against torture respect a mere bilateral agreement?" asked Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch in New York. "It's a legal fig leaf."
The British government is also trying to make deportations possible without such assurances, seeking to intervene in a case before the European Court of Human Rights that involves the Netherlands. In that case, an Algerian terror suspect, Mohammed Ramzy, who was acquitted on charges of links to a terrorist group, has appealed to the court to prevent his deportation by the Netherlands to Algeria on the grounds that he might face torture.
Britain is asking the court to set a precedent by ruling that the risk of torture faced by the suspect has to be weighed against the security risk faced by the host country.
A spokeswoman for the British Home Office called the European Convention on Human Rights a "cornerstone" of the European Union, but added, "There is a valid question about how rights and freedoms are balanced and interpreted in a phase of the current heightened security threat that Europe faces."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/13/news/limits.php
A Sinister Web Entraps Victims of Cyberstalkers
Tom Zeller Jr.
Claire E. Miller, a 44-year-old publishing executive in Manhattan, recently stripped her nameplate from the tenant directory at the entrance to her Kips Bay apartment building, where she has lived for more than 11 years. She has also asked the landlord to disconnect the buzzer and is in the process of changing her phone number.
Drastic measures, all, for an otherwise cheerful and outgoing person. But Ms. Miller has been unnerved by a sudden and, since last September, steady onslaught of unsolicited and lusty phone calls, e-mail messages and even late-night visits from strange men — typically seeking delivery on dark promises made to them online by someone, somewhere, using her name.
"I wouldn't even try to guess at the motivation behind this," Ms. Miller said.
She is being harassed — cyberstalked, by modern definition. The term has by now found its way into dozens of state legislatures, police reports and talk-show lineups, joining other unsavory byproducts of the Internet age.
State legislatures took notice around 1999 and began passing laws that make cyberstalking a crime. Three months ago, President Bush signed federal anti-cyberstalking legislation. But cases like Ms. Miller's make it clear that the problem is not easily legislated away and show how devastating it can be to individuals caught in its web.
One profile posted at the "adult personals" site iwantu.com included Ms. Miller's full name, address and phone number, along with a solicitation for eager suitors to call or drop by her home. "My name is Claire E. Miller," the ad began. It concluded: "I can make you very happy and satisfied. In my den of love pad."
It is the online equivalent of scrawling "for a good time, call Jane Doe" on a bathroom wall, but the reach of the Internet has made such pranks — if they are only that — far more sinister. And the problem is only likely to grow, fueled by the availability of personal data online and the huge growth in social networking and dating sites, which are attracting investment from big companies.
"Cyberstalking is the hidden horror of the Internet," said Parry Aftab, an attorney and executive director of WiredSafety.org, a network of 9,000 volunteers who patrol the Web and assist victims of cyberstalking, child pornography and other online ills. "Nobody talks about it. They think they have to live with it."
Ms. Miller suspects that her perpetrator is a stranger who may have found her personal information while snooping around in the AOL e-mail account of an old high school friend. But late at night, in the topsy-turvy churn of an anxious brain, all kinds of people — old lovers, acquaintances — become possible culprits.
"That's when the self-doubt and fear comes in," Ms. Miller said.
There are no statistics on how often this particular breed of online impersonation takes place, but Jayne A. Hitchcock, the director of Working to Halt Online Abuse, an organization that assists victims of Internet harassment, says it is common enough.
"I think I've seen everything," Ms. Hitchcock said. Participants in online fantasy football leagues, angered by some nuance of the competition, silently turn on and anonymously harass one another, and in eBay auctions, either the seller or the buyer turns stalker, she said. They channel that "Internet road rage," Ms. Hitchcock said, into a variety of anonymous vendettas.
After receiving informal requests for information about cyberstalking from the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies, Ms. Hitchcock's group began tracking demographic details in 2000. In February, the group — which she says handles an average of 50 new cases each week — released a five-year analysis of data on the victims and, to the extent possible, the stalkers. The data is sketchy; victims volunteered to fill out a questionnaire, and harasser data is, in most cases, provided by the harassed. But there are some insights. For example, increasing numbers of men appear to be applying for help, and overt threats of offline harm occurred in about a quarter of the cases last year.
In about half the cases, victim and perpetrator appear to be strangers. For the rest, it can be deeply, disturbingly personal.
Earlier this month, a Suffolk County police officer, Michael Valentine, was indicted on 197 counts of stalking, unauthorized use of a computer and other charges after hacking into the Yahoo e-mail account of a woman he had briefly dated and posing as her in online communications.
The Suffolk County District Attorney's office also charges that Mr. Valentine, of Lake Grove, accessed the woman's personal profile on the dating site Match.com, sending electronic "winks" and other communications to 70 different men on the site. At least two showed up at the woman's home for dates.
That case, and Ms. Miller's, echo that of Gary S. Dellapenta, of Los Angeles, a former security guard who spent the summer of 1998 trolling chat rooms and personals sites posing as his ex-girlfriend. He posted rape fantasies under her name and, providing her home address, begged strangers to deliver on them.
Six men arrived at the former girlfriend's door before Mr. Dellapenta was eventually tracked down. He was sentenced in 1999 to six years in prison under California's then-new cyberstalking law.
J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and the author of several books on criminal personalities, said that the universe of cyberstalkers runs the gamut, from "jokesters and pranksters to people who have clear criminal intent." He called this particular brand of harassment — in which the perpetrator deploys third parties, wittingly or not, to haunt the victim — "stalking by proxy."
"With any new technology that comes along, you have the shadow of criminality that follows," Mr. Meloy said, although he added that the Internet, with all its distance and anonymity, provided a unique vehicle for the unleashing of hidden furies.
"It's a much more veiled, shielded, disinhibited way of communicating," Mr. Meloy said, "and much more raw in the expression of aggression."
