Canadian Panel Says Song Downloads Are Legal
Copyright Board backs private copying but says uploading music to networks is piracy.
Jon Healey
The music industry may soon be singing a new tune: "Blame Canada."
The nation to the north already tempts Hollywood studios with lower production costs and senior citizens with cheap prescription drugs. Now it could start luring music fans with free — and legal — downloads.
The Canadian Copyright Board said Friday that downloading pirated music and burning it onto CDs was legal under Canadian law. Uploading songs onto file-sharing networks remains taboo.
The board's opinion won't necessarily hold up in court, the Canadian Recording Industry Assn. was quick to point out.
But Canadians are likely to be encouraged to download songs from networks like Kazaa instead of buying them online or in stores, said Evan R. Cox, a San Francisco-based attorney at Covington & Burling who specializes in copyright law.
"For people who were self-regulating and said, 'I know this is not proper; I'm not going to do it,' now they've been told it's proper — they're going to do it," Cox said.
Canadian law gives copyright holders an exclusive right to copy and distribute their works. In 1998, however, Canadian lawmakers legalized some forms of personal or "private" copying — in particular, copying onto audio recording media like CDs and cassette tapes — and applied a sales tax to those media to compensate copyright holders.
The Copyright Board's job is to decide which "audio recording media" qualify for the private copying exemption and how much tax to levy.
On Friday, the board said it believed the exemption applied to downloaded songs "as long as two conditions are met: The copy must be for the private use of the person making it, and it must be made onto an audio recording medium." And the board extended the exemption to some portable music players, such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod.
The exemption also apparently applies to computer hard drives, which are not taxed because copyright holders haven't asked that they be. The levy on other media ranges from 16 cents for a recordable CD to $19 for a portable device with at least 10 gigabytes of storage capacity.
The Recording Industry Assn. of America declined to comment. Its Canadian counterpart wasn't so reticent.
"The issue of whether downloading is illegal or not is an issue for Canadian courts," said Richard Pfohl, general counsel of the Toronto-based Canadian Recording Industry Assn. "The Copyright Board has no place to opine on the matter."
Pfohl added that it was nonsensical to argue, as the board does, that a song uploaded illegally becomes perfectly legal once downloaded. The board could confuse music fans, he said, making it harder for the CRIA to convince the public that file-sharing is wrong.
The Copyright Board's levy generated $45.7 million in its first three years and is expected to produce an additional $21.3 million this year, said Paul Audley, policy advisor to the Canadian Private Copying Collective, which collects and distributes the money. About two-thirds goes to songwriters and music publishers, and the rest is split between performers and labels.
Pfohl said the music industry would have been a lot better off if people had just paid for all that music instead of copying it: Sales have declined a total of $323.5 million since the tax went into effect in 1999.
Attorney Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates civil liberties in cyberspace, said the Canadian board's levy had glitches but was a more promising way to address file sharing than the RIAA's tactic of suing users.
"The levy approach puts money in the pockets of artists," he said, "something the litigation approach doesn't appear to be doing."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...,7976988.story
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Canadian Music Sharers To Face Lawsuits
Recording industry to borrow U.S. tactic with 'chilling impact' for online siphoning
Robert Thompson
The millions of Canadians who share music files on the Internet should be prepared for the possibility of facing a lawsuit early in the new year, the head of the Canadian Recording Industry Association said yesterday.
Brian Robertson told the National Post his organization will soon begin launching legal action against Internet music uploaders.
Uploaders are those who allow people to access music stored on their computer hard drives. In some cases, uploaders freely share hundreds of music albums with users around the world.
The legal action will target users who upload or share music files over the Internet using services such as Kazaa, Mr. Robertson said. The Canadian Recording Industry Association, or CRIA, represents Canada's major record labels, including Sony Music and Universal Music.
Mr. Robertson would not say exactly when legal action would be launched, noting "it will be sooner rather than later." Sources told the Post that lawsuits are expected early in 2004.
"We've gone through a process, and spent $1-million on a value-of-music education campaign," Mr. Robertson said. "But the industry continues to be devastated by file sharing. It is regrettable that we'll have to take this action, but we've been forced to."
According to CRIA, sales of compact discs in Canada have fallen by $450-million, or 23%, since 1999.
Andrew Currier, an intellectual property lawyer at Toronto-based Torys LLP, said he expects a file- sharing lawsuit will have a "chilling impact" on Canadians who use free online music services.
"What parent wants to bother retaining a $500-per-hour intellectual property lawyer to defend their child against this?" he asked.
In September, the Recording Industry Association of America launched 261 lawsuits against users who uploaded or shared files using software like Kazaa. The lawsuits' targets included a 12-year-old girl who settled her case for US$2,000 and a 71-year-old Texas grandfather.
From the period starting when the RIAA first threatened lawsuits, through to the weeks following the launch of legal action, the number of people using Kazaa fell by 41%, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. After the lawsuits, compact disc sales, which had been slumping for three years, began to increase.
CRIA has retained litigation attorneys in preparation for the lawsuits. Mr. Robertson would not specify how many lawsuits would be filed, but he did say the legal action would be similar to the lawsuits filed in the United States.
For some time, CRIA has been using software that tracks and identifies users involved in trading free music files. "Users should be aware that using file-sharing services is a very public process," Mr. Robertson said.
Canada has approximately 3.5 million high-speed Internet users. Given the high use of broadband Internet connections, Canadians have been pegged as some of the heaviest per capita users of peer- to-peer file-sharing services in the world.
Only one legal service in Canada, called Puretracks.com, charges users who download music from its site. Songs typically cost 99 cents, while an album costs $9.99.
One of the factors leading to heightened free music sharing is that there has been some ambiguity surrounding the Canadian Copyright Act, leading some to believe that sharing digital music files is legal.
The Canadian recording industry currently receives a tariff on blank media such as MP3 players and recordable compact discs in order to compensate music companies for music sales lost to piracy.
Last Friday, in a decision on raising levies on blank media, the Copyright Board seemed to indicate that music downloading over the Internet was not illegal.
Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in legal matters related to the Internet, said the law is less murky when it deals with uploading, but there could be problems pursuing downloaders in court.
"The Copyright Board decision doesn't preclude them from going after uploaders, but in terms of downloaders, it certainly creates a complication," he said.
Mr. Currier said he has been waiting for a case in Canada where a music file-swapper was taken to court. He thinks it will clarify some of the ambiguity in the Copyright Act.
"I've been waiting for an upload type case to come -- I've been looking for some clarification from the court. My sense is that the Act would catch an uploader."
http://www.canada.com/national/natio...3-a856c5abebe5
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Web Firms To Name Pirates
Internet service providers will reveal music file sharers if compelled by court
Robert Thompson
Three of Canada's largest Internet service providers said yesterday they will co-operate in identifying those accused of violating copyrights, as the Canadian Recording Industry Association prepares to launch lawsuits against digital music swappers.
As first reported in the National Post on Monday, the Canadian Recording Industry Association plans to launch lawsuits against Internet users that upload or share music files using peer-to-peer software. The lawsuits are expected in early 2004.
CRIA says Internet file-sharing of music has caused sales of compact discs in Canada to fall by $450- million, or 23%, since 1999.
