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Old 07-09-11, 07:00 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 10th, '11

Since 2002


































"For every... filter there’s a work-around. For every blacklist there’s a proxy server. And for every well-meaning attempt to limit the bad stuff there is good stuff that gets knocked out too." – Eric Schmidt


"[The Kuchar brothers] were the people who made me want to make movies. They were giants. They inspired four to five generations of militantly eccentric art fans. To me they were the Warner Brothers of the underground." – John Waters


"The idea that you would hire someone on an—essentially—success fee to run around and sue people at will who may or may not have infringed as a way of protecting yourself... does not reflect how news is created and disseminated in the modern world." – John Paton


































September 10th, 2011




"It Was a Dumb Idea": Newspaper Chain Fires Copyright Troll Righthaven
David Kravets

The new chief executive of MediaNews Group, publisher of the Denver Post and 50 other newspapers, said it was “a dumb idea” for the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain to sign up with copyright troll Righthaven.

The Denver-based publisher’s year-long copyright infringement litigation deal with Righthaven is terminating at month’s end, said John Paton, who replaced Dean Singleton to lead the company on Wednesday.

“The issues about copyright are real,” Paton told Wired.com in a telephone interview. “But the idea that you would hire someone on an—essentially—success fee to run around and sue people at will who may or may not have infringed as a way of protecting yourself... does not reflect how news is created and disseminated in the modern world.

“I come from the idea that it was a dumb idea from the start,” Paton added, noting that Righthaven was informed of the decision to end relations last month.

On Wednesday, Wired reported that Las Vegas-based Righthaven, founded more than a year ago to monetize print news content through copyright infringement lawsuits, was struggling after several courtroom setbacks. Righthaven has not prevailed in court on any of the infringement lawsuits filed over MediaNews’ content, though it appears from court records that about two dozen cases had settled out of court.

Paton said if he was MediaNews’ chief a year ago, he likely never would have signed on with Righthaven, which hoped to fix the print media’s financial ills by suing bloggers and website owners for reposting snippets or entire copyrighted articles. Terms of the Righthaven-MediaNews deal grant each side a 50 percent stake in settlements and verdicts.

Three dozen outstanding MediaNews infringement cases over Denver Post material are on hold while a federal judge in Colorado weighs dismissal over MediaNews’ agreement with Righthaven. A decision by US District Judge John Kane of Denver is pending on whether the lawsuits can proceed to the merits of the infringement allegations.

Sara Glines, a MediaNews vice president, said those cases are likely to remain active as Judge Kane weighs whether Righthaven has standing to sue over the Denver Post copyrights.

“It’s more complicated than that because the cases are with Righthaven, and they have control as long as litigation is in process,” Glines wrote in an e-mail. “But our position is that we will not pursue further litigation with Righthaven.”

The legal flap in those copyright cases concerns Righthaven not owning the copyrights it was filing suit over, despite initially saying it did. Instead, MediaNews granted Righthaven permission to sue over the newspaper chain’s content. The deal does not grant Righthaven license to use the content in any other way other than for litigation purposes. The Copyright Act, however, only gives rights holders legal standing to sue on behalf of their own works.

Judges in Las Vegas have been dismissing Righthaven lawsuits left and right over the same standing issue in lawsuits regarding content owned by Las Vegas-based Stephens Media—Righthaven’s first and remaining client—and a major investor in the faltering enterprise.

Righthaven has not filed a new case in two months. Righthaven’s chief executive, Steve Gibson, said in a recent telephone interview it is awaiting appellate rulings on the issues of standing and fair use before pursuing more litigation.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...righthaven.ars





Court: ISP Not Responsible When Subscribers Infringe Copyrights
enigmax

In a case brought by EMI against one of Germany’s largest Internet service providers, a court has ruled that the ISP cannot be held liable when its subscribers infringe copyright. Music giant EMI wanted the ISP to block a certain file-sharing site but the court decided otherwise and dismissed the case.

After calls to the Russian host of a file-sharing site to shut down the service failed, in early 2010 a leading music label launched legal action against one of Germany’s largest ISPs.

Although the identities of the plaintiff, defendant and file-sharing site are redacted from court papers, the case reference (28 0 362/10) reveals a lawsuit between EMI Music and ISP HanseNet Telekommunikations.

EMI argued that HanseNet was involved in infringing its copyrights by providing Internet access to subscribers using a file-sharing links site.

To this end, the label argued that the ISP, Germany’s 4th largest, should stop providing subscriber access to the service by way of DNS blocking. Furthermore, to counter the site changing its URL or IP address to circumvent any court ordered injunction, EMI also asked for the site’s current and future IP addresses to be blocked.

HanseNet argued that as a mere conduit of information as detailed under the E-Commerce Directive 2000/31/EC, it is not responsible for the actions of others using its services.

The ISP also argued that infrastructure for carrying out such blocking isn’t in place and, in any event, such blocks are easily circumvented making it technically impossible for it to comply fully with any banning order.

Furthermore, even if a block could be carried out effectively, HanseNet said that such action is not required by law. The ISP argued that the blocking of a website constitutes a substantial interference with the fundamental right to freedom of information, and without legal basis could not be carried out.

In its recent ruling, the Cologne Regional Court decided that as an ISP HanseNet is not liable for the infringements of its customers. Describing the lawsuit as “unfounded”, the Court dismissed the case.

Christian Solmecke, a lawyer heavily involved in file-sharing cases at the Wilde Beuger Solmecke law firm, told TorrentFreak that in his opinion the decision is correct.

“The defendant is only a technical provider. He is not allowed to track the traffic of its users. The judge said, that looking into the traffic stream would be an infringement of German communication law. Furthermore the court stated, that blocking a domain is ineffective and therefore useless,” he explains.

Solmecke says that the Cologne Regional Court usually makes decisions in favor of copyright holders so the change in this case is welcome.

“We will try to use some of the argumentation of the court in our actual file-sharing cases. Especially we will try to convince the court, that parents have no chance to control the surfing behavior of their children,” Solmecke concludes.
https://torrentfreak.com/court-isp-n...rights-110908/





P2P Downloads Fall as 'Skynet' Introduced
Tom Pullar-Strecker

The "Skynet" law appears to be encouraging some internet users to stop accessing entertainment through peer-to-peer file sharing services, but the fall off in patronage has not been as marked as that which followed some crackdowns overseas.

Orcon chief executive Scott Bartlett said the internet provider had experienced about a 10 per cent drop in customers downloading files over peer-to-peer file sharing networks since the anti-piracy law took effect on Thursday, suggesting some customers were modifying their behaviour for fear of being fined.

Bartlett said he had been told by other internet providers that they had seen a bigger drop in traffic and said the new law was definitely having an effect, however the country's two largest internet providers were less certain.

TelstraClear spokesman Gary Bowering said it saw international traffic decline about the time the controversial regime came into force but it couldn't say for certain if the two events were related. "In broad terms, the recent change is noticeable but not major."

Telecom spokeswoman Anna Skerten said it had seen no discernible impact. While there had been "a few dips", these were within the bounds of normal fluctuations in traffic, she said.

In 2009, the BBC reported that Sweden experienced a one-third drop in total internet traffic after it forced internet providers to reveal the identities of illegal file-shares to right holders for the first time.

Telecom, TelstraClear and Orcon have not received any requests from rights holders that they send infringement notices to customers under New Zealand's "three-strikes" regime, but Bartlett said he was definitely expecting some and believed the first would come through in about a week.

He would not disclose his sources, but indicated Orcon had been in contact with organisations representing rights holders to discuss the smooth implementation of the regime, under which internet users can be brought in front of the Copyright Tribunal and fined up to $15,000 if they are detected three times accessing pirated material.

Skerten said Telecom was also in discussions in rights holders group to "get more of a handle from them as to what we can expect".

Southern Cross Cable marketing director Ross Pfeffer said it had no way of monitoring the overall volume of internet traffic to and from the country.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/di...law-introduced





How Sweden Dismantled Many Of Its Online Civil Rights At The Orders Of US Content Industries
Mike Masnick

People who talk about copyright policy and some of the things going on around the globe, often talk about how various governments' decisions appear to be direct-on-order from Hollywood and the legacy US entertainment industry. And, to some extent, that sounds crazy conspiratorial to think that Hollywood and the MPAA would be so involved in domestic policies that impact innovation around the globe. But as some are noting, this "nutjobby" theory is now actually looking like clear fact, at least in the case of Sweden. This has all come out thanks to the State Department cable dumps, which basically show that pretty much Sweden's entire strategy in pushing through bad laws that take away civil rights and privacy online were direct from the US entertainment industry, weakly laundered through the US State Department, who merely passed along Hollywood's orders to the Swedish government... backed up with the threat of trade sanctions. What's really amazing is that the diplomats in the State Department never seem to consider whether or not they should be protecting a few big entertainment companies, rather than the best interests of citizens around the globe. It's such a short term view, as well, because wiping out civil rights elsewhere will come back to haunt the US. But as long as the MPAA's members keep getting paid...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...dustries.shtml





The Coalition Has No Digital Rights Policy
Loz Kaye

The Pirate Party movement believes that the way information is shared and controlled is a key fight in 21st century politics. The Internet gives us tools to participate in a more active and equal way in culture, political life and the economy - if we are able to grasp them. These tools, which we could only have only dreamt about two decades ago, have opened up a new front in politics. Every key story this year has had a digital dimension; from the riots to “Hackgate”, from the Middle East to failings in our education system. We all should have the right to take part in the peaceful information revolution.

Yet, at every turn, the coalition has been exposed as having no coherent policy on digital rights. Nothing illustrates this better than its zig-zag course on Internet filtering and website blocking.

A key moment was the BT/NewzBin2 case. A clutch of Hollywood studios took BT to court in order to force them to restrict access to the website "NewzBin2". The site in question provides only links to film downloads – it does not even host copyrighted content. The studios were extremely pleased to have the court find in their favour, seeing it as a crucial precedent. They were beginning to lose patience with how slowly the Government was implementing the Digital Economy Act, and saw this as a convenient shortcut. Culture and communications minister Ed Vaizey enthusiastically welcomed the judgment – ironically enough, online, by tweeting: ”Interesting judgment in Newzbin case, should make it easier for rights holders to prevent piracy”. He went on to continue defending the result, and his statement, from a barrage of replies.

This was not just a personal view, or a casual evening's tweeting. It is the end product of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s approach to filesharing, as shaped by big media. Obviously the case has profound implications – it is now possible to get an injunction to force Internet service providers to censor websites in the UK. The question is how this will play out in practice, will we see a kind of site by site legal skirmish? Clearly no-one wants to see this – apart from lawyers, perhaps.

Not satisfied, however, rights holders from the music industry to the Premier League immediately began piling on the pressure to ‘streamline’ the process. Even before the Newzbin judgement, the Open Rights Group exposed secret meetings between these industry groups and Ed Vaizey. Proposals included “permanent injunctions on the basis that a ‘Council’ and ‘expert body’ have come to the view that the evidence submitted by copyright owners is valid and the blocking access to the website is appropriate.” Not just censorship, but censorship by quango.

However at least we thought we knew where we stood - the Government department responsible has a view on web blocking, and believes that it is proportionate and effective.

And then again, perhaps not. Just days after the NewzBin2 case we heard a completely contradictory announcement, on the topic of the Digital Economy Act's own provisions for web blocking (easily overlooked given the furore over the Act's more headline-grabbing "3 strikes" elements). Media regulator Ofcom reported back on the act with the view that "blocking web addresses is not practical or desirable as a primary approach", and Vaizey’s culture ministry promptly announced it would no longer bring forward these reserve powers on site-blocking – though they still exist. The media focus on this story was reserved for Vince Cable, who called site blocking “cumbersome and unworkable”. This was presented as a victory for the Business Secretary. The Telegraph, who has not always been keen on Mr Cable, even hailed him as ‘Saint Vince’ and said that he is “ready to fight for one of our basic human rights in the digital age”.

So it would appear that the Business department is on a full on collision course with the Culture and Media department, which cannot be in the interests of the digital economy. But frankly it seems more like the empty handing out of a few media brownie points. The NewzBin2 judgement makes the blocking proposals in the Digital Economy Act irrelevant, anyway. Unless ‘Saint Vince’ is set to take on Hollywood and tell them their injunctions are cumbersome and unworkable, his portrayal as some kind of digital hero is just hot air.

As if any further confirmation was needed that the government's policy on digital rights, and freedom of speech is entirely made up on the fly, along came the riots and a classic knee-jerk reaction to the use of social media. As I observed in my article for ORGzine on the subject, one of the few concrete parts of David Cameron’s statement to the recalled House of Commons was a full on attack on social media. It was carefully worded, but the thrust was that the Prime Minister thought further action is necessary to combat the “ill” done by status updates.

At this point things took a turn for the authoritarian, with MP Louise Mensch saying it was "acceptable to shut Twitter and Facebook off for an hour or two”. It is also worth pointing out that she is a member of the influential Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Whatever happened to "cumbersome and unworkable”? Let alone the question of who would be responsible for such a shut down, how they would be accountable, what the threshold of perceived threat should be to make such a decision warranted, or how it could be reversed.

It took another two weeks until the next u-turn, when Theresa May met with representatives from the industry and police, and it became clear that ministers were rowing back from an untenable position. It was allowed to trickle out that the Home Secretary started the meeting expressing the view that the "government has no intention of restricting internet services" – although, if you've been following the u-turns carefully, you'll notice that the government is still happy to leave that job to Hollywood and their lawyers.

On the day of the meeting, Nick Clegg gave an interview in which he was widely trailed as saying: ''We are not going to become like Iran or China. We are not going to suddenly start cutting people off''.

What he actually began by saying on Cameron’s proposal was “We have not said as a government we are going to do this. All we have said is that we will look at whether it might be right to do this”. In other words, despite the media management, this is an endorsement of the Prime Minister’s position. What is evident is that Nick Clegg is only permitted to speak out on digital (or human) rights when it suits the Tories, while the Lib Dems are silent when it matters most. I don't personally count sitting on the front bench and looking uncomfortable as a contribution to defending digital rights.

We might be tempted to shrug this all off as spin, but it does not amount to credible government. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats must decide once and for all if they are willing to commit to a true coalition. Clegg’s party – and its activists – can no longer pretend to be both in office and in opposition.