Mari J. Frank, an attorney and privacy consultant who specializes in cases of identity theft, called Ms. Miller's situation "identity theft for revenge."
"I speak about it all the time," Ms. Frank said, adding that the rise of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, where young people often naïvely divulge too much information to a world of potential stalkers, has made the situation worse. "Even teens are becoming the victims of cyber ID theft and cyberstalking," she said.
About 45 states now have laws similar to California's. And the new federal law — tucked into the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act — updated telephone harassment law to include computer communications.
Some advocates of civil liberty have complained about what they see as overly broad language of the federal update, which prohibits not only anonymous communications intended to threaten, abuse and harass, but also those intended to "annoy" — a term that might characterize a wide range of anonymous Internet banter that falls far short of cyberstalking.
Others, though, have argued that such banter would be protected by the First Amendment, and only cyberstalkers have anything to fear.
That is, of course, if they can be found.
Ms. Miller filed an initial complaint with the New York City police department in October, but said she was not contacted after that. Using a number provided by a friend, she called a detective with the department's units on computer crimes last week, and is now working with investigators there. (A deputy chief, Michael Collins, a police spokesman, said a clerical error in the processing of Ms. Miller's initial complaint apparently delayed her case.)
Ms. Miller has also found two dating sites where her name has been used — imatchup.com and iwantu.com — and had the profiles either removed or hidden.
According to Ms. Hitchcock, the director of Working to Halt Online Abuse, federal cyberstalking legislation can provide needed leverage in pursuing what are often complicated cases. Perpetrator and victim might reside in different states, for instance, and the evidence might be in the hands of Internet companies all over the country, or the world. The law also gives the F.B.I. and other federal law enforcement agencies greater purview over cyberstalking.
But getting that far, Ms. Hitchcock said, is a long road.
Using a Web site usually involves leaving tracks in the form of an I.P. address, which can be traced back to an Internet service provider and perhaps the computer of a stalker. Under most circumstances, a subpoena or a search warrant is required to obtain that information from an online service, so filing a police report is crucial. After that, contacting an organization like WiredSafety.org or Working to Halt Online Abuse, at haltabuse.org, can help. They work with both victims and law enforcement to help move cases forward.
Ms. Miller has taken all these steps — and worked diligently on her own.
Late last month Ms. Miller asked the support staff of iwantu.com, which has offices in Seattle and Canada, Costa Rica and Britain, for data that would reveal the Internet service provider of the person who set up the account there.
On April 3, the company put its position succinctly in an e-mail message to Ms. Miller: "Please note that unfortunately, we cannot supply I.P. addresses. Sorry."
That is precisely what they should have done, said Mark Brooks, an online personals industry analyst and the editor of Online Personals Watch, an industry newsletter. "They can't possibly give that out to another user," said Mr. Brooks, who is a former executive of dating and social networking sites like Cupid.com and Friendster. "It might be a stalker calling to get that information."
Executives for iwantu.com did not return phone calls or e-mail messages seeking comment, and the contact number provided on the imatchup.com Web site for the media relations representative and "Romance Director," Dan Levine, connected to the customer service department instead. A representative reached last weekend said he was not sure why that number was listed, and suggested sending an e-mail message or a letter.
These are delicate issues for an industry that is in the throes of a debate about client safety and security. Several states are considering legislation that would require online personals services to disclose whether they conduct background checks on their members.
According to Mr. Brooks, most members of the industry are sensitive to issues of online safety, but argue that background checks — which must rely on third-party commercial data brokers with spotty information — are expensive and by no means foolproof.
And yet one service, True.com, has quickly become one of the most popular personals sites by conducting background checks on anyone seeking to make a connection. Its staff promises to prosecute those who misrepresent themselves on the site — a concept that Ms. Miller might endorse. She said she planned to pursue her tormenter until he is found.
"I do feel that the Internet is a wonderful tool," she said. "I just want to make sure it's kept safe for everyone."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/17/te...rtner=homepage
China's Bid For 'Respect'
Biz watching Hu visit for anti-piracy commitment
Brooks Boliek
Chinese President Hu Jintao is on his first visit to the U.S. as that nation's leader, and when he leaves the White House Thursday, entertainment industry executives hope he takes a commitment to fight copyright piracy back to his homeland.
Among the litany of complaints Washington has with Beijing is the seemingly endless addiction the rising Asian economic, political and military powerhouse has for bootleg movies, music and other intellectual property. Estimated U.S. losses to Chinese copyright piracy range from $2.5 billion-$3.8 billion a year, according to the U.S. Trade Representative.
According to the USTR's April review, the country's lackadaisical enforcement actions allowed infringement levels of 90% or more "for virtually every form of intellectual property" in China during 2004.
On Tuesday, Hu toured Microsoft Corp.'s suburban Redmond, Wash., campus and dined at company chairman Bill Gates' home. Hu said he admired what Gates had achieved. He also sought to reassure Gates that China is serious about protecting intellectual property rights, a key concern for the company as it battles widespread piracy of its Windows operating system there.
"Because you, Mr. Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I'm a friend of Microsoft," Hu said through a translator, according to the Associated Press. "Also, I am dealing with the operating system produced by Microsoft every day," he added, to laughter.
Gates responded: "Thank you, it's a fantastic relationship," and then quipped, "And if you ever need advice on how to use Windows, I'll be glad to help."
Hu, Gates, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and an entourage of Chinese dignitaries saw some business technology demonstrations and toured Microsoft's Home of the Future, which features experimental technology.
That Hu's American visit began with a tour of Microsoft and dinner with Gates could be viewed as a sign of a newfound seriousness the Chinese government has pertaining to intellectual property theft. His visit comes after years of battling widespread software piracy in the potentially lucrative China market. Chinese government officials say they are serious about cracking down on sales of illegal copies of Windows, and some computer makers are pledging to ship more computers with legitimate Windows software installed.