Those ensnared by CRIA lawsuits could face fines of up to $1-million if the group successfully pursues criminal charges.
While CRIA, which represents Canada's music recording labels, can track users who share music on peer-to-peer networks, the association is only able to secure an Internet protocol address. An IP address identifies a computer connected to the Internet.
However, CRIA will have to ask Canadian Internet service providers for personal information relating to the IP addresses to identify those it feels have violated copyrights.
To obtain personal information from Internet service providers, CRIA will have to turn to Canada's court system, according to Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa.
"It could be a difficult and lengthy process," said Mr. Geist, noting it might take a few months to obtain a court order and the information from ISPs.
However, yesterday, three of Canada's largest ISPs -- Telus Corp., Bell Canada and Rogers Cable -- said they would turn over personal information on their subscribers if presented with a court order.
"If they have a valid court order, our policy is to co-operate," said Taanta Gupta, a Rogers' spokeswoman.
http://www.canada.com/national/natio...7-3b28b10c28ef
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Apple hits 25 million iTunes downloads
Alorie Gilbert
Apple Computer has nearly doubled sales of digital music through its iTunes music store since launching a Windows-compatible version of its iTunes software in October, the company said.
Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple said Monday that customers have downloaded a total of 25 million songs from iTunes since April, when the online store opened, with 12 million songs purchased during the past two months alone.
Apple has been widely credited with sparking a boom in sales of downloadable music following the music industry's crackdown on illegal Internet file-swapping services such as Kazaa and Napster. Unlike its no-pay-to-play predecessors, the iTunes service charges 99 cents per song.
iTunes' rapid growth has exceeded some analysts' expectations. "This really underscores the pace at which people are accepting legitimate online music distribution," said Phil Leigh, senior analyst at Inside Digital Media.
iTunes customers download an average of 1.5 million songs from the service per week, said Apple Vice President of Application Marketing Rob Schoeben. Apple expects that customers will download 100 million songs by the first anniversary of iTunes' launch next April.
Apple executives are "blown away" at the rate at which people are purchasing songs at the company's store, Schoeben said. "You normally have a launch spike, and then you see it taper off," Schoeben said. "We're not seeing that. We're adding more and more accounts. We're not seeing people trying it and then going away. What we see in the numbers is that they're getting hooked."
Though Apple makes very little money on song sales, iTunes helps fuel sales of the company's iPod digital music player, Apple executives have said. As of October, the company had sold 1.4 million iPods, and it expects the device to be a popular holiday gift this year. Apple has introduced electronic gift certificates and a section of the iTunes site that showcases holiday music, both of which should further boost holiday-related sales, Apple said.
Apple has a 70 percent share of the legal music download market, and Digital Insight's Leigh predicts iTunes' sales this year will be at least five times that of all the legal competition combined. But competition is expected to grow. In addition to Musicmatch and the recently revived Napster, iTunes rivals may soon include Microsoft and Wal-Mart. Microsoft and digital music services provider Loudeye said on Monday that they're teaming up to help companies create new online music services based on Windows technology.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5124550.html
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SBC Taps Alcatel For Fiber Connections
Ben Charny
U.S. telephone service provider SBC Communications said Tuesday it has reached a four-year deal with Alcatel to supply equipment for its much-anticipated push to build high-speed fiber-optic connections to homes and offices.
SBC evaluated proposals from 20 companies since June before deciding on Alcatel, company spokesman Jason Hillery said. Alcatel was among the favorites because SBC had already used Alcatel equipment to outfit a San Francisco business and residential complex with an example of what's known as "fiber to the premises," or FTTP.
SBC, Bellsouth and Verizon Communications say FTTP will counter the growing threat from the nation's top five cable companies, which within the last year began complementing their cable TV and broadband services with local and long-distance dialing over an Internet connection.
Telephone companies eventually want to sell cable TV and videos on demand to complete their own hat trick of service offerings. But the current copper infrastructure that connects homes to their national network has only enough bandwidth to support broadband and voice.
"With FTTP, the carriers get tremendous, essentially unlimited, bandwidth," said Hilary Mine, Alcatel senior vice president of marketing.
The three major U.S. phone companies all announced their fiber intentions last year, but the plodding pace of the equipment testing they launched in June has sparked concern they were backing away from their original plans. "This is a big first step to advance test and develop this technology," SBC's Hillery said. "Now that we're able to focus on Alcatel, we can complete lab trials and move this out and do a field trial."
In November, Verizon Communications chose Advanced Fibre Communications as its lead supplier of fiber-optic equipment to deliver broadband to millions more homes and offices. It also plans to use equipment from Sumitomo Electric Lightwave, Pirelli Communications Cables and Systems North America, and Fiber Optic Network Solutions (FONS). Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
A BellSouth spokesman said that company is still evaluating FTTP proposals from equipment makers, but does not foresee a decision in the near future.
http://news.com.com/2100-1037-5125727.html
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Stop! ID Thief!
Identity theft is common—but keeping a watchful eye on your credit card accounts is now easy.
Simson Garfinkel
Putting technology to work for you
More than three million people in the United States were the victims of identity-theft-related fraud in the past year, according to a recent survey by the Federal Trade Commission. These people have had accounts opened in their names by scam artists, they’ve had their names given to the police by crooks stopped for various infractions, and they’ve had their homes sold out from underneath them. Damages to these victims average more than $10,000 per theft.
Grim as these statistics may be, the growing amount of credit card fraud is even worse: more than five million people had sham transactions dropped onto their credit card statements last year, and more than a million others have had non-credit-card accounts misused, including savings and checking accounts. Fortunately, you can protect yourself using a combination of ingenuity and tech savvy.
The whole foundation of the credit system is fundamentally insecure. A credit card number is really nothing more than a password—a password that’s not even secret, because you need to share it in order to use it. Just about the only way that you can detect misuse is to watch your accounts for unauthorized activity.
Keeping such a watchful eye is a lot easier now than it used to be. Credit card companies allow you to view your transactions on secure Web sites. For many people, however, even the few minutes it takes to deal with these sites is a big disincentive. But personal-finance programs like Quicken or Money streamline this process. I use Quicken, which automatically downloads new transactions from my credit cards, bank accounts, and investments with a single mouse click. To use this feature, you first store all of your account numbers and passwords in the program’s “PIN Vault.” There’s no need for you to memorize all those digits: the information is kept encrypted under a master pass phrase.
Getting Quicken set up is only half the battle, of course. You also have to manually review your downloaded transactions every few days to find out if somebody is using your credit card without your authorization. Banks and credit card companies are always looking for fraud as well, but they frequently don’t catch it until it is too late. You can nip the problem in the bud by calling up your credit card company and asking for a new account number at the first sign of fraud.
Another source of fraud is those “convenience checks” that the card companies send in the mail. Crooks steal them out of your mailbox and go on their own personal spending sprees. Protect yourself by calling up your credit card company and asking them to stop sending the checks. A locked mailbox is a good idea, too. And though it might sound extreme, buy a good crosscut shredder for your receipts; identity thieves have posed as homeless people, rummaging through trash, looking for bank statements and other sources of personal information. While you have the credit card company on the phone, have them put a password on your account. This replaces your “mother’s maiden name” and is much more secure. Finally, ask the credit card companies to stop sharing your personal information with other businesses. This will stop some of the junk mail coming into your house, including those “preapproved” credit card offers, which are a primary source of identity theft.