Let's pick up where we left off: Theresa May's stated position was that the Government has "no intention of restricting Internet services". Unfortunately, this is directly contradicted by her own ministry. The Home Office's "Prevent" strategy on terrorist radicalisation says “Internet filtering across the public estate is essential.” Notice that the context for this statement is the same as that of the riots: threats to public order and the safety of British citizens. Yet the conclusions are strikingly different. What it also shows is that the confusion in government policy is not just the result of two parties expressing different viewpoints; even individual ministries can not agree the same line from month to month.

I am fully aware that there is a profound difference between downloading an illegal copy of “Swagger Jagger” and organising a terrorist attack online. But the point that site blocking is “cumbersome and unworkable”, in Vince Cable’s words, not because it is politically difficult, but because it is both technically and practically impossible. This is something the Pirate Party has been repeating ever since we were formed, but if the government chooses to ignore us, then they might care to listen to Google’s Eric Schmidt:

“For every... filter there’s a work-around. For every blacklist there’s a proxy server. And for every well-meaning attempt to limit the bad stuff there is good stuff that gets knocked out too.”

If any law has embodied government's difficult relationship to the Internet it must be the Digital Economy Act. With clear provisions to disconnect whole families, including provably innocent people, from the Internet, this Act was a sure fire way to sabotage, not build, the digital economy. Rushed through in the dying days of a discredited parliament, the Act remains a real cause of anger it seems Westminster has still failed to understand. Despite the hopes of some in the grassroots of the Liberal Democrat party, the coalition is now a serious obstacle to progress on this issue.

An Early Day motion (EDM1913), noting the a UN report which categorically stated that disconnection clauses were in violation of international human rights law, received much support – in fact, more MPs signed the motion than voted against the Digital Economy Act. But what it made crystal clear was how few Conservative MPs were willing to put their name to it. The brutal truth is that the Tories are unlikely to give the legislative time to getting rid of the Act, let alone vote for any change.

Worse still, it has been recently revealed that the Government actually asked Ofcom to make Digital Economy Act appeals harder. It also wants to rule out a public consultation – once again trying to do deals away from the public eye. I suspect it is actually this fear of the power technology can give us to hold our representatives to account that drives alarm about the Internet in the corridors of power.

The ongoing farce of the swinging positions makes one thing clear – there is no common view in the government on the Internet. What is all the more extraordinary is that they and, for that matter, the media do not even seem to have noticed.

Either the coalition can continue down the path to ever increasing control or they can start listening and embrace the idea of digital rights. It is time for them to choose.
http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/blog/2...rights-policy/





FBI / IFPI Teach How To Bust Private Torrent Sites
Ernesto

A diplomatic cable recently published by Wikileaks reveals how the U.S. Government has spent $125,000 to educate Ukraine’s police officers on Internet piracy. Among other things, experts from the FBI and IFPI taught 30 of Ukraine’s top cyber-crime officers how to bust private torrent sites. Whether the investment will pay off is doubtful though, as some police officers said that they have no Internet connection at their workplace.

The U.S. Government is determined to do all it can to reduce online piracy, and a cable written by U.S. Ambassador William Taylor from Ukraine shows that this effort is not limited to the homeland.

The cable, dated 17 December 2008, was published by Wikileaks this week and reveals details on a piracy workshop the U.S. Government organized in the country.

In the cable Ambassador Taylor writes that the workshop was paid for by the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, which allocated $125,000 to educating Ukrainian authorities on piracy. About 30 local police officers with experience in computer/internet cases were participating .

A topic high on the agenda during the meeting was the fact that many large torrent sites are hosted in Ukraine. Matthew Lamberti of the Department of Justice named the example of Demonoid, a large semi-private BitTorrent tracker that started renting servers in the country early 2008.

“Lamberti noted that earlier this year one of the world’s biggest pirate websites had moved to Ukraine, and that the founder of the site had stated that he was looking for a ‘suitable’ home after being pressured to leave several other countries, including the Netherlands, Canada, and Malaysia. Lamberti cautioned that Ukraine might become a haven for pirate sites if it did not step up enforcement efforts,” the ambassador writes.

However, stopping these sites from renting server space is easier said than done, as Ukrainian authorities don’t have the legal means to do so.

“Representatives have argued that Ukrainian law does not give law enforcement officials clear authority to shut down such websites, although sometimes ISPs can be persuaded to do so,” the ambassador notes.

Aside from these warnings the workshop also explained how private BitTorrent trackers in the U.S. and U.K. were effectively shut down. Kiffa Shirley from the FBI’s Cybercrime Fraud Unit used the example of EliteTorrents, one of the largest BitTorrent communities that was raided during the summer of 2005.

elitetorrents

“Shirley gave a detailed briefing on the different kinds of websites that engage in internet piracy and the technology they employ. He also described the investigative steps he and other FBI agents took to investigate elitetorrents.org, a pirate website based in the United States that was known for its extremely fast illegal downloads,” we read in the cable.

Mumith Ali from the music industry funded anti-piracy group IFPI explained how they busted the music oriented BitTorrent tracker OiNK in 2007.

“Ali provided participants with strategies and best practices based on his experiences investigating some of the biggest pirate websites in Europe, including a UK-based private pirate website with 180,000 members notorious for offering illegal downloads of pre-release music albums. Prosecution of the owner of the site is currently pending in English Crown Court,” the ambassador summarizes.

Interestingly enough, it later turned out that one of the main reasons why no torrent admin has been found guilty in the UK is because of IFPI’s involvement. Since the police relied heavily on information provided by industry-funded groups like IFPI, the courts doubted the objectivity of the investigations against both FileSoup and OiNK.

Among other things, the IFPI employee introduced the Ukrainian cyberpolice to several investigative tools they use to spy on BitTorrent communities, including the packer sniffer application Wireshark.

“Moreover, Ali gave a live demonstration of how people download illegal works from pirate websites. Ukrainian participants were particularly interested in Ali’s description of a free computer program called ‘Wireshark’ used by IFPI to investigate pirate sites; we are following up with the Ministry of Interior to provide more information on this program.”

There is no doubt that the 30 computer experts of the Ukrainian police force have learned a lot during the workshop. However, it is doubtful whether the tens of thousands of dollars in U.S. tax payer money will have much of an effect. Apparently, there are bigger problems in the local police force that have to be dealt with first, as the ambassador notes at the end of the cable.

“Unfortunately resource issues will continue to hamper enforcement efforts. For example, several police officers from the regions complained privately that they did not have access to the internet in their workplace,” he writes.

Bummer.
https://torrentfreak.com/fbi-ifpi-te...-sites-110902/





Appeal Restrictions for Those Accused of Illegally File Sharing

UK plans to limit the grounds for appeal for alleged illegal file sharers
Dinah Greek

The Government is planning to restrict the grounds for appeal that will be given to alleged illegal file sharers under the process being developed by Ofcom.

As part of its obligations under the Digital Economy Act (DEA), the communications regulator must establish the independent appeals body that people can use if accused of illegal file sharing.

Ofcom has also been developing the code for the online copyright appeals process, which sets out what grounds people can use to appeal such as “the subscriber took reasonable steps to prevent other person infringing copyright”.

However a previous copy of Ofcom’s online copyright infringement appeals process seen by Computeractive included a more general right of appeal. The code stated that "The grounds set out in the Act are non-exhaustive and we reflected this in our drafted Code by including an option to appeal on 'any other reasonable ground'."

However the Department of Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) has asked Ofcom to remove this option.

Quite what is meant by ‘any other reasonable grounds’ is not clear and neither Ofcom nor the DCMS would clarify the statement nor will they confirm the authenticity of the copy we have seen.

“We're not commenting other than confirming that the Government has asked us to remove something that had been added to the Code,” an Ofcom representative told us.

Although Ofcom added the option because it felt that as technologies and consumer behaviours evolve it would avoid future lengthy revisions of the code it said that “it is within the Government's remit to change the Code as it sees fit.”

Therefore it is not clear if it will be put back in and the DCMS said: “We are still examing the code and will not speculate on what will be in the final version”.
Under the Digital Economy Act (DEA) copyright holders will be able to report a suspected infringer to the suspect’s ISP. The ISP then sends out warning letters to this person.

The ISP must keep this data so it can provide an infringement list showing the copyright holder how many times a user has been notified about alleged copyright infringement. Persistent offenders could ultimately have their internet service suspended.

However they will be able to appeal any accusations by rights holders.Last month culture minister Ed Vaizey put a price on this, which will be £20 if they wished use this process. This reason for the charge is to deter people making what Mr Vaizey called ‘frivolous’ appeals. The sum will be refunded if a person wins their case.

Saskia Walzel, senior policy advocate at Consumer Focus said: "There are significant issues around how consumers can appeal against notifications. The requirement for bill payers to show that the alleged infringement did not happen on their internet connection is a particular concern.

"The Act does not explicitly say that bill payers can’t appeal notices on other grounds than those it sets out. It is important that Ofcom’s code provides certainty to consumers about their rights to appeal allegations by copyright owners. It should be clarified that bill payers are not liable for copyright infringement by others, unless they explicitly authorised the infringement."
http://www.computeractive.co.uk/ca/n...y-file-sharing





P2P Lawyer: IP Address Not Enough, Let Me Search All PCs in the House
Nate Anderson

A file-sharing lawyer admitted this week that IP addresses don’t by themselves identify someone accused of sharing copyrighted material online.

While an IP address can identify Internet subscribers, “this does not tell Plaintiff who illegally downloaded Plaintiff's works, or, therefore, who Plaintiff will name is the Defendant in this case,” lawyer Brett Gibbs told a California federal magistrate judge. “It could be the Subscriber, or another member of his household, or any number of other individuals who had direct access to Subscriber’s network.”

To figure out who actually shared the pornographic movie at the center of the case, lawyer Brett Gibbs of Steele Hansmeier LLC told the judge (PDF) he would need to search every computer in the subscriber's household.

The subscriber in question, a grandfather who is not named in court documents, didn’t take this suggestion well. He is representing himself, and when Gibbs called him on the phone to discuss the matter, the grandfather “told Plaintiff's attorney that he felt like destroying and/or disposing of his computer. When told by Plaintiff's counsel that such actions would violate the explicit instructions of Plaintiff's counsel and his ISP, and may even result in Court sanctions for spoliation, Subscriber indicated that he did not care… Plaintiff is concerned that he may in fact do something rash to attempt to escape liability in this case in the near future.”

Boy Racer

Mass filesharing lawsuits have been predicated on the idea that an IP address is all the information required to find out who shared a copyrighted file online (or, at least, that it is all the information required to find someone legally accountable for copyright infringement occurring over their Internet connection). In the last two years, tens of thousands of settlement letters have been sent to Internet subscribers across the country, demanding a few thousand dollars from them to make federal lawsuits go away.

That happened in this case, Boy Racer v. Doe, in California’s Northern District. A judge refused to allow lawyers to investigate the initial set of 52 IP address in a single case; instead, they could investigate just one. After contacting the ISP in question, Gibbs had his subscriber, but a one-hour phone call with the man on August 18 apparently convinced him that the subscriber knew nothing about it.

So Gibbs went back to court to tell Judge Paul Singh Grewal that he needed to search every computer in the home. California lawyer Stewart Kellar was at this hearing, and he noted that Grewal was plainly irritated at the request.

Grewal asks, if the ISP subpoena info is insufficient, why did Boy Racer only ask for that? Judge Grewal thought it was made clear from the expedited discovery that the ISP info would be sufficient to allow this case to succeed and now I’m hearing that is not true…

Grewal is getting stern, says: now I’m hearing the early discovery is insufficient, now I’m hearing you need doc requests and interrogatories, that’s a whole lot more discovery than I was lead to believe, isn’t it? You can’t get this discovery without a court order correct? Gibbs admits that is correct…

Gibbs is asking to inspect the subscriber’s hardware and any systems in the household. Grewal asks: what if there are 5 computers in the residence that accessed the IPs? What if there are half a dozen smart phones? Grewal notes that in his house there are at least a dozen connective devices…

Grewal says if we allow this type of discovery in a case that hasn’t been severed, we’re looking at the search of potentially hundreds or thousands of devices without anyone yet being named.


Looking through a defendant's hard drive is hardly unusual; Jammie Thomas-Rasset had to turn hers over to an RIAA investigator as part of her file-sharing lawsuit years ago. But the Boy Racer case is becoming yet another example of the limits of IP addresses—and an example of how all the parties involved increasingly recognize these limits.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-the-house.ars





SAP to Plead Guilty to DOJ Criminal Charges

The US Department of Justice filed a criminal suit against former SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow
Loek Essers

Former SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow will plead guilty to criminal charges of copyright infringement for downloading software from Oracle's servers.

According to documents filed in the U.S. District Court of Northern California, former SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow will plead guilty to all 12 criminal charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice.

"TomorrowNow will wave indictment and will agree to be charged in an Information with eleven counts of Unauthorized Access to a Protected Computer with Intent to Defraud and Obtaining Something of Value," the stipulation signed by the U.S. attorney and TomorrowNow said.

The company is also pleading guilty on one count of criminal infringement of a copyright.

The authorities filed criminal charges on Wednesday and TomorrowNow settled with the DOJ on Thursday. The penalty SAP faces is unclear. "The United States will lodge an under-seal copy of the proposed plea agreement with the Court separately," according to the document. Sentencing will take place at a hearing on Sept. 14.

"We are very pleased that the Department of Justice brought criminal charges against SAP for their widespread and systematic theft of Oracle's intellectual property to which SAP has repeatedly confessed," Oracle spokesperson Deborah Heller said in an email statement.

The very rare criminal prosecution follows years of protracted litigation between Oracle and SAP. Oracle sued SAP in 2007, alleging that its former subsidiary, TomorrowNow, illegally downloaded Oracle software and support materials in the course of providing lower-cost support to Oracle customers. A jury awarded Oracle US$1.3 billion [http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...n_SAP_lawsuit] in damages in November 2010. SAP challenged that figure in February this year.

On Sept. 1, a federal judge overturned a $1.3 billion judgment and approved SAP's request that Oracle accept a lower award of $272 million, which would negate the need for a new trial. Oracle could still appeal that decision and Heller said that the company is considering that.
http://www.itworld.com/software/2018...iminal-charges





Russian Minister: YouTube and Google Should Be Shut Down For Copyright Infringement
enigmax

A recently leaked confidential diplomatic cable has revealed that not only is the United States government unhappy with the level of intellectual property rights enforcement carried out by Russia, but also that the reverse is true. Russia’s Deputy Minister of Economic Development said that not only do U.S. sites continue to offer pirated Russian movies, but that YouTube and Google should be shut down for not respecting local laws.

