Quotes Of The Week
"Worldwide, one out of every three copies of software in use today has been obtained illegally." - Robert Holleyman
"[P2P applications have] substantial uses for non-infringing purposes." - University Of Washington statement
"You did a piracy, you deserve it." – Whiter.F trojan, just before wiping a hard drive
"Our surveys show that 46 percent of online consumers are not interested in reading any form of content in a digital format." - Joe Wilcox.
"Let's not miss what's happening here. Microsoft, a company known primarily for making highly profitable business software, has put a box in your living room. It entered your house under the humble pretense of being a game machine, a toy for the kids, but it just ate your CD player and your DVD player, and it's looking hungrily at your telephone. It's all up in your media cabinet. It's talking to your iPod, your digital camera, your TV, your stereo, your PC, your credit card and the Internet. It has created a miniature electronic ecosystem inside your home, with itself at the center." – Lev Grossman
University Of Washington Won't Restrict Peer-To-Peer File Sharing
Brian Alexander
The UW will not try to prohibit peer-to-peer applications often used for illegal file sharing, it said in a statement released late last week in response to allegations of the activity. In early April, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent a letter to the UW pinpointing three UW network users who were sharing copyrighted music over a high-speed Internet backbone between universities.
The UW responds to allegations of illegal activity on its networks using educational initiatives and the enforcement of policies and procedures, the letter said. But it will not prohibit use of applications over which copyrighted songs and movies are shared.
These applications have "substantial uses for non-infringing purposes," the May 3 letter read. Peer-to-peer file sharing is an area of research being pursued over Internet2 networks by the Internet2 consortium, according to the letter.
Some universities, like the University of Mississippi, have actively tried to prevent file sharing using peer-to-peer programs, but the UW only pursues violators who have been pinpointed by the RIAA or other such associations.
In its letter to the RIAA, the UW stated, "Once we have knowledge of illegal activity, or of an allegation of illegal activity, we take immediate action."
The RIAA complaint was specifically in response to file sharing using i2hub, a program similar to Kazaa or Grokster, but specifically for students at universities on the Internet2 backbone. Internet2 is a super-high-speed network among universities, government agencies and corporations that can "feel" 100 to 1,000 times faster than commercial Internet connections, according to a spokesperson for Internet2.
In most cases, students using i2hub can trade a movie in less than five minutes or a song in less than 20 seconds -- many times faster than file sharing speeds over commercial Internet backbones, according to the RIAA.
The UW hasn't attached names to the three users the RIAA pinpointed by IP address, a series of numbers used to identify a user on a network, said Oren Sreebny, director of client services and learning technologies for Computing and Communications. The information has been sent to a UW group that investigates complains, but he hasn't heard anything back, he said.
"If [the users were in] the residence halls, for example, it's usually possible to track [them] down from there," Sreebny said.
http://thedaily.washington.edu/news....=13173&-search
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Commissioner Points To 'Graduated Response' To Illegal File Sharing
Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding has described the 'graduated response' to illegal file sharing and downloading advocated by a number of Member States as 'a major step forward'.
The Commissioner was addressing an informal meeting of ministers for audiovisual policy in Cannes on 16 May, focusing in particular on the impact of the information society on the European film industry. Ms Reding said the opportunities for people to access films online are set to increase dramatically, and that Europe must take the opportunity to exploit new markets and offer more choice to the general public.
However, she stressed that: 'Intellectual property rights represent the economic heart of the audiovisual industry as a creative activity [and play] a vital role for fostering investment, growth, job creation and cultural diversity in the European Union.'
The advent of film online presents opportunities both for the film industry, in terms of access to new international and niche markets, as well as Internet service providers, for whom high quality content will drive broadband adoption. However, warned Ms Reding, successful business models cannot be built on a 'free-rider' system of illegal downloading and file sharing.
'Rights holders must receive an equitable share of the revenue,' argued the Commissioner. 'As high quality content cannot exist without such remuneration, a business model built on a free-rider system is in fact a house of cards. Moreover, illegal uploading and downloading takes up enormous amounts of bandwidth, which puts a lot of strain on the 'backbone' of the Internet.'
In the fight against this type of piracy, the Commissioner welcomed the so-called graduated response being introduced in certain Member States and called for an exchange of best practices in combating piracy. The graduated response can entail the following steps: (1) Internet service providers (ISPs) send an e-mail to their clients telling them to stop sharing files illegally; (2) ISPs send a registered letter to their clients telling them to stop; (3) ISPs cut the bandwidth of their clients; (4) ISPs suspend or terminate the contract.
Ms Reding also called for educational programmes on the value and importance of intellectual property rights for the availability of content. 'Explaining why something is wrong is often more effective than telling people not to do something. In particular, the accent should be put on the fact that peer-to-peer networks involve not only downloading, but also uploading of pirated works,' she said.
In conclusion, Ms Reding stressed that: 'There is an urgent need for a meaningful dialogue between the film industry and the service providers to ensure that online distribution takes place through legal supply. There may be a disastrous loss in revenue if the market is inundated with unauthorised file sharing of films, as has been observed with music.'
Ms Reding finished by promising that the Commission will investigate the possibilities of designing funding mechanisms for online distribution, for instance through the MEDIA 2007 programme, as well as for encouraging the digitisation of new audiovisual works for online distribution.
To read the full text of Commissioner Reding's speech, please
click here.
http://dbs.cordis.lu/cgi-bin/srchida...RCN_ID :23836
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MPAA Targets TV Download Sites
John Borland
Continuing its war on Internet file-swapping sites, the Motion Picture Association of America said Thursday that it has filed lawsuits against a half-dozen hubs for TV show trading.
The trade association said that piracy of TV programming is growing quickly online, and that shows are as important to protect as big-budget films. This is the first legal action from the group that has focused most heavily on TV content.
"Every television series depends on other markets (such as) syndication and international sales to earn back the enormous investment required to produce the comedies and dramas we all enjoy," MPAA Chief Executive Officer Dan Glickman said in a statement. "Those markets are substantially hurt when that content is stolen."
The latest round of suits retains a focus on BitTorrent technology, which has been widely used online to distribute movies and films.
The suits are focused on the sites that serve as traffic directors for BitTorrent swaps, rather than on individual computer users uploading and downloading content. The MPAA also has sued individuals, but has not said how many people have been targeted.
The six sites sued Thursday include ShunTV, Zonatracker, Btefnet, Scifi-Classics, CDDVDHeaven and Bragginrights.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5705142.html
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Dutch Academics Declare Research Free-For-All
Jan Libbenga
Scientists from all major Dutch universities officially launched a website on Tuesday where all their research material can be accessed for free. Interested parties can get hold of a total of 47,000 digital documents from 16 institutions the Digital Academic Repositories. No other nation in the world offers such easy access to its complete academic research output in digital form, the researchers claim. Obviously, commercial publishers are not amused.
DAREnet was already launched about a year ago, but for demonstration purposes only. The €2m DARE programme - a joint initiative by all the Dutch universities, the National Library of the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) - harvests all digital available material from local repositories, making it fully searchable. Aside from bibliographical information, the content can be full text, or even audio and video files.
The initiative is clearly not welcomed by commercial scientific publishers such as Elsevier Science. Increasingly, universities complain about the high cost of scientific journals and many argue that the research results should be distributed freely or at significantly less cost to library subscribers.
In Hungary, financier and philanthropist George Soros is also backing a new effort to provide free and unrestricted access to scientific and other academic literature.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05...cess_research/
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Court Rules For German ISPs In P2P Identities Case
Jan Libbenga
ISPs in the state of Hamburg can't be forced to provide customer data to record companies, even when illegal copying is suspected, at least for now. The Higher Regional Court in Hamburg has ruled (
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/ 59602) that there is no legal basis for demanding customer data. ISPs, the court argues, aren't part of the criminal act. They merely provide access to the web.
The Higher Regional Court overruled a earlier decision by the Hamburg District Court, which had granted record companies access to customer data after they discovered an FTP server where numbers by German band Rammstein could be downloaded for free. The District Court based its ruling on the German Copyright Act.
The Higher Regional Court in Hamburg, however, followed a similar ruling by judges of the federal state of Hesse. Here too the court rejected the claim by a music group to hand over the name of a customer who ran an illegal music server.
Experts believe that the setback for the record industry is only temporary as legislators in Germany are drafting a new Telemedia Act, granting the recording industry more freedom in obtaining data from internet service providers.
The developments in Germany are closely watched by experts in the Netherlands. There the Dutch Protection Rights Entertainment Industry Netherlands (BREIN) has just launched (
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05...racy_lawsuits/) its largest round of lawsuits yet targeting 42 individuals suspected of illegally swapping copyrighted music.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05...rg_isp_ruling/
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Software Piracy In M'sia Down To 61 Pct In 2004
The software piracy rate in Malaysia was lower at 61 percent as of 2004, an improvement of two percent over 2003.
However, given the growth of the Malaysian software market, the losses suffered from piracy increased from RM490 million to RM509 million.
In a global software piracy study commissioned by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), its chair for the Malaysia Committee, Ajay Advani said reduction in the piracy rate was a step in the right direction.
BSA is the international association of the world's leading software developers, and the independent study, which indicates that software piracy continues to be a major challenge worldwide, was conducted by IDC, a global technology research leader.
"Malaysia's software market continues to grow. This translates to more jobs, innovation and tax revenue. One of the reasons for this growth is that Malaysia's piracy rate has steadily improved," he said in a statement, here Wednesday.
"Credit for this must go to the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs, and Malaysian consumers," he said.
Advani said the ministry has been relentless in improving intellectual Property Rights protection in Malaysia through a mix education and enforcement initiatives.
Malaysian consumers, especially companies and businesses, are responding and buying more legal software, he said.
"We are confident that this trend would continue," he added.
IDC used proprietary statistics for software and hardware shipments, conducted more than 7,000 interviews in 23 countries, and enlisted IDC analysts in over 50 countries to review market condition.