One of those companies, Lenovo Group Ltd., met Monday with Microsoft officials to reaffirm Lenovo's five-month-old commitment to ship computers with genuine operating systems. Microsoft held a similar meeting last week with Chinese computer manufacturer Founder Technology Group Corp., also among the companies that have pledged to promote legal Windows use.
There also have been recent shows of force by the Chinese regarding piracy of entertainment products; authorities there have closed a half-dozen illegal optical disc plants and said they have eight more under investigation. Last month, the government also announced the creation of a new court that will prosecute pirates, amid increasing international pressure to protect the intellectual property of industries making everything from movies to medicine (HR 3/13).
The government also claims that Chinese courts last year sentenced 741 violators of intellectual property rights, adding that there were 16,583 civil cases against pirates in 2005, a 21% jump from the year before. In late 2004, China lowered the threshold for prosecution of piracy cases; individuals who sell more than 5,000 pirated discs can be imprisoned for three to seven years.
In advance of Hu's visit, Zhang Pimin, deputy director general of China's powerful State Administration of Radio, Film and TV, touted his country's attempts to curb piracy.
"Personally, I hate piracy," Zhang said in an interview through an interpreter. "It hurts the domestic industry as well as the international industry. Piracy leads people to illegal activity and illegal people."
He enumerated the anti-piracy measures the Chinese have taken, saying it will take time for them to take effect. China only recently embraced a market economy with its attendant property rights, Zhang explained.
"We are in a kind of education," he said. "Manufacturing is illegal, and now buying is illegal, too."
Like the high-profile war against illegal downloads in the U.S., it is difficult to get people to understand the problems caused by rampant copyright theft, he said. The average Chinese has only eight years of schooling and per-capita gross domestic product is about one-twenty-fifth that in the U.S., according to the Chinese government.
While industry officials said they realize that changing the Chinese mind-set is difficult, they point out that piracy is not a new problem for Beijing; it's one that they promised to fix before joining the World Trade Organization.
"I'm willing to give a little slack on that point," MPAA chairman and CEO Dan Glickman said. "As long as they have a clear direction."
The Chinese have talked a good anti-piracy game at least since 1996, when the U.S. under then-President Clinton threatened to slap tariffs on Chinese imports unless they took steps to rein in piracy and other unfair practices. Since then the country has been admitted to the WTO and is required to meet fair trade obligations, which include copyright protections, or face lawsuits that could result in sanctions. The studios, record companies and other intellectual property holders have asked the Bush administration to take WTO action, but so far it has not taken that drastic step.
"One of the things that strikes me is that the talking points they use are almost a mirror to those I use when I lobby up on the Hill," RIAA chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol said. "From the standpoint of rhetoric and understanding the issue, they have it down. The question is: Will they back the rhetoric with action?"
On a recent visit to China, Glickman found reason to question the Chinese commitment because pirated DVDs were an easy score.
"Street piracy was ubiquitous," he said. "They give a lot of lip service, backed by limited action. Some of the local government officials are serious about it, but it is haphazard at most."
Hu's visit is as much about polishing his country's image at a time when the copyright piracy helps exacerbate a U.S. trade deficit that is soaring above $200 billion. China is playing economic footsie with countries Washington considers tyrannical, and its undervalued currency hampers U.S. competition.
"Part of President Hu's challenge is also to speak to the U.S. public," Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, a leading administration voice on China, said in a speech this week. "China does not want to be seen as a threat; it's seeking respect."
U.S. and Chinese officials must "demonstrate to the United States public that the economic relationship with China offers a fair, two-way street -- that there are mutual opportunities and benefits."
Entertainment industry executives look at China's billion-plus population and instantly see how it could benefit their business -- only the government would take steps to protect their products.
To that end, execs hope that Hu's visit will work as another pressure point for the entertainment industry.
"It's on the president's agenda list, we know that," Glickman said. "And when their film people talk to me, they know it's a priority."
Bainwol said the Chinese don't have to change their entire world to make a positive impact. A few concrete steps within the next few weeks or months would leave an indelible mark. Giving copyright holders the exemplars -- fingerprints left on CDs and DVDs by the machines that make them -- left in the plants they closed would be considered a show of good faith.
"Hu's visit is a moment in time," Bainwol said. "This is a journey, but there are critical moments coming up in the next few months that will make a difference."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr..._id=1002383350
Gov't Ensures Computers Will Use Genuine Software
China Daily
All the computers produced and sold in China must install authentic operating system software, spokesman for the National Copyright Administration Wang Ziqiang said yesterday.
Governments are especially required to purchase computers with genuine operating system software.
"As the operating system is necessary to a new computer, the requirement at this time is specifically focussed on this type of software," Wang said.
No detailed list was given regarding the type of operating system required for installation.
According to a notice issued by three relevant central government departments, computer manufacturers and retailers that install pirate software will be punished.
The government document also noted that operating system software producers should provide a favourable price to computer companies.
Wang predicted that the price of computers will not go up after the new policy is adopted.
Computer manufacturers and operating system software producers are required to report their sales to the Ministry of Information Industry every year in February.
Those who refuse to do so, or those who provide fake figures, will be exposed to the public.
As for government, various levels of departments were required by another notice to establish a special fund on purchasing further software besides the operating system.
"This is a measure to ensure that all software used on government computers is authentic," Wang said.
Those computers with trademarks normally install authentic software, while most computers that are assembled by individuals do not, according to the spokesman.
http://english.people.com.cn/200604/...11_257472.html
First P2P Infringement Case Heads To Court
Beijing Secondary People's Court has begun to hear a lawsuit filed by Shanghai Busheng Music and Culture Company against Beijing Feixingwang Music Software Development Company, who is accused of software copyright infringement.
This is the first court case in Beijing concerning P2P music downloading technology.