Identity theft is generally hard to prevent because it involves new accounts that crooks open in your name, rather than old accounts for which you have the account numbers. Again, the best way to protect yourself is by getting more information. Both Equifax and TransUnion offer credit-monitoring services. For a monthly fee they’ll watch your credit file and let you know whenever a new account is opened in your name, or when one of your creditors reports that you’re late to make a payment on an already opened account. To notify you, they send an e-mail message that asks you to log in to a password-protected Web site. If you see a suspicious account, you can call up the bank, report the fraud, and try to have the account shut down.
The Equifax service costs $4.95 per month if you want alerts sent within seven days of suspicious activity, $9.95 per month if you want alerts sent within 24 hours. TransUnion charges $10.95 for three months and provides notification within a week. Of course, it is the poor security practices and aggressive sale of credit reports that are largely responsible for the identity theft epidemic in the first place. Still, my advice is to swallow your indignation and sign up for these services.
Finally, don’t click on links in e-mail messages from unknown senders. Thieves are sending out messages that look as if they come from PayPal or eBay, then capturing the usernames and passwords of people who attempt to log in to fake Web pages. Avoid this scam by typing the companies’ Web addresses directly into your browser rather than clicking on links.
Perils abound on the electronic frontier. Taking a few smart precautions will ensure that you don’t have people copping your identity to plunder your bank account and sully your reputation.
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...finkel1203.asp
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Court Leaves the Door Open For Safety System Wiretaps
Adam Liptak
PEOPLE with sophisticated safety and communications systems in their cars may be getting an unwanted feature. An appeals court decision last month revealed that the government may be able to convert some of the systems into roaming in-car wiretaps.
The decision, by a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, arose from a criminal investigation in Nevada. An unidentified company challenged a series of court orders requiring it to create a roving bug for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The appeals court overturned the orders, but its reasoning suggested that the issue will recur.
The technology involved, used by OnStar, ATX and others, combines a global positioning satellite transmitter with a cellular telephone. Drivers can use the services to seek information and emergency help.
Most of the court file in the Nevada case is sealed, and the appellate decision did not discuss the nature of the investigation or specify the brand of the system in question. But the court's description of the system's features is consistent with one offered by ATX, which provides telematics services for cars from BMW, Ford, Jaguar and Mercedes-Benz, among others.
The device discussed in the decision allows drivers to punch one of three buttons: for emergencies, general information and roadside assistance. The phone has a speaker and microphone, and it turns out that the microphone may be activated surreptitiously, allowing government agents to listen in on conversations in the car.
Geri Lama, a spokeswoman for OnStar, said that her company was not involved in the case and that OnStar's setup was not capable of what she called "stealth listening."
"Any time we call into the vehicle, it rings," she said, adding that if a car is stolen, OnStar can retrieve data about its location but cannot eavesdrop on the people inside.
OnStar, a General Motors subsidiary, is the leading provider of telematics services, not only for G.M. vehicles but also models from Acura, Audi, Isuzu, Lexus, Subaru and Volkswagen.
Neither Bennee B. Jones, the Dallas lawyer who represented the company in the case, nor Gary A. Wallace, an ATX spokesman, responded to telephone and e-mail messages seeking comment. ATX is based in Irving, Tex., near Dallas. Natalie Collins, a spokeswoman for the United States attorney in Las Vegas, declined to comment.
The appeals court decision, rendered after the wiretapping had concluded, ruled that the lower-court judge should not have allowed it. But the appellate ruling was narrow, based on the fact that safety features of the system in question had to be disabled to permit the government to listen in.
The majority had no objection in principle to converting the device into a bug; a dissenter would have allowed the eavesdropping even at the expense of safety. The government indicated that it would ask either the three-judge panel or a larger panel of the appeals court to reconsider the decision that disallowed the Nevada wiretap.
Privacy advocates on both sides of the political spectrum said the decision raised troubling questions about in-car communications devices. "If the facts were just a little bit different, law enforcement would have won this case," said Chris Hoofnagle of the Electronic Information Privacy Center, a civil liberties group.
Bob Barr, a former congressman from Georgia and a former federal prosecutor, agreed. "People ought to boycott such systems," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/au...s/21SNOOP.html
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Loudeye, Microsoft Team On Music Store
John Borland
Digital music services provider Loudeye and Microsoft announced that they have teamed to promote Loudeye's new service that helps other companies set up online music stores much like Apple Computer's iTunes.
Seattle-based Loudeye and the software giant said Monday that they will work together to handle the infrastructure and distribution for online music services branded by other companies that are looking to sell songs online or to enter the digital media business in some other way.
Loudeye's digital music services, which include its Digital Music Store and iRadio Service that contains 100 preprogrammed music channels, are based on Microsoft's Windows Media 9 Series technology. Early customers of the service include AT&T Wireless and Gibson Audio, a division of Gibson Guitars.
"The problem for companies that want to launch a digital media service with their own brand is that it's very expensive," said Loudeye Chief Executive Officer Jeff Cavins. "We'll charge them a fraction of the cost of what it would take to build it themselves."
Loudeye's plan highlights the growing presence of legal downloadable music, just eight months after Apple launched its iTunes song store.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5123634.html
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DVD-Copying Firm Sued By Warners
BBC
Film giant Warners is taking legal action against a US-based firm that distributes DVD-copying software.
Warner Home Video UK said the product sold by 321 Studios Europe gets around the anti-copying protection on DVDs.
It is seeking an injunction to block the sale and distribution of the software, which it says is in breach of new EU anti-piracy laws.
321 - already the subject of a similar lawsuit - previously said it welcomed the prospect of a legal case.
Warners said the new move had been prompted by the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003, which came into force at the end of October.
Previous laws
This law strengthens copyright protection in the UK and amends the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
It follows an earlier injunction filed against the company by Warners in September under the previous laws. This is still pending.
The latest lawsuit has been filed on behalf of the Motion Picture Association, which represents the major Hollywood studios.
In a previous statement, 321 Studios has said it welcomes the opportunity in court to clarify the position of copying DVDs for personal use.
The firm sees itself as a leading proponent in the fair use of copyrighted material, fighting its case on both sides of the Atlantic.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...lm/3254234.stm
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China Arrests First Religious Cyberdissident, Rights Group Says
BEIJING (AFP) - A Paris-based rights group called on China to release a 23-year old religious dissident arrested for using the Internet to support unauthorized Christian activities.
Reporters Without Borders called on Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to order the release of Zhang Shengqi, who was arrested on November 26 for publishing Internet articles supporting China's banned Christian church. "Zhang's is the first case of a cyberdissident jailed for expressing support for the banned Christian Church," Robert Medard, head of the media advocacy group said in a statement Wednesday. "He has been accused of divulging state secrets, when in fact he only published articles on the government crackdown on his religious community." Zhang was arrested at his home in northeastern Jilin province. Police searched his house and confiscated his mobile phone and articles written by another jailed religious dissident, Liu Fenggang. In recent months, China has moved to crackdown on unauthorized religious groups, arresting group leaders and razing unlicensed places of worship and temples, rights group and local officials have said. China permits worship in official versions of the four main religions of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam and Christianity, but keeps them under strict state control. Nevertheless, a series of underground Buddhist and Christian groups, particularly evangelical and charismatic type churches, have expanded rapidly over recent years and drawn in millions of worshippers.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/031217/323/eh9me.html
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Streamcast Back In Court Today
Chris Clancy
It promises to be a humble homecoming for Streamcast Networks Inc., makers of the peer-to-peer file sharing software Morpheus, which back in March — amid a whirlwind of lawsuits, office turmoil, and bad press — moved from downtown Franklin to Seattle and, later, Los Angeles.