When it comes to the protection of intellectual property, it’s well known that the United States is almost continually unhappy with just about every other country’s regimes. A huge amount of lobbying is carried out on a continual basis by government and the private sector in the hope that one day everyone will adopt US-like approaches to rights enforcement.

One of the countries that presents particular challenges to the United States is old enemy Russia. Of course, relations have warmed somewhat in recent years and the world is a safer place as a result, but seeing eye to eye on infringement issues will take a while yet.

The United States feels that Russia needs to show more respect for U.S. intellectual property rights and has been openly critical, for example, of the state of the pirate movie and music scene there. However, perhaps what is less known is that Russia isn’t happy with U.S. efforts to protect its home grown products either.

According to a confidential diplomatic cable dated 13th November 2009, U.S. Russian embassy officials met with Ministry of Economic Development Deputy Minister Stanislav Voskresenskiy to discuss the upcoming United States/Russia IPR Working Group meeting, scheduled to take place in Washington, DC just a few days later.

Voskresenskiy told the meeting that Russia’s record on IPR enforcement had been on an upward trend in the previous 12 months. However, the cable notes that while Voskresenskiy said that pirated goods are now more difficult to buy, he admitted that since Russia’s record is so poor, “a positive trend was not difficult to accomplish.” Actual achievements, he added, would be presented at the Washington meeting.

What follows is an interesting take by Voskresenskiy on the current state of world IPR enforcement and a clear indication that the Russians do not believe that the problems lie exclusively with them.

“Voskresenskiy went on to state that, in his opinion, no country in the world is prepared to fight Internet piracy. He argued that all existing laws, including laws in the U.S., are antiquated and do not address new technological trends,” the cable reads.
“As an example, [Voskresenskiy] stated that YouTube and Google (as YouTube’s owner) should be shut down because they do not conform to current Russian IPR laws. He admitted that this was not feasible, but continued to emphasize that these entities need to follow local laws, even if the laws are outdated,” the cable adds.

But just as Hollywood and the music industry criticizes Russian piracy of U.S. products (the AllofMP3 controversy as just one small example), Russia’s Deputy Minister of Economic Development says that the United States needs to sharpen up too.

“Voskresenskiy also raised two issues [embassy officials] have heard from other sources: a) that Russian made movies are being pirated and sold in the U.S., cutting into Russian box-office sales, and b) that there are U.S.-based Internet sites selling pirated Russian movies for download,” notes the cable.

“Voskresenskiy stated that Russian delegation members to the Working Group are eager to discuss these issues with their U.S. counterparts.”

This and other cables reveal that the Russians believe U.S. / Russia discussions on intellectual property rights are “unbalanced”. However, the fact that the Russians are prepared to discuss the negative effects of piracy on their domestic rights holders is seen as a positive by embassy staff and actually present a great opportunity “to begin engaging the Russians on cooperative efforts to improve IPR protection.”

Rest assured though, the quid pro quo won’t include shutting down YouTube or Google. Hopefully the Russians won’t get any ideas about blocking “rogue sites” that don’t respect their local laws….
https://torrentfreak.com/russian-min...gement-110906/





YouTube’s Content-ID Piracy Filter Wreaks Havoc
Ernesto

YouTube describes its Content-ID anti-piracy filter as a state-of-the-art technology, but those who look closely can see that in some cases it creates a huge mess. The system invites swindlers to claim copyright on other people’s videos and make money off them through ads. It automatically assigns thousands of videos to people who don’t hold the copyrights, and its take-down process appears to be hugely biased towards copyright holders.

In recent years Google and YouTube have gone to extremes to protect copyright holders. Perhaps the greatest achievement thus far is their state-of-the-art Content-ID system.

Content-ID allows rightsholders to upload the videos and music they own to a central ‘fingerprint’ database. YouTube will then scan their site for full or partial matches, and if there is a hit the copyright holder can automatically take it down, or decide to put their ads on it.

Although the above sounds like a fair and honest solution, not everything Content-ID does goes to plan. Of course some errors are expected when pioneering a new system, but the problems are more severe than that. Welcome to the world of YouTube swindlers, mass misattribution of copyrights and an unfair bias towards stubborn copyright holders.

One of the problems appears to be that people with bad intentions can claim copyright on videos they have nothing to do with, and even run ads on them. In the YouTube support forums there are hundreds of posts about this phenomenon, also summarized by the PRV blog recently.

Although some swindlers may indeed be around, most of the “misattribution” problems seem to be the result of screwups and technical limitations. A good example is the case of the Dutch game review site Gamer.nl, owned by the publishing platform Sanoma.

All Game Videos Are Belong to?

A quick Google search shows that the site has ‘claimed’ ownership of more than 10,000 YouTube videos, nearly all game related. However, most of the videos in question have nothing to do with the website. In fact, most are standard game trailers or fan made videos.

So what is going wrong here?

It appears that the Content-ID filter is automatically assigning these videos to Gamer.nl, because the clips produced by the review site also include snippets of trailers and in-game play. In other words, the Content-ID filter is set so broad that official game trailers are assigned to Gamer.nl because Gamer.nl uses footage from the trailers in its reviews.

As a result Gamer.nl is now collecting ad revenue on thousands of videos it has nothing to do with. And bear in mind that the above is just a single example, there are several similar examples which show that it’s a widespread issue.

TorrentFreak got in touch with Gamer.nl to hear their side of the story. They confirmed to us that in their case the videos are flagged by the system, not an actual person.

“Because our productions contain a lot of game footage, YouTube classifies videos with similar footage as infringing. Since this is an automated process we can’t do anything about it,” Gamer.nl’s Joost Wouterse said.

“Unfortunately the YouTube notice makes it look like we are actively flagging material as infringing, but this is not the case. We would never claim ownership on the game footage we use in our productions, but we do of course claim ownership on our full videos,” he added.

Wouterse understands that the confusion caused by the mass-takedowns is unfortunate, but at the same time he’s happy that the Content-ID system allows them to protect their own videos. The big question is of course, whether the thousands of videos that are assigned to them by mistake can simply be seen as collateral damage.

In response to this Wouterse said that YouTube users can file a counterclaim if they disagree with the removal of a video. But this isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.

Many users simply do not know whether they are allowed to post parts of a game trailer, or in-game material, and may think the claim from Gamer.nl is legit. Also, since YouTube threatens to ban the accounts of repeat infringers for life, they may not want to cause any trouble.

Bias Towards Copyright Holders?

Adding to the scare factor that might prevent people from complaining, YouTube’s Content-ID system also appears to hold an underreported bias towards copyright holder which sometimes makes bringing back content impossible.

Patrick McKay, candidate for Juris Doctor at Regent University School of Law and founder of FairUseTube.org, told TorrentFreak that there’s a systematic flaw in YouTube’s copyright enforcement system that needs to be addressed. A bias towards copyright holders which goes directly against U.S. law.

According to the DMCA, YouTube should make a video available again if a user disputes a claim from a copyright holder. The copyright holder then has to file a lawsuit to take the disputed video offline again. But this is not how YouTube works according to McKay.

“Under YouTube’s content ID system, the exact opposite is true. After a copyright holder rejects a Content ID dispute, that’s the end of it, and the user’s video is blocked without giving them further recourse under either copyright system—Content ID or DMCA,” he explained to TorrentFreak.

“Content ID thus gives the copyright holder sole authority to decide whether a video is fair use (and most copyright holders will never agree something is fair use), which is completely unfair to users, and ends up trampling fair use rights.”

McKay, who experienced the problem first hand, believes that YouTube needs to address this systematic bias towards copyright holders.

The issues outlined above illustrate that YouTube’s copyright enforcement system and Content-ID filter are not the solid machines they claim to be. Not for regular users at least. Although it’s understandable that mistakes are made when millions of videos are added every month, YouTube should work on getting the basics right.

Don’t let the war on pirates ruin the fun for everyone.
https://torrentfreak.com/youtubes-co...-havoc-110908/





Victory for Cliff's Law
Rory Cellan-Jones

Remember the attempt to extend copyright for music beyond the current 50 years?

It became known as the Cliff Richard law, because it promised to make sure the veteran rocker would go on earning money from 60s hits like Living Doll for many years to come.

Now it looks as though Sir Cliff and his fellow musicians could be on the verge of victory.

In Brussels today a key EU committee voted to approve a directive that would extend music copyright from 50 to 70 years.

Now all that's needed is for the Council of Ministers to give it the nod - it's rare for them to say no - and then member states will be obliged to enshrine the extended copyright in law.

I was under the impression that this was a battle that had been lost years ago, with the UK government dead set against extending copyright.

A quick search turned up a couple of stories from 2006 and 2008 that suggested that was indeed the case.

The Department of Business tells me the government changed tack in 2009 when the EU suggested a modification, so that the new extended copyright term would be 70, not 95, years.

When the coalition came to power last year, the new government reaffirmed Britain's support for the musicians.

This evening a spokesman for the Intellectual Property Office told me: "We support this proposal - it should create a fairer system for performers."
Sir Paul McCartney Sir Paul McCartney and Roger Daltrey have also campaigned for copyright extension

What is surprising about this is that ministers have also approved the findings of the Hargreaves Review on copyright.

Its central message was that the copyright regime should be tidied up, and enforced where possible, but that its reach should not be extended.

All those music industry bodies which have campaigned so long for this are keeping their powder dry tonight, waiting for the Council of Ministers to rubber-stamp the decision before they say anything.

A spokesman at one body sounded pained when I referred to the "Cliff Richard law".

"Think of the hard-up session musicians not Cliff Richard," he told me, claiming that thousands of struggling artists would now be guaranteed a pension.

But expect plenty of outrage from opponents who have argued that copyright extension will only benefit hugely wealthy rock dinosaurs.

There have been plenty of battles in the last few years between the music industry and the web libertarians.

This one looks like ending with a rare victory for the old rockers.

Update 8 September, 0926: Just to clarify, the copyright extension discussed here refers to music recordings not composition. Composers already enjoy copyright that extends for 70 years after their death - so this extension is about performers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14829373





The Final Countdown
Wendy M. Grossman

The we-thought-it-was-dead specter of copyright term extension in sound recordings has done a Diabolique maneuver and been voted alive by the European Council. In a few days, the Council of Ministers could make it EU law because, as can happen under the inscrutable government structures of the EU, opposition has melted away.

At stake is the extension of copyright in sound recordings from 50 years to 70, something the Open Rights Group has been fighting since it was born. The push to extend it above 50 years has been with us for at least five years; originally the proposal was to take it to 95 years. An extension from 50 to 70 years is modest by comparison, but given the way these things have been going over the last 50 years, that would buy the recording industry 20 years in which to lobby for the 95 years they originally wanted, and then 25 years to lobby for the line to be moved further. Why now? A great tranche of commercially popular recordings is up for entry into the public domain: Elvis Presley's earliest recordings date to 1956, and The Beatles' first album came out in 1963; their first singles are 50 years old this year. It's not long after that to all the great rock records of the 1970s.

My fellow Open Rights Group advisory council member Paul Sanders, has up a concise little analysis about what's wrong here. Basically, it's never jam today for the artists, but jam yesterday, today, and tomorrow for the recording companies. I have commented frequently on the fact that the more record companies are able to make nearly pure profit on their back catalogues whose sunk costs have long ago been paid, the more new, young artists are required to compete for their attention with an ever-expanding back catalogue. I like Sanders' language on this: "redistributive, from younger artists to older and dead ones".

In recent years, we've heard a lof of the mantra "evidence-based policy" from the UK government. So, in the interests of ensuring this evidence-based policy the UK government is so keen on, here is some. The good news is they commissioned it themselves, so it ought to carry a lot of weight with them. Right? Right.

There have been two major British government reports studying the future of copyright and intellectual property law generally in the last five years: the Gowers Review, published in 2006, and the Hargreaves report was commissioned in November 2010 and released in May 2011.

From Hargreaves:

Economic evidence is clear that the likely deadweight loss to the economy exceeds any additional incentivising effect which might result from the extension of copyright term beyond its present levels.14 This is doubly clear for retrospective extension to copyright term, given the impossibility of incentivising the creation of already existing works, or work from artists already dead.

Despite this, there are frequent proposals to increase term, such as the current proposal to extend protection for sound recordings in Europe from 50 to 70 or even 95 years. The UK Government assessment found it to be economically detrimental. An international study found term extension to have no impact on output.


And further:

Such an extension was opposed by the Gowers Review and by published studies commissioned by the European Commission.

Ah, yes, Gowers and its 54 recommendations, many or most of which have been largely ignored. (Government policy seems to have embraced "strengthening of IP rights, whether through clamping down on piracy" to the exclusion of things like "improving the balance and flexibility of IP rights to allow individuals, businesses, and institutions to use content in ways consistent with the digital age".

To Gowers:

Recommendation 3: The European Commission should retain the length of protection on sound recordings and performers' rights at 50 years.

And:

Recommendation 4: Policy makers should adopt the principle that the term and scope of protection for IP rights should not be altered retrospectively.

I'd use the word "retroactive", myself, but the point is the same. Copyright is a contract with society: you get the right to exploit your intellectual property for some number of years, and in return after that number of years your work belongs to the society whose culture helped produce it. Trying to change an agreed contract retroactively usually requires you to show that the contract was not concluded in good faith, or that someone is in breach. Neither of those situations applies here, and I don't think these large companies with their in-house lawyers, many of whom participated in drafting prior copyright law, can realistically argue that they didn't understand the provisions. Of course, this recommendation cuts both ways: if we can't put Elvis's earliest recordings back into copyright, thereby robbing the public domain, we also can't shorten the copyright protection that applies to recordings created with the promise of 50 years' worth of protection.

This whole mess is a fine example of policy laundering: shopping the thing around until you either wear out the opposition or find sufficient champions. The EU, with its Hampton Court maze of interrelated institutions, could have been deliberately designed to facilitate this. You can write to your MP, or even your MEP - but the sad fact is that the shiny, new EU government is doing all this in old-style backroom deals.

http://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwa...countdown.html





Patent Bill Viewed as Bailout for a Law Firm
Andrew Pollack

A bill to overhaul the patent system that is before the Senate contains a provision that could get an influential law firm off the hook for a possible $214 million malpractice payment.

The provision clarifies how much time pharmaceutical companies have to apply for patent extensions that can provide extra years of protection from generic competition.