IDC Asia Pacific associate director, Martin Kralik said piracy was still most prevalent in countries and regions where the software market was growing, as personal computing becomes more integral to work and daily life.
"However, we have learned from places such as Taiwan that adopting policies to protect intellectual property is key to curbing piracy," he said. "Once a high-piracy locale, Taiwan has managed to drive software piracy levels down significantly, with the government sending a strong message that it would not tolerate software piracy while at the same time working with the industry to launch educational campaigns," he said.
The Taiwan government also put in place a regulatory regime to help prevent optical piracy, and has raided software piracy rings that were profiting from illegal software, said Kralik.
The study said 53 percent of the software installed on personal computers in Asia Pacific was pirated in 2004, the same level as in 2003.
However, losses due to software piracy increased from US$7.5 billion to almost US$8 billion.
Launching the study in Singapore, BSA Asia vice president and regional director, Jeffrey Hardey said software piracy remained a major concern for Asia Pacific countries.
"While many governments have taken steps to better protect intellectual property rights, much remains to be done in order for there to be substantial reduction in software piracy levels."
"The software industry is a proven engine for growth. Strong resolve in ensuring intellectual property protection is essential if countries in the region are to see continued innovation and investment," said Hardey.
The study finds that software piracy rates in Asia Pacific range from a high of 92 percent in Vietnam to a low of 23 percent in New Zealand.
The Asia Pacific region has the fourth highest average piracy rate and three of the world's top five pirating countries are in the region.
The study also found that online piracy poses a major threat to countries. Without strong copyright laws and enforcement of those laws, online piracy - via "warez" groups, spam, auction sites and P2P (peer-to-peer) systems - would proliferate alongside internet usage.
During 2004, an additional 44 million people began using the internet in the Asia Pacific region.
The fastest growing internet populations were those in emerging countries, as China alone would add 100 million new internet users over next four years.
Additionally, it said online piracy was also facilitated by increases in broadband penetration, since it enable users to send and download more quickly larger files such as software programmes.
According to IDC estimates, in 2004, more than 7.5 million more households in Asia Pacific gained broadband access, expanding the total number of broadband-enabled households to over 33 million.
BSA president and chief executive office, Robert Holleyman said worldwide, one out of every three copies software in use today has been obtained illegally.
"These losses have a profound economic impact in countries around the world. Every copy of software used without proper licensing cost tax revenue, jobs and growth opportunities for burgeoning software markets," he said.
In 2004, the world spent more than US$59 billion on commercial packaged personal computer software, up from US$51 billion in 2003.
However, over US$90 billion was actually installed, up from US$80 billion the year before.
http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v3....php?id=135135
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Software Piracy Rate Continues To Fall In Singapore
Johnson Choo
The piracy of business software has been on a constant decline over the past three years.
Singapore's 42 percent piracy rate in 2004 is the lowest in South East Asia, but the software industry says there is a new threat coming from the Internet.
There are some 280 million Internet users in the Asia-Pacific; China alone is expected to add 100 million new users over the next four years.
That is why the Business Software Alliance feels the increasing trend of Internet piracy cannot be ignored.
Said Jeffrey Hardee, Asian regional director at BSA, "We see a high level of Internet penetration in Singapore, and also broadband penetration. So with this, you have the ability to move large files over a short amount of time.
"With the improvement in peer-to-peer file-sharing technology, unfortunately, we also see an illegal use of that technology, and so the file-sharing of large software files is taking place on a more rapid basis, and we're very concerned about the growth of that."
Figures show that while piracy rates are going down in some countries, the quantum of loss in earnings has actually increased.
Said Martin Kralik, associate director of IDC Asia Pacific, "In China and India, we see a 15 percent growth in PC penetration every year, similar in number of broadband users etc, so this is a percentage of a larger pie. At the same time, currency exchange rates have been a factor.
"Overall for the US dollar in 2004, the average rate is about 6 percent off the 2003 rate. So in countries like Singapore for instance, where the local currency has strengthened, as a result we see the US dollar value of those losses magnify as well."
Overall, the industry is optimistic that with more education and enforcement, piracy rates will continue to go down. - CNA /ct
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stori...148246/1/.html
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Africa A Software Piracy Hub
Staff Writer
An International Data Corporation (IDC) report on global software piracy has found that 80% of all software sold in Africa is pirated. The global average piracy rate is 35% and SA's rate is slightly higher at 37%.According to the Global IDC Software Piracy Study released by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) in Johannesburg yesterday, Algeria, Kenya, Nigeria and Tunisia all rank in the mid- to high- 80s, while Zimbabwe posts the highest software piracy figure of 90%.
The IDC says Africa's economy is suffering to the tune of over $1 billion as a result. The report, which covers 87 countries, says the piracy rate in the EMEA region has dropped slightly since last year, and now stands at 39% on average. However, illegal software still costs software companies and countries' economies more than $15.5 billion in Europe, Middle East and Africa, and almost $33 billion worldwide.
Neil Dundas, a legal advisor to the BSA and a director at Bowman Gilfillan attorneys, notes that the statistics must be seen in context. He points out that the global piracy average dropped by 1% despite a massive increase in the number of PC users, an influx of new users from high-piracy market sectors such as consumers and small businesses, and the increasing availability of unlicensed software at online peer-to-peer file-sharing sites.
"Unfortunately, the value of pirated software increased. Last year, the world spent over $59 billion on PC software but installed more than $90 billion. For every $2 worth of software purchased legitimately, one was obtained illegally," Dundas says.
"Piracy is seen as a quick fix, an easy way to benefit from technology without investing too much. People rarely think of the ethical or economic consequences of pirating software," says Stephan le Roux, chairman of the BSA
http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/busi...l%20View&O=FPT
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Software Piracy Losses Rise In 2004
With 35% of software pirated globally, losses hit $33B
Michael Paige
Piracy continues to represent a major thorn in the side of software vendors, with over a third of software installed last year on the world's computers having been pirated and resulting losses mounting to $33 billion, according to a study released Wednesday.
Last year, spending on commercial package computer software rose to over $59 billion, up from $51 billion in 2003, according to the study carried out by industry researcher IDC. Yet over $90 billion worth of software was actually installed on computers globally, rising from $80 billion a year earlier, the study revealed.
"Worldwide, one out of every three copies of software in use today has been obtained illegally," said Robert Holleyman, chief executive of the Business Software Alliance trade group, which commissioned the study.
"These losses have a profound economic impact in countries around the world," Holleyman said. "Every copy of software used without proper licensing costs tax revenue, jobs, and growth opportunities for burgeoning software markets."
While the percentage of illegally installed software eased to 35% last year from 36% in the foregoing year, the growth of the PC market and a weaker U.S. dollar resulted in a rise in dollar losses. In 2003, software piracy resulted in losses of $29 billion, the Washington-based industry association said.
Piracy rates increased in 34 countries and decreased in 37, with Vietnam, Ukraine, China, Zimbabwe and Indonesia leading the list of countries with the highest piracy rates.
The United States led the list of countries with the lowest rate of piracy at 21%. However, dollar losses in the United States were the highest at $6.6 billion given the size of the market.
U.S. losses were nearly double those suffered by the country with the second highest amount of dollar losses: China, where vendors missed out on $3.5 billion in sales due to the proliferation of illegal copies of programs.
John Gantz, chief research officer at Framingham, Mass., IDC said, "Piracy is still most prevalent in countries and regions where the software market is growing as personal computing becomes more integral to work and daily life."
To be sure, a whopping 92% of software in Vietnam was pirated last year, closely followed by Ukraine with a piracy rate of 91%. China and Zimbabwe both had a piracy rate of 90%, while 87% of software in Indonesia was illegally copied.
The adoption of policies designed to protect intellectual property rights is key to curbing piracy, the researcher said.
Holleyman, the Business Software Alliance CEO, said the group's education, policy initiatives and enforcement efforts continue to have an impact on the problem.
"But the continued influx of new users in emerging markets, and the increased availability of pirated software primarily through the Internet and P2P [peer-to-peer] networks, underscores that continued education is a must," he asserted.
IDC conducted over 7,000 interviews in 23 countries to carry out the study and its analysts in over 50 countries reviewed local market conditions.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/stor...&siteid=google
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Gamers To Rule Their Own Virtual Worlds
Will Knight
Multiplayer online games could be made more robust and immersive by using peer-to-peer (P2P) networking to let players store part of a virtual universe on their own computer.
Researchers say blending P2P networking - best known for letting people find and share music and video files online - with online gaming could make virtual worlds more stable and, eventually, more expandable.
Massive multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, provide users with a complex virtual world in which to interact and act out adventures with others. Popular titles in the genre include World of Warcraft, Everquest II and Final Fantasy XI.
But existing games require users to connect to a centralised server owned and maintained by the company behind the game. Although this makes a game easier to control and maintain, it also provides a single point of failure and can complicate expanding it for large numbers of player.
Now researchers at France Telecom have built a simple role-playing game that works without the need for any centralised server. The project, called Solipsis, lets users interact within a virtual space hosted collectively on their own computers.
Infinitely scalable
"The idea is to have an infinitely scalable world," says Joaquin Keller, who developed Solipsis at France Telecom's research laboratory in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, south west of Paris. "The current approach has limitations."
A user expands the scale of Solipsis just by installing the software. The project currently provides only a 2D interface for user interaction, but Keller says more complex 3D graphical features are under development.
Keller adds that designing the P2P virtual world has been tricky because of the need to avoid the network becoming flooded with communications as the number of users increases. The researchers dealt with this issue by developing a system that only exchanges messages locally rather than broadcasting them.
Other P2P-powered games are also under development and some observers say they will enable the creation of more engrossing and exciting virtual worlds.
Common governance
The Open Source Metaverse Project, for example, lets users build visually complex 3D landscapes that can be linked to one another online. Some existing virtual worlds may also switch to a P2P network scheme eventually. Second Life, created by Linden Lab of California, US, was built with a P2P system in mind, although currently it runs on several large servers.