Representatives of the self-proclaimed “digital communications solutions provider” will be standing today before U.S. Civil Court Judge John T. Nixon as part of a status conference regarding a pending lawsuit against twenty-three of the world’s biggest record labels — including Arista Records, Capitol Records, London-Sire Records, and Elektra Entertainment Group.
Defense attorney Chad Vander Wert, an attorney with Nashville law firm Jack, Lyon, & Jones, described today’s meeting as “just a step in the process.”
The record giants filed a complaint against Streamcast and an early incarnation of its Morpheus software, musiccity.com, in late May, charging copyright infringement. The plaintiffs state that Streamcast employees acquired hundreds of compact discs controlled by the record labels, and illegally “ripped” them — that is, reproducing them for the purposes of distribution without securing the required authorization.
“With these thousands of sound recordings, [Streamcast] created a massive database of digitized music that they stored on computer hard drives,” the lawsuit states.
This initial hearing has been a long time coming, as Streamcast’s defense filed a motion to transfer the case’s venue from Nashville to Los Angeles, arguing that since a similar lawsuit is taking place in California’s Central District Court — one wherein Streamcast was sued by twelve of the same record labels, this time for a less direct form of copyright infringement — the two cases ought to be consolidated. Judge Nixon denied that request Dec. 1.
“We felt that because we won a partial summary judgment in the California case, the plaintiffs were doing a little bit of judge- shopping,” said Matthew Neco, general counsel and vice president of business affairs at Streamcast. “Apparently Judge Nixon believes otherwise.”
http://www.nashvillecitypaper.com/in...&news_id=29290
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Film Fans Befuddled by Copyright
Katie Dean
A major studio's recent action to curtail online sales of its films has left some movie buffs confused about where and when purchasing foreign DVDs is legitimate.
In general, U.S. law permits consumers to buy imported DVDs for personal use. But the law is a little murkier for retailers.
Questions arose for Asian film fans after Miramax Film sent a cease- and-desist letter to Seattle-based Kung Fu Cinema, demanding last week that the site stop selling DVDs of Hero, a Chinese film.
Miramax owns the rights to distribute the movie in the United States. While Kung Fu Cinema didn't actually sell Hero, the site linked to HKFlix.com, a U.S. company which sells import DVDs online.
So when and where can film purists seek out the original versions of foreign movies?
In the non-Internet world, if one buys a foreign DVD overseas and brings it home in a suitcase for personal use, that's legal. Hauling 100 DVDs back to the United States and selling them, however, is not.
Ordering a movie online from an overseas distributor, so long as it is not a counterfeit copy, is also permitted under U.S. law.
"There's no reason under the copyright law why I couldn't import a single copy for my private, personal use," said Jeff Cunard, a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, who represents clients in the media, entertainment and technology industries. That holds true "if I came across the border in Canada carrying it in my baggage or if I order the film from a website in Hong Kong or the Netherlands, or if I asked a friend in London to go to the store, buy it and ship it to me."
Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, says most of the laws pertaining to overseas sales of copyright material date back to a time when ordinary consumers had limited access to foreign retailers.
"The rules of copyright were honed and developed in an era when the only people who had to pay attention to this were larger firms that had ready access to lawyers," said Zittrain. "The Internet has changed this. People that are regularly transacting in other people's intellectual property might want to do some basic consultation to figure out if they are crossing any wires."
"In some ways, the best protection is basically being a small fry -- not worth the attention of the whale," Zittrain said.
Unless, perhaps, the whale is Miramax. Currently, martial arts film fans are waging a write-in campaign in an attempt to convince the studio to release Asian movies in their original versions so movie buffs can buy the films in the United States and won't have to buy overseas or turn to downloads or bootleg copies.
"When (Miramax) releases DVDs in this country, they often heavily edit it. They've Americanized the movies. Fans of Asian cinema want the original versions," said HKFlix.com's Stockton, who has joined the write-in campaign. "We feel that it's unfortunate that they have chosen to limit the options of fans and consumers in the way they have."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,61598,00.html
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The New Information Ecosystem: Part 1: Cultures Of Anarchy And Closure
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of the forthcoming The Anarchist in the Library and a true scholar of the internet age, presents a compelling, five-part panorama of the implications of electronic peer-to-peer networks for culture, science, security, and globalisation. His provocative argument registers peer-to-peer as a key site of contest over freedom and control of information.
Part 1: It’s a peer-to-peer world
In the first of his five-part series, Siva Vaidhyanathan maps the fluid new territory of electronic peer-to-peer networks that are transforming the information ecosystem. Is this a landscape of enlarging freedoms where citizens shape the forms and meanings of social communication, or does it offer an invitation to entrenching state surveillance and closure?
Part 2: ‘Pro-gumbo’: culture as anarchy
Peer-to-peer technologies have precedents in the anarchistic and hybrid processes by which cultures have always been formed. Decoding anxious cultural preservationists from Matthew Arnold to Samuel Huntington, the second instalment of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s five-part series reframes p2p in the light of other technologies and practices – cassettes, creolisation, world music – which likewise reveal the energetic promiscuity of culture. Any attempt to censor or limit this flow would leave cultures stagnant.
Part 3: The anarchy and oligarchy of science
Science is knowledge in pursuit of truth that can expand human betterment. But part three of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s powerful series sees the free information flows at the heart of science being pressured by the copyright economy, the post-9/11 security environment, proprietary capture of genetic databases, and science policies of governments and universities. If commerce and control defeat openness and accumulation, what happens to science impacts on democracy itself.
Part 4: The nation-state vs. networks
In the last decade, the nation-state has survived three challenges to its hegemony – from the Washington Consensus, the California Ideology, and Anarchy. The promise of a borderless globalisation unified by markets and new technology has been buried. The fourth part of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s compelling series asks: what then remains of the utopian vision of global peer- to-peer networks that would bypass traditional structures of power?
Part 5: Networks of power and freedom
The use by non-state networks of new communication technologies is challenging ideas about citizenship, security, and the nation-state. In response, the impulse to restrict or suppress is shared by states as different as the United States and the People’s Republic of China. In concluding his five- part openDemocracy series, Siva Vaidhyanathan maps an issue that will define the landscape of 21st century politics.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates...8-101-1319.jsp
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Extract
The Genie’s Revenge: A Response To Siva Vaidhyanathan
Matthew Rimmer
In his essay series on peer-to-peer (P2P) culture on openDemocracy, Siva Vaidhyanathan provides a picturesque account of intellectual property in the digital era. He considers the implications of peer-to-peer networks for law, politics, culture, and science, but is rather shy about analysing legal judgments dealing with peer-to-peer networks. This is a shame because this would challenge and complicate his simple dichotomy between information ‘anarchy’ and ‘oligarchy’.