But critics, who have labeled the provision “The Dog Ate My Homework Act,” say it is really a special fix for one drug manufacturer, the Medicines Company, and its powerful law firm, WilmerHale. The company and its law firm, with hundreds of millions of dollars in drug sales at stake, lobbied Congress heavily for several years to get the patent laws changed.

The patent office initially said that the company had missed the deadline for applying for a patent extension by a day or two, potentially losing nearly four years of patent protection on its main drug, the anticoagulant Angiomax. The provision would guarantee that the Medicines Company got the extra patent protection, and it would relieve WilmerHale, which was hired to file the application, of a possible malpractice payment to its client.

On Thursday, the Senate is scheduled to vote on an amendment proposed by Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, that would strip the provision from the bill. “The key question is whether we will vote to bail out a law firm that made a mistake and now wants consumers and taxpayers to pay the freight for that error,” Senator Sessions and Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, said in a letter sent Wednesday to colleagues. They said the extra patent protection on Angiomax could cost hospitals and consumers $1 billion.

But Mr. Sessions faces an uphill battle because Senate leaders want their colleagues to pass the House version of the bill, which contains that provision, without any amendments, saying any changes could jeopardize the entire legislation.

David E. Redlick, co-chairman of the life sciences practice at WilmerHale, said other companies, including Bayer and AstraZeneca, might also now benefit from patent extensions.

“The repeated assertion that this is a single company bill is just not so,” Mr. Redlick said. He said the existing law had unclear wording. The new provision “will resolve that uncertainty on a permanent basis, which one would hope would be a key purpose of patent reform.”

He also said that a federal judge ruled last year that the Medicines Company had filed its application on time. So the patent extension is expected to be granted, and WilmerHale would never have to make the malpractice payment, even without the legislation, he said. The legislation provides insurance in case the court ruling is reversed, he said.

Applications for patent extensions must be made within 60 days of a drug’s approval by the Food and Drug Administration.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office ruled that the Medicines Company, which filed its application in 2001, had missed the deadline by a day or two.

As a result, Angiomax could have been vulnerable to generic competition as early as September 2010, instead of June 2015. Sales of Angiomax accounted for virtually all of the Medicines Company’s $437.6 million in revenue last year.

The company, based in Parsippany, N.J., sued the Patent Office, arguing that since it had received F.D.A. approval for Angiomax after the customary close of business on a Friday, the 60-day clock should not have started ticking until the next Monday.

In August 2010, a federal judge agreed and the government did not appeal. The Patent Office, which granted interim patent extensions during the lawsuit, is working on the final extension.

But APP Pharmaceuticals, a drug company that wants to sell a generic version of Angiomax, is trying to have the judge’s decision overturned.

The amendment would change the patent law to agree with the judge’s interpretation of the deadline calculations.

The Medicines Company has been pressing for years for a legislative solution, spending more than $17 million since 2005 on prominent lobbyists, including former House majority leaders Richard Gephardt, a Democrat, and Dick Armey, a Republican.

The company has been assisted in its effort by WilmerHale, known formally as Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr.

The firm has a huge Washington office, and a few dozen of its members went to work for the Obama administration. The firm is also a powerhouse in Boston, and some of the most active supporters of the provision in Congress are from Massachusetts, like Representative Ed Markey, a Democrat.

In February, WilmerHale agreed to pay $18 million to the Medicines Company to compensate it for its legal and lobbying costs. It also agreed to pay as much as $214 million more if a generic version of Angiomax reached the market before June 15, 2015, because the extension application was deemed late. Part of the payment would be covered by the firm’s insurer.

WilmerHale reported revenue of $962 million in 2010, with profit of $1.33 million per partner.

The Medicines Company, according to its regulatory filings, is also talking about compensation from Ropes & Gray, another law firm that was involved in the filing for the patent extension.

APP Pharmaceuticals, the Generic Pharmaceutical Association and Citizens Against Government Waste are trying to derail the provision.

The Medicines Company has argued that longer patent protection will allow it to test Angiomax, also known as bivalirudin, for more uses. It also argues that the drug saves money for the health care system over all compared with alternatives.

In late June, the House of Representatives narrowly approved adding the provision to the patent reform bill. Initially, the vote was 209 to 208 against the amendment, but some Democrats pushed for a revote, saying not all members had had time to vote. On the revote, the amendment passed 223 to 198. Democrats voted 155 to 31 in favor and Republicans 167 to 68 against.

John Conyers Jr., a Democrat from Michigan who sponsored the amendment, called it a “technical revision.” He added, “By eliminating confusion regarding the deadline for patent term extension applications, this amendment provides the certainty necessary to encourage costly investments in life-saving medical research.”

Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, opposed the amendment.

“As a practical matter, this is a special fix for one company,” he said. He said that it should have been handled under rules for private relief bills and that it would also interfere with the litigation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/b...-millions.html





Fighting Backlog in Patents, Senate Approves Overhaul
Edward Wyatt

The Senate approved a sweeping reform of the nation’s patent laws on Thursday, sending to President Obama a bill that changes the system for determining priority for inventions at the patent office and provides more financing for an agency beset by application backlogs and outdated computer systems.

After rejecting proposed amendments to a bill approved by the House last June, the Senate voted 89 to 9 to pass the bill, completing an effort of at least six years to overhaul the patent office’s operations and the procedures by which patents can be challenged.

President Obama, who has made his support for the bill a central piece of his focus on promoting jobs, is expected to sign it into law soon.

“Improved patent quality will benefit businesses across the economic spectrum,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who was a primary sponsor of the bill. “For years, low-quality patents have been a drain on our patent system, and in turn our economy, by undermining the value of what it means to hold a patent. Higher-quality patents will infuse greater certainty into the patent system, which will better incentivize investment in American businesses, create jobs and grow our economy.”

The bill, known as the America Invents Act, has not received universal acclaim. The bill changes the method for determining the priority of patent applications to a “first to file” system from the long-standing “first to invent” method.

Several groups representing small businesses, entrepreneurs and early-stage investors have said that change puts small companies, which usually account for the bulk of new jobs, and individuals at a disadvantage to large companies that employ fleets of patent lawyers.

“This bill is unequivocally a job killer,” said Valerie S. Gaydos, a Baltimore-based investor in early-stage companies. “It will create a rush to the patent office, with innovators seeking to file anything and everything. The applications will be less complete, less well written and it will create more of a backlog.”

David S. Kappos, the patent office director and under secretary of commerce for intellectual property, disagreed, saying that the first-to-invent system was flawed because it essentially granted an inventor the right to legally defend his contention that he came up with an idea first. By changing to a first-to-file system, which is used in nearly every other country around the world, priority is clearly established, he said.

Many large corporations — like General Electric, Caterpillar and I.B.M. — supported the bill, which opponents suggested was evidence that the bill favors behemoths at the expense of the little guy. They point out that Mr. Kappos worked at I.B.M. for 27 years before taking the patent office job.

One of the bill’s main goals is to relieve the patent office’s backlog of applications, which has grown considerably in recent years. It now takes, on average, two years to get a preliminary ruling on an application, and an additional year for final grant, the patent office says.

The Internet age has created a surge in applications: in 1997, 2.25 patents were pending for every one issued, but by 2008 the rate had nearly tripled, to 6.6 patents pending for every one issued, according to patent office statistics. A backlog of about 700,000 applications is made worse by computer systems that are out of date, Gary F. Locke, the secretary of commerce, has said.

Lawmakers are betting that the backlog will be helped by giving the patent office access to more money. The agency already pays its own way, generating revenue from fees for applications and maintenance of patents. Revenue has usually exceeded the amount appropriated to the patent office by Congress, and legislators have often used the excess money for unrelated projects.

The bill addresses that by setting up a reserve fund for the collection of any fees in excess of the annual appropriation. But the patent office has to return to Congress for specific authority when it wants to tap the reserve.

That provision was put in place by the House, which feared losing budgetary authority over the patent office. The Senate in March passed a bill that would have given the patent agency direct access to all of the money it raised through fees.

When the House bill was returned to the Senate, Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, tried to amend the bill to go back to the Senate financing version, but the amendment was killed Thursday.

Also defeated was an amendment that would have stripped a provision from the bill that clarifies a method of calculating the deadline for applications to extend a patent. Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican who sponsored the amendment, said that the change was actually meant to benefit a single company and its law firm, which might have missed such a deadline in 2001.

A third amendment, by Senator Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, also was defeated. The amendment would have created a transitional program for consideration of business method patents.

The bill also contains a provision for an eight-year period of postgrant review of patents already issued. The measure was specifically aimed at so-called business method patents, which provide protection for a unique method of performing a task. The measure was heavily favored by the banking industry, which has been beset by patent infringement suits over things like electronic imaging of paper checks. The bill also provides a new method for challenges to be made to patent applications before a patent is granted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/b...nt-system.html





"A Massive Collection Scheme": Yet Another Judge Slams File-Sharing Lawsuits
Nate Anderson

Over the last few weeks, some California federal judges have been hammering the lawyers bringing mass file-sharing lawsuits. Add Magistrate Judge Bernard Zimmerman to that list.

Last year, On the Cheap LLC sued 5,011 alleged pirates of its porn film Danielle Staub Raw. Zimmerman this week threw out 5,010 of the anonymous defendants. "No courtroom in the building can hold over 200 people, let alone 5,000," he wrote in his order. Even if it could, everyone would have different lawyers, different issues of fact, different defenses—in short, it would be a total nightmare for the efficient dispensation of justice.

Of course, this assumes the plaintiffs in the case want to go to trial against anyone. Judge Zimmerman strongly suspects that they do not. He ordered the plaintiffs to provide him detailed information on their settlement activities, but his order appears to have been ignored by On the Cheap. In a potent piece of footnoting to his new severance order, Zimmerman attacked the company:

The Court's concerns are heightened by plaintiff's refusal to file under seal a copy of its settlement letter and related information about its settlement practices. The film sells for $19.95 on plaintiff's website. According to public reports, plaintiffs in other BitTorrent cases, rather than prosecuting their lawsuits after learning the identities of Does, are demanding thousands of dollars from each Doe defendant in settlement. If all this is correct, it raises questions of whether this film was produced for commercial purposes or for purposes of generating litigation and settlements.

Put another way, Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution authorizes Congress to enact copyright laws "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." If all the concerns about these mass Doe lawsuits are true, it appears that the copyright laws are being used as part of a massive collection scheme and not to promote useful arts.


Adding to the judge's suspicions, On the Cheap hasn't actually served any of the anonymous defendants in the case. ("Eleven months after the complaint was filed, not a single Does [sic] has been served," he wrote, and then denied a motion to extend the service time even longer.)

The judge makes clear that he "does not condone copyright infringement." And he likes settlements, which lead to mutual resolution of legal disputes and clear the court's calendar. But none of this justifies "perverting the joinder rules first to create the management and logistical problems discussed above and then offer to settle with Does defendants so they can avoid digging themselves out of the morass plaintiff is creating."

Ice burn!? Not exactly. Before Zimmerman shredded the case, On the Cheap was allowed to subpoena Internet providers and obtain the names of subscribers whose accounts may have been used to access Ms. Staub in the "raw." On the Cheap has already settled with at least 70 of them. Assuming an average settlement of $2,000, that's $140,000 in cash.

On the Cheap has to notify all 5,010 severed defendants by first-class mail about the new ruling, which should put an end to new settlements, but the company (and its lawyers) get to keep the cash they've picked up so far.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...g-lawsuits.ars





Naming Names on the Internet
Eric Pfanner

Three years ago, after the suicide of a popular actress who had been bullied via the Internet, South Korea introduced a radical policy aimed at stamping out online hate. It required contributors to Web portals and other popular sites to use their real names, rather than pseudonyms.

Last month, after a huge security breach, the government said it would abandon the system. Hackers stole 35 million Internet users’ national identification numbers, which they had been required to supply when registering on Web sites to verify their identities.

The South Korean experience shows that “real name” policies are a lousy idea, and privacy threats are only one reason. Online anonymity is essential for political dissidents, whose role has been highlighted in the uprisings in the Arab world, and for corporate whistle-blowers. In the United States, the Supreme Court has found a constitutional basis for protecting anonymity.

Why, then, are the calls for restrictions on Internet anonymity growing?

Last month, Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich of Germany said bloggers should disclose their true identities, citing the case of the Norwegian terrorist suspect Anders Behring Breivik, who had blogged under the pseudonym “Fjordman.”

“Normally people use their names when they take a position,” Mr. Friedrich told Der Spiegel. “Why shouldn’t this be something that is also self-evident on the Internet?”

His words were echoed by Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, who said during a media conference in Edinburgh last month: “The Internet would be better if we had an accurate notion that you were a real person as opposed to a dog, or a fake person, or a spammer.”

Mr. Schmidt was speaking in relation to Google Plus, the company’s new social networking service. If people do not want to give their real names, he noted, they do not have to use Google Plus.

Fair enough. Still, it is discouraging to hear a top executive at a company that says it is committed to an “open Internet” opine that anonymity is overrated.

True, the Internet would probably be more civilized if contributors to online discussions had to use their real names. Some people might even start to use spell check and proper punctuation.

And it is true that cyberbullying is nasty. Perhaps anonymity ought not to be defended to every extreme.

What about online death threats, for example? Should they be considered less menacing than threats delivered via the mail or in person? The question is at the heart of a U.S. court case in which a California man is accused of posting 8,000 abusive, anonymous messages on Twitter about a Maryland-based Buddhist leader and her group.

The case shows that the authorities already have tools for rooting out anonymous trolls and troublemakers when they really want to do so. Further evidence of that is seen in a series of arrests of members of one of the most notorious hacker rings, who operate under the name Anonymous.

Mr. Schmidt’s support for the use of real identities has more to do with commerce than crime-fighting. Google wants to know more about its users because this information is valuable to advertisers and other businesses.

“If we knew that it was a real person, then we could sort of hold them accountable, we could check them, we could give them things, we could, you know, bill them; you know, we could have credit cards and so forth and so on, there are all sorts of reasons,” he was quoted as saying in Edinburgh.

Yet the complications are enormous. Even self-contained Internet services like Facebook have had difficulty enforcing “real name” systems. To achieve this on the borderless Internet would be impossible — as South Korea discovered with YouTube, a unit of Google. Rather than complying with the country’s policy on names, Google blocked uploads to YouTube’s Korean version and redirected users to YouTube.com, the site’s international version.