Shanghai Busheng accuses Beijing Feixingwang of illegally providing 59 songs whose copyright belongs to Shanghai Busheng for users to download, share and search.
Busheng says that Feixingwang has made as much as RMB2.944 billion from these illegal downloads.
Beijing Feixingwang argues that the P2P software it provides was developed by a Taiwan company, not itself, so it requests the court to reject the accusers' appeal.
No judgment has been released and another hearing is expected soon.
http://www.chinatechnews.com/index.p...e=news&id=3828
Pretentious prattle
The Man Behind Scrambled Hackz
Eliot Van Buskirk
I saw a video the other day that really stood out from the rest of the links making the rounds.
It depicts a man demonstrating software that appears to parse what he's saying fast enough to reassemble the same words by pulling and reordering bits from a recorded Michael Jackson interview. The result: Jackson appears to speak the same sentence right back to him.
The man goes on to explain how the software behind this process works, and his video closes with a live performance of the software in which a performer appears to employ the beat-box method to control the playback of audio and video on a large video screen behind him, in front of what I can only imagine must be a dazzled crowd.
If you haven't seen it yet, you can watch the video here.
It might look like a fancy parlor trick, but if the Scrambled Hackz (or "sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!") software does what it appears to do in the video, its ramifications extend far beyond. Sven König does a fine job of explaining how the software works in the above video, but here's the general idea:
1) Scrambled Hackz analyzes the audio portion of a video file to determine the tempo of the incoming audio, and then slices it up into discrete chunks of a quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note and so on (a process also used by audio editing programs such as Ableton Live and Sony's Acid software).
2) Using a large number of vectors, those slices are classified into a database according to their sonic characteristics.
3) When you send new audio information to the program (using, say, your voice and a microphone), it follows approximately the same process, becoming classified in the database. The software then outputs the pre-analyzed sample that is most similar to that newly cached sample.
4) The result, as you can see in the video, is that König is able to reconfigure a Michael Jackson interview or any number of '80s music videos on the fly, so that they produce a sound similar to whatever he inputs. On screen, the software plays the frames of video that accompany the selected audio.
I must admit to having been enthralled by this video, because Scrambled Hackz appears to have countless possibilities. One could use the system as a virtual guitar pedal onstage, or as an audio interface to a massive library of longer samples. Producers looking for something that "sounds something like this" would be able to find exactly that in seconds. Or, live performers could use it as it's already been used (see video), as an audiovisual instrument in its own right.
König says Scrambled Hackz was designed specifically to infringe copyright. But it has substantial non-infringing uses, so it passes the main litmus test for whether a piece of software is legal. Users could record audio or video of themselves and use the program to pull together samples of various past performances into a real-time performance. For instance, I could take every bass line I've ever recorded and create new ones out of them merely by humming a few bars. An established artist could perform a single song in a live setting that encompassed his or her entire recorded audio and video catalog. People might load their entire media collections into Scrambled Hackz and play around with them in their homes, in art galleries or on a stage, using only their vocal cords or any instrument.
The list goes on and on. Scrambled Hackz' potential uses, both infringing and non-infringing, are mind-boggling. I can't wait to see what people build on top of it, either.
Wired News was not able to test the program, although it should soon be compiled into something that anyone can use. On the strength of the demonstration video alone, Scrambled Hackz is seriously exciting. An interview with its creator, König, was in order.
Wired News: How did the idea to create Scrambled Hackz initially come to you?
Sven König: My background is more conceptual media art than it is music, and my current main interest is intellectual property, the history of this concept and how it will shape future societies in which most valuable goods are immaterial: ideas/knowledge and information.
I believed (and still do) that IP is fundamentally wrong, and if that's the case it must be possible to show that, not just by writing a text but by an artistic project. So the original idea of (Scrambled Hackz) was just to somehow "hack copyright." I'm a music lover so it was quite clear that I wanted to work with music.
In the beginning I just wanted to show that any of my own music could be completely reconstructed out of very small samples of copyrighted music, to ask the question of who now owns that music? Do I own it or do 30 other musicians/labels own my song?
WN: How long did you develop it after that?
SK: From the first idea above (that was in early 2004) it took just one month to write a small command-line program that would do what I wanted. But its functionality was very limited and it took 60 minutes to synthesize a song of five minutes' length. That was actually already enough to illustrate the original concept but I've realized that if I could get it working in real time it could become a "discursive software." Since then I'm working on the real-time version.
WN: What sort of response have you received from people who have seen the video?
SK: Since I got Boing Boinged I've received thousands of mails from people telling me what a great idea this is. Most of them also want the software badly.
WN: Have you received any commercial or open-source-collaboration interest?
SK: A few commercial inquiries and a lot of people offering help for the open-source development.
WN: When might Scrambled Hackz be released to the public, and under which license and operating systems?
SK: I'm currently very busy with lots of other things, but because there's such a great interest I hope to find the time to launch (Scrambled Hackz) on SourceForge in mid-May. The initial release will be just the core so the nerds can already start to play with it. All code will be licensed under the GNU GPL and it will be platform-independent.
WN: I was astounded by the speed with which the program is able to reassemble the Michael Jackson interview once the sound sample database has been created. Can users of the eventual release expect that sort of performance on a normal machine? Will any special hardware be required?
SK: Michael works in real time on my 2-year-old laptop, a 1.7-(GHz) Centrino with 1.5 (GB of) RAM. No special hardware is needed; any recent computer will do it.
WN: Could the sample lengths be made longer to enable Scrambled Hackz to act as the search mechanism for full measures of music? I'm picturing using it to find the right four-measure sample in a large database, for instance.
SK: Scrambled Hackz is not made for that, but with some tweaking and improvements it should be possible.
WN: Will users be able to analyze their own video and audio libraries using Scrambled Hackz?
SK: Yes, of course.