Julian Dibbell, who co-edits the online gaming weblog Terra Nova, says P2P networking could go beyond just solving technical issues to generate more interesting forms of virtual interaction. "At the moment, the games companies are in control, and they tend to be autocratic," he told New Scientist."When you go peer-to-peer you have the prospect of common or complex governance."
But Dibbells adds that, without central control, it could be a challenge to make sure such games continue to appeal to users. "How do you make things seem interesting for everyone if individuals can basically do whatever they want?" he asks.
Unauthorised copying of digital artefacts may be a particular problem, he says, although Second Life provides a potential solution, letting users add copy controls to items they create within the game. These items can then be exchanged or sold to other users, and the currency used in Second Life can be exchanged for real world cash.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7372
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BBC To Trial TV Downloads Service
The BBC has announced that it plans to begin making TV programmes available over the Internet.
From September the corporation will hold three months of 'intensive trials' of its interactive Media Player (iMP). It will make selected TV programmes available for up to seven days after they were broadcast, alongside the radio broadcasts which are currently being streamed plus additional channels not yet available online. It also plans to offer feature films, where it can acquire the rights.
Unlike the BBC's current online content - radio stations streamed via its own Radio Player application or Real Player - the new system will require users to download programmes. These will have embedded DRM software that will tell the iMP to delete them once their seven days have expired. The same DRM will prevent programmes from being shared or burned to disc. Geo-IP technology will also be used to restrict availability to the UK.
Content will be distribute using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology.
The pilot will be used to assess the demand for particular types of programmes and to determine whether there will be any impact on the commercial TV market. The final decision on whether to go ahead will rest with the BBC governors.
The BBC's director of New Media and Technology, Ashley Highfield, could not resist drawing a parallel with the most well-known and successful online content delivery service, coupling it with a reference to a 70s TV advert.
'MP could just be the iTunes for the broadcast industry, enabling our audience to access our TV and radio programmes on their terms - anytime, any place, any how - Martini Media,' he said.
'We'll see what programmes appeal in this new world and how people search, sort, snack and savour our content in the broadband world.'
Highfield said in a recent speech that the uptake of broadband and the increasing numbers of people using the internet to access audio visual material was in danger of stalling without the necessary content to attract viewers and listeners.
Broadband users who would like to be considered for a place on the pilot should send an e-mail to
imptrial@bbc.co.uk including their name, contact details, age and postcode.
The trial software is for Windows only.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/72866/bb...s-service.html
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Trojan Revives Software Piracy War
Malware creators seem to have started a battle against piracy on the Internet. After recently reporting the appearance of the Nopir worms, whose aim is to deleted all of the MP3 and COM files from the computer, leaving a message to the user of the affected computer, this time, PandaLabs informs that a Trojan called Whiter.F has emerged, a malware that deletes all the files form the hard disk of the affected computer.
This new malware variant, like most Trojans, cannot spread on its own. It spreads through traditional mediums, such as floppy disks, CD- ROMs, email messages with attached files, Internet downloads, FTP, IRC channels, peer-to- peer (P2P) file sharing networks, FTP, etc.
Once installed in a computer, it creates a text file called WXP in the root directory of the user’s computer. This file contains the phrase You did a piracy, you deserve it, similar to the threats made by the creator of the Nopir worm. Then, this Trojan replaces all the files on the hard drive with the text file it has created, and then completely removes them, causing the affected computer to stop functioning. For this reason, this Trojan is considered extremely damaging. Furthermore, even if the user attempts to recover the hard drive data using a special tool, the files recovered will be the files with the messages described above.
For further information, visit
http://www.pandasoftware.com/ virus_info/encyclopedia/.
http://www.integratedmar.com/ecl-usa...cfm?item=12334
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Users Downloading Less Adware
Brian Morrissey
A leading spyware-removal firm reported the amount of adware programs it found on consumer computers dropped in the first quarter.
According to Webroot, a Boulder, Colo.-based maker of spyware-removal software, it found adware on 64 percent of computers it scanned in the first quarter, down from 73 percent in the fourth quarter of 2004. The average computer with adware had 6.9 copies of it, constant with the previous quarter.
The firm attributed the lower adware figures to consumer awareness of advertising software that often comes bundled with free software, such as file-sharing programs. Webroot estimates the adware market generates up to $2 billion annually.
The most prevalent adware program found was CoolWebSearch, which Webroot found on 8.2 percent of computers, the same level as the prior quarter. Webroot tracked a decline in distribution for Claria's GAIN software, which it distributes with the Kazaa file-sharing program. GAIN was on 2.2 percent of scanned computers, compared to 2.6 percent in Q4 2004.
Similarly, Webroot tracked a decline in distribution of 180Solutions' 180search Assistant, which was found on 2 percent of scanned computers compared to 2.6 percent in the previous quarter.
Webroot tabbed CoolWebSearch, which often redirects a user's home page to its search engine, as its "top threat" for Q1 2005. Over the last five quarters, the firm has tracked 17 variations of CoolWebSearch.
http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/int..._id=1000926847
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Tor Torches Online Tracking
Kim Zetter
Privacy tools can sometimes create strange bedfellows.
That's what has happened with an anonymizer system that was originally developed and funded by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to help government employees shield their identity online. It is now being co-funded and promoted by the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The system, called Tor, allows users to surf the internet, chat and send instant messages anonymously. It works by transferring traffic three times through random servers, or nodes, on its way from sender to recipient to make it difficult for anyone to trace the data back to its source.
Tor has been completely rebuilt since the Navy initially designed it in the late '90s. The EFF has thrown its support behind the project, and its creators are now hopeful they will be able to add servers and attract new users, thus bolstering the system's privacy and security benefits.
"There's an assumption that people working on government things and people working on EFF things can't possibly be working on the same things," said Roger Dingledine, one of Tor's developers. "But they both want the same sort of security."
Besides, Dingledine said, the Navy is happy to have the outside world using its designs because "it demonstrates that the Navy writes stuff that is useful."
The Naval Research Lab began developing the system in 1996 but handed the code over to Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, two Boston-based programmers, in 2002. The system was designed as part of a program called onion routing, in which data is passed randomly through a distributed network of servers three times, with layers of security protecting the data, like an onion.
Dingledine and Mathewson rewrote the code to make it easier to use and developed a client program so that users could send data from their desktops.
"It's been really obscure until now and hard to use," said Chris Palmer, EFF's technology manager. "(Before) it was just a research prototype for geeks. But now the onion routing idea is finally ready for prime time."
Dingledine and Mathewson made the code open source so that users could examine it to find bugs and to make certain that the system did only what it was supposed to do and nothing more.
The two programmers wanted to guard against a problem that arose in 2003 when users of another open-source anonymizer system -- called JAP, for Java Anonymous Proxy -- discovered that its German developers had placed a backdoor in the system to record traffic to one server. The developers, who included researchers at Dresden University of Technology, said they were forced to install a "crime detection function" by court order.
Law enforcement authorities have long had an uneasy and ambivalent relationship with anonymizer services. On the one hand, such services allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies to hide their own identity while conducting investigations and gathering intelligence. But they also make it harder for authorities to track the activities and correspondence of criminals and terrorists.
Anonymizer services can help protect whistleblowers and political activists from exposure. They can help users circumvent surfing restrictions placed on students and workers by school administrators and employers. And they can prevent websites from tracking users and knowing where they're located. The downside is that anonymizer services can aid with corporate espionage.
One person who searched the website of a competing hardware company found that the site delivered a different page when he accessed it from his company computer than when he accessed it using Tor.
"The website looked at who was looking at it (based on the IP address) and gave them false information depending on who was visiting it," Dingledine said. "(The person was) quite surprised to find that (the site) was different."
Tor can be used to hide the identity of file swappers, although the system is not set up specifically for that purpose. Current default settings for the server software block ports typically used to transfer files over peer-to- peer clients, including BitTorrent and Kazaa. But server operators can change the settings manually, and some Tor servers have been set to accept peer-to-peer traffic. Nevertheless, Tor's encryption system slows down data- transfer rates for large files typically traded over peer-to-peer networks, according to Dingledine.
"We suspect they wouldn't be very happy with Tor because it slows down when you're transferring really large files," he said. "We can imagine a time one day when Tor is so large we can imagine a lot of people moving a lot of bytes around. But that's not the most pressing design problem we have to worry about right now ... and this isn't really the spin we're looking for. We're looking for helping human rights people and corporations and individuals get privacy and safety on the internet."
Tor works with Windows, Unix and Mac operating systems and differs from a similar service, by Anonymizer, in that the latter only allows users to surf the web anonymously and only sends data through a proxy server once. Anonymizer also sells its products, whereas Tor is free.
Tor builds an incremental encrypted connection that involves three separate keys through three servers on the network. The connection is built one server at a time so that each server knows only the identity of the server that preceded it and the server that follows it. None of the servers knows the entire path the data took.
The data gets encrypted with three keys, one for each server. As the data hits a server, it peels off one layer of encryption to reveal to the server where it should send the data next. When the data reaches the second randomly selected router or server, another layer of encryption is removed to reveal the next destination.
People or organizations can volunteer their systems to operate as servers or routers. Currently the system has about 150 servers operating around the world on every continent except Antarctica and Africa. Traffic is processing through the system at about 10 MB of data per second, depending on the time of day.
Because of the way the system is designed, there's no way to know how many users are on the system. At least there's no way to know now that Dingledine fixed a bug. In January, he discovered a design flaw that kept users connected to the system even after they finished sending data.
"(In this way) I calculated how many clients I had on my server and multiplied that by the number of servers," Dingledine said. He extrapolated the number to count about 20,000 users. A new release of the system keeps users connected for only about five minutes so they can't be counted.
The system's efficiency and privacy benefits will increase with the number of users and servers. Essentially, the more servers available through which to route traffic, the faster the traffic will fly and the less likely anyone will be able to determine the path that specific data took through the system.