The real world is often messy, chaotic and anonymous. The Internet is mostly better that way, too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/t...-internet.html





How an Omniscient Internet "Sextortionist" Ruined the Lives of Teen Girls
Nate Anderson

In the spring of 2009, a college student named Amy received an instant message from someone claiming to know her. Certainly, the person knew something about her—he was able to supply details about what her bedroom looked like and he had, improbably, nude photos of Amy. He sent the photos to her and asked her to have "Web sex" with him.

Instead, Amy contacted her boyfriend Dave, who had been storing the naked photos on his own computer. (Note: victim names have been changed in this story). The two students exchanged instant messages about Amy's apparent stalker, trying to figure out what had happened. Soon after the exchange, each received a separate threat from the man. He knew what they had just chatted about, he warned, and they were not to take their story to anyone, including the police.

Amy, terrified by her stalker's eerie knowledge, contacted campus police. Officers were dispatched to her room, where they took down Amy's story and asked her questions about the incident. Soon after, Dave received more threats from the stalker because Amy had gone to the police—and the stalker knew exactly what she had said to them.

Small wonder that, when the FBI later interviewed Amy about the case, she was "visibly upset and shaking during parts of the interview and had to stop at points to control her emotions and stop herself from crying." So afraid was Amy for her own safety that she did not leave her dorm room for a full week after the threats.

As for Dave, he suffered increased fear, anxiety, confusion, and anger; he later told a court that even his parents "had a hard time trusting anyone or even feeling comfortable enough to use a computer" after the episode.

Due in large part to the stress of the attack, Dave and Amy broke up.

But who had the mysterious stalker been? And how did he have access both to the contents of Dave's computer and to private discussions with police that Amy conducted in the privacy of her own room?

Why is my webcam light on?

The bizarre case wasn't an isolated incident. Around the same time, a Los Angeles area juvenile named Sara received an instant message from a screen name that looked almost identical to her boyfriend's. The person behind it asked her for pornographic photos; she supplied them. She soon realized her mistake, but it was too late. Threats began to roll in, saying that her mysterious interlocutor would post Sarah's nude photos on the Internet if she did not send more. When Sara e-mailed copies of these threats to her boyfriend, the stalker knew. He even called her on the phone to make the threats more personal.

"For the longest time I didn't know who this man was, why he was doing it or [if] he would come back," Sara later wrote in a victim impact statement. "Not knowing is the worst, most dreaded feeling. It's always in the back of your mind. I moved away from the LA/OC [Los Angeles/Orange County] area but even here the thoughts never left me."

In another case, a woman named Gloria received an e-mail with the subject line "who hacked your account READ it!!!" from someone who claimed to have invaded her machine. Why? The hacker said it was because Gloria's ex-boyfriend had hired him to do so—a "particularly traumatic" move, as the government later noted, because Gloria had actually taken out a restraining order against her ex-boyfriend, who had been harassing her. Gloria didn't reply to the e-mail and soon received another, this time containing a nude picture of her and promising to post it across the Internet if Gloria didn't do as he wished.

It was one of the few cases where the stalker acted on his warning. After Gloria sent copies of these threats to a friend of hers, the stalker somehow knew about it and told her, “you pissed me off now I'm going to show you.” Her nude photo was posted to MySpace—appearing on the account of the friend to whom Gloria had shown the stalker's threats.

The cases grew stranger. A 17-year old girl was online when she received an instant message from her sister—but her sister was in the next room and not using a computer. Various women reported that the lights on their laptop webcams would pop on at times when the cameras weren't in use; one woman was so unnerved by the behavior that she covered her own computer's camera with a sticker to make sure no one was spying on her.

But someone had been, and he went after so many people that Glendale, California police finally realized a broader pattern was emerging in their area. The FBI investigated and on March 8, 2010, after six months of investigations and interviews, obtained a federal search warrant for a small, neat home on Monica Lane in Santa Ana. Two days later, the feds descended, looking for their man.

Meet Guicho

Inside the home, they found 32-year old Luis "Guicho" Mijangos sitting a wheelchair. Mijangos was an illegal alien and a paraplegic who hadn't walked since he was around 17, when a drive-by gunshot wound paralyzed him from the waist down. He grew up—unhappily, in his telling—in Mexico, where his father was "harassed" and later died. After the death, Mijangos' mother took her son to the US and eventually remarried.

Despite his injuries, Mijangos had prospects. He had taken computer classes at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa and become proficient in Java, C++, and Web design. He set up home-based Web and computer consulting business and told investigators that he was clearing a respectable $1,000 per week.

But when the FBI showed up with a search warrant, Mijangos quickly admitted to much more. He worked with a few “black hat” hackers, he said, helping them transfer money and make use of stolen credit cards. He claimed that his criminal role was deliberately kept minor “because it meant that he would face less trouble from the police,” according to the account of the FBI Special Agent who interviewed him.

Agents had doubts about the scope of this initial account. Mijangos admitted that he did sometimes hack into other people's computers. A favorite trick was seeding peer-to-peer networks with popular-sounding song titles that were actually malware; when someone downloaded and executed the file, their machine was infected and would open itself to Mijangos's control. He claimed to have done this only five times.

And when it came to the crazy stalker-style behavior that so many women (and some men) had reported, Mijangos said his work was being misconstrued. Instead of “sextorting" his victims, Mijangos said he "hacked into female victim accounts at the request of boyfriends and husbands to determine whether the female victims were cheating on their boyfriends or husbands,” according to an FBI account. “Mijangos said he was supposed to be paid for this conduct but was not.

"Mijangos acknowledged he threatened to expose these pictures, and reckoned the threats might look like extortion, but stated that he did so to discourage anyone from contacting the authorities. Mijangos also acknowledged he asked for additional sexual videos but only to determine whether they would actually do it.”

It didn't take long to punch a hole in these claims. The FBI recovered four laptops, a BlackBerry, and a host of USB drives from Mijangos's home; a “filter team” scoured the devices for anything that fit the parameters of the search warrant. After vetting, such material was turned over to the FBI agents working the case, who learned that Mijangos had actually gone after 129 different computers for a total of 230 victims. Forty-four of the victims were juveniles.

The FBI found different kinds of malware on the computers, including tools to install a key logger on remote machines, software to turn on webcams and microphones attached to infected computers, and "dozens of videos" from those webcams, most showing the victims " getting out of the shower, dressing for the day, having sex with a partner.”

In a file called "things importan" [sic], the FBI even found screen captures from victim machines showing identifying information about them displayed on bank and financial websites.

On June 17, 2010, the FBI Cyber Squad operating out of Los Angeles swore out an arrest warrant against Mijangos. Five days later, Mijangos was arrested at 6:10 am and charged with felony extortion.

Sextortion

After his arrest, Mijangos later admitted that he made up to $3,000 a day performing "complicated financial hacks" with others. He hung around in online hacker forums like "CC Power," learned how to use malware tools like Poison Ivy and SpyNet to gain entry to other machines, and use "crypter" software to hide his work from anti-virus and security programs.

Some of the hacks simply targeted individuals, slipping the initial malware onto their machines through P2P networks. Once he had control, Mijangos's malware contacted mijangos.no-ip.org, a service that obscured his own domain name while giving his malware a persistent location for phoning home. When contact was made, Mijangos could download additional code like keyloggers to the infected machines, and it was a simple matter to grab and misuse people's credit cards after that.

But the truly odd "sextortion" behavior was Mijangos's calling card. Indeed, as the government later put it, he "dedicated considerable time to toying with victims." If he obtained access to a woman's computer, he searched for incriminating photos and video—or accessed the webcam and tried to take some of his own. If he obtained access to a man's computer, he instead impersonated the male and reached out to the man's girlfriend to ask for nude photos. With photos in hand, Mijangos would approach the women and threaten to post the picture publicly unless they sent additional nude videos of themselves. Some women did so.

He then spent considerable time monitoring people's communications. In the case of his most spectacular hacks, Mijangos could watch the instant messaging and e-mail communications of both a boyfriend and girlfriend, and could even listen in to conversations made over the phone or in person with police by using the computer's built-in microphone. The omniscient effect this created tended to terrify victims; one said later that she felt like her life had been taken from her.

On March 21, 2011, Mijangos reached a plea deal with the government and copped to two felony charges, computer hacking and wiretapping. The deal required that, whenever he might leave prison, Mijangos would report all computer use, online accounts, and passwords to his probation officer, and "shall not hide or encrypt files or data without prior approval."

On September 1, federal judge George King sentenced Mijangos to 72 months in prison for his “psychological warfare” and "sustained effort to terrorize victims."

“The FBI has seen a rise in similar cases based on the exploitation of emerging technologies by criminals," said Steven Martinez, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, in a statement after the sentencing, "and it’s my hope that this sentence serves as a warning for victims of Internet predators to advise law enforcement or a trusted source when threatened, and always refrain from sending compromising photographs via cyberspace."

But people just won't refrain, as illustrated by the rise of "sextortion" cases across the country. In one of the most memorable, a male high school student just outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, conned numerous male classmates into sending him nude pictures of themselves, then demanded that some engage in sex acts with him to keep the pictures from coming out.

Citing a few more recent examples, an August Associated Press story claimed that sextortion is on the rise in the US, and the government has taken to using the term in its criminal filings.

Without nude pictures and compromising videos, the attackers in such cases have no leverage—but digital devices have made it so easy to point, shoot, and share that everyone involved in the Mijangos hacks already had such pictures, and didn't appear to have hidden or secured them. With pictures that common, but taboos against their public distribution still strong, sextortion will certainly continue. But at least Luis Mijangos won't be doing it.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ined-lives.ars





Film Is Skeptical About Domestic Efforts on Terrorism
Brian Stelter

The film “Better This World” introduces itself with the frightening sounds of television anchors filtering the news of a terrorist plot against the Republican National Convention in 2008. “Disturbing news tonight about homegrown terror,” one of the anchors says, not for the first time and not for the last.

But, the film suggests, viewers should also be disturbed about the ease with which that label — “terrorist” — is applied.

Through the eyes of Bradley Crowder and David McKay, who were accused of a firebombing plot at the convention, “Better This World” examines the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s controversial use of informants, an issue that receives far less attention than initial reports of suspected terrorism. Through interviews, telephone recordings and text-message transcripts the film leaves viewers with the impression that Mr. Crowder and Mr. McKay were philosophically seduced by an informant. The two men admitted to making Molotov cocktails on their own, but the cocktails were not used.

The film had an Oscar-qualifying theatrical release here last week, but it will reach many more people when it has its television premiere on Tuesday night on “POV,” the PBS documentary series. Simon Kilmurry, the executive director of “POV,” said it was timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“The legacy of 9/11 is something we’re all living with today, and these are some of the issues that I think tend not to get looked at very closely,” Mr. Kilmurry said.

In a pairing of sorts the next “POV,” on Sept. 13, will show “If a Tree Falls,” a documentary about the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group that set fires and was labeled a domestic terrorist threat by the F.B.I. in 2001. One of its former members, Daniel McGowan, who pleaded guilty to arson charges, says in that film, “People need to question, like, this buzzword” — terrorist — “and how it’s being used and how it’s, like, just become the new ‘communist.’ ” He adds, “It’s a boogeyman word.”

The “Better This World” filmmakers, Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega, said they came away from their reporting with a recognition that use of the term “domestic terrorist” had broadened dramatically since the Sept. 11 attacks. “In the media and in the legal realm it’s marshaled for all sorts of political agendas, and it’s complicated,” Ms. Galloway said.

They included the TV sound bites to highlight that impression. “In this case the media trumped up the charges and said some pretty provocative things that would instill fear in the average American,” Ms. Duane de la Vega said.

Mr. Crowder and Mr. McKay, angsty young men from Austin, Tex., say in the film that they looked up to Brandon Darby, an activist who co-founded a relief group in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Together, Mr. Crowder and Mr. McKay say in the film, they made plans to protest the Republican convention in Minneapolis. Because the convention was treated as a possible target for terrorists, the F.B.I. was aggressive in its monitoring of protest groups; Mr. Darby was made an informant.

In a prison interview shown in the film, Mr. Crowder asks himself if the events that led to his incarceration would have happened if he had not met Mr. Darby, and he answers, “No, I don’t think they would have.” Mr. McKay says in the film, “I felt like Brandon Darby entrapped me,” though he admitted as part of his guilty plea that he had lied when he said he had been entrapped by Mr. Darby. Mr. Crowder was released from prison last year; Mr. McKay could be released this fall.

Mr. Darby, once hailed in leftist circles, is now a hero to some conservatives for his role in the case. He has denied any wrongdoing, and he has a pending libel lawsuit against The New York Times over its coverage of his activities as an informant.

Ms. Galloway noted that defendants in many cases like this one have accused informants of trapping them. “That’s a common situation,” she said. “You have the flashbulb headlines about a domestic terrorist case, and then, not long after, a counter allegation by the defendant about misconduct by a government agent or informant.”

The film also poses thorny questions about government prosecutions of cases like the one involving Mr. Crowder and Mr. McKay, who were called terrorists but who were convicted of lesser charges. The filmmakers said that audiences on the festival circuit this year were “surprised by how far the government is allowed to go” in such prosecutions. When they screened the film for international audiences, Ms. Galloway said, “people were stunned by the amount of resources devoted to terrorism.”

Mr. McKay suggests in the film that the government “didn’t want two kids who made a mistake; they wanted two terrorists who were going to hurt people” because “it legitimizes everything that they’ve done.” But the film also gives substantial time to interviews with F.B.I. agents.

The sheer amount of evidence in the film lends itself to a subtheme about surveillance, also a hot topic on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The filmmakers retraced Mr. Crowder and Mr. McKay’s attendance at convention protests, via surveillance-camera footage provided by the police. Other evidence in the film — text messages, interrogations, footage of the men shopping for supplies at a Wal-Mart — emerged during the trials. There is even a clip of Mr. Darby talking to his F.B.I. handler, as recorded by his own hand-held camera as he walked through one of the protests.

Ms. Duane de la Vega said Mr. Darby had spoken to her at length by telephone, but he ultimately decided not to participate. She said that he sent her a text message after the film started appearing at festivals and said: “Congrats. I don’t agree, but congrats.”

Ms. Duane de la Vega said she and Ms. Galloway see “Better This World” as one in a series of journalistic works that they hoped would “bubble up the issue” of informant use and domestic terrorism prosecutions.