WN: Are you taking the installation on the road, or are there permanent places where people can try it for themselves?
SK: I'm currently mainly focusing on the improvement of my performance. The installation is shown only at some media art festivals. But I'm getting many inquiries from artists who want to use the software for installations, so maybe it won't take very long and we will see many (Scrambled Hackz) installations everywhere. My installation is very basic anyway. I'm really looking forward to what other people come up with.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,...?tw=wn_index_2
Apple Needs to Make OS X Open-Source
John C. Dvorak
A cloud is rising over Mac OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project. That would make the battle between OS X and Linux the most interesting one on the computer scene. With all attention turned in that direction, there would be nothing Microsoft could do to stem a reversal of its fortunes.
Let's start at the beginning. There's been a lot of fuss over Apple's rollout of the unsupported Boot Camp product, which lets Mac users run Microsoft Windows easily on an Intel-based Macintosh. I got into various levels of trouble when I suggested that Apple was going to gravitate towards Windows since it would be easy to do and there was some evidence that the company might want to do it.
Some people saw this prediction as somewhat contradictory, because I've also been advocating that Mac OS X be ported to all PCs and become an alternative OS for the rest of us on our standard systems. Getting OS X onto PCs might be even more doable today, since researchers are reporting that as many as half of the business-owned PCs in operation now may not be capable of running Microsoft Vista. It seems like an ideal time to roll OS X over to the PC.
So what's actually happening? Well, here's what I think is going on, and also what I think should be going on. Let's start with what's going on.
The Boot Camp product is pure test marketing. It's so obviously test marketing that it's hard to believe that people are foolish enough to get worked up about it. You watch a test-marketing scheme to see the results. You use the results to make predictions. We do not have enough results yet to determine what's going to happen next. The test-marketing scheme is likely to be carefully orchestrated and segmented as follows:
Step 1: Testing for level of interest. Will this initiative of running Windows on a Mac increase or reduce computer hardware sales in any noticeable way among the hacker nerds who bother to go through the process? Will this translate to a broader acceptance?
Step 2: Determining functionality without risk. Does Windows works well on Mac hardware, or not? The idea here is to put it into the wild and see what happens in a support-free environment where Apple has no responsibility to help make it work.
Step 3: Blowback analysis. Apple needs to analyze the reaction to Windows on a Mac. This includes seeing whether there is massive rejection of the idea—protests, picketing, egg-throwing, and flaming. In other words, can the community at large live with the idea of Windows running on a Mac? That cannot be known or assumed without this test.
So this testing scheme essentially breaks down to practicality, functionality, and political marketability. So far, everything seems to be going well except for the blowback, which seems to be mixed but mostly positive. Much of the positive reaction, though, seems to stem from the mistaken supposition that having Windows on a Mac will make OS X look better by comparison, so people will flock to OS X. This is a dubious and dangerous conclusion for Mac heads to draw.
So what do I think will happen now? And specifically, what is Apple going to do with OS X?
If the Windows test keeps going the way it's going, the results may indicate that Mac users are more likely to shift to Windows than we used to think. But what will happen to Mac OS X? I suspect that the testing of Windows on a Mac might be duplicated in reverse, with a similar test of the Mac OS X running on a conventional PC. Here again, we'd need to look at the test-marketing results. In this scenario, the idea would again be to determine—by testing—whether or not getting OS X onto PCs would help or hurt Apple as a company. The same three factors would be assessed: practicality (is anyone interested?), functionality (does it work at all?), and political marketability. In the case of political marketability, one additional variable enters the picture: Microsoft perceiving this as a threat to its business.
Since no company, including massive IBM, has been able to compete with or unseat Microsoft from the desktop, Microsoft's stance alone may prevent any universal acceptance of OS X on the desktop from ever happening. In fact, I assume that as this is being written, Microsoft has coders in its skunk works tearing into OS X looking for deep flaws that it can exploit and publicize. Don't think otherwise. It only makes sense that they'd do this.
Thus a cloud is rising over OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project. That would make OS X versus Linux become the most interesting battle within the computer scene. With all the attention turned in that direction, there would be nothing Microsoft could do to stem a reversal of its fortunes.
But I repeat myself.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1950226,00.asp
U.S. Advised To Promote Open Standards, Source, Innovation
A business- and university-led public policy group has issued a downloadable 72-page report examining open standards, open source software, and "open innovation." The report concludes that openness should be promoted as a matter of public policy, in order to foster innovation and economic growth in the U.S. and world economies.
The report was released by the Committee for Economic Development (CED), a non-profit, non-partisan public policy research organization comprised of about 200 senior corporate executives and university leaders. The report resulted from a project within CED's Digital Connections Council (DCC), which is chaired by Paul M. Horn, SVP of research at IBM. The project was directed by Elliot Maxwell, described as "a key advisor on digital economy issues in the Clinton Administration."
The CED report concludes that intellectual property (IP) law and business practices designed for the trade of physical goods threaten economic development and innovation in digital information product markets such as software. It recommends several specific steps aimed at helping public policy makers promote openness, innovation, and economic growth:
• Open Standards
• Governments should "encourage the development and use of open standards, through processes as open to participation and contribution as possible"
• The results of government-supported research should be readily available for inclusion in open standards
• Governments should create incentives for early disclosure of intellectual property rights affecting open standards, because historically, companies have waited, in order to maximize damage claims
• Open Source Software
• Governments should not mandate any particular license, such as requiring open source software only; however...
• No citizen should be required to use the hardware or software of any particular vendor
• International procurements should also supprt inter-operability requirements
• Open Innovation (such as 'peer production' systems like WikiPedia and eBay user ratings)
• To foster open innovation, federally funded, non-classified research should be widely disseminated, following the example of the NIH (National Institute of Health)
• "Any legislation or regulation regarding intellectual property rights [should be] weighed with a presumption against the granting of new rights ... because of the benefits to society of further innovation through greater access to technology."