Siva is a bold polemicist who is not afraid of making sweeping generalisations. Take for instance, the articulation of the thesis of his forthcoming book, The Anarchist in the Library:
“The actors who are promoting information anarchy include libertarians, librarians, hackers, terrorists, religious zealots, and anti-globalisation activists. The actors who push information oligarchy include major transnational corporations, the World Trade Organisation, and the governments of the United States and the Peoples’ Republic of China.”
Some would call this a black and white vision of the world. Librarians tend to be orderly, law-abiding folk. They would not like to be lumped together with hackers, terrorists and religious zealots. Moreover, the United States tends to have a rather complex relationship with both multinational companies, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and China. These various interests cannot all be aligned under the ugly phrase, “information oligarchy”. We are experiencing a much more contested and varied moment in law, politics, culture, and science.
Siva displays a darting, hummingbird-like intelligence – he moves from topic to topic, making intelligent linkages and drawing fine conceits. He covers an impressive range of material, cutting across a range of disciplines – law, politics, culture and science.
Sometimes Siva can be faulted for his ephemeral, fleeting discussion of issues. For instance, his three-paragraph treatment of the epic litigation over Myriad Genetics’ patents is much too short and superficial. Siva should linger on topics like this, and draw out their complexity and nuances. He should also resist the temptation to take such a holistic view of the world, in which everything is connected – a six- degrees-of-separation universe. His vision of The Anarchist in the Library is a little too tidy and neat for the chaotic maelstrom that the title of the piece suggests.
Siva provides a great sense of the undoubted promise of peer-to-peer networks in culture, politics and science. However, such potential remains latent and unrealised.
Thus far, peer-to-peer networks have primarily been venal creatures of e- commerce. They have been vulnerable to legal actions for copyright infringement because they have facilitated the dissemination of copyright media for profit and gain.
Peer-to-peer networks should therefore pay heed to Siva’s idealistic hopes, if they wish to survive in the future. The courts would be happy to foster such technology if it promoted the freedom of speech, the mixing of cultures, and the progress of science.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates...8-101-1639.jsp
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Senate Considers Bill To Limit Peer-To-Peer Security Risks
Wilson P. Dizard III
A bill requiring federal agencies to curb the security risks caused by peer-to-peer file sharing is scheduled to go to the floor of the Senate next year.
HR 3159, the Government Network Security Act of 2003, would require agencies to develop and implement plans for protecting federal systems from the security and privacy risks posed by peer-to-peer file sharing. It also would require the General Accounting Office to assess the plans’ effectiveness.
The House passed HR 3159 on Oct. 8. The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee approved the legislation without amendment Nov. 10, clearing the way for floor consideration of the bill. Because the Senate and House versions of the bill are identical, there would be no need for a conference committee to resolve differences.
Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, introduced the bill along with Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the committee’s ranking member. Davis’ committee held hearings in May on the risks of peer-to-peer file sharing, focusing on computer security for the general public and child pornography issues.
The bill has 28 House co-sponsors. The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee passed the legislation in a business meeting without hearing evidence from witnesses.
HR 3159 would give federal agencies six months to develop and implement their plans for controlling file- sharing risks. It allows agencies the flexibility to use technology, such as firewalls, or other means, such as employee training, to control the risks.
Tens of millions of computer users have downloaded peer-to-peer file sharing programs such as Kazaa, usually to exchange music files. But the programs can allow outsiders to insert malicious spyware, adware and viruses, and to download personal information from users’ systems. During the hearings and consideration of the bill, lawmakers expressed concern that peer-to-peer file sharing could jeopardize national security data or files containing citizens’ personal data.
The House committee said in a fact sheet on the bill that it had found peer-to-peer file sharing at federal agencies that use classified data, such as an Energy Department laboratory, a NASA research facility and Labor Department headquarters.
http://gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/24468-1.html
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P2PNET.NET IS OFFLINE
Yesterday, the p2pnet.net host, along with NASA and thousands of other machines, came under a massive hack attack.
A lot of sites were defaced and others, completely destroyed, backups included.
Unfortunately, p2pnet falls within the latter category.
"It'll mean re-building the site from scratch, which'll take a while," says founder Jon Newton. "But we'll get it all happening again as soon as we possibly can.
"For now, please bear with us."
Cheers! And thanks .....
the p2pnet crew
http://p2pnet.net/
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Music Industry's Prayers Unanswered
Free downloading just one of many problems, critics say
Robert Thompson
If the music industry prayed for better times in 2003, it's clear those prayers weren't answered.
The past year continued a trend that has plagued the industry for four years: a staggering loss of sales in the face of increasing legions of fans helping themselves to free music over the Internet.
The numbers tell it all: Canadian sales of compact discs have fallen from a high of $1.4-billion in 1998 to an estimated $881-million in 2003. Sales of music in the United States have fallen by US$2-billion since 1999.
Falling sales have been a trend since Napster started the frenzy of free music downloading in 1999. Today, millions flock to such peer-to-peer services as Kazaa to click and receive music for free.
"What we've got here is a change in distribution," music pundit Bob Lefsetz wrote earlier this year. "Distribution is in the process of changing the product and [the people] in power at major labels are completely clueless as to what's going on."
Mr. Lefsetz and others have criticized the music industry's inability to adapt to changing trends. But not everyone seemed so perplexed.
Apple Computer Inc. launched iTunes, the first digital music service of any consequence to use a paid model -- US99 cents for any of the more than one million songs on offer.
By December, iTunes had 25 million downloads, with more than 12 million coming in the past two months, and proved that a paid downloading model could not only attract media attention, but grab consumer dollars, as well.
By the end of the year, companies sensed a gold rush -- Roxio Inc. relaunched Napster and giant retailer Wal-Mart Inc. jumped into the fray.
Wal-Mart said yesterday it will begin offering digital music downloads on its Web site for US88 cents.
Legal digital music sales accounted for US$80-million in sales in the United States, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, and are expected to grow to US$200-million in 2004. It's impressive growth -- but consider that total U.S. music sales in 2002 were US$13-billion.
However, David Card, a media analyst with Jupiter Media Metrix in New York, says the music industry cannot blame all its problems on free downloading.
He said the music recording business failed to properly study the buying habits of its biggest customers -- teenagers. Unlike past generations, he says, teenagers today have many more ways to spend entertainment dollars. No longer is it just movies and music, but an array of new media -- from computer games to multi-tasking cellphones.
"There's been a generational shift," Mr. Card says. "The music industry has been blaming all of its problems on downloading. But I think there have been a series of issues, including downloading, that have impacted what's going on."
In the short term, the Canadian music industry will try to curtail free digital downloading through the courts.
Brian Robertson, head of the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), has said the group will follow lawsuits launched in the United States this year and start the new year by suing Canadians who have uploaded thousands of songs through free services.
In September, the Recording Industry Association of America sued 261 individuals, including a 12-year- old girl and a 71-year-old Texas grandfather, who swapped music files over the Internet. Traffic on Kazaa fell by 41% in the aftermath and the Canadian industry hopes the threat of lawsuits will create the same chill here.
The industry hopes Canadian consumers will move to paid downloading services, like Puretracks.com, which is Canada's only such service.