Security will also increase as the system's user base becomes more diverse. With more and more users spread among government agencies, academia and the private sector, eavesdroppers will find it more difficult to determine the nature of the person who sent data through the system
That's why Dingledine said the Navy is happy to have more users on it. In addition to Navy users, the Independent Media Center runs some of the larger servers on the system and sends traffic through it. A diabetes support group in Germany carries a link to Tor on its website so that members can research their illness and communicate with other members without fear of eavesdropping. Dingledine also heard from someone at the CIA who said he uses the system regularly for intelligence gathering.
"You need a lot of diversity in the user base in order to make it secure," he said. But he acknowledged that adding more and diverse users can slow traffic, since traffic will inevitably cross continents and various kinds of servers, taking longer to arrive at its destination.
Because the data goes through three routers, there's protection against someone setting up a rogue server to track traffic. This doesn't, however, prevent someone from setting up numerous rogue servers to increase the chance of tracking data.
"It's a tricky design question -- how to scale the network without allowing the adversary to sign up a lot of servers. The answer we have right now is to have all new potential servers go through a manual process to sign up," Dingledine said. "We try to detect if one guy is signing up dozens of servers. I don't think we've had that happen yet."
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,67542,00.html
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Father Sued For Teen's Downloads
Megan Twohey
Dave Bink was shocked when he learned last month that he was being sued by the recording industry for the downloading of hundreds of songs, including "All You Wanted" by Michelle Branch, "Eat You Alive" by Limp Bizkit and "U Don't Have to Call" by Usher.
Bink, 48, a motorcycle salesman from Racine, Wis., listens to nothing but Led Zeppelin and The Doors and can barely turn on the computer.
"I don't have anything with Usher or anything like that," Bink said. "And I've never downloaded music in my life. I thought it was a joke."
It's not.
Two years ago, Bink's teenage daughter downloaded more than 600 songs on their home computer through Kazaa, Internet software that allows users to swap music for free.
Since 2003, the recording industry has been searching the Internet for people who use Kazaa and similar software to share and download copyrighted songs. It has sued 11,000 users for copyright infringement.
Because the home computer was registered in his name, Bink is among the targets. He faces this choice: Pay $3,750 to settle or go to court, where he may be ordered to pay at least $750 per song.
It's part of the recording industry's strategy to thwart the sharing of music online, a growing practice that helps explain why CD sales dropped 21 percent from 1999 to 2004.
The recording industry has gone after the software companies that provide free peer-to-peer file-sharing technology. In a case that will soon be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Recording Industry Association of America argues that the companies should be held liable for the alleged copyright infringement that is committed by their customers.
But it wants to hold the customers accountable, too, said Jenni Engebretsen, a spokeswoman for the association. Every time a copyrighted song is downloaded for free, the record label and artist are robbed of royalties.
"While we work to hold accountable the businesses that encourage and profit from illegal file sharing, it is critical for us to send a strong message to individual users that you can be caught and there are consequences for your actions," Engebretsen said.
Hence the lawsuits against people such as Bink. The Recording Industry Association of America files them in federal courts - Bink's was filed in Milwaukee - after gathering the Internet Protocol addresses of users of Kazaa and other music-sharing software. In most cases, it refers to the defendants as "John Does" until it can obtain actual names from their Internet service providers.
Bink's daughter, Samantha, said she never imagined that her computer clicks could set such a process in motion.
She began using Kazaa two years ago when she was 13. Her friends said she could use the software to download music for free.
"I just thought it was really cool," said Samantha, who takes piano lessons and plays the trumpet in her school band. "You could listen to music and you didn't have to pay for it."
Until last week, Kazaa advertised itself as "100 percent legal." That she might have been breaking the law never crossed her mind.
She stopped eight months later under the instructions of her mother. A family member read an article about people who were being sued for downloading music. Sandy Bink didn't know if her daughter was doing something illegal, but she wanted to play it safe.
The software was removed from their computer, and Samantha deleted the downloaded songs.
They never told Bink about Samantha's downloading, so he was especially confused when a process server slapped him with a summons last month. He learned what had happened from a recording industry "counselor" in Seattle whom he was directed to call.
Outraged, Bink has decided to fight the lawsuit in court - even though it could cost him more than $450,000, more than 10 times the settlement offered.
He argues that he shouldn't be sued for something his daughter did. As he sees it, Samantha was duped by Kazaa's advertising.
"I'm going to take it to court, even though I can't afford a lawyer," Bink said. "I'll probably get chewed up and spit out. But I just don't think it's fair."
His odds aren't good.
Of the 11,000 lawsuits filed nationwide, 2,300 have been settled, Engebretsen said. None has gone to trial.
Earlier this year, a Chicago woman tried to fight a lawsuit filed against her. The woman didn't think she had committed copyright infringement when she downloaded music. But before the case went to trial, the recording industry filed a motion for summary judgment. The judge ordered the woman to pay $22,500 for the downloading of 30 songs.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization in San Francisco that advocates for Internet freedom, calls the lawsuits misguided and unfair.
"This is not the way the recording industry should be enforcing copyright infringement," said Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst with the organization. "Basically, they're suing their fans, alienating their audience and victimizing people who don't even realize that what they're doing is wrong."
Newitz said the recording industry should be creating legal ways for people to share and download music on the Internet instead.
But Engebretsen said that the Recording Industry Association of America does support pay-for- use music downloading sites such as iTunes, and that the lawsuits are part of its effort to steer people toward such legal alternatives.
The lawsuits have made a dent in the illegal sharing and downloading of music, Engebretsen said, pointing to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project to make her point.
The survey taken in 2003 showed that the percentage of Internet users who download music had fallen from 29 percent in March and April to 14 percent in November and December, shortly after the lawsuits began.
But data provided by Big Champagne, a market research firm that measures music-sharing traffic, tells a different story. It shows that the average number of worldwide users of music- sharing software has nearly doubled since the fall of 2003. More than half are American.
"There are more and more people downloading and sharing free content over the Internet," said Eric Garland, Big Champagne's chief executive director. "There's nothing the recording industry could have done to reverse the trend."
He added, "The capacity to share music on the Internet is bigger than the lawsuits. There are always going to be new waves of 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds who are discovering it."
A spokesman for Kazaa pointed to a message in fine print on its Web site that says the company "does not condone activities and actions that infringe the rights of copyright owners."
"As a Kazaa user," the Web site says, "it is your responsibility to obey all laws governing copyright in each country."
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/san...n/11675234.htm
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The False Mathematics of the RIAA
Barry L. Ritholtz
The feedback on the P2P downloading debate has been terrific; Let's add a few additional bullet points into our repertoire of arguments:
First, let's consider what actual P2P losses are to the industry.
They are much more difficult to calculate than the RIAA would have you believe. Why? First, downloaders pull songs they would never buy; I have Outkast's "Hey Ya" somewhere; I consider it a goofy novelty song, and the only reason I have it is that someone else sync'ed it to a Peanuts animation (everyone on stage dancing to Schroder's piano). It was an amusing but unauthorized use, which I downloaded, smiled at, and never saw again.
Oh ya: The CD that song came from -- OutKast’s 2003's release, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below -- sold 10-million plus copies.
Lost sales? Hardly.
Consider the biggest of all downloaders -- mostly-broke college students. They have a computer their parents bought them, and the campus gives them a big, fat pipe. They get access to music they would never have bought, resulting in future post-college sales. But the one-to-one lost sales argument is transparently false.
Next, let's consider what the damages to the industry are. Consider the issues of substitution: What would it cost to purchase an "unlimited amount" of digitally distributed music? The answer is found in the Napster-to-Go model:
"The Napster to Go model . . . shows that the RIAAs claims of a lost sale for every download to be demonstrably false. If you can download an unlimited number of songs via napster and play them for as long as you continue to subscribe, then the maximum loss the RIAA suffers from a single downloader cannot exceed $15/month no matter how many songs a person downloads." -- via boingboing
Over the course of 10 years, that represents total gross losses of $1,800, of which Napster keeps between 15 and 20%. Net loss: $1,500 dollars.
But wait, there's more: The Rhapsody Music Subscription from Real Networks charges only $10 per month. That's $120 per year. Over a decade, the loss downloaders present to the industry by not signing up for Rhapsody are: lost revenue of $1,200 (gross). In other words, the total net industry losses are ~$1,000 per decade. Hardly as apocalyptic as portrayed.
By approving the Napster/Rhapsody subscription models, the music industry has unwittingly created a viable legal defense, at least when it comes to damages portion of their litigation, for defendants in a RIAA P2P litigation. The claims of losses in the $100,000 or even $10,000 are silly -- as long as this $1,000 net loss per decade option exists.
Of course, that doesn't consider studies (such as the one from Harvard/UNC CHapel Hill) that shows P2P drives CD and concert ticket sales. I only buy music that I hear and like. Since that hardly happens via the radio anymore, P2P is my most common source of new music (that, and Apple adverts).
Further, the industry's disingenous claims that its the artists are getting ripped off by downloaders are rather misleading. (Putting aside the industry's own long and storied history of ripping off their artists for another day).
A recent NYT article reveals that most musicians make their bread and butter not by selling CDs, but by touring and performing:
"According to a new list of the 50 top-earning pop stars published in Rolling Stone, over the hill is the new golden pasture. Half the top 10 headliners are older than 50, and two are over 60. Only one act, Linkin Park, has members under 30.
The annual list, which entails some guesswork, reverses the common perception of pop music. Not only is it not the province of youth; it's also not the province of CD sales, hit songs and smutty videos.
While sexy young stars take their turn strutting on the Billboard charts or MTV - or on the cover of Rolling Stone - the real pop pantheon, it seems, is an older group, no longer producing new hits, but re- enacting songs that are older than many of today's pop idols."