• The NSF (National Science Foundation) should fund research into "alternative compensation methods, similar to those created to facilitate the growth of radio, to reward creators of digital information products"
The full 72-page CED report is available for download,
here (PDF download). A brief summary, on which this story was largely based, is also available, [urlhttp://www.ced.org/projects/ecom.shtml#open]here[/url].
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2542131185.html
ODF Alliance Continues to Grow and Build Out
As you may recall, a new organization called the ODF Alliance was formed on March 3 of this year to support the uptake of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) by governments. It's formation was in large part intended to make the adoption of ODF less difficult for future states (and less dangerous for state CIOs) than it had been for Massachusetts last year. Yesterday, the ODF Alliance issued a press release announcing that it has more than tripled its membership to 138, and has also appointed a Managing Director.
As I reported one month ago today when I decided to look in on the Alliance a few weeks after its launch, this highly targeted initiative got off to a very rapid start. It appears that the pace of recruitment has slowed (membership leaped from 38 to 113 in the first two and a half weeks, while an additional 25 members have joined in the past month), but I expect that the rate of recruitment may pick up again with the addtion of the new Managing Director, Marino Marcich.
The membership now comprises quite an intriguing list of members, including Corel Software, EDS, EMC, IBM, Novell, Opera Software, Optaros, Inc., Oracle, Software AG, and Sun Microsystems (among many others), on the vendor side, and BellCom OpenSource A/S, Free Standards Group, GNOME, Mandriva, OpenOffice.org, OSDL, and Red Hat (again, among many others) on the open source side. There are many other for profit and not for profit members of all types as well. Or, as sponsor organization Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) President Ken Wasch phrases it in the press release, membership, "ranges from the City of Bloomington, Indiana and the National Archives of Australia to the Indian Institute of Technology and the Bristol City Council (UK)." (For a more detailed analysis of the membership at formation, see my earlier blog entry on March 3.)
The hiring of a Managing Director indicates a degree of commitment and longevity for the initiative, as it is difficult to attract good talent for transient efforts. Marcich's credentials for the job are listed in the press release as follows:
Marcich brings more than a decade in working internationally on technology, standards and open market issues. Prior to joining the Alliance, Marcich was vice president of Dutko Global Advisors, an international strategy and management firm. A former senior official at the U.S. Department of State, Marcich has worked in Brussels advising companies on global strategies relating to regulation, standardization and trade issues.
The European connections are particularly apt, as active and public interest in open standards/open source is much higher in European governmental agencies than in the U.S. counterparts, where support for and adoption of open source software is ongoing but less visable. The membership of the Alliance also reflects a very strong showing of European based companies and organizations of all types.
The press release does not include a great deal of additional information about the activities being conducted by the Alliance (nor has the ODF Alliance Website been updated with anything interesting in the last month), but it does close with this intriguing note:
The ODF Alliance is now actively supporting adoption of the Open Document Format as a worldwide standard of the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The six month approval ballot began November 1, 2005, and ends May 1, 2006. The ODF Alliance and its members have contacted various national voting entities recommending approval and are optimistic of a positive outcome.
In other words, it sounds like the Alliance is engaged in global lobbying for approval of ODF by ISO. From what I understand from other sources, a favorable vote, perhaps involving the participation of an unusually high percentage of eligible members, is not in doubt.
As previously, I'll check in on the Alliance from time to time and report on further developments as they occur.
For further blog entries on ODF, click
here.
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standa...60419061204507
GoDaddy.com Donates $10K to Open Source Development Project
GoDaddy.com, the No. 1 registrar of domain names worldwide, recently donated $10,000 to the OpenSSH free secure server management tools project.
According to the company, OpenSSH has become a staple of all free Unix and Linux operating systems in the world. With a long history of security and quality, OpenSSH is the core component used by millions to log in and manage servers. SSH, or Secure Shell, is a service used to log into computers over a network and then execute commands on the remote machine and move files from one machine to another. The service encrypts connections, thus protecting the security of the host machines and the connection itself.
OpenSSH is provided and managed by the OpenBSD project. Like most open source projects, OpenBSD is composed solely of volunteers throughout the world who contribute their time and expertise to creating critical software free of charge.
Support from companies like Go Daddy help ensure the continued success of the vibrant open source engineering community and the introduction of new technologies for the benefit of all. Donations help the project fund acquisition of test hardware and maintenance of needed equipment. The assistance also allows OpenSSH to organize conferences for volunteers to meet and share ideas.
Bob Parsons, GoDaddy.com Founder and CEO commented, ''OpenSSH and the work of the OpenBSD project volunteers are integral to online security. Go Daddy is pleased to be able to help them continue their great contributions to the Internet community. At Go Daddy, we use OpenSSH extensively to manage our large and rapidly expanding technical infrastructure. Our engineering staff relies on it on a constant basis. Go Daddy is very grateful and we want to show our appreciation to this extremely vital organization.''
Theo de Raadt, Founder and Leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects added, ''We are very thankful Go Daddy has the vision to financially support the mission of OpenSSH. This will allow us to keep improving the quality and security of the product which system administrators around the world rely on to do their jobs.''
GoDaddy.com, Inc. is the ''on-ramp'' to the Internet for individuals and businesses worldwide, providing a one-stop shop for acquiring, creating and safeguarding a unique online identity. GoDaddy.com offers a comprehensive line of Internet products and services, including domain name registration, web hosting solutions, personalized email packages, SSL certificates, web development tools, eCommerce utilities and more. GoDaddy.com is the world's No. 1 domain name registrar, both in terms of new registrations and domains under management.
The Go Daddy Group includes three ICANN-accredited domain name registrars: flagship registrar GoDaddy.com, Inc., membership-based registrar Blue Razor Domains, Inc., and reseller registrar Wild West Domains, Inc.