"The lawsuits in the United States had a deterrent effect on those using free file-sharing sites," said Phil Leigh, an industry analyst with Inside Digital Media. "But the main thing they did was highlight the legitimate online services in the eyes of the public. You want to slap people for shoplifting, but you also want to have alternatives for them to buy."
In Canada, much of the focus has been on Puretracks.com, a paid downloading service with backing from the music industry that is owned by Toronto-based Moontaxi Media Inc.
The service, launched in October, expects to have more than 350,000 songs available in January, says chief executive Alistair Mitchell.
- - -
On the global front, the music industry wasn't entirely passive. Facing mounting financial losses, Sony Music and BMG Music proposed a merger this month in an attempt to deal with the problem by increasing market share and finding savings.
Weeks earlier, Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s led a group of investors in the US$2.6-billion purchase of Warner Music from AOL Time Warner Inc. Mr. Bronfman's group appears to believe the industry can use new technology to its advantage to return to its former glory.
Mr. Bronfman is betting the music business can derive more revenue from services that are outside of traditional music sales.
For example, the industry expects to have its songs acting as the ringtone on cellular phones in the near future. To date, the ringtone fad has allowed users to download simplified songs, which use notes from touch-tone phones. But soon the music industry expects to be charging users to download parts of actual hit songs, which will then be played when someone dials their mobile phone. It is one example of the way the industry hopes to find further revenue streams.
But don't expect to see wholesale changes at any of the major record labels in the coming months.
They will continue to promote paid downloading and may cut more jobs to curtail costs, but Mr. Card does not anticipate that any of the world's largest record labels will undergo a metamorphosis.
"Given that the entertainment business is not very scientific, I think we're less likely to see a massive overhaul of any of the big recording labels."
LEGAL U.S. ONLINE MUSIC SALES:
In U.S. dollars
'03: $80M
'04: $200M
Source: National Post
CANADIAN MUSIC SALES:
Retail value of pre-recorded audio products sold in Canada
'98: $1.4B
'99: $1.3B
'00: $1.1B
'01: $1B
'02: $922M
'03: $881M
Source: Canadian Recording Industry Association, National Post
U.S. MUSIC SALES:
'97: $12.2B
'98: $13.7B
'99: $14.6B
'00: $14.3B
'01: $13.7B
'02: $12.6B
Source: Recording Industry Association of America, National Post
http://www.canada.com/national/natio...b-b14cce396a33
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The Recording Industry Is Unwittingly Driving Encryption Adoption
Clay Shirky
For years, the US Government has been terrified of losing surveillance powers over digital communications generally, and one of their biggest fears has been broad public adoption of encryption. If the average user were to routinely encrypt their email, files, and instant messages, whole swaths of public communication currently available to law enforcement with a simple subpoena (at most) would become either unreadable, or readable only at huge expense.
The first broad attempt by the Government to deflect general adoption of encryption came 10 years ago, in the form of the Clipper Chip. The Clipper Chip was part of a proposal for a secure digital phone that would only work if the encryption keys were held in such a way that the Government could get to them. With a pair of Clipper phones, users could make phone calls secure from everyone except the Government.
Though opposition to Clipper by civil liberties groups was swift and extreme the thing that killed it was work by Matt Blaze, a Bell Labs security researcher, showing that the phone's wiretap capabilities could be easily defeated, allowing Clipper users to make calls that even the Government couldn't decrypt. (Ironically, ATT had designed the phones originally, and had a contract to sell them before Blaze sunk the project.)
The Government's failure to get the Clipper implemented came at a heady time for advocates of digital privacy -- the NSA was losing control of cryptographic products, Phil Zimmerman had launched his Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) email program, and the Cypherpunks, a merry band of crypto-loving civil libertarians, were on the cover of the second issue of Wired. The floodgates were opening, leading to...
...pretty much nothing. Even after the death of Clipper and the launch of PGP, the government discovered that for the most part, users didn't want to encrypt their communications. The single biggest barrier to the spread of encryption has turned out to be not control but apathy. Though business users encrypt sensitive data to hide it from one another, the use of encryption to hide private communications from the government has been limited mainly to techno-libertarians and a small criminal class.
The reason for this is the obvious one: the average user has little to hide, and so hides little. As a result, 10 years on, e-mail is still sent as plain text, files are almost universally unsecured, and so on. The Cypherpunk fantasy of a culture that routinely hides both legal and illegal activities from the state has been defeated by a giant distributed veto. Until now.
It may be time to dust off that old issue of Wired, because the RIAA is succeeding where 10 years of hectoring by the Cypherpunks failed. When shutting down Napster turned out to have all the containing effects of stomping on a tube of toothpaste, the RIAA switched to suing users directly. This strategy has worked much better than shutting down Napster did, convincing many users to stop using public file sharing systems, and to delete MP3s from their hard drives. However, to sue users, they had to serve a subpoena, and to do that, they had to get their identities from the user's internet service providers.
Identifying those users has had a second effect, and that's to create a real-world version of the scenario that drove the invention of user-controlled encryption in the first place. Whitfield Diffie, inventor of public key encryption, the strategy that underlies most of today's cryptographic products, saw the problem as a version of "Who will guard the guardians?"
In any system where a user's identity is in the hands of a third party, that third party cannot be trusted. No matter who the third party is, there will be at least hypothetical situations where the user does not want his or her identity revealed, but the third party chooses or is forced to disclose it anyway. (The first large scale example of this happening was the compromise of anon.penet.fi, the anonymous email service, in 1995.) Seeing that this problem was endemic to all systems where third parties had access to a user's identity, Diffie set out to design a system that put control of anonymity directly in the hands of the user.
Diffie published theoretical work on public key encryption in 1975, and by the early 90s, practical implementations were being offered to the users. However, the scenario Diffie envisioned had little obvious relevance to users, who were fairly anonymous on the internet already. Instead of worrying now about possible future dangers, most users' privacy concerns centered on issues local to the PC, like hiding downloaded pornography, rather than on encrypting network traffic.
However, Diffie's scenario, where legal intervention destroys the users' de facto privacy wherever it is in the hands of commercial entities, is now real. The RIAA's successful extraction of user identity from internet service providers makes it vividly clear that the veil of privacy enjoyed by the average internet user is diaphanous at best, and that the obstacles to piercing that veil are much much lower than for, say, allowing the police to search your home or read your (physical) mail. Diffie's hypothetical problem is today's reality. As a result, after years of apathy, his proposed solution is being adopted as well.
In response to the RIAA's suits, users who want to share music files are adopting tools like WINW (WINW Is Not WASTE) and BadBlue, that allow them to create encrypted spaces where they can share files and converse with one another. As a result, all their communications in these spaces, even messages with no more commercial content than "BRITN3Y SUX!!!1!" are hidden from prying eyes. This is not because such messages are sensitive, but rather because once a user starts encrypting messages and files, it's often easier to encrypt everything than to pick and choose. Note that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because users have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to a first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a felon.
The obvious parallel here is with Prohibition. By making it unconstitutional for an adult to have a drink in their own home, Prohibition created a cat and mouse game between law enforcement and millions of citizens engaged in an activity that was illegal but popular. As with file sharing, the essence of the game was hidden transactions -- you needed to be able to get into a speakeasy or buy bootleg without being seen.