The takeaway for viewers, she said, is to make sure that they understand the context of the alarming headlines about accused terrorist acts. She said, “When they read about domestic terrorism — keep reading.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/a...nformants.html





Now We Can All Use the FBI Anti-Piracy Warning!
David Kravets



Bloggers rejoice! No longer will the recording, movie and software industries retain exclusive rights to the FBI’s familiar anti-piracy logo.

The “FBI Anti-Piracy Warning Seal,” which has been draped on Big Content’s wares since 2004, is going to be made available for use on all copyright content. Even personal websites can proudly display the logo without violating federal law, which carries a maximum six-month sentence and other penalties for using the insignia without FBI approval.

The FBI has only allowed its use by members of the Recording Industry Association of America, Business Software Alliance, Entertainment Software Association, Software & Information Industry Association, and of course the Motion Picture Association of America, which likes to make sure you can’t fast-forward through the DVD while the warning is displayed, thus driving you to download an MPEG from the Pirate Bay.

The Justice Department is taking public comment on the proposed new rule through November 7, and the changeover will likely be approved by the attorney general soon thereafter.

The FBI, in announcing the proposal in the Federal Registrar on Wednesday, said the insignia was an important warning to “users of copyrighted media about the potential consequences of intellectual property crime, and the FBI’s role in investigating such crime. It serves as a vivid and widely recognizable reminder of the FBI’s authority and mission with respect to the protection of intellectual property rights.”

Regardless of the logo’s effectiveness in combating piracy, the FBI conceded that the “pilot program” it had begun with major industry was biased against Joe Six Pack.

“Unfortunately, the pilot program also had the effect of excluding non-members of these five associations from being able to use the APW Seal in their works,” the FBI said.

The logo can only be affixed to copyright works, and it cannot be altered or used in a “manner indicating FBI approval, authorization, or endorsement.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...tipiracy-logo/





The Next Internet: What's Holding Us Back?
Scott M. Fulton, III

Tim Berners-Lee, to his credit, did not invent the Internet. He did have one good idea. He was not the first person or even the twelfth with the same idea, but he did make it work. Yet most of the underlying work - the bringing together of dozens of communications systems with slightly or wildly varying protocols - was done before him. He just plugged it in, and for that, he gets most of the credit.

What made the Internet, and thus the Web, possible - the thing that, without which, Tim Berners-Lee would still be watching reruns of "Eastenders" - was a decision. The major carriers of electronic mail, whose business it had become to route messages to each other's members, collectively reached a truce. They decided that the long, endless fight over who has the biggest volume, the longest distance, the fastest network, so that one could charge the others more postage than it was being charged, was too expensive and was stifling progress. They decided to call off the war. I know. I was on the phone with them the moment it happened.

The date was April 25, 1990. My assignment was a story on the subject of universal e-mail addresses - the notion that someone could have an address that is independent of CompuServe, GEnie, Delphi, or Prodigy. The protocol these addresses were based upon was an international standard called X.400. That standard not only specified what we now call the "domain" for each e-mail recipient, but also the manifest for the settlements of any charges between one carrier, such as GE Information services, and another to which it might hand off the message, such as MCI Mail.

I asked one of GE's lead engineers, Kenneth Murphy, how X.400 made sense of all the various exchanges an e-mail had to make on its way to its recipient. To my astonishment, Murphy explained that, if the meeting going on that day was successful, X.400 would not even be necessary.

Here is how I presented the story for the May 1990 issue of one of those printed computer magazines that is now the stuff of landfills:

The way the structure is being developed, an E-mail message is, to some extent, a property of the service on which it was composed; it will then be bought, under contractual arrangement, by whatever service the recipient chooses for reading that message. The legal issues are rather complex, so I'll let Kenneth Murphy elaborate: "Let's put some real names to this - I'm going to use AT&T [as merely one example]. AT&T Mail and GE Information Services have negotiated an interconnection agreement, which was announced last Monday [23 April]; it means all of their subscribers can send and receive messages to and from all of our subscribers. I haven't a clue what an AT&T Mail user enters at the 'To?>' prompt, in whatever front-end they've got; but presumably, they should be able to address me or any of our other subscribers without too much difficulty, as long as they know the correct way to format the address. They will pay AT&T Mail charges, whatever they may be. I, as GE Information Services, will deliver what's handed off to me, to my subscriber free of charge.

"Today, there's a concept of Settlement of Accounts. The interconnect agreement is a legal, contractual document between the two of us. It covers a lot of stuff, but one thing it specifically does not cover - and this is temporary - is the issue of settlement. Settlement means, I want reimbursement for my cost of delivering a message to my subscriber on your behalf, you being AT&T. Therefore, we need to finish this process and agree on some monetary values for messages, and then we just keep track of those accounts, and at the end of a period of months/quarter/year, we will settle the difference. That is a process that has long been in place for the interconnected postal services, telex networks, telephone networks, public data networks."

...

Since there will only be a handful of E-mail services, they may all decide to settle accounts with each other just as GE has with AT&T; so every E-mail provider will be connected to every other - what then? X.25 [the international standard at the time for packet-form communication] will make it possible for a user to make connections with more than one service; but if all of them are interconnected anyway, why should she want to? These are unresolved questions.

In fact, at the very minute Ken Murphy and I were talking, an international meeting was taking place regarding these very issues. Murphy told me, "There's a meeting going on today [25 April 1990] up in New Jersey where the service providers of North America are trying to grapple with the problems, both technical and commercial, of implementing interconnected directory services using the X.500 standard. It's not going to be easy. Also, there is going to be a meeting in two weeks of the North American service providers, working with the Electronic Mail Association. It's a working meeting of editors to sit down and publish a user guide that can be distributed throughout the marketplace, on how the heck you get from one system to another, now that these systems are interconnected. What I see at the 'To?>' prompt is going to be very different from whatever you see, unless we're on the identical system. If we're on the identical system, we don't need X.400."


Nothing we do on the Internet today would have been conceivable, let alone feasible, had these corporations never decided amongst themselves, "You know what, the heck with it." HTTP protocol could be developed because there was no longer any need for a settlement of accounts, or a protocol to keep track of such a settlement.

Nobody thanks GE, MCI, Sprintnet, UUnet, and the other names from another era buried in the rubble of our selective history, for the one bold stroke of sensibility that inevitably transformed our world. Every innovation brought forth since that time, including the one with the hyperlink thingie, resulted not so much from inventors or business titans or shrewd negotiators but from battle-weary pragmatists. They knew the real revenue would eventually come from the cavalcade of new services enabled by a unified digital communications platform, and dickering about how the seams should be sewn was trite. It was the best decision to quit ever made.

Today, we stand at a similar precipice of history. There are a handful of wireless carriers, a handful of Internet search providers, a handful of device manufacturers, a handful of technology portfolio managers. Each of them has the keys to something about the Internet that all of them require to run their business. The potential in front of them is an all-inclusive service of unlimited media from multiple sources: the world stage in one's pocket.

Yet rather than decide it'll all come out in the wash, each player tries to amass more intellectual property than another, driving up the value of their patents. Google buys Motorola because it couldn't buy Nortel, and someone may yet buy InterDigital, maybe to keep it away from Qualcomm, etc. The objective of this game is for one player to be paid the most penance and crowned king - an endgame that never comes.

An agreement between these parties on the order of the e-mail services agreement that forged the modern Internet, is impossible. The reasons why are in front of our faces:

1. Egos. The major players have become like sports teams. They're in front of the spotlight all the time, and we, the people, follow their moves and even place bets on them. Like pro wrestling sometimes, certain players wear the villain's hood, and others the gold belt of champions. We consumers have our emotions vested in this battle to a greater extent than before. In so doing, we've inflated the egos of the people in charge. They don't want to let us down. We've seen what happens when competitors reach covenants with one another (Microsoft + Novell, Microsoft + Sun). Covenants, some claim, are cloaked conspiracies to defraud consumers. (Everything, some claim, is a cloaked conspiracy to defraud consumers.)

2. Lack of faith. No one is certain any more of the potential value of the future services that the expansion of wireless Internet platforms may yet provide. Today's services appear to be undermining the foundations of many once-formidable industries - recording, publishing, news-gathering, advertising, porn. Not only is there no guarantee of a brighter future for content any more, there's no clear sign of it. Those whose futures are completely tied up in content are forging business models based on sci-fi constructs like content farms and self-repurposing. So there's no incentive for corporations to forfeit their revenue from licensing, in hopes of competing in media.

3. Debt. The cost of having built the telecommunications infrastructure that's already in place, will probably never be recouped from consumer services alone. It costs carriers such as Verizon as much as $4,000 per customer to deploy services from which they may expect to see, over their service lifetime, about $1,500. Consumers are not willing to pay what the Internet actually costs. Thus carriers must recoup their investment elsewhere, and licensing - with the litigation that comes with it - is the most convenient alternative.

Assuming that every merger and acquisition that could ever be made has been made, and every intellectual property infringement and licensing disagreement lawsuit that can be pursued has been pursued, the eventual outcome is exactly the same as the one the e-mail engineers foresaw back in 1990. It can be described with one of the simplest words ever given to English by the Latin language: par. That these unknown and, as yet, unheralded people could foresee this simple truth and their successors are blind to it, says everything about the history of technology in the last 21 years that anyone needs to know.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/enterpr...ats-holdin.php





The Future of Mobile Data Plans
Dan Rowinski

Cellular data usage has become subject of contention among consumers, carriers and federal regulators. Consumers want more data with less restrictions at manageable prices. The carriers want the opposite. The federal government is left to balance consumers' rights with spectrum allocation, bandwidth requirements, net neutrality and mergers that may disrupt the ecosystem.

There are a lot of balls in the air. It is likely that there will not be any type of compromise between the interests of these groups any time soon. Carriers are starting to set bandwidth limits into their data plans and throttling users who exceed those limits. The data plan needs to evolve.

Scenario: Families' Data Plan Headache

Imagine that you are a parent trying to balance your budget. You have a teenage son and daughter (let's call them twins for sake of argument) and the family is fairly well off, perhaps upper middle class. There is money, it just needs to be managed between the mortgage, old school loans, the car, household utilities and the ever growing web of data plans for every member of the families devices.

Mom and Dad both have smartphones and some type of tablet on a data plan. That is four data plans between them. Then, let's say each of the twins has a smartphone and they share a tablet. That is seven data plans for a four-person family ranging from $15 to $30 per device. That is not outrageous for a well-off family in a connected world, especially as smartphones and tablets continue to penetrate the market.

But every member of the family does not use their devices the same way. For instance, Mom uses a lot of data because she travels a lot for business and likes to download and stream movies and upload pictures. Dad uploads the occasional picture but really uses his devices mostly for email and checking up on the news. Between them, the twins use a fair amount of data between social networking, pictures and watching short videos. Mom often exceeds her data limits while Dad comes nowhere near his. The twins come close to their monthly data allotments, sometimes under or over. Regardless of the usage, the family is paying each month for those seven data plans.

Carriers Want To Increase ARPU

The carriers like it like this because the average revenue per user is high. Yet, it drives Mom and Dad crazy because they have to manage all these disparate bills and the fact that they are not reaching maximum return on investment for data not used. It is confusing and expensive.

This is a system that needs to change. One way to do it would be to block a set amount of data for the entire family that can be used between every device, with unused data rolled over into the next billing cycle.

In this scenario, there is one data plan for the seven devices. Let's call it 15 GB per month, slightly less than 2.5 GB per month per device, which is basically what the average data plan between Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile is currently, with fluctuations between each carrier. That 15 GB can be allocated to the family as a block and spread between the devices. One plan, one bill, less headaches. There will be months where Mom is not traveling and streaming as much content and the family will come in well below that number. Or perhaps they go over on a month. The family should not be throttled or forced to pay for extra data depending on the circumstances of the month if they have unused data from another month.

The carriers will hate this. Data is the new version of text messaging, which was the new version of voice minutes. It is the cash cow for carriers because they can set the plans and rates in such a way to maximize ARPU. The last thing that the carriers want to be are "pipes" that are just conduits for data usage through block data plans.

Content and The Pipe: What The Carriers Want

The carriers want to grow their networks. That means they want more users with more data plans on faster networks that handle data flow better. That is what is happening as smart devices proliferate and "4G" such as LTE comes to maturation. The more user that have data plans on multiple devices and the more efficient the network itself becomes, the higher the margins for the carriers.

Yet, the carriers are in a fight over content, ostensibly the source of data usage. When a user streams a Netflix movie over their iPad and stay within their data limits, the carrier does not make any more from that user. From the carrier's perspective, they are just the "dumb pipe" that delivers the over-the-top content. In their minds, that is unacceptable.

That is why you are seeing more carriers trying to throttle usage while also setting up their own content delivery networks. AT&T's U-Verse is a prime example. If the carriers can make money both from the data being used and the content going over the network, they are making money on the same data flow twice. In a blocked data plan scenario, this would be less lucrative.

Regulators Sticky Issues

The AT&T-T-Mobile merger puts a lot of this in to perspective. The Department of Justice thinks that if the merger goes through, the three remaining major carriers can do just about anything they want. Seven data plans for a family of four? Certainly! Let's charge more for every GB they use and then throttle them or make them pay more if they go over. The DOJ thinks that the carriers could collude to increase prices without actually intentionally doing so. All it takes is for one carrier to start increasing data prices and the others will follow, calling it "industry standard pricing."

But what if T-Mobile were to stay free? To compete with the bigger companies, they institute data blocking plans with rollover of unused GBs per month. That is precisely the type of competitive practice the DOJ thinks will be inhibited in a three-carrier ecosystem.

Change Will Come For The Carriers ... Eventually

Regardless of whether or not the AT&T-T-Mobile merger is approved, data plans are going to change in the future. The carriers are going to try and squeeze as much revenue as they can from each user, until they face a backlash from both consumers and the government.

It is probably inevitable that the carriers are going to be caught between regulators and users and be forced to change data plans to something that is more consumer friendly. Yet, the next several years will see data plans become more expensive, overage and throttling more frequent and consumers feeling the strain.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...lans_op-ed.php





Rice Demonstrates Full-Duplex Wireless Technology

New approach could double wireless capabilities when 5G networks arrive
Matt Hamblen

Rice University researchers today announced they have successfully demonstrated full-duplex wireless technology that would allow a doubling of network traffic without the need for more cell towers.

Ahutosh Sabharwal, a Rice professor of electrical and computer engineering, said the innovative full-duplex technology requires a minimal amount of new hardware for both mobile devices and networks.

However, he added that full-duplex technology does require new wireless standards, meaning it might not be available for several years as carriers move to 5G, or Fifth Generation, networks, he added.

Today, the largest national carriers in the U.S., AT&T and Verizon Wireless, are in the early stages of rolling 4G networks on LTE (Long Term Evolution) technology, while Sprint has a more fully developed 4G network running over WiMax.

Full-duplex technology would allow a cell phone or other wireless device to transmit data and receive data on the same frequency; today's networks require separate frequencies to send and receive.

In effect, therefore, full-duplex technology could double a network's capacity.

Rice reported that its innovation has attracted interest from wireless companies globally, noting that carriers are universally concerned about having enough spectrum to support the continuing explosion of wireless devices and their increasingly complex applications, such as video.

One of AT&T's arguments in wanting to purchase T-Mobile USA for $39 billion is to gain access to more wireless spectrum.

Asked on Tuesday to comment on the full-duplex technology demonstrated at Rice, an AT&T spokesman said the carrier would need to study the innovation before commenting on it.

Sabharwal and his colleagues, Melissa Duarte and Chris Dick, first wrote in 2010 that full-duplex was possible, and this summer Sabharwal and other colleagues showed a full-duplex signal with 10 times better reliability and throughput than any other touted by researchers, Rice officials said.

Sabharwal said Rice has also been able to show it can add full-duplex as an additional mode to existing hardware, such as smartphones, where space is limited. That means that a smartphone maker would not need to add new hardware to support full-duplex.

Rice's new technology was able to repurpose MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) antenna technology, which is already fairly widely used.

MIMO uses multiple antennas and the Rice team was able to send two signals in a way that they cancel each other out, allowing a clear signal to go through over the single frequency.

Cancellation of signals had been proposed in theory for full duplex networks a while ago, Sabharwal said, but it took time to figure out a way to implement the idea at low cost without sophisticated new hardware.

In addition to full-duplex technology, Rice has created a Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP) with open source software that provides a space for researches from other organizations to innovate freely and examine full-duplex innovations.

Also, Sabharwal's team has demonstrated it can provide full-duplex in asynchronous mode, which means that one wireless node can start receiving a signal at the same time it is transmitting, instead of waiting to finish the transmission.

Sabharwal and colleagues have also published their theory on how full-duplex wireless networks work. The authors say the document can be used by engineers interested in adopting the technology.
https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...ess_technology





D.Telekom Could Miss Fee if AT&T Deal Fails: Source
Peter Maushagen

Deutsche Telekom AG (DTEGn.DE) could miss out on a multi-billion dollar break fee if regulatory hurdles cause the failure of its $39 billion deal to sell T-Mobile USA to AT&T (T.N), a person familiar with the matter said.

"There are a number of options under which the (break fee) contract will not come into effect," the person, who is familiar with the contract, told Reuters on Monday.

Deutsche Telekom declined comment.

The U.S. government last week sued to block AT&T's purchase of T-Mobile USA, a deal that would vault the combined company above Verizon Wireless as the No. 1 player in the United States.

As part of the AT&T deal, Deutsche Telekom had secured a break fee comprising $6 billion in cash and other assets should regulators reject the deal.

But the source said on Monday that AT&T will only have to pay that fee if certain conditions are met.

For instance, the acquisition has to receive regulatory approval within a certain timeframe, the source said. Otherwise, the contract is void.

Also, the value of T-Mobile USA may not fall below a certain level, the person said. That could happen, for instance, if regulators demand that parts of the company be sold as a condition for approval of the deal.

Shares of Deutsche Telekom fell 1.8 percent to 8.58 euros by 0920 GMT (5:20 a.m. ET). The stock has lost about 17 percent of its value over the past month.

AT&T's Frankfurt-listed shares (T.F) were down 1.5 percent.

A German government official said on Thursday a deal for AT&T to buy T-Mobile USA could still be reached as the U.S. Department of Justice is holding talks with the two companies.

AT&T is expected to soon present a proposed solution to U.S. antitrust regulators to salvage the deal, people close to the matter said last week.

(Writing by Maria Sheahan; Editing by David Holmes)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...78416N20110905





Google Details Electricity Usage of Its Data Centers
James Glanz

Google released what was once among its most closely guarded secrets on Thursday: how much electricity its enormous computing facilities consume.

The company said that its data centers continuously drew almost 260 million watts — about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant — in order to run Google searches, YouTube views, Gmail messaging and display ads on all those services around the world.

Though the electricity figure may seem large, the company asserts that the world is using less energy as a result of the billions of operations carried out in Google data centers. Google says people should consider things like the amount of gasoline saved when someone conducts a Google search rather than, say, driving to the library. “They look big in the small context,” Urs Hoelzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, said in an interview.

Google says that people conduct over a billion searches a day and numerous other downloads and queries, and it calculates that the average energy consumption for a typical user is small, about 180 watt-hours a month, or the equivalent of running a 60-watt light bulb for three hours. The overall electricity figure includes all Google operations worldwide, including the energy required to run its campuses and office parks, he added.

While comparing different types of electricity loads is difficult, utility companies estimate that 260 million watts could power all of the homes in a sizeable city – say, 100,000 to 200,000 homes.

For years, Google maintained a wall of silence worthy of a government security agency on how much electricity the company used — a silence that experts speculated was used to cloak how quickly it was outstripping the competition in the scale and sophistication of its data centers.

The electricity figures are no longer seen as a key to decoding the company’s operations, said Mr. Hoelzle. Google is known to have built efficient data centers. Unlike many data-driven companies, Google designs and builds most of its data centers from scratch, including its servers that use energy-saving chips and software.

Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco, applauded Google for releasing the figures but cautioned that despite the advent of increasingly powerful and energy-efficient computing tools, electricity use at data centers is still rising as every major corporation now relies on them. He said the figures did not include the electricity drawn by the personal computers, tablets and iPhones that use information from Google’s data centers.

“When we hit the Google search button,” Mr. Horowitz said, “it’s not for free.”

Google also estimated that its total carbon emissions for 2010 were just under 1.5 million metric tons, with most of that attributable to carbon fuels that provide electricity for the data centers. In part because of special arrangements the company has made to purchase electricity from wind farms, Google says that 25 percent of its energy is supplied by renewable fuels, and estimates that it will reach 30 percent in 2011.

Google also released an estimate that an average search uses 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, a figure that may be difficult for many people to understand intuitively. But when multiplied by Google’s estimate of more than a billion searches a day, the figure yields a somewhat surprising result: approximately 12.5 million watts of Google’s 260 million watt total can be accounted for by searches, the company’s bread-and-butter service.

The rest is used by Google’s other services, including YouTube, whose power consumption the company also depicted as very small.

The announcement is likely to spur further competition in an industry where every company is already striving to appear “greener” than the next, said Dennis Symanski, a senior data center project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit organization. At professional conferences on the topic, Mr. Symanski said, “They’re all clamoring to get on the podium to claim that they have the most efficient data center.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/t...a-centers.html





ClearEdge Power to Make Fuel Cell for Data Centers
Martin LaMonica

ClearEdge Power is making what it hopes is the Goldilocks of fuel cells, a power source big enough for a business or school but less expensive than larger, high-end models.

The Hillsboro, Ore.-based company today said it has raised $73.5 million from institutional investors as well as Austrian energy supplier Gussing Renewable Energy and utility Southern California Edison.

The series E round will be used to expand to the east coast U.S. and internationally, including into central Europe. The company also intends to expand its product line with a fuel cell designed specifically for data centers, a product which is being now tested with customers, according to CEO Russell Ford.

The data center fuel cell will provide power at about half the cost of grid energy and provide back up in the case power goes out, Ford said. The company is planning other derivative products from its core 5-kilowatt fuel cell, too.

ClearEdge Power makes smaller units than Bloom Energy and FuelCell Energy but the company sees the light commercial market, such as retail outlets and office buildings, as a larger available market worth about $100 billion globally, according to Ford.

A single ClearEdge unit generates 5 kilowatts of power by converting natural gas into electricity using a chemical process. Customers also use the heat generated from power production for space heating or to heat water.

With its latest funding, it intends to set up business in Eastern states, including New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, where there's a relatively high cost of electricity. A 5-kilowatt unit, which is about the size of a refrigerator, costs $56,000. When maintenance and operation costs are figured in, the cost is lower than getting power from the grid, Ford said.

Fuel cells are a reliable source of power when power goes out and are cleaner than grid power. ClearEdge's fuel cells don't emit any air pollutants and they reduce carbon emissions by 35 percent to 40 percent, according to the company. Because they generate both heat and power, they are 90 percent efficient.

One of the big barriers to fuel cell adoption has always been the upfront cost. Return on investment depends on power and fuel prices, but the company's current commercial customers usually see a payback in around six or seven years, Ford said.

ClearEdge Power is negotiating with financial institutions so it can provide financing, which would remove the upfront cost. Solar companies are using the solar lease model to accelerate sales. Bloom Energy also offers financing where it owns and maintains its fuel cells and customers pay for the power and heat produced.

"As we get a little more mature to add financing as the solar companies have we will absolutely see an inflection in the adoption rate," he said. "I expect to have something in place in the very near future."

The company expects to sell 1,000 units next year and then double volume every year through 2015, he added.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20...-data-centers/





Netflix Cracks Down on Sharing: One Stream Per Customer Unless You Pay More
Phillip Dampier

Netflix streaming customers who happen to share their account with other family members are having a frustrated Labor Day weekend as Netflix completes implementation of strict new limits on the number of concurrent video streams available for viewing.

Netflix has always unofficially had streaming limitations:

Some membership plans allow you to watch simultaneously on more than one personal computer or Netflix ready device at the same time. If you are on the 1 disc out at-a-time plan [or stream-only plan], you may watch only one device at a time. If you are on the 2 discs out at-a-time plan, you may watch on up to two devices at the same time. Members on the 3 disc plan can watch on up to three devices. The maximum is four devices simultaneously, and that is available for members on the 4 or greater discs out at-a-time plans.

But many of our readers have told us they have never had problems running two or even three concurrent streams at the same time on a “stream-only” plan… until recently. What Netflix’s “official policy” was and what customers could actually do were two different things.

“Netflix never liked two streams at the same time on the same browser, but if you have several family members, two or three people could watch different shows on their own devices at the same time, but no more,” says Stop the Cap! reader Jared Ustel. “As of this weekend, streaming customers can only watch one show at a time.”

Stop the Cap! was able to verify this ourselves this weekend. Sure enough, while in the recent past we were able to support up to three video streams running at the same time, now it is just one.

This new restriction seems timed to coincide with Netflix’s recent price increases, which took effect Sept. 1. Now, large families sharing a Netflix account will either have to reserve time to watch their respective favorites or:

1. Pay considerably more for a combo disc-rental/streaming plan which unlocks a corresponding number of concurrent streams. If you want two concurrent video streams, you will need to pay $19.98 a month, which also allows you two mailed DVD’s out at a time. Three streams (and DVD’s) runs $23.98, four: $29.98;
2. Sign up for a second Unlimited Streaming account at an additional $7.99 a month;
3. Forget about Netflix.

While Netflix may have been hoping to cut down on the number of “shared accounts” with friends and distant family members, their policy change will hit families hard.

With the controversial Sept. 1 price increase effectively near-doubling the cost to watch video streams and rent one DVD at a time by mail, now may not be the best time to further antagonize loyal customers.
http://stopthecap.com/2011/09/05/net...-you-pay-more/





Did Wal-Mart Throw A Lawsuit To Get Access To Netflix Customers?

Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) recently surged into third place in the movie-download business, barely a year after buying the startup Vudu. Now, the giant internet retailer may have scored another coup.

A new court ruling gives Wal-Mart a major boost in its effort to muscle in on Netlix’s streaming subscribers. A federal court in California late last week approved a class-action settlement that requires Wal-Mart to pay out $27.5 million. But here’s the key element of the ruling: Wal-Mart will be allowed to pay the 40 million Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) subscribers in the form of gift cards for Wal-Mart.com—where there is prominent advertising for Vudu, which rents and sells movies a la carte..

The court ruling is a blow to Netflix, which had earlier blasted the settlement as “the equivalent of a marketing campaign that costs Walmart only 68 cents per potential customer.”

The class action came in response to a dinner meeting in 2005 at which the CEOs of the Netflix and Wal-Mart.com allegedly agreed to divvy up the DVD market. Consumer advocates say that under the pact, Wal-Mart agreed not to rent DVDs if Netflix agreed not to sell them. Class action suits were filed against both companies in 2009.

In what now appears to be a shrewd move by Wal-Mart, the company reached a settlement with the plaintiffs in July. The court ruling last week gave tentative approval to the settlement. Under its terms, approximately 40 million past and current Netflix subscribers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico will be notified by email that they are entitled to redeem an online settlement card at Wal-Mart.com. Members of the class action can also choose to receive a check in the mail. The settlement states that claimants will receive their share of the $27 million, minus 25 percent legal fees.

In court filings, Netflix argued that the settlement effectively hands over its customer list to Wal-Mart at a time when the retail giant is trying to expand its online video offerings. In response, the court approved an arrangement that will see a third party, not Wal-Mart, manage the payouts. The procedures also say that Wal-Mart cannot keep track track of which people that register their gift cards on the site are class action claimants.

Still, the way the settlement is being carried out will likely increase awareness of Vudu as a potential alternative to Neftlix at a time when Netflix is facing some new challenges. In recent months, Netflix has failed to renew a key agreement major content provider Starz and announced a controversial plan that will significantly increase costs for subscribers who elect to receive movies both in the mail and a streaming service.

For the first half of the year, Vudu had 5.3 percent of the online rental-and-purchase movie market, behind only Apple’s ITunes, with a 65.8 percent share, and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Corp.‘s Zune Video Marketplace, with 16.2 percent. Vudu was more popular than comparable offerings from both Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and Sony (NYSE: SNE).

“Netflix continues to believe the lawsuit is without merit and the settlement changes nothing,” said spokesman Steve Swasey by email. Wal-Mart didn’t reply to phone requests for comment.

The Wal-Mart settlement is slated to receive final approval next February. Meanwhile, Netflix says it will continue to fight ongoing court claims that it is also liable for the same antitrust allegations.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-d...lix-customers/





Neither Smurf Nor Wizard Could Save Summer Movie Attendance
Brooks Barnes

It was the summer that North American movie attendance continued to slide, Hollywood’s reliance on overseas ticket sales intensified, the Smurfs flexed their minimuscles and a cadre of A-list stars flopped — again.