This has serious financial repurcussions for the business model the industry is presently wed to. And the list of artists who are making the big bucks reveals industry mismanagement has led to mostly ignoring the key economic demographic driver of our century: The baby boomers.
Here's a little secret the RIAA would rather not have you know: Musicians make most of their money performing and touring -- not selling CDs or downloads. Rolling Stone has a detailed analysis of the top 50 acts . . . here's a top 10 list to whet your appetite:
2004 Music Money Makers
1. Prince $56.5 MILLION
2. Madonna $54.9 MILLION
3. Metallica $43.1 MILLION
4. Elton John $42.9 MILLION
5. Jimmy Buffett $36.5 MILLION
6. Rod Stewart $34.6 MILLION
7. Shania Twain $33.2 MILLION
8. Phil Collins $33.2 MILLION
9. Linkin Park $33.1 MILLION
10. Simon and Garfunkel $31.3 MILLION
Note that 9 of the top 10 grossing performers aren't the hot new thing -- they are the better known rock classics -- which the labels have mostly also been paying little attention to for so many years.
The industry can scapegoat P2P for all their woes, but a closer analysis of the math demonstrates the claim is illusory. (Mis)management is the primary sources of the industry problems.
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/commen...lse_mathe.html
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Interview with TotalVid's Founder Karl Quist
Thomas Hawk
TotalVid is a new internetwork that is broadcasting in the land of internet television. TotalVid has specialized in offereing various long tail extreme sports, a natural place to start, to it's viewers and is now beginning to branch out into other long tail content areas.
I had an opportunity to do an email interview with Karl Quist, the founder and General Manager of TotalVid, and talk about TotalVid's role in the new world of internet television.
TH (Thomas Hawk): Tell me a little bit about Karl Quist, what is your position at Total Vid? When did you start Total Vid? What did you do before Total Vid?
Have you ever been or are you personally involved in extreme sports?
KH (Karl Quist): I'm the GM (General Manager). I started the company in July of 2003 for Landmark Communications, our parent company. Before founding TotalVid, I had worked as Director, New Ventures for Landmark. My role there was primarily focused on identifying promising online and offline media investments for the company to invest in. Within Landmark, we had really developed a conviction that broadband was going to create distribution opportunities for content that has traditionally not been carried by traditional media channels. If you look at Landmark's history, it's really one of building media businesses that take advantage of changes in media consumption habits. The company was founded as a newspaper business a hundred years ago, but evolved into broadcast TV ownership and was early in the cable business with The Weather Channel. More recently, the company has made significant investments in leading online businesses. TotalVid was launched to provide broad distribution for video content that traditionally hasn't penetrated the TV and video rental markets.
Our initial launch included Extreme Sports and Travel, although we've added several new categories since then (Anime, Martial Arts Instruction, Home Improvement DIY, Music Instruction and Motorsports). I've been a long-time action sports participant and fan. I've windsurfed for 18 years. I drove my wife crazy watching the same windsurfing videos over and over again, because the videos were so hard to come by. I even had my TiVo programmed to record anything having to do with windsurfing -- it never finds anything. I've been a surfer and skier as well, and these markets are similar in that you can't just pop into Blockbuster and find a good selection of current surf or snow films.
TH: Tell me about Total Vid. What is it? What is your vision for the company?
KQ: TotalVid offers a video download service that allows customers across a wide range of enthusiast categories such as action sports, anime, martial arts and others to view high-quality, full-length videos in categories that are important to them. Our current product is a 7-day download that a consumer can view an unlimited number of times for $1.99 to $3.99. All of our titles have traditionally been sold through specialty retailers for $20-30 each, and because they can't be found at the video store, we're finally giving users a way to view these videos at a price-point that encourages more frequent consumption.
We don't focus on major studio releases. Our belief is that these markets are very well served by the traditional & emerging distribution channels. Our goal is to expand across a large number of enthusiast/hobby categories so that when a consumer comes to TotalVid, they can find a video that speaks to his/her unique interests. Typically, that interest has gone unserved by traditional media channels who've focused on categories with broader appeal.
What's interesting, though, is that when you combine our categories, they collectively represent a huge market. Over 50 million Americans participate in one of the action sports represented on our site. Add travel, home improvement and Anime, and all of a sudden, we have a library that offers something for most broadband users.
TH: Extreme sports seem like a natural place for long tail content. There are so many niche sports. Can you tell me about the ones that you guys are offering and which niche sports that you plan to offer in the future?
KQ: Exactly. We definitely like the action-sports category. There's so much great content that's being produced out there in each of the sub-genres. Within action sports, we offer BMX, Inline, Kiteboarding, Mountain Biking, Skate, Ski, Snowboard, Snowmobiling, Surfing, Wake, Windsurfing, Motocross, Off-road, Whitewater and Climbing. When you peel back action sports, you see that it's not a category in itself, but rather a collection of very unique markets.
As I mentioned, we launched a great martial arts instruction category. We offer street racing videos. Our home improvement, music instruction and travel videos are a great resource for people as well. We'll enter several new categories this year. Some will be in the action sports category -- categories like paintball; and some will be in totally unrelated categories.
TH: At your site people can opt to buy a video tape or DVD of a program or they can also choose to by a VOD downloadable version. Are you able to share with me the percentage breakdown of your volume? Are more people opting for VOD or is DVD still the primary choice for people in purchasing content?
KQ: We do offer both formats, although we have an interesting hybrid approach. One of the benefits of our service is that consumers can try at a low price point before they purchase the full DVD. If you get a download and then purchase the DVD from us, we'll credit your rental towards the purchase price. Also, if you buy the DVD from us, we give you a permanent download. The benefit there is that you can start watching it right away rather than wait for the DVD to be shipped.
We actually see our users opting for the download option by a significant majority. We also are finding that the vast majority of our DVD buyers are taking advantage of the download that we give them.
TH: One question that I think VOD still needs to grapple with is the broadcast quality of content, particularly as it relates to HDTV. Do you guys offer HDTV downloads or is the bandwidth cost still prohibitive? What would you have to charge to make it economically feasible to offer a program in HDTV quality? What do you see as the future for high quality VOD content? I would think that with extreme sports especially that the oohs and ahhs of HDTV would be especially compelling. Also can anything be done with peer to peer to cut down the cost of distributing HDTV quality content?
KQ: Good question. There's definitely a cost increase associated with delivering true HD content, but I think as bandwidth costs continue to drop, that will become less of an issue. Currently, a bigger issue is the amount of time it takes a user to download a HD file. Having to wait 2-3 hours for a video to download detracts from the on-demand nature of the experience. Again, this will change too as broadband providers like Comcast, with whom we have a partnership, continue to ratchet up their download speeds. As long as consumers are viewing the content on a computer screen, the current bitrates work quite well. However, as more consumers push video content from their PC to the living room, we'll all have to adapt by offering higher-quality encodes.
TH: Are you able to share with me the economics of your content? There is obviously a split between you guys and the content creators. How does that work? Is there some kind of revenue sharing agreement? How does your affiliate program work?
KQ: We have over 200 producers that we work with across our various categories.
We offer them an attractive revenue share so that as our business grows, they benefit from that growth. It's a pretty easy process. They send us their videos and we send them checks every quarter. Because most of these creators aren't in the rental market today, we're bringing them incremental revenue. We're really getting some great results for some of these producers.
We have an affiliate program for publishers/partners that allows them to earn a commission on sales that they drive through our site.
TH: What about advertising revenue. Do you guys put advertising in your content or can you to offer lower cost versions of some of your programming?
KQ: At this point, we're focused on a user-paid model as opposed to an ad- supported one. For long-form content such as ours, ads just don't make that much sense when you consider that the ad revenue you could derive from a video wouldn't even cover the bandwidth costs, much less provide a meaningful payment to the content creator.
TH: It looks like you guys have agreements in place with Microsoft and
Akimbo. I know that you guys are available through Akimbo now. When will you be available through the Microsoft's Media Center Edition platform? Do you have any plans to offer your content through TiVo? What about cable or satellite VOD? Can you get Total Vid on Comcast right now?
KQ: That's right. We're working with Microsoft to become more integrated in the MCE platform, which we think is a great fit with our content. We're talking to a number of partners about incorporating our growing library into their offerings as well. Because our content is so compelling, yet hard to find through traditional channels, we really are a natural partner for companies like TiVo and others who are looking to bring internet-delivered video into the living room. To this point, our discussions with the cable operators have been limited to the internet side. Our library is a great extension of their VOD offerings--it complements rather than competes with what they offer through their digital offering.
TH: What would it take to have more niche mainstream sports on a VOD basis? Do you ever see a day for instance when you can see your grandson's Little League game or your old high school alma mater play their rival via VOD? What are the barriers to getting more mainstream sports on a VOD basis and how important is it that mainstream sports be broadcast live?
KQ: Internet VOD definitely changes the distribution economics in a way that enables content to be produced that appeals to very narrow audiences. Generally, sporting events, I believe, will be viewed primarily in real-time. Most sporting events are far more compelling to view when you don't know the outcome already. There are certain types of sporting events, however, that also carry some sentimental value that people would pay for on a VOD basis.
TH: What other non-sports content would make for good VOD internet TV? I know you guys are doing Anime animation as well. Where are the other sweet spots of the long tail?
KQ: Well, we see a ton of potential out there. Certainly, we're in a number of categories outside sports (travel, anime, music, home improvement). Think of what people get passionate about and there's probably an underserved market waiting for video to be made available in a convenient, download format like the one that TotalVid offers. You could imagine foreign language programming for people living outside their home country. Videos for auto enthusiasts....new parents....brides....these are the kinds of things you're likely to see on TotalVid as we expand to new categories.
TH: Thanks for taking the time to do the interview Karl!
http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/949/my_interview_with
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Music Rules
A Supreme Court ruling against peer-to-peer network Grokster would do more than punish music pirates. It would affect the future of the Internet.
Andrew Leonard
I decided to rip my vinyl in honor of MGM vs. Grokster, the case heard before the Supreme Court on Tuesday that will likely result in a landmark ruling on copyright law.
"To rip one's vinyl" means to convert long-playing records to digital files. And if some doomsayers are correct, it's the kind of thing the music biz would be able to prevent me from doing if the Grokster decision goes their way. In a worst- case scenario, anything that would allow me to copy music, whether it's a CD-burner, some audio-editing software, or a peer-to-peer network like Grokster, would be illegal.
But to be honest, stopping me from taking moldering P-Funk, Rolling Stones and R.E.M. albums and transforming them into MP3s for my own enjoyment is not the highest priority for the entertainment industry. In the Grokster case, a roll-call of music and movie studios are targeting their sights on file-sharing peer-to-peer networks. Their argument is that the creators of those networks should be deemed responsible for what people do with them -- technically, that means they should be found guilty of "secondary liability" for the copyright infringement committed by file sharers.
The case before the Supreme Court does not pertain to whether the actual act of file sharing is illegal. Let's accept for now that when you or I grab a copy of the newest Aimee Mann track from Kazaa or LimeWire, we are committing intellectual-property piracy, stealing royalties from starving artists, and threatening the entire economic basis of the music industry. Personally, I enjoy supporting the artists I like by purchasing their records on iTunes, and I especially savor doing so after I have heard a free sample of their music over the Net. But that's an entirely separate issue from what's at stake in this case. MGM vs. Grokster deals with whether the creators of a technology are responsible for how it used. It's not an understatement to say that the case could influence the future of the Internet.
This is why the "secondary liability" charge makes a lot of folks, particularly those in the computer, consumer electronics and telecom industries, very nervous. A decision in favor of the plaintiffs would represent a reversal of the precedent set 20 years ago in the famous "Sony-Betamax" case, which held that Sony was not liable for any copyright abuses likely to be perpetrated by owners of VCRs because there were "substantial noninfringing" uses of the product. In other words, because the VCR could be used for perfectly legitimate purposes, like watching a rented movie, it was OK for Sony to sell it, even if some people were going to use it to tape copyrighted television shows.
The defendants in Grokster say that because P2P networks can also be used for legal purposes -- such as distributing public domain content or anything for which the copyright holder has granted permission -- they should enjoy the same protection. Last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, a decision that surprised many observers of the long-running war between file sharers and the entertainment industry. Over the past decade, the entertainment industry has been winning most of its copyright battles, both in court and in Congress.
No one knows which way the Supreme Court will go, but the tech industry fears disaster: If the creators of programs that enable sharing over the Internet are liable for what people do with the software, then the manufacturers of any devices that enable copying could also be at risk. So everyone on the trail that leads from you to a given digital file is in danger -- the computer manufacturer, the CD-burner manufacturer, the audio-editing software writer, the Internet service provider and the telecom company.
I'm not a particularly paranoid person. But the entertainment industry did do everything it could to stop me from owning VCRs and MP3 players. It drives record company executives nuts that I can plug a newly purchased compact disc into my computer and rip the music on it to my hard drive in seconds. They are constantly experimenting with ways to stop that, and a ruling in their favor in MGM vs. Grokster, even if ostensibly aimed at P2P networks, could give them the legal authority to be even more aggressive than they already are.
So I decided to rip my vinyl in symbolic support of the right to do with my music what I like. But a funny thing happened on my way to the iTunes library.
I haven't owned a working turntable in 15 years. My record albums have moved between three houses in that time, packed away in crates gathering dust in the basement. I've gone years without even thinking of them. But after returning home from a store that specialized in refurbished stereo equipment with a beautiful Technics record player, I retrieved the crates from their hiding places and began spreading albums across my dining room table.
And I started to freak out a little bit. All those albums! All that personal history laid out before me. That "Ziggy Stardust" record -- I remembered playing it for the first girl I had a crush on. That Skynyrd album -- would I ever have owned it if I hadn't been a teenager in north Florida? "Entertainment," by the Gang of Four -- just a glimpse of it reminded me of a brutal breakup. It was as if, as an acquaintance who'd had a similar experience noted later, I had discovered a room in my house that I'd forgotten existed.
My original plan had been to choose an album to rip and then write about it, but the memory vault was just too distracting. I started randomly listening to cuts, reminding myself of how I became the person I am today. Like a breakthrough mental therapy session, the explosion of albums from my past set my consciousness astir, an experience both exhilarating and destabilizing.
My kids bugged out when they came home from school and saw all the records strewn across the dining room. But then my daughter turned on the computer because she wanted to listen to some music. And I was a little sad to realize that there would never be a similar trip down memory lane for her.
As a full-fledged member of the digital generation, her music, her pictures, her video, will all be on the hard drive. The only thing that will tie her to the data that will help define her identity will be her ownership of it -- her ability to retrieve that data when and where she wants it. And in a digital age, such ownership is a fragile thing, under constant attack and frighteningly vulnerable -- not just to lawyers, but also to computer crashes and format changes.
If the entertainment studios had their way, every time a format changed, you'd have to buy all your records all over again. In their ideal world, we would hold restricted licenses to our content, not ownership. Digital rights management would cripple our all-powerful computers, creating backups would be impossible, and the basic human impulse to share the wealth of information that helps define who we are would be beset with obstacles. This is not paranoia. At every step of the way, intellectual- property-right holders have resisted technological innovations that give ordinary people more scope to enjoy and consume music, television, movies or any other content.
That's why MGM vs. Grokster is so important. The deeper we get into the digital age, the more we will be defined not by our relationships with physical objects but with the data that we have accumulated in our journeys through life. If we lose the right to own that data and do what we want with it, if the power of the computer, and the Net, is taken from us, we're at risk of losing a lot more than a few files -- we stand at risk of losing the evidence that tells us who we are.
The chore of ripping vinyl is a quick lesson in what a pain in the ass the analog, pre-digital lifestyle really was. But it's also a reminder, in case anyone has forgotten, of the marvelousness of the computer.
The first shocker is that to record an album on one's hard drive, you actually have to play it in real time! Again, my kids -- who, just before leaving on a road trip over the weekend burned two albums to CD in about three minutes -- were befuddled. Real-time is slow. Digital is not slow.
But if you manage to get your album converted to some kind of humongous, uncompressed file, then you are faced with all kinds of subsidiary questions. Do you try to clean up the cracks and pops? What format do you compress the file into? How do you divide up the tracks?
Ripping vinyl is a time-consuming task that demands attention and requires getting up to speed on audio-editing software. But that it's possible at all is astonishing. The fact that I can look at the waveform for Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower" and not only see that annoying, nasty popping sound just before the guitar solo, but delete it right out of existence, was eye-opening. Gee, having transformed that analog record to a digital file gives me all sorts of power, doesn't it? Now I can sample it, cut and paste it, mash it up with other songs, rip it to CD, e-mail it to my friends, post it on a publicly accessible Web server.
Whoops -- might not want to do that last part, or a nastygram from the Recording Industry Association of America could soon follow. But you get my point, right? That amazing protean device, the computer, gives me digital omnipotence. And that phenomenal distribution network, the Internet, contains all the software, and all the wisdom necessary to use that software to wreak my magic and share the fruits of my labor with the world.
But is the distribution of all that power to the masses good or bad? That, in essence, is what the Supreme Court is really being asked to decide. This struggle has been years in the making, brewing ever since people started to understand what networked computers were truly capable of. The highest court in the land is set to rule on a fundamental aspect of the Internet, the fact that it makes copying stuff absurdly easy -- to the point that a tidal wave of copyright violation has swept across the globe, destabilizing entire industries in its wake.
The specifics of the case concern certain P2P networks, but fundamentally speaking, the entire Internet is a P2P network. It is the greatest invention for facilitating the sharing of information ever created.
Now what do we do with that? Do we decide that because it is easier than ever before to copy intellectual property we must cripple our computers and the Net, because the threat to established business models for the entertainment industry is so great? Or are the benefits from the new paradigm so obvious that it's time to tell the lords of Sony and Universal and MGM to suck it up, to evolve new business models, or die? To go with the flow, rather than try to resist the tide? Isn't it time to let a thousand iTunes music stores bloom?
Both sides in this dispute are right. After the RIAA sued Napster out of business, the operators of file-sharing programs redesigned their systems so they would not suffer from Napster's fatal flaw. Napster included a central index of the files being shared, and so its owners knew who was using its system for copyright violation. But because they did nothing about it, they were deemed at fault.
I believe the record company lawyers when they argue that the changes in design to P2P networks were made on purpose so that the operators of the networks could get away with profiting from illegal activity while still staying within the bounds of the law. When an individual downloads a copy of a new Ashlee Simpson single from a P2P network without paying for it, that is a violation of copyright. Just how morally wrong that might be is a debatable issue. But its illegality is not.
To recap: The Sony-Betamax case decision ruled that it was legal to sell a device that could be used for illegal purposes. The defendants in Grokster argue that the same is true of P2P networks -- they are used for legal distribution of content as well as illegal. And they are correct. But there is no denying that P2P networks are popular because they are a great way to get free access to proprietary intellectual property. It's a big problem for the music business as it is presently constituted, and I have some sympathy for the executives trying to cope with it. If I were in their position, I'd try to stop it, too.
But I would fail because no matter how the Supreme Court rules in this case, the entertainment industry will not succeed in its efforts to stop widespread piracy. New distribution protocols will continue to be devised and people will continue to use them. It only gets easier to copy and distribute content. It never gets harder. Digital- rights-management software will continue to be cracked as soon as it appears. Or it will simply be irrelevant. Even the DRM software included in, say, Apple's iTunes, is a joke. I can buy a new album by the Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A. on iTunes, burn it to a CD, and then rip that CD into DRM-free MP3s and make it available for sharing on a P2P network in a matter of minutes. There might be some downgrade in sound quality inherent in the process of burning and ripping, but not enough to matter to anyone who really, really wants to hear the song "Galang" right now and is unwilling to pay 99 cents for it.