The Go Daddy Group also offers private domain name registration services through Domains By Proxy, Inc., as well as SSL Certificates through its SSL Certificate Authority, Starfield Technologies, Inc. The Go Daddy Group registers or renews a domain name every 3 seconds and more than 13 million domain names in its portfolio. The Go Daddy Group is also the world's largest web host in terms of hostnames.
http://www.thehostingnews.com/article2217.html
Code for Unbreakable Quantum Encryption
Raw code for 'unbreakable' quantum encryption has been generated at record speed over optical fiber at NIST. The work is a step toward using conventional high-speed networks such as broadband Internet and local-area networks to transmit ultra-secure video for applications such as surveillance.
The NIST quantum key distribution (QKD) system uses single photons, the smallest particles of light, in different orientations to produce a continuous binary code, or "key," for encrypting information. The rules of quantum mechanics ensure that anyone intercepting the key is detected, thus providing highly secure key exchange.
The laboratory system produced this "raw" key at a rate of more than 4 million bits per second over 1km of optical fiber, twice the speed of NIST's previous record, reported just last month. The system also worked successfully, although more slowly, over 4 km of fiber.
After raw key is generated and processed, the secret key is used to encrypt and decrypt video signals transmitted over the Internet between two computers in the same laboratory. The high speed of the system enables use of the most secure cipher known for ensuring the privacy of a communications channel, in which one secret key bit, known only to the communicating parties, is used only once to encrypt one video bit. Compressed video has been encrypted, transmitted and decrypted at a rate of 30 frames per second, sufficient for smooth streaming images, in Web-quality resolution, 320 by 240 pixels per frame.
Applications for high-speed QKD might include distribution of sensitive remote video, such as satellite imagery, or commercially valuable material such as intellectual property, or confidential healthcare and financial data. In addition, high-volume secure communications are needed for military operations to service large numbers of users simultaneously and provide multimedia capabilities as well as database access.
http://www.it-observer.com/news/6127...um_encryption/
Mafia Boss's Encrypted Messages Deciphered
Rossella Lorenzi
The recently arrested "boss of bosses" of the Sicilian Mafia, Bernardo Provenzano, wrote notes using an encryption scheme similar to the one used by Julius Caesar more than 2,000 years ago, according to a biography of Italy's most wanted man.
The biography, written by journalists Salvo Palazzolo and Ernesto Oliva, is published in Italian on
www.bernardoprovenzano.net, which is the most exhaustive Web site on Provenzano.
Accused of numerous murders, including the 1992 killings of two judges for which he was sentenced to life in jail, the 73-year-old boss was arrested last week in a farmhouse about just a few miles from his Sicilian hometown Corleone, a place forever associated with the Godfather saga.
Also known as "Binnu u tratturi" (Binnu the tractor) because of his reputation for mowing down people in his youth, Provenzano had been on the run for more than 40 years, many of them spent writing cryptograms on little pieces of paper, known in Sicilian dialect as pizzini.
The Italian police found about 350 pizzini in Provenzano's hideaway.
A few dozen of these notes contained requests to his family, such as having lasagne on Easter. All the others, featuring orders to his lieutenants, displayed numeric sequences that concealed the names of people.
Caesar Cipher
At least one coded note, published in the Web site's biography, has a strong resemblance to what's known as Caesar cipher, an encryption scheme used by Julius Caesar to protect important military messages.
The letter, written in January 2001 by Angelo Provenzano to his father, was found with other documents when one of Provenzano's men, Nicola La Barbera, was arrested
"...I met 512151522 191212154 and we agreed that we will see each other after the holidays...," said the letter, which included several other cryptograms.
"The Binnu code is nothing new: each number corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. "A" is 4, "B" is 5, "C" is 6 and so on until the letter Z , which corresponds to number 24," wrote Palazzolo and Oliva.
While the classic Caesar cipher moves everything three letters later (A becomes D, B becomes E, etc.), the "Provenzano code" assigns a number to each letter by simply increasing by 3 the value given to the 21 letters of the Italian alphabet listed in order.
So, A becomes 4 (1+3), B becomes 5 (2+3), C becomes 6 (3+3), etc
"In the Provenzano code the key is the +3 shift," mathematics expert Alessandro Martignago told Discovery News.
As the code is cracked, the "512151522 191212154" person becomes "Binnu Riina." Most likely, it refers to Bernardo Riina, arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of aiding Provenzano while he was on the run.
According to Martignago, the Provenzano code might have been made more secure by changing the + 3 key with other shift characters ( +5, +7, +8, etc.) from time to time.
"Looks like kindergarten cryptography to me. It will keep your kid sister out, but it won't keep the police out. But what do you expect from someone who is computer illiterate?" security guru Bruce Schneier, author of several books on cryptography, told Discovery News.
Indeed, no high-tech ran the Mafia network under Provenzano's rule. Top Mafia businesses were conducted on an obsolete Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter. Pizzini were delivered by a chain of messengers.
The fact that the boss code was rather straightforward may be explained by Provenzano's lack of education. It stopped when he dropped out of school at about eight.
Anna Petrozzi is an editor at Antimafia 2000, a magazine that Provenzano read, as copies found in his hideaway attest.
"The police are not new to these coded messages. When they arrested in 2002 Antonio Giuffré, one of his right-hand men then turned informer, and about 30 pizzini came to light," she told Discovery News.
Those pizzini helped investigators enormously. Once the cryptograms were decoded, several members of Provenzano's close circle were identified, a step which ultimately led to his arrest.
"Now we will have to work on the newly discovered pizzini, which contain several coded names. We have known the system used to code them since 2002," assistant state prosecutor Giuseppe Pignatone told state television RAI 2 on Thursday.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs...tml?source=rss
'Scary Movie' Sends Weinsteins to the Top
AP
Bob and Harvey Weinstein returned to the box-office lead as ''Scary Movie 4'' debuted with $41 million, the first No. 1 opening for the new company founded by the former Miramax bosses.