This requirement in turn created several long-term effects in American society, everything from greatly increased skepticism of Government-mandated morality to broad support for anyone who could arrange for hidden transactions, including organized crime. Reversing the cause did not reverse the effects; both the heightened skepticism and the increased power of organized crime lasted decades after Prohibition itself was reversed.
As with Prohibition, so with file sharing -- the direct effects from the current conflict are going to be minor and over quickly, compared to the shifts in society as a whole. New entertainment technology goes from revolutionary to normal quite rapidly. There were dire predictions made by the silent movie orchestras' union trying to kill talkies, or film executives trying to kill television, or television executives trying to kill the VCR. Once those technologies were in place, however, it was hard to remember what all the fuss was about. Though most of the writing about file sharing concentrates on the effects on the music industry, whatever new bargain is struck between musicians and listeners will almost certainly be unremarkable five years from now. The long-term effects of file sharing are elsewhere.
The music industry's attempts to force digital data to behave like physical objects has had two profound effects, neither of them about music. The first is the progressive development of decentralized network models, loosely bundled together under the rubric of peer-to-peer. Though there were several version of such architectures as early as the mid-90s such as ICQ and SETI@Home, it took Napster to ignite general interest in this class of solutions.
And the second effect, of course, is the long-predicted and oft-delayed spread of encryption. The RIAA is succeeding where the Cypherpunks failed, convincing users to trade a broad but penetrable privacy for unbreakable anonymity under their personal control. In contrast to the Cypherpunks "eat your peas" approach, touting encryption as a first-order service users should work to embrace, encryption is now becoming a background feature of collaborative workspaces. Because encryption is becoming something that must run in the background, there is now an incentive to make it's adoption as easy and transparent to the user as possible. It's too early to say how widely casual encryption use will spread, but it isn't too early to see that the shift is both profound and irreversible.
People will differ on the value of this change, depending on their feelings about privacy and their trust of the Government, but the effects of the increased use of encryption, and the subsequent difficulties for law enforcement in decrypting messages and files, will last far longer than the current transition to digital music delivery, and may in fact be the most important legacy of the current legal crackdown.
http://www.internetweek.com/story/sh...cleID=17000186
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B'buster Chief: End Regional Codes, Thwart Pirates
Sam Andrews
MARSEILLES, France -- Blockbuster Inc. president and chief operating officer Nigel Travis on Thursday called for an end to regional coding on DVDs, saying they merely create more opportunities for piracy. "I believe, in addition to the elimination of two-tier pricing, the studios should also make another significant strike against piracy with the elimination of regional coding," he said. "The extra time on windows created by regional coding is an opportunity that pirates exploit." Travis, the keynote speaker at the annual two-day Perspectives in European Video conference taking place here, cited "Finding Nemo," which was released on video and DVD in the United States on Nov. 4 but will not be available in the United Kingdom until March 18. "That is a five- month gap and an obvious case where people are going to take advantage," Travis said. Likewise, "Seabiscuit," he said, would be out in the United States on Dec. 16, but would not be released "in the country next door to the U.S. -- in Mexico -- until February and in the U.K. until May 17. Pirates can drive a cart and horses through these holes in the release schedule, and the loss in revenue hurts us all -- studios, distribution, retailers and, most of all, consumers, who are probably totally confused and frustrated."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr...ent_id=2047010
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Copyright and Fair Use
By eWEEK Editorial Board
Without competition, an industry can stagnate due to high prices, slow product delivery and limited product innovation. Recent lawsuits that invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act seek to curb competition and therefore threaten to bring about those conditions. Passed in 1998, the DMCA was written to limit Internet piracy. But a provision of the law—Section 1201—prohibits individuals from circumventing technological measures erected by copyright holders to protect their works. It is this section that corporations are invoking to kill competition.
For example, Chamberlain Group, which makes garage-door-opener systems, sued Skylink Technologies, a manufacturer of universal remote controls for garage-door openers, citing the DMCA and alleging that Skylink's transmitter violated the anti-circumvention provision of the law. Last month, a federal judge in Illinois disagreed. The ruling was a step in the right direction.
Copyright Only Creativity
"Under Chamberlain's theory, any customer who loses his or her Chamberlain transmitter but manages to operate the opener either with a non-Chamberlain transmitter or by some other means of circumventing the rolling code has violated the DMCA," wrote Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer. "In this court's view, the statute does not require such a conclusion."
While we applaud Pallmeyer's decision to dismiss the case, her ruling hinges on Chamberlain's failure to publicly state that other companies' products couldn't be used with its garage-door openers. By sidestepping the DMCA, she shed little light on how broadly the law can be applied.
We encourage the Cincinnati U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit to address the use of the DMCA to curtail competition when it rules on an appeal by Static Control Components. In February, Lexmark International used the DMCA to win an injunction that stopped Static Control from making chips that let Lexmark toner cartridges be refilled.
The Skylink and Lexmark examples show that the DMCA is disturbingly susceptible to use as an anti-competitive weapon. Repeated abuse of a statute in this way is a sign that the law itself is defective. We call upon legislators and the courts to attain a balance that will promote the interests of copyright owners while respecting the rights of consumers. Thus, we back U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher's H.R. 107, under which circumvention for the purpose of exercising fair-use rights would be allowed. The Virginia Democrat's bill would also allow making and distributing hardware and software if the technology is capable of substantial noninfringing use.
Precedents in fields as remote as garage-door openers can have far- reaching ramifications, especially in IT, where many innovations are copyrighted. Laws intended to protect against copyright infringement should not inhibit innovation and consumer choice.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1407919,00.asp
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Webcast Alliance To Fight Expansion Of Riaa Antitrust Exemption
Takes up cudgels
A COALITION OF online broadcasters said today it will take up arms against proposed US legislation that would widen the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) exemptions from antitrust law.
According to the Webcast Alliance, the so-called EnFORCE Act (Enhancing Federal Obscenity Reporting and Copyright Enforcement Act of 2003) broadens the current antitrust exemption the RIAA has.
Ann Gabriel, president of the Alliance, said that a federal judge approved a $143 million in a CD price fixing case brought against the RIAA's "Big Five" record labels.
The latest legislation, she said, attaches: "additional language to expand their [RIAA's] antitrust exemptions to a bill they know most legislators would have had a hard time opposing, since it deals with the exploitation of children".
She added: "This is so typical of the RIAA and their manipulative, smoke and mirrors tactics".
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13163
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Mute - Encrypted Distributed File Sharing
MUTE protects your privacy by avoiding direct connections with your sharing partners in the network. Most other file sharing programs use direct connections to download or upload, making your identity available to spies from the RIAA and other unscrupulous organizations.
Ants display collectively intelligent behavior when foraging for food or fighting off predators. Each ant in the colony acts in a rather simple way, but together they end up doing something clever, like discovering the shortest path between their ant hill and a food source. MUTE's routing mechanism is inspired by ant behavior.
http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/
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Stephen King: Forget Piracy, Boomers Are Just Tired Of Buying Crap
Stephen King's editorial in the new Entertainment Weekly (not online, but the best part is below) opines that the real crisis in the entertainment industry isn't piracy, it's mental fatigue among moneyed baby boomers.
So what happened in the '90s? I think we're seeing an entire generation -- my generation, the baby-boom generation -- turning off the lights upstairs and putting a sign on the door: SORRY, BUT I'M TAKING A NAP. MIND CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Pretty much the same deal is going on with music sales. Piracy and illegal downloads, although covered to a fare-thee-well in the press, account for only a fraction of the drop in $$. I think what's happening is all too clear: We baby boomers are just too pooped to party. Oh, we do buy some records -- you may have heard that we love the Beatles, Rod Stewart, and those funksters the Rolling Stones. Just don't try to get us to listen to anyone who isn't registered with AARP! Bob Seger was probably correct when he told us rock & roll never forgets, but it sure gets tired.
Movie-ticket sales have remained strong, but only because the studios are selling a product aimed almost solely at Gen-X and Gen-Y. Most R-rated movies go in the tank. PG-13 rules. A film like ''The Fast and the Furious'' strikes box office gold, while Clint Eastwood's ''Mystic River'' muddles along at the box office. I'd argue that 20 years ago, ''Mystic River'' would have done ''Chinatown'' box office numbers. Now the baby boomers look at the previews on TV and think, Nah, that looks too serious. Too hard. Guess I'll stay home and watch ''Jeopardy!'' And the ''Jeopardy!'' answer is ''Just about the saddest thing Steve King can think of.'' The question is ''What do you call a whole generation going to sleep?''
http://boingboing.net/2003_12_01_arc...58254264789155
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Court Limits Efforts to Unmask Music Swappers
John Schwartz
The recording industry must first ask a judge before forcing Internet companies to disclose the names of people who trade music online, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled yesterday.
The sharply worded ruling, which underscored the role of judges in protecting privacy and civil rights, is a major setback to the record companies in their efforts to stamp out the sharing of copyrighted songs through the Internet. It overturns a decision in a federal district court that allowed the music industry to force the disclosure of individuals simply by submitting subpoenas to a court clerk without winning a judge's approval.
Until yesterday's ruling, the industry could seek information on file traders without filing a lawsuit or even appearing before a judge, a streamlined procedure that opponents of the industry said did not protect Internet users' rights.
"It's a huge victory for all Internet users," said Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate general counsel for Verizon Communications, which brought the suit against the Recording Industry Association of America to protect the identities of its Internet customers. "The court today has knocked down a very dangerous procedure that threatens Americans' traditional legal guarantees and violates their constitutional rights."
The appeals court did not directly raise those constitutional issues in its decision. The judges said they were "not unsympathetic" to the industry's troubles in limiting music piracy "or to the need for legal tools to protect those rights." But in a decision that focused narrowly on the nuts and bolts of copyright law, they said that the music industry had gone too far.
Cary Sherman, the president of the recording association, said that the case "is inconsistent with both the views of Congress and the findings of the district court." Mr. Sherman said that his organization would continue to sue those who violate copyrights. It "doesn't change the law, or our right to sue," he said. "It just changes the way we get the information."
Mr. Sherman said his member companies had not decided whether to appeal, or whether to press Congress to amend trademark law.
The recording industry has been struggling to counter an army of Internet downloaders — tens of millions strong — who, beginning with the advent of Napster in the late 1990's, have swapped songs on peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa without regard to the intellectual property rights of artists, composers and the companies that record the music.
In September, the industry began suing large-scale file swappers. Although the swappers' libraries of music were out in the open, visible to industry experts who traced the activity, their identities were not. Most file-sharing networks operate anonymously, with only an Internet ID number managed by the service provider to link them to the activity.
The recording industry used a controversial provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 to demand that companies that provide Internet connections reveal the names of those customers.
The industry ran into a public relations problem when some of its early lawsuits were issued to innocent people — including a Boston-area woman who did not even own a computer that could run the file-trading program she was accused of using — and sympathetic defendants like a 12-year-old girl. The publicity surrounding the suits, however, got the message to file traders that there could be consequences to their illicit listening pleasure.
The opinion in the Verizon case was written by Chief Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and represented the view of the three judges who heard the case.
In his ruling, Judge Ginsburg wrote that Verizon, as an Internet service provider, was "acting merely as a conduit" for the music files and did not store the data on its own computer network. The industry's argument, he added, that subpoena power could be applied to an Internet service provider when songs were only momentarily passing through its data pipes, "borders upon the silly."
Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, said that the problem for the industry was that "the Internet moves at Internet speed," while law moves at a more deliberate pace. "I don't think anybody had peer-to-peer in mind when the statute was written."
Under the decision, notices sent to an Internet service provider that does store its customers' data, as in a Web site, could still be valid.
The decision will probably have little practical effect on the hundreds of people already sued by the industry. But it changes the music battlefield in many ways.
"For people whose names have been requested but not turned over, this is a reprieve," said Stewart Baker, a lawyer who represents Internet service providers. People who have already settled lawsuits by the industry could conceivably argue that their identities were obtained illegally and demand their money back, but the industry could simply sue all over again, he said.
Mr. Sherman, the recording industry executive, argued that the decision would end up hurting consumers because they would no longer be notified before a lawsuit was filed and they had been given a chance to settle cases.
The procedure that the industry now may have to use is a more conventional process for unmasking anonymous people known as a "John Doe" case that involves filing a lawsuit against the unknown person and then asking a judge to compel Internet service providers to reveal the identity. That process will be more cumbersome and expensive for the music industry and, potentially, for consumers as well. But Ms. Deutsch of Verizon said it "will be much more protective of users' rights."
The recording industry, in the meantime, has begun to pursue other tactics in its fight against file traders. On Tuesday the organization began quietly sending out letters to Internet service providers to propose a new "voluntary notice program" asking that file swappers be notified "without providing us with any identifying information."
The industry appears to be moving away from the expensive and image-tarnishing strategy of suing customers, said Gigi B. Sohn, the president of Public Knowledge, a policy group in Washington. While the threat of lawsuits is unlikely to go away, she said, "I can't imagine that this is going to be the core of their strategy" in the long term. "They know they've got to get people buying music online," and the rise of legitimate services like iTunes from Apple and Rhapsody from RealNetworks suggests that the shift is beginning to occur, she said.
Mr. Sherman said, however, that the goal of the new initiative was simply "expanding the reach" of the industry's enforcement and education efforts, and "not to diminish one over the other."
Representatives of several organizations that have taken a stand against the recording industry stressed that the issue in the case was not whether copyright infringement should be legal.
"People who violate copyright can be punished," said Chris Hanson, senior staff counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has fought the industry in its attempt to force Internet service providers, including a number of colleges, to give up the names of file traders with a simple subpoena. "The record industry had argued that the courts were required to be a mindless tool of the industry" under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, he said.
The process that the industry had pursued was far too loose, said Peter Swire, a former privacy official in the Clinton administration who served as an expert witness for Verizon in district court.
Like Wednesday's federal court decision in the case of an accused terrorist, Jose Padilla, he said, the music decision asserts the role of the courts in protecting citizens' rights. "Due process," Mr. Swire said, "is alive and well in the American court system."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/20/te...agewanted=2&hp
Until next week,
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js.
Reel Life Funnies:
Christmas CD blues - “What a crappy present!” 
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Current Week In Review.
Recent WIRs -
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=18158 December 13th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=18087 December 6th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=18030 November 29th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17982 November 22nd
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