To be totally successful in preventing me from piracy would require a massive reengineering of the entire infrastructure of the digital world. Every device or program that enables the copying of data would have to be redesigned. So the defendants in Grokster are also right when they argue that the logical extension of the entertainment industry's position would mean bringing the digital revolution to a screeching halt. If the test of every new device or new software application or new improvement to the Internet is to ask whether it could possibly hurt the existing business models of movie studios and TV networks and music companies, then we might as well just all pack up our computers, go home, and start sharpening our pencils.
The combination of computers and the Internet is Pandora's box. The court has two obvious options: It can give the entertainment industry the right to stuff everything that has just popped out of that box back in, or it can recognize the inevitable, that the cat is out of the bag and we're all going to have to learn how to adapt.
It is possible to adapt, after all. iTunes is one great example -- even if the DRM included in it is annoying. My desire to search out songs on file-sharing networks plummeted when I was offered an easy, cheap way to get the music I wanted. Now I pay more for music on a monthly basis than I have in years and years. I suppose it's possible that the overall profitability of the music industry might decline in the long run, but then again, it might not. In the most famous example, Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" was spiked by its record company for not being commercial enough. Wilco leaked it online, generated a huge buzz among listeners, and then landed a new contract.
Great changes are afoot. Anyone paying attention to the Net has known this for a decade or more. The Supreme Court's decision to hear Grokster is just the latest ratification that profound questions about how to grapple with these changes need to be asked and answered.
And it doesn't have to lead to disaster. Because much as I wax nostalgic about my ancient albums, and worry about the precariousness of a world constructed out of pure data, there is still no question in my mind that what the computer has given us is better than what it has taken away.
"Play another record, Daddy," my son says, staring with fascination at the spinning black platter. My son is only 7, but he likes to rock. So I throw a little Killing Joke on and think back to my first summer after college to a late-hours club called the Vatican in Gainesville, Fla., where the playing of "War Dance" was a regular reason to hurl oneself onto the dance floor, with or without company.
Underneath Killing Joke in a stack of albums is Neil Young's three-record compilation, "Decade." Running my hands over its well-worn jacket, I recall persuading my grandfather to buy it for me when I was 13 or 14. He didn't know beans about popular music but he was trying to spoil me by offering to purchase one album. Being a sly opportunist, I picked an album that contained a whopping three records. And then listened to it, obsessively, for years.
Beneath Neil Young's plaintive visage stare the gangsta faces on the cover of N.W.A.'s "Straight Outta Compton." The strutting of Easy E seems ludicrous now. But staring at him I recall a night, fueled on tequila and rage at a busted marriage, spent chanting "Fuck Tha Police" with a friend at 3 in the morning, while throwing darts at a picture of my ex.
It's easy to get nostalgic about lost eras. Record albums are cooler than CDs and even the pallid CD jewel-box is an improvement on the physical nonentity that is a digital file. It's easy to imagine that our lives are somehow poorer without these signposts. When, 30 years from now, my son and daughter look for mementos to evoke their childhood, what will they latch on to? A playlist? Is that enough?
I think, actually, that it is. Because the whole fetishization of object as memory aid, much as I like to wallow in it, is still a red herring. It's the music itself that carries the most evocative force, not the delivery mechanism, no matter how cool the holographic art on "Their Satanic Majesties Request" or how massive Bob Marley's spleef is on "Catch a Fire."
I'll be honest: making a symbolic point by ripping my vinyl in honor of Grokster was really just a side benefit to my main goal -- getting all my music into the format where it has the most potential to be a vibrant, enriching part of my life.
The truly remarkable thing about the digitalization of music, and the emergence of the computer as my playback device of choice, is that it has made me a more active listener and a more empowered consumer than ever before. I am exposed to more new music now, via the Internet, than previously, and I enjoy better, easier, more serendipitous access to my old music. A random shuffle of my iTunes library is a swirling kaleidoscopic tour of my personal history, a constant delight.
That library is a part of who I am, and once I get everything I ever loved in there, I'm going to make sure I never lose it again. And I'm going to share it with friends and family.
So my kids won't have albums or CDs to haul around with them. But they will have, in their iPods or laptops or Sony PSPs or some new, as-yet-inconceivable doohickey, unbelievably vast libraries of art and photography and music and history and literature and science that will be personal expressions of glorious complexity. And they will have unprecedented powers to express their creativity in all kinds of audiovisual splendor. The future will belong to those companies who figure out how best to serve them, while those that get in their way will themselves fall by the wayside. The future should belong to the smart -- to the TiVos and Apples and Googles -- the companies that are nimble and cater to our needs, rather than to those who thwart our desires.
An enlightened society finds the right boundary lines between what profits the corporation and what profits the soul. Decisions are always being made as to what is acceptable or not. Home taping: OK. Selling copies of pirated movies: Not OK. In between, it always gets messy. Computers and the Internet have made possible an era in which information and art can be shared and distributed as never before. And yes, that does mean that people will share things that don't necessarily belong to them. But that's a small price to pay for living in the future. Here's hoping the Supreme Court understands that, when, sometime in the next few months, it decides the future of the Internet.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2005/03/30/grokster/
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Jury Fails to Determine Validity of Yahoo! Ad Tech Patent
Kevin Newcomb
The patent dispute over bid-for-placement technology between Yahoo! Search Marketing and FindWhat.com resulted in a mistrial late Wednesday. Parts of the case could still be decided by a judge next month.
A jury was unable to reach a verdict after deliberating since Friday in the U.S. District Court trial in California. The jury did find that FindWhat infringed on 18 claims within the patent held by Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture). They also found that FindWhat had proven six of those claims invalid during the trial, but they were unable to reach a decision on the 12 other claims.
"We are pleased to learn the jury has determined that FindWhat infringed on all of the patent claims that were before the jury and at issue in the trial," a Yahoo! spokesperson said. "It is unfortunate that the jury did not reach conclusion on the remaining issues. We look forward to resolving all remaining issues in the post-trial briefing that has been scheduled by the Court."
FindWhat's argument all along has been that the patent itself is invalid based on "inequitable conduct" by Yahoo!, meaning they did not file the paperwork correctly, or did not communicate properly with the patent office when the patent was filed.
"We continue to believe that FindWhat.com has never infringed any valid and enforceable claim of the '361 patent," said Craig Pisaris-Henderson, FindWhat.com's chairman and CEO.
Judge Cormac J. Carney has scheduled a hearing for June 24, 2005. At that time, he may rule on the issue of inequitable conduct, and he could potentially enter the parts of the jury's verdict where a decision was reached into the record, though he is not required to do so. The judge will not have a set time limit to make his decision, but he has generally tried to keep the trial moving quickly.
The jury found invalid two of the main claims in the patent describing the overall method of selling bid- for-placement search ads. If the judge accepts the jury's decisions on those two claims, FindWhat, and the industry in general, will score a big win. Most of the remaining issues relate to lesser issues that could force FindWhat and others to alter the way they do business without changing it completely.
"The up-side of inequitable conduct is good for the company and the industry," Pisaris-Henderson said. "The down-side is basically a neutral, as it has no effect on the way we do business."
Overture, now Yahoo! Search Marketing, filed the lawsuit in January 2002. The trial began last month after the judge denied FindWhat's attempts to have the case dismissed.
The dispute centers around the bid-for-placement business model and technology used by both Yahoo!'s Overture division and FindWhat. In July 2001, Overture was granted U.S. Patent No. 6,269,361, "System and method for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine." Yahoo! claims the patent protects its bid- for-placement products and another patent it holds protects its account management tools.
http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3504671
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Soufun.com Sues Sohu.com For Copyright Violations
Beijing's Haidian District People's Court yesterday held its first session on Soufun's lawsuit against Sohu (SOHU) for copyright and domain name violations.
Soufun claims in its petition that Sohu's real estate website Focus.cn, which was opened in Nanjing in February this year, has been copying large quantities of Soufun's web content including bulletin board (BBS) postings. Soufun presented relevant pictures and data as evidence.
But Sohu refutes Soufun's claims by saying that Soufun's information comes directly from real estate developers, so Soufun does not own the copyright to these words and pictures. For the BBS information, Sohu says the information was created by the users, and not by Soufun itself, so it is not a violation of copyright to reprint that information.
Soufun asks Sohu to pay RMB477,500 as compensation and make a public apology. The case is being processed by the court and there is no indication of when a decision will be made.
http://www.chinatechnews.com/index.p...e=news&id=2611
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Yahoo Sued Over Candyman Child Porn Site
A minor and his parents have filed a $10 million lawsuit against Yahoo Inc. and a man who once operated a Yahoo Groups site where members traded child pornography.
The lawsuit, filed on May 9 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, charged that Yahoo breached its duties by allowing co-defendant Mark Bates and others to share child pornography on a site, called Candyman, that Bates created and moderated via the Yahoo Groups service.
Yahoo spokeswomen Mary Osako said the company had not been served and did not comment on pending litigation.
Bates pleaded guilty in 2002 to setting up the Candyman group site for the trade and distribution of child pornography, the Houston Chronicle reported at the time. The site attracted thousands of users and was in operation for two months before Yahoo closed it down in February 2001.
Pornographic photos of the plaintiff -- who is using the name Johnny Doe -- were taken and posted to the Candyman site by a neighbor, said the lawsuit, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters.
Among other things, the plaintiffs alleged that Yahoo was aware of the activity on the site and that it took no action to block or remove the pornographic images of Doe and other children.
Attorneys familiar with cases involving online service providers said the Communications Decency Act generally shielded Web sites from responsibility for material posted by users.
"Unless the plaintiff has very concrete proof that Yahoo knew that this group contained child pornography, it's very likely that Yahoo will not be liable," said John Morris, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington.
"We believe that they knew, and at a minimum didn't exercise reasonable care on their sites," said Adam Voyles, the plaintiffs' lead attorney.
A child pornography investigation led by the FBI and dubbed Operation Candyman targeted Yahoo Groups users and resulted in the arrest of more than 100 people in the United States.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=8481234
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Adobe to Shut Down Digital Media Store
Robyn Weisman
Without any fanfare, the Adobe Digital Media Store, which was set up to showcase the versatility of the PDF format, will cease operations on June 3, 2005. According to its Web page, users no longer are able to purchase digital content, although they may download already purchased content and redeem gift certificates before the June closing date.
Tom Prehn, senior business development manager at Adobe Systems Inc. and the creator of its Digital Media Store, said that the store, which was launched Oct. 31, 2003, sold a wide range of content, from best-selling novels and popular magazines to scientific papers. According to Prehn, the store became unnecessary as vendors such as Amazon.com and eBooks.com increasingly offered a broad range of e-docs for purchase.
"E-books is a narrow term, with over 1 million e-docs now readily available. And they're becoming more popular worldwide in different languages and [countries], rather than just in North America," Prehn said.
According to Prehn, about 55 percent of PDF e-content sales are in reference and nonfiction. PDF provides consumers with the information they need right away, which may be why reference e-books and e-docs are more popular than so-called "entertainment" PDFs.
PDFs don't have to be an Internet blight. Click here to read Don Fluckinger's column.
Without commenting directly on the closure of Adobe's Digital Media Store, Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research, noted that problems exist with the PDF e-format.
"Our surveys show that 46 percent of online consumers are not interested in reading any form of content in a digital format," Wilcox said.
Wilcox said that adoption of e-books overall perhaps has lagged behind other forms of digital media because the pricing of most of these books is not that different from physical books.
"There aren't the same production costs involved, [yet] there is usually little or no difference in price between e-books and their physical counterparts. And the physical book format is highly portable. You can lend to someone else, while e-books are constrained by the devices they can be read on. It's hard to share content [through e-docs] as it is with physical books and magazines," Wilcox said.
For his part, Wilcox said he is baffled that e-books didn't pursue a lower-cost strategy to increase their adoption. Digital music downloads have already set a precedent by offering a lower price point in comparison to CDs. The average digital album costs around $10, about $3 to $4 less than a CD—which makes sense, given that a CD offers consumers extras such as better audio fidelity, album art and sometimes video.
http://www.pdfzone.com/article2/0,1759,1815262,00.asp
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BitTorrent Goes Trackerless: Publishing with BitTorrent gets easier!
Press Release
As part of our ongoing efforts to make publishing files on the Web painless and disruptively cheap, BitTorrent has released a 'trackerless' version of BitTorrent in a new release.
Suppose you bought a television station, you could broadcast your progamming to everyone in a 50 mile radius. Now suppose the population of your town tripled. How much more does it cost you to broadcast to 3 times as many people? Nothing. The same is not true of the Web. If you own a website and you publish your latest video on it, as popularity increases, so does your bandwidth bill! Sometimes by a lot! However, thanks to BitTorrent the website owner gets almost near-broadcast economics on the web by harnessing the unused upstream bandwidth of his/her users.
In prior versions of BitTorrent, publishing was a 3 step process. You would:
Create a ".torrent" file -- a summary of your file which you can put on your blog or website
Create a "tracker" for that file on your webserver so that your downloaders can find each other
Create a "seed" copy of your download so that your first downloader has a place to download from
Many of you have blogs and websites, but dont have the resources to set up a tracker. In the new version, we've created an optional 'trackerless' method of publication. Anyone with a website and an Internet connection can host a BitTorrent download!
While it is called trackerless, in practice it makes every client a lightweight tracker. A clever protocol, based on a Kademlia distributed hash table or "DHT", allows clients to efficiently store and retrieve contact information for peers in a torrent.
When generating a torrent, you can choose to utilize the trackerless system or a traditional dedicated tracker. A dedicated tracker allows you to collect statistics about downloads and gives you a measure of control over the reliability of downloads. The trackerless system makes no guarantees to reliability but requires no resources of the publisher. The trackerless system is not consulted when downloading a traditionally tracked torrent.
Although still in Beta release, the trackerless version of BitTorrent, and the latest production version are available at
http://www.bittorrent.com/
http://www.bittorrent.com/trackerless.html
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ILN News Letter
RIAA Sues Seven Shops For Selling Infringing CDs
Seven small record stores and convenience marts in Florida and New York were sued by the RIAA last week for allegedly selling infringing CDs. The copyright infringement suits accuse the businesses of reselling illegal CDs, or, in some cases, manufacturing counterfeit CDs.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1...332964,00.html
China Blocks Popular Gay Website
China has blocked a popular website devoted to providing information and support to the nation's large but closeted homosexual population, even as the nation fights an exploding AIDS epidemic. The site which sees 50,000 to 65,000 visits a day mainly from mainland Chinese, had been blocked since April 11th.
http://chinablockssite.notlong.com/
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Dutch Anti-Piracy Organisation Seeks File-Sharers’ IDs, Sues ISPs
As expected the Dutch anti-piracy organisation BREIN has taken the five biggest ISPs to court to obtain the identity of 42 of their customers, which it accuses of offering copyrighted material for upload. These 42 are the majority of the file-sharers who received a cease & desist letter through the ISPs and did not choose to settle for an average amount of 2100 euros (only eight did). This will be the first lawsuit in The Netherlands spinning from a copyright crack down on file-sharers and will test if ISPs have to hand over identifying information to aide copyright enforcement.
The ISPs' lawyer Alberdingk Thijm, of KaZaA fame, noted earlier that "a private party like BREIN has no legislative ground to obtain name and address information from providers." He refers BREIN to the possibility of criminal proceedings against the uploaders based on the alleged copyright infringement. Obviously BREIN'S director does not agree, but he will have to wait till June 6th before he can prove Alberdingk thijm wrong.
http://constitutionalcode.blogspot.c...ion-seeks.html
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Keep On Swapping! Canadian File Sharers Told
Pfohl
In the second blow against Big Music in two days, Canada's Justice Konrad von Finckenstein has ruled that putting music into a computer directory that might be shared remotely by someone else doesn't constitute copyright infringement under Canadian law.
The milestone ruling comes as Big Five record label - Universal Music, Warner Music, EMI, Sony Music and Bertelsmann's BMG - continue to accelerate their attempts to gain control of the way music is distributed online.
As part of the effort, they'd instructed their CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) to get a court order to force five Canadian ISPs to hand over the names of 29 people the labels claim were "each illegally distributing hundreds if not thousands of music copyright files to millions of strangers".
On March 15, "We are confident that the court will require internet service providers to disclose the identities of alleged digital music infringers," said CRIA general counsel Richard Pfohl . "The approach we have taken protects Canadians' privacy rights while ensuring that people can't steal music and remain anonymous."
However, von Finckenstein decided, "No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorised the reproduction of sound recordings. They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer user(s) via a P2P service."
He also said the labels had not:
"Made out a prima facie case (their affidavit evidence is deficient, they have not: made a causal link between P2P pseudonyms and IP addresses and they have not made out a prima facie case of infringement),
"Established that the ISPs are the only practical source for the identity of the P2P pseudonyms; and
"Established that the public interest for disclosure outweighs the privacy concerns in light of the age of the data."
In another announcement that spelled bad news for the music industry, "Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero," said Felix Oberholzer (Harvard Business School) and Koleman Strumpf (UNC Chapel Hill) in their new empirical analysis of the effect file sharing has on record sales.
Buy our music - or else!
In the meanwhile, the labels yesterday enacted another phase of their hard-core marketing plan to compel music lovers around the world to buy 'product'.
Their IFPI and other enforcement units in Denmark, Germany, Italy launched "the first wave of international lawsuits charging individuals with illegally file-sharing copyrighted music". Shortly afterwards, their French unit followed suit.
A total of 247 "alleged illegal file-sharers face legal action in a move that steps up the industry's international campaign against online copyright theft," says the IFPI in a puff release, also threatening that, "Further waves of lawsuits against major offenders will be launched in different countries in the coming months.
Big Music believes that to survive in the digital age, it has to replace p2p networks with corporate online music stores it backs and supplies.
The impact of von Finckenstein's decision is likely to be significant. Canadians are avid Websters and in 2002, 51% of all Canadian households had at least one member who regularly used the Internet from home, up from 49% in 2001.
And it'll be interesting to see what Quebec's Videotron will do.
With more than 430,000 Internet customers, it supplies high-speed cable Internet access throughout Quebec by cable and dial-up modem and is one of the five ISPs in the CRIA's sights.
The other four are Telus, Shaw, Bell Sympatico and Rogers Communications, all of which refused to hand their clients' names over to the CRIA.
Not Videotron, though. It's owned by Quebecor Media which is in turn a Archambault Group subsidiary, Archambault being the largest Quebec-based distributor and retailer of recorded music.
Last November it came out with a radio, tv and newspaper "awareness" project "similar to the RIAA campaign" against p2p file sharing.
But Shaw Communications president Peter Bissonnette was delighted.
"We are very, very pleased and I'm sure our customers are as well,'' he's quoted as saying in a CTV.ca story here. "We have obligations to protect the privacy of our customers. We've always taken that approach."
However, the chances of Big Music giving up are, of course, zero.
CTV's David Akin said the decision is different from similar rulings in the US where the music industry has sued 1,977 people since last fall. It has reached out-of-court settlements in around 400 cases.
"Some lawyers were saying the music industry might have hurt its case through legal sloppiness," Akin says in the CTV report.
"They really didn't have their t's crossed and their i's dotted. They would likely go back and assemble the evidence the judge said was missing. The judge said clearly there are some tests that have to be met, and the record industry failed to meet those tests."
Once they do that, the industry can resubmit its case, says CTV, adding.
"Until then, Canadian online music traders are free to keep swapping songs, Akin said."
And don't forget - Canada is the country where Big Tobacco learned you can't get away with it forever.
Go
here for a .pdf of the decision.
http://p2pnet.net/story/1118