It was the best Easter weekend debut ever, beating the $30.1 million opening of ''Panic Room'' in 2002, according to studio estimates Sunday.
With the success of ''Scary Movie 4,'' Bob Weinstein said he hopes to have a fifth film in the horror-spoof franchise in theaters over Easter weekend next year.
''I say the Weinsteins should be getting `Scary Movie' 5 through 10 ready right away,'' said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.
Weinstein said director David Zucker and writer Jim Abrahams, collaborators on ''Airplane!'' and the ''Naked Gun'' movies, would reteam for the next sequel.
''Scary Movie 4'' was released under the Weinstein Co.'s Dimension label, which the brothers brought with them after their departure from Disney-owned Miramax last year. Disney continues to share half the proceeds from the ''Scary Movie'' flicks and any future installments in pre-existing Dimension franchises, such as the ''Scream'' or ''Spy Kids'' series.
The Weinsteins will have sole control over any new franchises Dimension undertakes.
''We've got four or five new franchises in development, so it's not just like I'm going to go ad infinitum on the old stuff,'' Bob Weinstein said. ''We've got other ideas that I'm really excited about starting.''
The animated hit ''Ice Age: The Meltdown,'' which had been No. 1 the previous two weekends, slipped to second place with $20 million, raising its total to $147.2 million.
The weekend's other new wide release, Disney's animated tale ''The Wild,'' debuted at No. 4 with $9.6 million.
Fox Searchlight's acclaimed satire ''Thank You for Smoking,'' a hit in limited release, expanded nationwide and took in $4.45 million to come in at No. 8.
Hollywood's overall revenues rose for the fourth-straight weekend, with the top-12 movies grossing $110 million. That was up 23 percent from 2005's Easter weekend, which came three weeks earlier last year. It was up about 45 percent compared to the mid-April weekend last year.
The industry has pulled ahead slightly from its slow pace last year, when movie attendance fell 8 percent. The ''Ice Age'' and ''Scary Movie'' sequels have provided a solid lead-in to what analysts consider a strong early-summer lineup that launches next month with ''Mission: Impossible III,'' ''The Da Vinci Code,'' the animated tale ''Over the Hedge'' and ''Poseidon,'' a remake of ''The Poseidon Adventure.''
''Scary Movie 4'' continued the success of 2003's ''Scary Movie 3,'' which had rejuvenated the fading franchise by softening the tone from the R ratings of the first two installments to PG-13. The first ''Scary Movie'' opened at No. 1 in 2000 with a $42 million take.
The latest version features longtime ''Scary Movie'' player Anna Faris and co-stars Leslie Nielsen, a Zucker and Abrahams favorite who starred in ''Airplane!'' and ''The Naked Gun'' comedies.
Bob Weinstein said 40 to 50 percent of the audience was in the 12- to 17-year-old range. The movie also drew well among older audiences lured in by the Zucker-Abrahams brand of humor, Weinstein said.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. ''Scary Movie 4,'' $41 million.
2. ''Ice Age: The Meltdown,'' $20 million.
3. ''The Benchwarmers,'' $10 million.
4. ''The Wild,'' $9.6 million.
5. ''Take the Lead,'' $6.7 million.
6. ''Inside Man,'' $6.3 million.
7. ''Lucky Number Slevin,'' $4.6 million.
8. ''Thank You for Smoking,'' $4.45 million.
9. ''Failure to Launch,'' $2.6 million.
10. ''V for Vendetta,'' $2.2 million.
------
Universal Pictures and Focus Features are owned by NBC Universal, a joint venture of General Electric Co. and Vivendi Universal; DreamWorks is a unit of DreamWorks SKG Inc.; Sony Pictures, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount and Paramount Classics are divisions of Viacom Inc.; Disney's parent is The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is a division of The Walt Disney Co.; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight Pictures are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros., New Line and Warner Independent are units of Time Warner Inc.; Lionsgate is owned by Lionsgate Entertainment Corp.; IFC Films is owned by Rainbow Media Holdings, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Box-Office.html
AT&T Aims For Internet Television
Laurie Sullivan
In an effort to secure a position in Internet-based television, AT&T Inc. reported an agreement Tuesday with Akimbo Systems to offer Internet-based video-on-demand to its Homezone TV service subscribers. The service begins this summer.
The AT&T Homezone service, being trialed within several states, integrates AT&T Yahoo! high-speed Internet and AT&T DISH Network programming. The service provides video on demand, digital video, and Internet content, such as photos and music through a set-top box.
Akimbo's digital content library offers more than 10,000 television programs and movies-on-demand. The company said it adds daily more than 150 titles in 85 categories, from music and sports to movies and educational programs.
The service, which combines Internet and Dish Network programming, intends to complement AT&T's Project Lightspeed, a multi-billion dollar fiber upgrade that will let AT&T sell Internet protocol television (IPTV) service to homes, as the offering continues to roll out, an AT&T spokeswoman said.
An online guide with video search functions provides full program descriptions and previews. Remote access with an Internet-connected computer lets subscribers browse and download programs, so new shows are available for viewing when they get home.
http://www.techweb.com/wire/networking/185303601
Panasonic Unveils 103-Inch TV Screen
AP
Home TV screens just keep getting bigger. And there's no end in sight. Panasonic pitched a tent outside the New York Stock Exchange yesterday to show off the biggest high-definition plasma screen yet.
At 103 inches, it's an inch bigger than versions being produced by Samsung and LG.
Panasonic vice president Andrew Nelkin says the new screen weighs 400 pounds. If you buy one, and have a wall big enough to fit it, you'll want professional installation.
He also says he wouldn't be surprised to see someone come up with an even bigger screen before long.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT