[JackSpratts]

Site announcement:

Due to the current climate and current conditions the unfortunate, difficult and sad decision has been taken to close Phoenix Torrents down.

We have all made friends during our time here that we would like to keep in touch with, so we are keeping the IRC channel open for chat and to get together - please use it, however as a Bittorrent site, Phoenix will not be returning.

The quickest and easiest way to get to our IRC channel is to install MIRC and copy the following to your browser

irc://irc.wikkedwire.com/phoenix-torrents

Alternatively you can use the java chat by going to :

HERE

We've had our ups and downs during the last 14 months, but mostly its been a ball. Without your support it wouldnt have been possible so we would like to thank all the members, visitors and supporters of Phoenix Torrents during this time, and wish the other sites in the community every success.
http://www.phoenix-torrents.com/


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Hollywood Bid To Cripple eDonkey, BitTorrent

The Motion Picture Association of America has announced legal actions to shut down file-trading networks it claims distribute millions of unauthorised copies of Hollywood films and TV programs.

"We cannot just sit back and let internet pirates brazenly steal our movies and other intellectual property," MPAA president and chief executive Dan Glickman said on Tuesday.

"Today's actions not only will protect creativity but also will bolster the nascent legitimate online market for motion picture distribution. The film industry believes digital delivery of entertainment holds great promise, if we can protect it from thieves long enough to give it a chance to grow."

The MPAA, Hollywood's main trade and lobbying group, said it was filing civil suits and pressing for criminal actions against networks with the names BitTorrent, eDonkey and DirectConnect.

The association said these networks offer a new type of peer-to-peer (P2P) trading of films.

US courts have so far ruled that P2P networks cannot be held responsible for any copyright violations of their users, but MPAA said these services are different than the music-swapping networks.

"The operators of these servers exercise total control over which files are included on their servers and even determine if some kinds of files aren't allowed," said John Malcolm, the MPAA's director of anti-piracy operations.

"For instance, some operators won't post pornography on their systems, but they have no compunction allowing illegal files of copyrighted movies and TV shows to flow through their servers. We are moving to stop that. The message today is clear: If you illegally trade movies online, we can find you and we will hold you accountable."

MPAA said BitTorrent, Direct Connect and eDonkey are examples of newer kinds of "peer-to-peer" file-trading networks that have proliferated online in recent years. These rely on servers termed BitTorrent "trackers," eDonkey "servers" and Direct Connect "hubs" to index and deliver files of all kinds.

"The operators being targeted by these actions have helped online pirates steal hundreds of millions of illegal copies of movies and TV programs," MPAA said.

In addition to civil suits filed in US and British courts, the MPAA said it was working with its members and local law-enforcement agencies in several countries "to pursue criminal actions against the people behind illegal file-trading servers based in those countries."

"Law enforcement officials in France, The Netherlands and Finland have already taken actions based on the information brought to their attention," MPAA said.

The MPAA and local copyright holders are also sending "cease and desist" letters to internet service providers worldwide seeking to shut down the eDonkey servers and DirectConnect hubs.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Breaki...oneclick=true#


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AllPeers Launches Private Beta Program for Cutting-Edge P2P Platform

Over the past four years, peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have proven to be a faster, more efficient and financially more attractive proposition for distribution of digital content than software based on the World Wide Web
Press Release

AllPeers Ltd. today announced that its product has entered a private beta test phase in preparation for general availability of the software in early 2005. The U.K.-based start-up has been developing its cutting-edge P2P platform since March 2003.

Over the past four years, peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have proven to be a faster, more efficient and financially more attractive proposition for distribution of digital content than software based on the World Wide Web. A number of specific P2P applications have appeared, targeting a variety of areas including groupware, photo sharing, file exchange and internet telephony. However, it is more difficult to create P2P applications than traditional networked software, slowing the appearance of innovative new P2P software. The AllPeers platform includes a software development kit (SDK) that solves the most difficult technical challenges, dramatically reducing time to market and letting P2P software developers concentrate on the unique features of their application.

The first application to take advantage of the AllPeers platform is another AllPeers product, an advanced digital photo sharing application enabling users to organise and share digital photos directly from their PCs.

“Photo sharing was an obvious candidate for our first application. Every year more people are buying digital cameras (47.9 million in 2003, up 71 percent from 28 million in 2002 according to IDC) and 66% of new phones now ship with an integrated camera. However, high-quality photos tend to be large files, making it inconvenient to share them via a website or email”, explains Cedric Maloux, CEO of AllPeers. “AllPeers Digital Photo Sharing lets users organise their photos directly on their PCs and share them with friends and family with a single mouse click.”

The vision of the AllPeers platform is to offer complementary and integrated social software services on a P2P network, letting users remain fully in control of their profile and data. “The use of a P2P network makes AllPeers far more scalable and flexible than other solutions,” says Matthew Gertner, CTO. “The fact that AllPeers has been conceived from the beginning as a platform means that we can easily roll out additional services in the future that integrate smoothly with the photo sharing service and with each other.”

A public beta program for the AllPeers Digital Photo Sharing is scheduled for Q1 2005. In the meantime, users interested in trying the software can still register for the private beta on the AllPeers website (www.allpeers.com). Information about the features and availability of the AllPeers SDK can be obtained by emailing e-mail protected from spam bots.

For additional information, please contact: e-mail protected from spam bots

About AllPeers Ltd.
AllPeers is a privately held company with headquarters in Oxford , United Kingdom . Our software development center is located in Prague, Czech Republic.

Contact Information:
Mr Cedric Maloux
AllPeers Ltd.
PO Box 407
Oxford
OX2 8XB
United Kingdom
+420 731 476 550
http://www.allpeers.com
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2.../emw189741.htm


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New CD Copy-Lock Technology Nears Market
John Borland

A new kind of copy-protected music CD will likely hit U.S. shelves early next year, as record label SonyBMG experiments with a technology created by British developer First 4 Internet, according to sources familiar with the companies.

Several major music labels have already used a version of the British company's technology on prerelease compact discs distributed for review and other early- listening purposes, including on recent albums from Eminem and U2.

The releases for the retail market, expected early in 2005, will be the first time the Sony music label issues copy-protected CDs in the U.S. market, although the company's other divisions have done so in other regions. BMG, Sony's new corporate sibling, has been more aggressive, with a handful of protected CDs released last year.

"We have always focused on a high level of protection, but we've waited until there aren't any playability issues."
--Mathew Gilliat-Smith,
CEO, First 4 Internet
A SonyBMG representative declined to comment on the plans. First 4 Internet Chief Executive Officer Mathew Gilliat-Smith confirmed that his company plans to release a consumer version of its technology with one major label in the United States, but he declined to identify the label.

Gilliat-Smith said his company has been waiting to improve its technology. Better-known companies Macrovision and Sunncomm have seen sporadic--and sometimes controversial--use of their products on CDs released around the world.

"We're not keen to rush," Gilliat-Smith said. "We have always focused on a high level of protection, but we've waited until there aren't any playability issues."

The new SonyBMG experiments are a further sign that copy protection on music CDs may be moving closer to the mainstream U.S. market. The practice is much more common in European and Asian markets.

For several years, the major record labels have sought a way to protect CDs against unrestricted copying and "ripping," or transforming songs into files such as MP3s that can be swapped widely online. Early experiments proved unpopular, prompting reports that the discs could not play in certain kind of stereos, or might even damage computers.

The past year has seen resurgent signs of interest from the major labels, however. A watershed moment in the United States came when the BMG- released Velvet Revolver album reached the top of the industry's sales charts, despite being clearly marked as copy-protected. Industry insiders said that helped assuage some boardroom concerns about potential consumer backlash.

Questions remain about the appropriate technology to use, however. The technology from Sunncomm, used by BMG in the United States, can be fairly easily disabled simply by pressing a computer's "Shift" key while loading. Although label officials have said that's enough to deter casual pirates, the industry wants to avoid that kind of simple work-around.

It also may be a tricky job to make rules associated with copy-protected discs match those associated with songs purchased from online stores such as Napster or Apple Computer's iTunes. Those stores allow their customers to burn CDs that can then be copied without restriction; by contrast some labels want to limit the number of times a copied CD can be duplicated again--a technology called "secure burning."

First 4 Internet's entry into the market marks a potentially new twist on the basic technology, however. The company got its start by offering a tool to identify pornographic images in Web sites and e-mails, and selling the technology to Web-filtering companies for their own products.

The company has been working on the disc-protection technology since 2001, following conversations with the EMI record label, Gilliat-Smith said. The technology wraps ordinary song files in strong encryption, but in a way that still allows regular CD players to read them. Another part of the disc contains data files that help improve protection.

The company has worked particularly closely on prereleases in the U.S. market with Universal Music. First 4 Internet's U.S. representative said the copy-protection technology has been included on a number of extremely high-profile CDs while in the review and demo stage, without being broken.

"Could it be broken? I'm sure that somebody must be able to do it," said Graham Oakes, the head of Los Angeles-based Ezee Studios, which represents First 4 Internet. "But is there a generally known hack that has been put on the Net, or have any of the record label IT people found a hack yet? No."

Analysts remain skeptical that labels will ultimately launch copy-protected discs on a widespread level in the United States, citing continued consumer opposition and the delicate technological balancing act between strong protection and universal compatibility with CD players.

"If there's something that isn't going to play in every CD player that's out there, it's going to create a backlash," said Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg. "If it's easy to defeat, then that doesn't bode well for why you released it in the first place."
http://news.com.com/New+CD+copy-lock...3-5492395.html


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Cryptography Research Wants Piracy Speed Bump On HD DVDs
Faultline (peter at rethinkresearch.biz)

Analysis Just about a year from today, if not sooner, if we believe the outpourings of both the DVD Forum and the Blu-Ray Disc Association, we will be able to go out to the shops and buy blue laser, high definition, high density DVDs in two completely different designs. We will also be able to buy the players and recorders by then, as well as studio content from virtually every major studio in the world, on one or the other system.

If you believe the hype, DVD manufacturers will likely have to buy in two types of DVD manufacturing equipment. Households will have to buy two DVD players. Consumers will have to buy one PC with one type of high density DVD player and buy another separate player to read the other format of disk.

We neither believe the hype, nor understand the argument between the two formats. Surely a single format is better for everyone, but it appears not. Every round of format wars that have gone on since the original VHS Betamax wars, has been split, and the result a draw, and it looks like this one will be too.

In the end the devices are likely to be virtually identical. The Sony- Panasonic- Philips camp that inspired the Blu-ray version may have slightly more capacity on their discs, that's the official view right now, but it might change. They also have devices out right now and have had them for over a year, but they are very expensive, up at around $2,000 and are not the volume versions that will be able to play pre-recorded material. Eventually these devices will be about 10 per cent more than DVD players are now.

The DVD Forum backed Toshiba and NEC technology may be slightly cheaper for studios to manufacture, but then again we only have the word of Toshiba on that, and most DVD producers seem set on supporting both.

The disks need to play on PCs, as well as DVDs and games consoles, and it is unlikely that anyone is going to shoot themselves in the foot by making a disc that is incompatible with any of these devices.

So Microsoft's VC 9 codec has to be supported, as does the prevalent MPEG2 and H.264 codecs, and nobody is planning to argue the toss about the quality of sound from Dolby. So there is a chance that all of the software on top of these disks is going to be identical.

In the end all of the Blu-ray manufacturers are still in the DVD Forum, and given that the Blu-ray leaders make about 90 per cent of the worlds DVD players and that half of the studios have backed the DVD Forum standard, their players may well end up playing both formats. The early consumers may well be asking "What's the difference" a year from now having little clue as to how different the two technologies are, under the "hood."

But what if they each choose a different way to protect the content on their disks? How much danger would that put the two groups in?

The Content Scrambling System of the DVD has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, as piracy has become relatively rampant. It was designed more or less as a speed bump to put off anyone other than the professional pirate. But then along came the internet, and it has become possible for anyone to download CSS circumvention or to read up, on various websites, how to go about it. The speed bump has been somewhat flattened and it needs reinforcement in the next technology.

So it falls to these same companies to build something for the studios that will be rather harder and more persuasive, to act as a hurdle against piracy for these new DVDs. In fact an organization called Advanced Access Content System (AACS), formed back in July by such notables as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Disney and Warner Brothers has come together in order to create a decent speed bump against piracy that should last at least for the next decade, a decade during which broadband lines improve to the point where it will be child's play to download even a high definition movie.

The definition of what is required has been very clear from the studios. They want a system that has the ability for the security logic to be renewed and which should also have some form of forensic marking in order to help track pirates.

At the heart of this protection system will be the safety of the revenue of all the major studios, which now get way in excess of 50 per cent of any given film's revenues from DVD sales.

Faultline talked over such a system with its authors this week, who are optimistic about its bid to become the new, but more sophisticated CSS for the next generation DVD disk.

Cryptographic Research's senior security architect, who also mockingly refers to himself as "chief anti-pirate" is Carter Laren, and Cryptography Research is both realistic about just what it takes to stop pirates and how difficult that is, as well as optimistic that the two competing associations are set to choose its own submission as the basis for this protection system.

Cryptography Research (CR) is just a 15 man intellectual property company, but it was single handedly responsible for discovering how professional pirates use Differential Power Analysis to read encryption keys and break complex coding systems thought to be uncrackable, and has also come up with circumvention strategies. Virtually all the intellectual property around DPA is held by CR and is licensed all over the world. CR also wrote the SSL3 secure sockets layer security version for the IETF.

Put simply DPA is a system of "listening" to power distribution on semiconductors as they read encryption keys. Circumvention comes from balancing out all power use when an encryption key is being applied so that it cannot be read just by observing which circuits are active.

If it appears to you that DPA is really about making it harder for the "professional" pirate who makes a fortune from illicit manufacture of pirated goods, rather than about stopping college kids from using P2P networks to swap files, then you'd be right.

"We would rather chase professional pirates than College students," says Laren, and this shows in his strategy to build a protection system.

What CR has built, he calls Self Protecting Digital Content or SPDC. In effect this is a form of content that is no longer passive and includes code that can execute in a specially constructed SPDC virtual machine that resides in each player.

The logic behind this approach is that so far Digital Rights Management systems have tried to both support a trust chain, a way of moving decryption keys around between devices, as well as allowing the expression of rules to decide what usage is allowed with that content.

What CR does instead is much simpler and more direct. It tries to cut off any player that has been used for mass piracy.

"When a pirate makes a copy of a film encoded as SPDC, the output file is cryptographically bound to a set of player decryption keys. So it is easy when looking at a pirated work on a peer to peer network, or any copies found on copied DVDs, to identify which player made those copies," said Laren "When the content owner sends out any further content it can contain on it a revocation of just the player that was used to make a pirated copy."

"We picture a message popping up on a screen saying something like 'Disney movies won't play on your player any more please call this number for further information.' Or perhaps 'To fix this please call Disney with your credit card,' something like that anyway.

"We know that pirates can make copies by tapping the MPEG stream with modified players, or by making a bit for bit copy of the disk, or by using an analog attack (catching the film stream on the way to the TV over aerial cabling and re-digitizing it). But using this cryptographical binding we have forensic marking visible on the copy."

The neat thing about this process is that if someone makes copies for their own use, that can be enabled. Private individuals could be allowed to make copies for other players, even for their friends, and that's no problem.

It's only when a pirated copy is discovered coming back to a content owner (presumably watching P2P sites) that a player will get revoked, and that is only effective on content made after that point, with the revocation message in it.

When asked Laren said, "No, this is not the same as fingerprinting or watermarking. When you generate a fingerprint you are making each copy that is sold, slightly different and that has some cost implications when stamping disks. Our forensic information is being created by the player's virtual machine at the time it is played (copied) so all the disks can be identical."

The virtual machine players create movie outputs that are artistically identical but each one is altered if some minor way. This alteration is just the changing of a few bits of data every few seconds, so every 50 frames or so. And the CR system works such that if ten separate players are used in collusion in a copying process, taking samples of frames from each, it will not only identify one of the players, but all of them and they can be revoked from all future content.

"The big problem for studios is piracy based on film copies that have no digital identifiers. Because they can be sent around the internet with no chance of catching the original copier and then you have to go after the P2P user."

"The problem now is that everything in this market has accelerated. There are time constraints in that all the studios want to move to better protection as soon as the new disk formats come out and that is set for the end of next year. This means that AACS has to get its skates on if the players for this market are not to be launched ahead of its choice of security system.

By that time, if the CR system, or any other system, is to be used, the virtual machine players need to be integrated onto the two format in time for testing and studio acceptance to take place prior to the end of 2005.

CR has in fact dropped any attempt to have its actual encryption technologies used in this process. The disk formats will accept RSA or AES 128 bit encryption or both, but CR says this doesn't matter.

"The cryptographic portion of this is pretty easy to solve and any cryptographer that knows what he is doing can do a good job of that. So we have withdrawn from that part of the spec and we're just putting forward the binding process to our virtual machine," said Laren.

The virtual machine is based on a stripped down DLX processor. CR has taken out the floating point arithmetic and we've made a few changes for the sake of extra security. The DLX is a 32-bit pipelined embedded RISC CPU architecture that has come out of academia and was originally designed for teaching, but is not too unlike the ARM or any other RISC device.

It can be built in hardware, expressed in a hardware language like the Verilog Hardware Description Language and CR has a reference implementation in the C programming language.

As for the business model of CR, it plans to charge no royalty to the consumer electronics manufacturers, and adheres to the principle of charging the businesses whose security problems it solves, in this case the studios. So it plans to charge, perhaps as little as a couple of cents, for each HD disk that is pressed using the technology.

What if only one of the two disk formats agrees to install the player in their HD DVD players? "Well if one format gets its security broken, then that is a basis for suppliers to switch to the other format isn't it," says Laren in a clearly rehearsed sales pitch.

But in the end, Self Protecting Digital Content remain only a speed bump. For real pirates, buying a new player every time they get a set of keys revoked is just an inconvenience, but for someone that is casually taking content and placing it on the internet, the loss of function on their personal devices will certainly reduce the activity to only the seriously committed.

"We realize that all we are doing is enabling the game that goes on between the pirate and the content owners. We see revocation of keys through this system as taking last mover advantage away from the pirates, and giving it back to the content owners," concludes Laren.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12...aphy_research/


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Lawsuit Filed To Prohibit Copyright Protection Of Software

Computer software should not be protected by copyright laws designed for music, literature and other creative works, according to a lawsuit filed in a U.S. court in San Francisco.

Intellectual-property consultant Greg Aharonian hopes to convince the court that software makers can protect their products adequately through patents, which provide more comprehensive protection, but are difficult to obtain and expire in a shorter period of time.

The case seeks to clarify which laws the $100 billion U.S. software industry uses to protect its products. Currently, software makers like Microsoft Corp. use both copyright and patent laws to protect their creations, as well as "clickwrap" agreements that stipulate terms of use.

An official with a software-industry trade group said not every software product is protected by patents.

"If you eliminated the ability to sue somebody for copyright infringement, you would eviscerate our ability to go against pirates," said Emory Simon, counselor for the Business Software Alliance, which estimates that U.S. businesses lost $6.5 billion last year to piracy.

Aharonian argues in his complaint that software copyright laws violate the right to due process enshrined in the U.S. Constitution because they do not provide clear boundaries for appropriate use. That means industry players and courts do not have a clear idea of the rules.

"Until you're sued and a judge makes up his mind about what is the idea and expression (at stake), no one knows," Aharonian said in an interview.

In one well-known case, Lexmark International Inc. invoked copyright laws to prevent a competitor from making computer circuits that allow cheaper inkjet cartridges to work on its printers.

One court ruled in Lexmark's favor in 2002, but an appeals court in October overturned that decision and allowed rival Static Control Components to sell its inkjet cartridge parts.

Aharonian said in his complaint he does not know if he personally has run afoul of copyright laws because he has set up a database of thousands of computer programs to help software companies figure out if their products infringe on existing material.

If the owner of any of those programs decides to sue, he could face hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties and possible jail time.

While patents protect an idea -- say, a way to direct traffic on the Internet -- copyrights only protect the expression of that idea, usually the written code that tells the computer what to do.

Inventors applying for a patent have to prove their idea is new and original, a process that typically takes years and costs thousands of dollars. Patents expire after 20 years.

Anybody who scribbles a poem on the back of a cocktail napkin, by contrast, is protected by copyright laws for 70 years after their death, or 95 years if the work is owned by a corporation.

Both the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Copyright Office began accepting applications for computer programs in the 1960s. Congress included software in copyright law in 1976.

An official with the U.S. Copyright Office declined to comment on the case, but said copyright protection was vital for U.S. software makers.

"I think it is fair to say it is the primary means of protecting U.S.-based software," said Kent Dunlap, principal legal advisor to the Copyright Office's general counsel.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/biztech...eut/index.html


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Makers Of Video Games Settle Piracy Claims That Killed Company
AP

A company driven out of business by Hollywood and the video game industry over its DVD- and computer game-copying software has settled with three
makers of video games, apparently closing out the legal mess that led to its collapse.

Although having folded in August under the crush of copyright-related lawsuits and unfriendly court orders, 321 Studios Inc. on Monday agreed to never again make or sell software letting users create backup copies of computer games.

The Entertainment Software Association announced the settlement Tuesday. An attorney for the trade group refused to divulge other terms.

Calls to a telephone listing for 321, which was based in the St. Louis suburb of St. Charles, went unanswered. A telephone listing for Robert Moore, 321's founder and president, was not available.

The company reached a similar deal in August with Hollywood studios, agreeing to stop selling DVD-copying software worldwide The company's owners also agreed to an unspecified financial settlement, the Motion Picture Association of America said then.

Monday's permanent injunction -- issued against 321 by a federal judge in New York -- resolves a lawsuit filed there in June, alleging that 321's Games X Copy violated copyright laws by illegally cracking copy-protection systems used by game makers.

That case -- brought by Atari Inc., Electronic Arts Inc. and Vivendi Universal Games Inc. -- marked a new legal front against 321, which already was at odds with Hollywood over the company's DVD-copying software.

Federal judges in New York and California had barred 321 from marketing the questioned DVD-cloning software -- a victory for Hollywood studios, which contended that such products violate the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law bars circumvention of anti-piracy measures used to protect DVDs and other technology.

After those rulings, 321 shipped retooled versions of its DVD-copying products, removing the software component required to descramble movies.

Moore has defended Games X Copy, arguing that federal copyright law allowed consumers to make backup copies of their software. Games X Copy had fetched $60 and let users make what 321's Web site called ``a PERFECT backup copy of virtually any PC game.''

The trade group's president Doug Lowenstein countered that ``video game copyright owners stand to lose an enormous amount from the piracy enabled by products like Games X Copy.''

Lowenstein said game-copying software could facilitate theft of intellectual property, given that creating and marketing a top video game typically costs companies $5 million to $10 million.

In a statement, Lowenstein called the DMCA protections ``critical to protecting our intellectual property and essential to maintaining the high-quality of our industry's innovative products.''

Chun Wright, a piracy attorney for the trade group that represents U.S. publishers of computer and video games, said Tuesday the case ``demonstrates that the industry is not going to tolerate any game-copying software in the marketplace.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/10416571.htm


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Apple Fights RealNetworks' 'Hacker Tactics'
John Borland

Apple Computer has quietly updated its iPod software so that songs purchased from RealNetworks' online music store will no longer play on some of the Mac maker's popular MP3 players.

The move could render tunes purchased by many iPod owners unplayable on their music players. For the last four months, RealNetworks has marketed its music store as the only Apple rival compatible with the iPod, following the company's discovery of a way to let its customers play their downloaded tunes on Apple's MP3 player.

Apple criticized RealNetworks' workaround, dubbed Harmony, as the "tactics...of a hacker," and warned in July that RealNetworks-purchased songs would likely "cease to work with current and future iPods." Apple offered no further statement Tuesday, but confirmed that the software released with its iPod Photo will not play music purchased from RealNetworks' music store.

The high-tech feud may be as grounded in public relations as it is in genuine technology development, but it highlights what remains a serious issue in the digital music business. Unlike CDs, songs sold by competing online stores are often not directly compatible with different brands of MP3 players.

Songs purchased from Apple's iTunes store can only be played directly on an Apple iPod, while songs purchased from Napster or MSN Music can only be played directly on a device that supports Microsoft's audio format, for example.

Record label executives, as well as rival technology companies, have repeatedly urged Apple to open up its iPod to play songs purchased from other music stores, but the company has declined to do so. Executives from several labels had applauded RealNetworks' attempt to create compatibility between its store and the iPod, even lacking Apple's permission.

RealNeworks said in a statement that it remains "fully committed to providing consumers with the freedom to use the music libraries they purchase from us on different portable audio devices they acquire, both now and in the future--including the iPod Photo."

To promote the release of its Harmony software, RealNetworks held a half-price sale in its song store in late August, charging just 49 cents per song. At the close of the three-week promotion, the company said it had sold more than 3 million songs during the sale.

RealNetworks said it did not know how many of those customers were iPod owners, however.

The changes Apple made were to the iPod's "firmware," which is the low-level software that powers hardware such as MP3 players or cell phones. This kind of software is often, but not always, updatable, and companies often use changes to provide new features or capabilities for devices.

Apple released its last update to the iPod software in mid-November, offering new versions for the iPod Mini as well as all fourth-generation click-wheel iPods.

The notes that accompanied the release mentioned several enhancements, but did not comment on Harmony. It was not immediately clear whether iPods older than the photo edition had as a result also been rendered incompatible with RealNetworks' technology.
http://news.com.com/Apple+fights+Rea...3-5490604.html


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p2p minimalism: two p2p progs in 15 and 9 lines
posted by smoketoomuch

As a proof of concept (of the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications), Edward Felten posted a p2p-prog written in python that is only 15 lines of code.

As a response, Matthew Skala wrote a p2p-prog called MoleSter, written in Perl that is only 9 lines of code and uses only the TCP protocol library.

Fun stuff. It seems that there is a competition now
This is also on slashdot (there are some funny comments worth reading there as well) : http://developers.slashdot.org/artic...&tid=156&tid=1
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=20831


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FTC to Host Two-day Peer-To-Peer File-Sharing Workshop
Contributed by: Tommy

The Federal Trade Commission will host a two-day workshop on consumer protection and competition issues related to peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing on Wednesday, December 15, and Thursday, December 16, 2004, beginning at 9:00 am EST. The workshop is the latest in a series of efforts to assess the impact of new and significant technologies on consumers and businesses.

P2P file-sharing technology enables individuals to share files, including music, video, or software. Because the files do not reside in a central location — they are stored on the hard drives of users — P2P file-sharing technology allows for faster file transfer and conservation of bandwidth. The workshop agenda can be found at the following link on the Internet: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/ workshops/filesharing/agenda.pdf.

Who:
Federal Trade Commission, Government, and Industry Representatives, Interested members of the public.

Where:
FTC Conference Center
601 New Jersey Ave, NW
Washington, DC

When:
Wednesday and Thursday, December 15-16, 2004. Conference begins at 9 am each day.

Persons unable to attend the workshop may dial in by calling 1-888-532-3213 on Wednesday and 1-800-556-4879 on Thursday. The confirmation number is 34096099 on Wednesday and 34096281 on Thursday, and the chairperson for both days is Beth Delaney.
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/articl...41214210214316


FTC Focuses On File Swapping
John Borland

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday will kick off a two-day workshop studying the consumer implications of peer-to-peer technologies.

The topics covered will range from the now-familiar effects of file-swapping services on entertainment companies to the potential risks consumers face by downloading content on peer-to-peer networks, or even just by installing the software.

The FTC does not have a specific proposal in front of it. It holds periodic workshops on new technologies to study issues raised and often comes up with recommendations to Congress afterward.

"There appear to be many current and potential business and consumer applications for P2P file-sharing technology," the organization said in a Federal Register notice announcing the meeting. "The...workshop is intended to provide an opportunity to learn how P2P file-sharing works, to discuss current and future applications of the technology (and) discuss the risks to consumers related to file- sharing activities."

The FTC has dabbled in file-sharing issues periodically, issuing a consumer warning in mid-2003 about the risks of bundled spyware, copyright lawsuits and pornography in using peer-to-peer software.

The organization subsequently worked with several file-sharing trade groups to develop a set of warnings that companies could post to help educate consumers about the risks. Those proposals are now complete, and the FTC sent a letter to Congress last week saying that--if implemented--they could help ameliorate some of the dangers.

This week's workshop comes as litigation over file-swapping networks has reached the highest pitch since the original days of Napster.

Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case dealing with the legal liability of peer-to-peer software companies for copyright infringement. Attorneys say the court's decision could fundamentally alter a precedent that many technology companies, including even Apple Computer with its iPod music player, have depended on for 20 years.

On Tuesday, the Motion Picture Association of America said it is stepping up its legal campaign against file-traders, pursuing criminal and civil action against key participants in BitTorrent, eDonkey and Direct Connect networks, all of which are widely used to distribute copyrighted movies and software.

The two-day FTC session will be broken up into several pieces. The first day will primarily look at consumer issues associated with file sharing, as well as possible future technology developments. Panelists will range from Justice Department officials to university computer science professors.

Thursday's sessions will focus more specifically on the technology's effects on the music industry and on copyrights as a whole.
http://news.com.com/FTC+focuses+on+f...3-5491292.html


P2P Battle Reaches FTC
Michael Grebb

The Federal Trade Commission officially entered the brawl over peer-to-peer software Wednesday as it hosted the first day of a two-day P2P workshop in which both sides accused each other of trying to deceive government regulators.

Representatives of P2P software companies charged that content interests have tried to demonize P2P in an attempt to effectively kill it. Content providers, meanwhile, argued that they merely want to make P2P networks more responsible to consumers and more respectful of copyright holders.

In the middle is the FTC, which has become increasingly interested in P2P software because of a flood of consumer complaints about exposure to spyware, viruses and rampant pornography when using P2P technology.

The agency could at some point create regulations governing how P2P software is marketed if it determines that P2P companies are misleading consumers, although it has given no official indication yet that it's considering such action.

During one panel Wednesday, P2P United Executive Director Adam Eisgrau addressed FTC staffers directly.

"You have had a great deal of deliberate, deceptive and misleading information," he said of presentations by industry groups about P2P technology. "The parents and grandparents who run the companies in P2P United are not Darth Vader."

P2P United is made up of BearShare, Blubster, eDonkey, Grokster and Morpheus but doesn't include Kazaa.

Industry representatives, however, held their ground, saying that P2P companies primarily enrich themselves by enabling consumers to illegally download copyright works.

Stanley Pierre-Louis, senior vice president of litigation for the Recording Industry Association of America, said 99 percent of the traffic on P2P networks involves copyright material, and accused P2P software companies of specifically designing their systems to "offload" liability onto consumers.

"These purveyors have consciously not done anything to stop rampant infringement on their networks," he said, pointing out that the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision to take the Grokster case could help clarify the issue. "Until courts properly provide recourse against illicit P2P services ... consumers will continue to find themselves liable.... Few appreciate how great the consequences can be."

Pierre-Louis said the RIAA has filed lawsuits against 7,000 individual alleged "infringers" since September 2003.

James Miller, chairman of CapAnalysis Group and an outside lobbyist for the RIAA, urged the FTC to act against P2P companies that tell consumers that their software is legal -- without telling them that they can't use it to download or distribute copyright works without permission.

"What's being communicated to them is that it's OK to download files, download copyrighted files," he said. "That's just outright deception."

P2P proponents at the conference countered that they are making strides to alert consumers about copyright law, providing warnings on their websites and even providing links to the FTC site.

Eisgrau said members of his group also plan to post information clarifying that buying premium versions of P2P software (in order to avoid adware and spyware) doesn't provide an automatic license to download copyright works. The FTC had recently raised concerns about the possibility of consumer confusion, and other panelists agreed that many users think that paying such a fee makes it OK to download anything they want.

In coordination with the FTC, P2P United also announced earlier this month a new "cybersafety" initiative that includes a series of consumer advisories warning users about copyright-infringement liability, data security, spyware, viruses and undesired exposure to porn.

Marty Lafferty, CEO of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, meanwhile, said his group of some 30 pro-P2P members has already formed a "consumer disclosure working group" to post similar warnings for consumers.

Miller, however, called such actions "inadequate" and urged the FTC to create specific rules for P2P companies to ensure that consumers understand the alleged risks. He recommended that the agency require "simple filters" to stop the trading of copyright files, as well as institute trade-regulation rules governing P2P software claims. He also urged the FTC to sue bad P2P actors when they engage in unfair trade practices.

Meanwhile, other panelists told FTC staffers the use of P2P software to trade in child pornography has become a problem.

Linda Koontz, director of information management issues for the Government Accountability Office (the investigatory arm of Congress), said a recent study of Kazaa found that entering certain search terms yielded child pornography. The agency plans to expand the study to other P2P networks in January, with more comprehensive results available in the summer of 2005.

Michelle Collins, director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's Exploited Child Unit, said the groups receive 2,000 reports of child exploitation on the internet every week, with much of that resulting from P2P trafficking of child porn.

The FTC workshop will continue Thursday with panels on how P2P software affects specific copyright issues and the music industry. The workshop came a day after the Motion Picture Association of America announced it would sue various enablers of popular P2P clients BitTorrent, eDonkey and Direct Connect.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0...w=wn_tophead_1


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No @$%*& Indecency Rules For Satellite Radio

Radio shock jock Howard Stern can rest easy--he won't face federal decency standards when he moves to satellite radio, at least for now.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission rejected a request from a radio broadcaster to consider applying federal indecency limits to pay satellite radio services like Sirius Satellite Radio, where Stern is headed in 2006, according to a letter released on Wednesday.

FCC Media Bureau Chief Kenneth Ferree told Mt. Wilson FM Broadcasters that precedent dictated that indecency standards did not apply to the subscription-based service.

"Your petition does not provide a basis to revisit that determination," he said in a letter to the Los Angeles broadcaster. XM Satellite Radio Holdings is the other major satellite radio service.

A representative for Mt. Wilson was not immediately available for comment.

Radio and television broadcasters are barred from airing indecent material, such as graphic sexual content, except during late- night hours when children are less likely to be listening or watching.

The FCC has been cracking down on sexual and profane antics on broadcast radio and television after singer Janet Jackson exposed her bare breast on national television in February.

Earlier this year the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee narrowly defeated a measure to apply the federal decency standards to pay television services.

Stern, whose radio show has drawn repeated complaints, decided to move to Sirius in early 2006, where he would be free to speak without federal regulators--or corporate parent Viacom--judging his program.

Viacom agreed last month to pay $3.5 million to settle complaints that it broadcast indecent material on its radio stations, including some involving Stern.
http://news.com.com/No++indecency+ru...3-5492774.html


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Blockbuster Eliminating Late Fees
Gary Norris

Blockbuster Inc., the world's biggest video rental company, has presented a promise to eliminate late fees on movies and games in the new year.

The policy is to take effect Jan. 1 in the United States and "sometime in the first quarter" in Canada. Casting about for ways to revive a business beset by competition from low-priced DVDs, Internet retailers and on-demand cable TV movie services, Blockbuster said Tuesday it will continue to set due dates for rentals.

Those dates will allow two days or a week for movies and a week for games, but customers will get a one-week grace period at no charge.

However, renters who keep merchandise past the grace period will automatically be charged for buying the product, minus the rental fee, Blockbuster said from its Dallas headquarters.

After that, they can return the movie or game in the following 30 days for a refund of the purchase price, less a "minimal" restocking charge.

The details and timing on lifting late fees in Canada are to be announced in the new year.

Late fees have provoked significant customer dissatisfaction. Class-action lawsuits were organized in various provinces, complaining that Blockbuster's late fee - up to $4.79 a day - was exorbitant and abusive.

A Quebec Superior Court judge dismissed that argument in September, ruling that the claim of exploitation did not "correspond to the commercial reality."

But online chatrooms continued to throb with resentment against Blockbuster: "Now I only go there if my local operator doesn't get a new release I'm interested in," said a typical recent posting.

Blockbuster said market-testing indicates that increased rentals and sales offset the decline in revenue from eliminating late fees.

It said late fees would have contributed $250 million to $300 million to operating income in 2005. This is expected to be countered by higher store traffic, less marketing activity and tighter cost control.

Blockbuster Inc. reported a net loss of $1.42 billion US in its latest quarter, hit by a $1.5-billion asset writedown and rising expenses. Revenue was up by a mere 1.8 per cent from a year earlier at $1.41 billion, and same-store rental revenue fell 6.3 per cent.

In reporting those results in October, the company presented a bleak picture of the movie-rental industry as a whole, and its president and chief operating officer resigned.
http://jam.canoe.ca/Video/2004/12/14/pf-784138.html


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The Internet's Biggest Foe
Lawrence Spiwak

Despite his self-professed claim of being a "techno-geek," FCC Chairman Michael Powell has done everything in his power to restrict American citizens' choice of information and entertainment.

While Powell has launched a vigorous censorship campaign against Howard Stern, the ABC show "Desperate Housewives," and Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," he has allowed the near total reconcentration of the broadcast industry into a very few hands. Not only do we have fewer voices, but small businesses are now at the mercy of broadcast giants when buying radio or television advertising time.

What people may not realize, however, is that Powell has also done everything possible to make sure consumers have no competitive access to the Internet.

The FCC's new rules will let the Bells dictate whatever terms they want and kill their competition in the bargain.After the passage of the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996, new competition was saving consumers and small businesses more than $10 billion a year. What's more, investment by telecommunications companies rose as competitors upgraded networks and services in the battle to win customers.

Yet Powell has steadfastly ignored both this record and the Supreme Court decision upholding the 1996 act, and has instead pursued a steadfast campaign to gut the act's market-opening provisions. Already, companies as large as AT&T and as small as Hoosier Telecom have quit selling to consumers. Several Wall Street analysts predict that in another 12 months, the Bells will recapture 80 percent of the 20 million customers that had chosen to take their business to phone companies that better met their needs.

Now Powell is moving taking aim at the competitive telephone industry: The FCC, which is expected to vote on a new set of rules Wednesday, is going to wipe out the act's market-opening provisions--in many cases within six months. It's long been understood that Powell's policies would kill competition in the consumer marketplace. But it appears that his proposals are also going to curtail competition and raise prices in the business market as well.

Powell has promised again and again to nurture small businesses. But his draft rules for the high-capacity lines used by business customers will shut the doors of many of the companies that compete to serve small businesses.

What's more, thousands will lose their jobs, and investors who bet their money on competition will be forced to strand billions of dollars they had put into competitive carriers.

Powell, as expected, tut-tuts any notion that the phone-service market is on its way back to being a monopoly. (Remember when your phone came in any color--as long as it was black?)

Throughout his tenure, Powell has paid lip service to the benefits of the Internet and new technology. But his policies conflict with his rhetoric.On the one hand, he says so-called inter-modal competition from wireless and Net phone providers will give consumers plenty of choice. But guess what? The so-called alternative competitive platforms all need access to Bells' network lines for the last mile to America's homes and businesses. Instead, the FCC's new rules will let the Bells dictate whatever terms they want and kill their competition in the bargain.

Let's also not forget that in the case of wireless, not only do the Bells serve over 70 percent of all U.S. consumers who take service from a national wireless carrier, but wireless is no substitute for the big high-capacity lines businesses require for their voice and data needs. Indeed, how else do you explain SBC's recent attempt to charge Net phone, or VoIP, providers a whopping 4 cents a minute to terminate a VoIP call on their network? Heck, even current retail long-distance charges are not that high.

On the other hand, Powell claims that the deregulation will somehow lead the industry giants to become more efficient and to invest, innovate and deploy fiber to every consumer home and small business in America.

Please.

First, the Bells admit they are only rolling out fiber to high-income (and presumably high-volume) areas. While there is nothing wrong with this in concept (particularly in a competitive market), it is irresponsible public policy for Powell to pretend that the Bells' fiber rollout will extend to rural America or urban inner cities and, on that basis, to pursue blanket deregulation.

Though Powell insists on focusing upon ephemeral possibilities rather than on the financial probabilities of Bell fiber deployment to justify premature deregulation, there is a real possibility that the vast majority of Americans will have no fiber at all. More likely they will be faced with an unshackled Bell monopoly over the legacy copper network. Indeed, given the huge costs of fiber deployment, many Wall Street analysts are highly skeptical of the Bells' ability to make good on their fiber claims.

Throughout his tenure, Powell has paid lip service to the benefits of the Internet and new technology. But his policies conflict with his rhetoric. In truth, he has been captured by the four Bell companies and done their bidding.

Because Powell's record proves conclusively that he is hostile to President Bush's stated goals of promoting entrepreneurship, technology deployment and, most important, individual freedom and liberty, Powell clearly does not deserve to serve in the second Bush administration.
http://news.com.com/The+Internets+bi...3-5491523.html


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Bid to Soften Copyright Law Impact
Sam Varghese

Regulations being drafted to soften the impact of the tough copyright laws, which were passed last week, are in their final stages and are set to be presented to the executive council tomorrow.

The copyright laws are linked to the Australia-US free trade agreement and will enable people other than copyright owners to force internet service providers to take down material allegedly infringing copyright.

At the time the laws were passed, Opposition trade spokesman Simon Crean asked for, and received, a letter from Trade Minister Mark Vaile, in which a pledge to work with the industry in drafting regulations that would "take the sting out of the bill" was made.

The regulations aim to create a framework for a "safe harbour" regime for ISPs and limit monetary penalties for transmission, caching, hosting or linking to content which may deemed to be in violation of the laws.

The regulations have to go before the Senate and are referred to as disallowable instruments - they are subject to revision or veto based on whether they are seen to support the legislation which they complement.

This raises doubts over whether the FTA can actually come into force from January 1 as the Senate would normally have 15 days to examine the regulations.

Asked for a comment, Peter Coroneos, chief executive of the Internet Industry Association, a Canberra-based lobby group, said: "The industry has been involved in further discussion with the government over the form of the regulations.

"We will be watching very closely to see whether the balance which we have been pushing for has been achieved."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Breaking/...?oneclick=true


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New Australian Grid Computing Project Could Foil Terror Plots
Iain Ferguson

Bridges and rail platforms may be monitored for terrorist bombs and residents of aged care facility for falls under research projects based on a new grid computing system being deployed by Monash University in Melbourne.

Dr Asad Khan, research director, School of Network Computing, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, said the projects involve use of a network of sensors, incorporating peer-to-peer software and linked by a wireless network, registering and alerting authorities to atypical patterns of behaviour within a defined area.

Dr Khan said the sensors could, for example, detect access by unauthorised individuals to remote parts of large infrastructure such as bridges or train platforms or the falling and subsequent failure to get up quickly of a resident of a nursing home or retirement village.

Simulation for the projects would be undertaken on a newly-acquired grid computing system. The University is upgrading a Sun Fire v20z Compute Grid Rack system based on 10 dual-processor Sun Fire v20z AMD Opteron Servers to a full 64 central processing unit configuration.

The University received the base Sun equipment as part of a grant program jointly sponsored by Sun and education solution partner Alphawest.

The grid computing project will allow the University to simulate very large-scale networks by using peer- to-peer software to mimic human memory-like capabilities. Dr Khan said the system -- which could simulate up to one million nodes (each of which includes a sensor and the second a small device that communicates over a wireless network) -- was expected to be delivered by mid-January and be up and running by the end of the month.

Dr Khan said while he had applied for Australian Research Council grants to help fund his projects, there was no concrete interest from the corporate or government sector as yet. The school is working with a Melbourne software company that would provide a database to buttress the system.

Provided some funding comes through, Dr Khan said, a real world-trial of the sensor system would be expected within the next three to five years.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/securit...9173723,00.htm


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Australian Police Get Go-Ahead On Spyware
Munir Kotadia

Australian police have been given the power to install spyware and Trojans on suspected criminals' computers under the new Surveillance Devices Act.

The Surveillance Devices Act allows both federal and state police to use key logging and tracking software when investigating offenses that carry a maximum sentence of three years, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Neil Campbell, national security manager of IT services company Dimension Data, said the laws needed updating because of confusion when dealing with new technologies. Campbell previously spent six years working with the Australian Federal Police computer crime team.

"If the police intercept SMS messages that have not yet been delivered, should that be classified as a telephone interception or as a regular search? Getting a search warrant is relatively easy--you need to show reasonable grounds that executing the search will provide evidence as to the commission of an offense. But getting an interception warrant is difficult," Campbell said.

Campbell noted that the police may find it difficult to install spyware onto a suspected criminal's computer, especially if the suspect is competent with IT security practices.

"It is going to be very hard to use spyware for monitoring the activities of a paranoid, tech-savvy criminal. How do they get it on the machine? Do they physically install it?" Campbell asked.

Adam Biviano, senior systems engineer at antivirus firm Trend Micro, said security tools have quite often been in conflict with monitoring techniques, and criminals have been using technologies such as encryption to make the monitoring of communications very difficult.

"Tech-savvy criminals will be watching for this kind of thing, especially if they know that law enforcement agencies are using these techniques," Biviano said. "They can look at process lists, what is using memory on their PC and what applications are running. If they know enough about their computer, they will be able to detect the (spyware) programs."
http://news.com.com/Australian+polic...3-5491671.html


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EU Ministers Move Forward On Controversial Data Retention Proposals
Honor Mahony

EU justice ministers meeting in Brussels on Thursday took further steps on controversial proposals to retain data about telephone calls and e-mails as part of an overall fight against crime and terrorism.

The new proposals, which were originally pushed by the UK and France amongst others, were prompted by the terrorist attacks in Madrid earlier this year as well as the September 2001 attacks in the US, and are expected to be in place by 2005.

The Dutch EU presidency gave member states two options: that service operators retain the information that they would gather anyway for commercial purposes or go beyond that to keep a list of specific data – as yet to be defined.

Despite opposition by Germany and others for data privacy reasons, the second option has been chosen.

Dutch Justice Minister Piet Donner said this "goes rather further and involves service providers of data communications being required to retain certain data for a certain period".

A small working group will now look into the issues surrounding such legislation – mainly cost, which will depend on the data retained, and privacy questions.

Strong concerns
The proposal has raised strong concerns.

Questions remain about how far records on the internet and text messages could be looked in to.

This will be among the issues that has to be examined.

Another issue is whether someone would be recorded simply for looking at a message that has been sent to them via the internet.

UK MEP Sarah Ludford, who is a member of the civil liberties committee in the European Parliament, said that the proposals require the retention of telecoms data "so that police or intelligence agencies can later seek access long after the data should be deleted under EU telecoms privacy law".

At their meeting, ministers also agreed a decision on the exchange of information on criminal records.

This decision, which passed quickly through Council, was prompted by the recent case of the serial killer Michel Fourniret who was able to carry out his crimes for years by exploiting the poor communication between French and Belgian authorities.

Ministers also discussed general approaches to fighting terrorism – something that will appear on the agenda of EU leaders meeting in Brussels later this month.
http://www.euobserver.com/?aid=17906&sid=9


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The Ownership Society

America's obsession with copyrights, trademarks, and medical advice.
Adam Christian

Surfergirl, Medical Examiner, and Jurisprudence all struck a strange synergy this week in their simultaneous focus on the obsolescence and mild absurdity of intellectual property law in the United States. Dana Stevens talks TiVo and trademarks; Amanda Schaffer wants medical research underwritten by public funds to be … public; Rod Smolla downloads his thoughts about Napster and copyrights here.

Grammar geeks will appreciate quijano's criticism of the "noun/verb" distinction used to determine trademark dilution:

Unfortunately for International Trademark Association lawyers, their "adjective only" rules conflict with, well, the English language. Everyone is aware of the propensity of words to slip into and out of different roles, different parts of speech (as Watterson memorably put it, "Verbing weirds language"). But this isn't just a symptom of poor education or reliance on jargon; instead, it's part of how isolating languages (like English) work. Google "zero derivation" to learn more.

On the issue of trademark dilution, the holders obviously have the right to protect their interests. But their insistence on defining how these trademarks are used grammatically is ignorant and their goal impossible. It is akin to attempting to enforce other arbitrary, non-English based grammatical rules ("don't split infinitives," "don't end a sentence with a preposition") with the force of law.

destor23 responds with this anecdote:

Of course, they can't enforce it, they just send out stupid letters to publications. I was once sent a letter, based on a piece I'd written, that claimed people can't "go rollerblading" but rather, "go inline skating on rollerblade brand inline skates." Letter gets crumpled up and tossed. Seriously, what are they gonna do about it?

taigaintucson sends out a classifieds query for the job of trademark violation enforcer here, while Schadenfreude, in a rare display of emotion, confesses her jealousy of surfergirl's journalism gig.

In a free-wheeling treatise inspired by the Napster debate, Drathan waxes philosophical about the nature of information in the age of the Internet:

Information is a very interesting form of energy. Unlike electrical, kinetic, or nuclear energy, [it] grows when shared and dies when locked. ...

This neatly explains Napster, Grokster, etc. The Information Energy seeks low-resistance, wide-distribution conductors. ...

China can raise a firewall, but it cant block blogs. It will learn to block blogs, but then something else will get through. The Court may ban Grokster, then something else will pop-up. Its the nature of information. It cant be held captive. ...

If I was the movie industry, I would not fight the change, I would embrace it and squeeze juice out of the new paradigm. ...

"But how do you embrace a bunch of pirates ripping off my work?" the media asks? And its a darn good question. Specially if we rephrase it: "How do I embrace MILLIONS of people interested in my work?"

and offers a subsequent elaboration of his main points:

Society has built many props around the nature of information (like the copyright laws, the print, the FCC (!!?)), but only the props that help information achieve its core mission (to spread) will succeed. The net has changed several paradigms and because of it, some props (once again, copyright included), no longer serve their core mission, but the opposite. Natural, evolutionary forces will force these props to adapt or die. (These "evolutionary forces" may take the form of a court desicion, or may take the form of a new grokster, or market forces, or a movie studio that releases a whole movie to the net for free, etc).

Suggesting that legal definitions of ownership are essentially arbitrary, Thrasymachus zeroes in on Smolla's analogy to airspace law:

If the courts and legislature had decided to uphold the airspace rights of landowners along heavily trafficked routes, then those rights would have been worth millions upon millions of dollars, and a pilot's decision to fly over a line of individual plots from (say New York to Chicago) without paying for the rights would have been considered an egregious and inexcusable act of trespassing and theft, depriving those landowners of money that would have rightfully been theirs.

By the same token, copyright theft is only "theft" because the law makes it so. The "theft" of one's copyright is no more inherently harmful than the "theft" of one's airspace. It's not like a finger is chopped off, or like any physical thing in the universe is altered by the performance of the act. It's a question of rights, and who has them, under law.

By contrast, TheRanger considers airspace a lousy example for the point Smolla is attempting to make.

Denisov criticizes Smolla's argument for its ahistorical approach to technology:

Smolla points to a generation gap—that kids know that stealing a cd from the store is wrong, but are unable to recognize that copying an album is wrong. However, people of all ages have copied songs and albums, not simply of a particular generation. If we go back a generation, people copied songs off the radio rather than buy the single; people recorded tapes of the album for their friends. [This fact] goes against his thesis of there being simply the law, the technology being irrelevant…

Smolla's argument rests on two ideas: 1) the technology doesn't matter, whether it be P2P or server-to-peer, the crime matters. Either the courts and record companies have been inconsistent, or the technology does matter, because then anyone whoever taped a song off the radio could be sued, 2) any P2P program has an inherent possibility for misuse —"everyone knows" that, except, well, no, they don't know that.

and offers this prediction:

Having said that, the record industry will probably win this for the same reason so many tech-related lawsuits have been won for the wrong side—judges of this age group know absolutely nothing about the nuances of tech and tech related issues. File trading will be be branded illegal, and just like any other activity declared illegal, young people everywhere will immediately stop doing it.

On a related note, helios gets downright giddy about the transformative potential of open access databases. MutatisMutandis points out the negative effects of poor access to medical research on the pharmaceutical industry here.

science_chick agrees that Schaffer's heart is in the right place but quibbles with the specifics. mav62, a medical research consultant, registers these thoughtful objections to the crusade for free public access:

1) The usefulness of these articles for the general public is limited. These articles are not written for the lay person. They contain technical language and complex statistical concepts that frankly are beyond the uninitiated. While the articles are all peer-reviewed, there still can be significant drawbacks to the study design that a casual reader would fail to appreciate. Someone looking for information on the latest research on a medical condition would be much better off reading summaries of research by someone who could put it all in an appropriate context.

2) Almost all peer-reviewed articles are already available for free in abstract form online. Most journals now require complete abstracts with a purpose, methods, results, and conclusion section. Lay people can receive much of what they would need to know from an abstract.

3) Asking authors to pay for the privilege of being published could put a serious damper on manuscript submissions. Large research institutions would probably break even by saving on journal subscriptions. However, contrary to your article, a lot of medical research does not originate with large institutions, nor is it all funded with government grants. A lot of research is conducted by private-practice physicians at their own expense. Asking them to spend an additional $1,500 to publish their work may persuade many to forgo research altogether. That would be bad for everybody, because a lot of good innovative clinical research would never get done. It would be especially bad for me, because I would be out of a job.

And there is nothing more sobering than realizing how technology could eliminate your professional raison d'être. AC …
http://slate.msn.com/id/2111141/


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P-to-P Backers Propose New Distribution Models
Grant Gross

A complete rewrite of the U.S. copyright system was just one proposal aired Thursday during a contentious series of panel discussions at a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) workshop on peer-to-peer technology.

The U.S. Congress should overhaul copyright law that allows a broken distribution model used by the music and movie industries to freeze out P-to-P services, a lawyer formerly in the music industry said at the conference, held in Washington, D.C.

A new digital transmission right for music, added to copyright law by Congress, would allow artists to get paid and consumers to have access to a wide range of music, said Bennet Lincoff, former director of legal affairs for new media at the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

The voluntary licensing model, administered through a collective of artists similar to ASCAP and other publishing organizations, would pay artists based on an online census of how much of their music is being traded and would encourage music companies to distribute their music as widely as possible, Lincoff said.

Others at the forum rejected Lincoff's idea, the subject of a paper published in November 2002, as a form of compulsory licensing that would require Congress, not free markets, to determine the value of a downloaded song.

"The problem with compulsory license (plans) as a solution to something like this, is they're all quite clumsy," said Stanley Besen, an economist and vice president of business consulting company Charles River Associates Inc. "They require someone to set the prices."

The two-day FTC forum included dueling studies on the effect of P-to-P file-trading on the music industry as well as opposing ideas about what the U.S. government should do about P-to-P vendors.

David Carson, general counsel of the U.S. Copyright Office, said his office was working on an amended version of the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act, a bill that would allow lawsuits against people who "induce" copyright violations, before Congress adjourned for the year. The bill failed to get to the U.S. Senate floor after opponents complained it was too broad, but Carson said the Copyright Office had proposed a version that would focus on the copyright-infringing products and services, not technology used.

Much of Thursday's session repeated old rhetoric that comes from both sides in the P-to-P debate. A representative of the movie industry used words such as "thievery" and "looting" to describe unauthorized file trading using P-to-P software. P-to-P software vendors can filter out pornography and viruses, but say they don't have the technology to filter out copyrighted content, said Dean Garfield vice president and director of legal affairs for worldwide antipiracy efforts at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

"Transformative technology has been highjacked, not by innovators, but by business people who are motivated by profit and who are so blinded by the chase for money that they fail to see the irony, the illogic and the incongruity of claiming to be technologists while asserting that their hands are tied by technological limitations," Garfield said. "Innovation is being retarded by those who leach on those who choose to create."

One P-to-P executive called on the MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to join P-to-P vendors to support an impartial study of whether copyright filters are feasible. Sam Yagan, chief executive officer of MetaMachine, distributor of the popular eDonkey P-to-P software, questioned how the music and movie industries could object to his desire to make money.

Yagan warned that future generations of P-to-P software will be fully encrypted and fully anonymous, distributed by programmers with no profit motive. "If you want to increase legitimate use of these networks, let us sell your products," Yagan said to the MPAA and RIAA.

Yagan also questioned legislative efforts focusing on current uses of P-to-P software because of rapidly changing uses of technology. "When we resort to these regulatory solutions, there's a chance we'll get it wrong," he said.

Other forum participants argued P-to-P software hurts the efforts of pay-per-download music services. Saying that P-to-P technology creates "black market networks," Jonathan Potter, executive director of the Digital Music Association trade group, said P-to-P vendors' business models create no added value for artists or consumers, other than allowing consumers to "get something for free."

Potter called on the entertainment industry to educate consumers about copyright violations, to provide compelling legal alternatives to current P-to-P service, and to continue enforcement efforts against violators. "Enforcement is perhaps not the only way to go," he said.

Potter also questioned why P-to-P vendors are surprised by lawsuits from the entertainment industry. "We should not give credence to people who play chicken with the law," he said. "There's not a lot of pity out there for people who invest (in P-to-P businesses) knowing the uncertainty in the law."

But Lincoff, the former ASCAP lawyer, said current legal download services often restrict how many times a song can be copied to other devices. That's why a digital transmission license is needed, he said.

"If the industry offered what consumers really want, the overwhelming majority would pay for it," he said. "If that's not true, then all surely is lost."

Consumers are now looking elsewhere because pay-per-download services don't give them unfettered control over the music they buy, he added. Meanwhile, the entertainment industry wants Congress to protect its outdated business model, he said.

"The industry has relegated consumer to black market services where adware, spyware, pornography and privacy invasions abound," Lincoff said. "The industry has no right to demand that public policy supports its desire to do business in a particular way."
http://www.computerworld.com.au/inde...9;fp;16;fpid;0


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Uncertain landscape ahead for copyright protection

Specter to Lead Key Panel as Industry Ally Hatch Steps Down
David McGuire

In the final few weeks before the 2004 election, lobbyists for high-tech, entertainment and civil liberties interests were crammed into an icy room in the Dirksen Senate office building, trying to hammer out a bill that would have put Internet song-swapping networks like Kazaa and eDonkey out of business.

It was a controversial measure on a difficult topic, and could have easily been lost in the end-of-year shuffle. But Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) was the lead sponsor of the measure and had ordered the warring factions to keep talking until they came up with language everybody liked.

Talks eventually collapsed, but the fact that the measure was being debated at all in the October before a national election testified to the power that an influential committee chairman like Hatch has in managing the legislative agenda.

"People were in that room for two reasons: One, because Senator Hatch has a history of wanting to get stuff done on intellectual property issues; and two, because he's the chairman," said a former Senate Judiciary counsel, who asked to remain anonymous.

In the realm of protecting music and movies from electronic theft, Hatch has been the entertainment industry's most powerful ally in Congress. A songwriter himself, Hatch has waged war against illegal file swapping, backing laws to stiffen copyright protections and keeping the issue in the spotlight with a steady stream of high-profile hearings.

In 2005, term limits require that Hatch hand over his chairman's gavel to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) -- an otherwise routine power shift that could have far-reaching implications for high-tech firms, movie studios, record companies and the future of downloading.

In Congress, the Senate and House judiciary committees have jurisdiction over any attempt to change federal law regarding criminal or civil violations. Efforts to outlaw certain kinds of peer-to-peer file swapping, increase penalties for illegal downloading or establish new rules against electronic copying must pass through those committees before they can come to a vote. In both chambers, chairmen set the agendas for their committees, so these individuals hold great sway over which bills go on the fast track and which ones die on the vine.

"Hatch has been a tremendous champion of certainly copyright, but also of all the intellectual property issues. It's not just a constituent issue for him. He's been just a terrific chairman, so it's a loss to not have him at the gavel," said Robert Raben, a former House Judiciary staffer who now lobbies Congress on intellectual property issues on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America and other clients.

Opponents of the entertainment industry in the copyright debate -- including high-tech companies, Internet service providers and civil-liberties advocates who have long argued that stiffened protections come at the expense of lost technological freedom -- see Specter's ascension as an opportunity to gain ground in a fight that they say has been stacked against them.

In the late 1990s, Hatch led the effort to pass the landmark Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the Senate. That law, signed by President Clinton in 1998, stiffened protections for legitimate copies of music, movies and software, making it a crime to circumvent the electronic safeguards that copyright owners use to prevent illegal duplication. Specter voted for that measure along with 98 other senators, but Hatch was the sole Senate sponsor.

In 2004, Hatch backed measures intended to ratchet up both criminal and civil crackdowns on people who illegally share protected songs and other media over services like Kazaa. He was also the prime mover behind the "Induce Act," the bill that kept industry lobbyists locked in a cold room well into October.

Modern peer-to-peer services like Kazaa, eDonkey and BearShare dodge liability for their customers' rampant piracy by decentralizing their networks and abandoning the ability to control what files their customers trade with one another. The Induce Act aimed to close that loophole by making it illegal for a company to profit by "inducing" people to violate copyright. The problem, according to opponents of the measure, was that Induce could be interpreted to target popular, legal devices like Apple's iPod.

"It's not clear to me what [Specter's] positions are on these issues but I think he's generally going to be a little more balanced. Hatch has really been an unabashed friend of the content industry and Specter has no such record," said Gigi Sohn, the president of Washington-based Public Knowledge.

Wherever Specter comes down on the copyright debate, it's an issue that will almost certainly take a back seat to other matters, at least at the outset of his chairmanship, former Specter staffers said.

"What he's going to care the most about are the judicial nominations, with asbestos and class action coming [second and third]. Those are the issues that for the first six months are going to be taking the lion's share of his time," a former Specter staffer said. Like many of the former congressional aides interviewed for this story, the staffer still works in politics and asked to remain anonymous so as not to jeopardize his relationship with the committee.

When he does come to grips with the copyright debate, Specter is unlikely to be too heavily swayed by what his predecessors have done, said David Urban, managing director of lobbying firm American Continental Group and a former aide to the senator.

"Everything is on the table. Everything is going to get a fresh look. Everything within the purview of the committee, he's going to take a big interest in," Urban said of Specter. "He's very deliberative. He wades in up to his chest in all the details. He's a guy who really likes to know all the subject matter."

Urban and other Specter staffers said it would be very like the senator to invite all the combatants in the copyright debate up to his office before he settled on any stance.

But while opponents of the recording industry may be salivating at the prospect of starting the Senate debate from scratch, sources familiar with Hatch doubt the outgoing chairman will cede his copyright role that easily.

"To the extent that people think ... the center of power over intellectual property issues will shift from Senator Hatch to Senator Specter, they may be quite mistaken," said a former judiciary staffer who now lobbies on behalf of copyright owners.

The aide, who asked to remain anonymous, said Specter might be inclined to let Hatch keep holding the reins. Specter "has been a follower rather than a leader on these issues," the aide said. "Given his new role and the number of issues he's going to have to deal with off the bat where he has shown an interest, he may choose ... [to] let Hatch and [ranking Democratic panel member Sen. Patrick J.] Leahy take the lead."

Before Hatch assumed the chairmanship, the panel had a subcommittee that dealt exclusively with intellectual property matters. A former staffer for Hatch said the senator did away with that subcommittee largely because he wanted to keep the issue under his own jurisdiction, but Specter could spearhead an effort as chairman to reestablish it.

Former staffers for both senators said that if Hatch wanted to re-launch the intellectual property panel, Specter would probably play along. Nobody in the committee or in the senators' offices would comment on whether such a move had been discussed, but lobbyists on the issue, former staffers and observers suspect it's already in the works.

"Specter and Hatch work pretty well together and [Hatch] was pretty good during the whole discussion of [Specter's] chairmanship. That's something where Specter would be willing to help," one of Specter's former aides said.

Hatch getting the subcommittee nod could significantly shift the dynamic of the debate. Congress watchers point out that the House, which still has an intellectual property subcommittee, has been far more prolific than the Senate in drafting measures on the topic in recent years. Were Hatch to chair a subcommittee, he would have an entire staff and a huge chunk of his time to devote to those issues.

And even if he isn't given a new chairmanship, Hatch will remain a force in the intellectual property debate, said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America. "He's still a senior member of the U.S. Senate and if he stands up on January 1st and says, 'This is an issue that needs to be dealt with,' it's not like people are going to suddenly ignore him because he's no longer chairman."

Still, regardless of where Hatch ends up, Specter will play a major role in how the electronic piracy debate evolves in the upcoming congressional session. Even if Hatch is chairing a subcommittee and churning out bills, it'll be up to Specter to determine what moves.

He may get a chance to make those decisions early in the term. In addition to Induce, two other anti-piracy measures supported by Hatch -- one which would have allowed the Justice Department to slap downloaders with financial penalties, and another which would have made it easier to jail file swappers -- failed to pass at the end of the 2004 session.

"Copyright issues are important and they're going to percolate up, and it's really impossible for [Specter] to ignore them," said David Green, vice president for technology and new media at the Motion Picture Association of America. "He might be right now more interested in something else, but because these issues are important to America they are going to be important to Arlen Specter."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...rss_technology


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Heroes Of The Internet Frontier
Eli Noam

The US Supreme Court agreed last week to hear the music industry's case to shut down file-sharing websites such as KaZaA, Grokster and eDonkey. These operations enable users to download millions of songs from each other for free instead of buying at least some of them in a music store. In aggregate, the traffic generated by music and video file-sharing can account for more than half of all internet traffic. Music companies, their revenues in decline, have been trying to suppress these "peer-to- peer" (P2P) practices in the courts, legislatures and by spreading deliberately defective copies of songs. They view P2P users as thieves who must be prosecuted. But traditional media companies should perhaps see P2P as to their long-term advantage because it helps create new markets and forms of distribution.

P2P is part of a large family of "grassroots" activities in the media. In the early years of broadcasting, radio amateurs congregated on the airwaves in the absence of commercial broadcasters. In the 1970s, personal computers were built by enthusiasts who successfully created the challenge for International Business Machines where giants such as RCA and the government-subsidised Bull had failed. Today, the open source movement has created Linux as an alternative computer operating system. The internet is perhaps the best example. It cannot be said that such voluntarist arrangements are more efficient than a market-based system. In theory at least, most of the arrangements listed above could be better created by companies with professional management, financing and marketing channels. Yet the frequency with which these grassroots movements emerge suggests some solid economic reasons behind them.

What all these activities have in common is that they are network operations. The more participants, the lower the activity's average cost and the higher its benefits to every participant. When the size of such networks is small, per-unit costs are high but benefits are low due to the small number of participants. Hence in many cases, the cost exceeds benefits and buyers will not show up, meaning insufficient "critical mass" for self-sustaining growth.

If an activity is ultimately desirable, one way ahead is for government to step in with subsidies, as in the early days of the internet. A second way would be for a company to underwrite the early deficit and then profit from subsequent growth. The problem is that competitors could access such a user base and share the benefits even though the early provider bore the costs of the original investment.

The third alternative is the community approach. For each member, belonging to a leading-edge group while beating the establishment becomes its own reward. Financially, the community activity lowers costs by contributing free labour to the common endeavour, such as skilled programmers' hours, and by sharing pirated content. Together, these efforts lower the number of participants required for critical mass. From there, the activity will often grow to a size sufficient for profitable commercial entry. Examples include commercial radio in the early 1920s; commercial internet providers in the 1990s; and, most recently, Apple with iTunes, its wildly successful music download service.

When such commercial entry takes place, private companies almost inevitably push aside the community that made it all possible. We can decry such evolution as a business takeover. Or we can celebrate it as part of the innovation process, in which community entrepreneurship plays an important but under-appreciated role.

Established media companies therefore should value the community efforts that create the user base for their own entry. While upholding the copyright principle, they should accept some early messiness in new applications in order to grow future markets. Twenty years ago, some of the same companies that are today challenging P2P also fought before the same Supreme Court against the video cassette recorder, citing the same piracy potential. They narrowly lost, but the VCR enabled widespread home video use that has proven immensely profitable to these companies.

It is not only about music. Today, with broadband internet emerging around the world, there are enormous secondary benefits to the economy and to innovation from rapid deployment of high-speed networks.

Entertainment uses are the "blockbusters" for broadband that will make it attractive to millions, thereby creating beneficial "network effects" that will enable other applications and future innovations. Suppressing P2P activities that prime the pump for subsequent commercial activity will only harm users, media companies and the digital economy as a whole.
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/fa063d7e-4f...00e2511c8.html

















Until next week,

- js.














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