From the first weekend in May to Labor Day, a period that typically accounts for 40 percent of the film industry’s annual ticket sales, domestic box-office revenue is projected to total $4.38 billion, an increase from last year of less than 1 percent, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box-office data.

The bad news: higher ticket prices, especially for the 18 films released in 3-D (up from seven last summer), drove the increase. Attendance for the period is projected to total about 543 million, the lowest tally since the summer of 1997, when 540 million people turned up.

Hollywood has now experienced four consecutive summers of eroding attendance, a cause for alarm for both studios and the publicly traded theater chains. One or two soft years can be dismissed as an aberration; four signal real trouble.

But there was a silver lining. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2,” “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” and a spate of superhero films, including “Captain America: The First Avenger” and “Thor,” generated enough interest to reduce the box-office hole created by winter flops like “Mars Needs Moms.” After the first quarter, ticket sales were down a staggering 20 percent compared with the same period in 2010. Sales lag 4 percent for the year.

“In an economy that has been unfortunately pretty depressing, the marketplace expanded to accommodate big pictures stacked back to back to back,” said Dan Fellman, president for domestic distribution at Warner Brothers.

The studio, owned by Time Warner, released two of North America’s top three summer movies. Its final Harry Potter installment was No. 1 with about $375 million in ticket sales and “The Hangover Part II,” which took in over $254 million, was third. “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” released by Paramount, a division of Viacom, was second with about $350 million in sales.

On a global basis, three movies took in more than $1 billion, the industry’s new threshold of smash success. Those films were “Deathly Hallows — Part 2,” “Dark of the Moon” and Walt Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.”

However, the old Hollywood power source — star wattage — continued to dim. Audiences still turned out for Johnny Depp in the Pirates series, but stars otherwise failed to draw crowds.

Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks flamed out “Larry Crowne.” Jim Carrey, who almost seems to be adopting a creepy public persona of late, flopped in “Mr. Popper’s Penguins.” Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig fell off their box-office horses in “Cowboys & Aliens.” The careers of Kevin James (“Zookeeper”) and Ryan Reynolds (“Green Lantern”) also cooled off.

Three movie companies managed to breathe life into aging or moribund franchises or seed new ones — Hollywood’s equivalent of home runs. Marvel Studios, a division of Disney, already has sequels to “Thor” and “Captain America” in the works, while Sony’s movie studio has moved a follow-up to “The Smurfs,” which came out of nowhere to sell over $132 million in tickets in North America (and is closing in on $400 million worldwide).

Efforts by 20th Century Fox, owned by the News Corporation, to restart its “X-Men” and “Planet of the Apes” franchises were particularly impressive. Fox took creative risks with “X-Men: First Class” and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” and it was rewarded with hits that will spawn sequels.

“The lesson for us is that different and original is always hard and always a risk but has great upside,” said Tom Rothman, co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment. “While both of those films had genetic material in common with their original franchises, both were very, very original pieces.” Notably, “First Class” and “Rise” received some of the summer’s best reviews.

Though the United States remains the world’s largest movie market, one of the summer’s lessons centers on the growing importance of overseas ticket sales, particularly in Russia and China. Several films — including “Stranger Tides,” “Kung Fu Panda 2” from DreamWorks Animation, and Disney-Pixar’s “Cars 2” — disappointed at home, but generated big returns internationally.

This phenomenon helps explain why studios keep churning out bland sequels despite an erosion of interest in them at home; fatigue does not set in as fast internationally, in part because moviegoing in many foreign countries is less of a habit, studio executives say.

“Stranger Tides,” for example, took in almost $70 million less in North America than its 2007 predecessor, “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.” But “Stranger Tides” took in $145 million more than “At World’s End” overseas.

“America used to set the course — if a movie disappointed here, then it was done,” said Phil Contrino, editor of BoxOffice.com. “That’s simply not the case anymore. America is just another territory now.”

The summer of 2011 provided another lesson in Hollywood’s sleight-of-hand economics. “Stranger Tides” may have taken in over $1 billion, but Disney must give half to theater owners; Jerry Bruckheimer, that film’s producer, and Mr. Depp also get a portion. Take what’s left and subtract costs — Disney spent an estimated $400 million on production and global marketing — and the profit is rather thin. (Disney also profits from sales of DVDs and related merchandise, however.)

Which of the summer’s two major bombs, “Cowboys & Aliens” and “Green Lantern,” was the bigger financial calamity? Both will lose tens of millions, but “Green Lantern” is by far the larger loss. Warner, confident that it could create a new franchise with that film, decided not to bring in a financing partner to reduce risk. Universal hedged its bet by teaming with DreamWorks Studios and Relativity Media.

Thematically, R-rated comedies ruled. Crude humor helped turn “Bridesmaids” into a surprise smash for Universal; that film, notably built around a female ensemble, took in $281 million worldwide, a staggering total for a movie that cost about $33 million to make. Sony’s “Bad Teacher” and Warner’s “Horrible Bosses” also plowed this ground to impressive results. “The Hangover Part II” was the granddaddy of the genre.

But audiences may be growing weary of extreme vulgarity. “The Change-Up,” a Universal comedy that opens with a baby defecating in Jason Bateman’s mouth, flopped, costing $52 million to make (and tens of millions more to market) and selling about $40 million in tickets worldwide.

Amid all of the special effects and computer animation, two old-fashioned films aimed at adults turned in impressive results. “The Help,” a DreamWorks Studios adaptation of a best-selling novel, has ridden strong reviews to $122 million in ticket sales and counting. Earlier in the summer, “Midnight in Paris,” distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, became an outsize hit for Woody Allen, selling $53 million in tickets.

“It’s always kind of funny to see Hollywood surprised that movies aimed at adults succeed in the summer,” said Mr. Contrino of BoxOffice.com. “If you don’t feed them garbage — surprise — they buy tickets.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/b...-to-erode.html





George Kuchar, Made Underground Films, Dies at 69
Paul Vitello

George Kuchar, a filmmaker whose campy yet ardent low-budget movies inspired underground directors like John Waters and David Lynch in the 1960s, and helped kindle the do-it-yourself moviemaking aesthetic now ubiquitous on YouTube, died on Tuesday in San Francisco. He was 69.

The cause was prostate cancer, his twin brother, Mike, said.

Mr. Kuchar and his brother started making films together as boys, using the eight-millimeter camera they received for their 12th birthday, props from their family’s apartment, and actors enlisted among friends and neighbors in the Bronx.

George and Mike Kuchar (pronounced KOO-char) began receiving attention in the underground film world in the early ’60s with sardonic sendups like “I Was a Teenage Rumpot,” “Night of the Bomb” and “Lust for Ecstasy.” The films spoofed the Hollywood schlock the brothers devoured during weekend marathons at the local movie house, where they essentially grew up, while conveying what The New York Times, in a 1983 retrospective, called “a compassionate sense of the human condition, especially of loneliness.”

As the two developed individual styles, George Kuchar directed the 1966 film short “Hold Me While I’m Naked,” a semi-autobiographical rumination on the frustrations of a maker of soft-core pornographic films. Many movie scholars consider it one of camp’s defining texts. Along with his “Weather Diaries,” a series of films he made on annual visits to a trailer park in Oklahoma during tornado season, it is his best-known work.

Mr. Kuchar’s ability to make movies on a shoestring during a prolific career in which he sometimes made two or three films a year for the art-house circuit was a point of pride for him, and an inspiration to several generations of young filmmakers.

“He was a liberator,” said P. Adams Sitney, a founder of Anthology Film Archives in the East Village, a nonprofit organization that collects and preserves experimental films. “He showed you how to make a film for absolutely nothing, using your friends and your ingenuity. His influence is incalculable — the whole world of YouTube is where you see it. He was a guy who just wanted to keep making films. I don’t think he even wanted to be ‘discovered’ by Hollywood.”

Mr. Waters, who crossed over from cult to mainstream with his 1988 movie “Hairspray,” said in an interview on Wednesday that the Kuchar brothers were “the people who made me want to make movies.”

“They were the first ‘experimental’ filmmakers I ever read about when I was 15,” he added. “They were giants. They inspired four to five generations of militantly eccentric art fans. To me they were the Warner Brothers of the underground.”

George Andrew Kuchar was born in Manhattan on Aug. 31, 1942 (an hour after his brother), and grew up in the Bronx. His father, also George, was a truck driver whose taste for pornographic films triggered an initial interest in what the younger George called “the sordidness of adults” and the power of film to “suddenly make it so alive.”

Their mother, Stella, bought the brothers their camera.

After graduating from the School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, Mr. Kuchar worked briefly drawing weather maps for the New York television meteorologist Dr. Frank Field; then tried drawing comics. He settled on being a full-time filmmaker after The Village Voice and The New York Herald Tribune wrote glowing articles about some of his early work. (A reviewer in Newsweek called the brothers “the holy innocents of the underground.”)

In 1971 he was invited to teach filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he remained on the faculty until his illness forced him to stop work this year. Teaching provided him with not only a steady income but also hundreds of amateur actors — his students — willing to be cast in some of his later movies, including “Carnal Bipeds” (1973), “I Married a Heathen” (1974) and “I, an Actress” (1977).

Mr. Kuchar, whose speaking voice never left the Bronx, was always prosaic in describing his work. In the many documentaries and print interviews that quote him, he almost never uses the term avant-garde. He is more likely to brag about how little money he spent making a film, or to compare the costs of using film and videotape, than to articulate his theory of film.

“Normally, I don’t have much of a personal life,” he said in one taped interview, answering a question about why he made movies. “Making a movie is very personal. You get to interact with people. It’s like a party. You make a party and then you’re home alone for a long time. You edit it, and put it together and then you go — and another party happens when you show the rushes. So it helps your social life.”

In an interview videotaped in 2009, however, he probably came as close as he ever would to explaining his motives as a filmmaker: “Makin’ movies, see, sometimes you see a very beautiful person. And the first thing that comes to my mind is, I want to make a movie of that person. ’Cause I like puttin’ gauzes — ah, cheap, black cloth on the lens with a rubber band — and creating these, what look like 1940s movies, or movies of a beautiful Hollywood style, and blowing these people up bigger than life and making them into gods and goddesses. And I think in the movies that’s a wonderful way of pushing them on the public, and infusing the public with great objects of desire, and dreams, and things of great beauty.”

He added, after a long pause, “Living human beings of beauty.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/m...ies-at-69.html





Cinematic Listology

6 Things the Film Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know About
Ashe Cantrell

You may already be a film industry cynic. Maybe you think Hollywood is a barren wasteland, devoid of creativity and originality. Maybe you’re sick of seeing talented people get ignored and vapid hacks get splashed all over the trades. Maybe you’re tired of 3D everything and having to re-buy your movies every five to ten years.

I’m not here to dissuade you of any of that. Hell no, I’m here to make it worse. Get ready, because this is some of the rottenest shit of which the film industry is capable. These are the things so terrible that Hollywood has to cover them up, lest God see their sin and smite them accordingly (and keep various government entities and lawyers off their backs, of course). If you still had any kind thoughts toward Hollywood, I suggest you prepare yourself for crushing disappointment.

But first, I’d like to give a very huge shout out and thank you to writers C. Coville and Maxwell Yezpitelok for their help on this article. You guys are great!

And now back to the shit storm, already in progress:

6. Tricky Hollywood Accounting

Here’s a basic example of Hollywood Accounting: A studio makes a movie. The studio distributes the movie itself, and although the distributor is technically a separate company, they both belong to the same parent company. Also, the distribution arm sets whatever fees it wants. If they want to charge themselves eleventy quintillion dollars for distribution, they totally can. Then, even if the film earns billions of dollars in box office receipts, they’re still technically in debt (to themselves) and thus haven’t turned a profit.

Sound ridiculous? It happens all the freaking time. David Prowse, the guy who was in the Darth Vader costume in the original trilogy of Star Wars (before being ousted by that douche Hayden Christensen in the special edition) has never been paid for Return of the Jedi because it hasn’t turned a profit after nearly 30 years. That’s after dozens of home video and theatrical re-releases. (All the merchandising money goes to Lucas directly, of course.)

Similarly, someone leaked Warner Bros.’ accounting sheet for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix onto the internet, showing that the film that had grossed about $1 billion worldwide had lost $167 million on paper.

Winston Groom, the writer of Forrest Gump was told that the film based on his work wasn’t profitable. Of course, he got the last laugh when they came to him asking if they could turn the sequel, Gump and Co. into a film as well, and he reportedly told them, ”I cannot, in good conscience, allow money to be wasted on a failure.” In other words, “Go fuck yourself.”

And then there’s Art Buchwald, whose spec script got stolen by Paramount (remember that, it’s going to come up later), and got turned into Coming to America. When he took them to court and sued for a percentage of the profit, Paramount was totally cool with it, because according to their books, it hadn’t made any kind of profit, so they didn’t owe him one red fucking cent. The judge later ruled that it was “unconscionable” for Paramount not to pay Buchwald something in a settlement. Otherwise, he’d have to ask Paramount to open their books for the courts to review. Paramount quickly backed down and settled with Buchwald instead.

5. Extorting Theaters

Ever wondered why popcorn, something that costs $.25 a bag on Planet Earth, costs $7 at the movies? Here’s a hint: it’s not because of the reconstituted pig flesh that they call butter.

Movie theaters have had to look for more and more ways to increase revenue, like jacking up the prices of things at the concessions stand and adding a dozen ads to the beginning of each film. Why, when new releases are constantly breaking records and making obscene amounts of money? Because film studios don’t like the theaters getting their beak wet.

Movie theaters operate on a kind of sliding scale. The first weekend of a movie’s release, the profit is split heavily in the studio’s favor, typically around an 80/20 split. The second weekend, it may change to a 70/30 scale, and so on. It’s even rumored that some major blockbuster films like Avatar are released with 90/10 or even 95/5 splits. Now keep in mind that exceptionally few films do very well after the first week of their release.

So why do the theaters take these awful deals? Because if they don’t, the studio is under no obligation to lease their films to that theater, so they can just totally bounce if they want to. If that happens, the theater has no films to show at all, and then what have they got to draw people in? Overpriced hot dogs?

4. Fake Reviews

Have you ever seen a trailer for a shitty movie on TV and it has one of those blurbs that’s like “…stunning…,” and maybe a soothing voice reads it aloud? You may joke with your friends that the rest of that quote is “a stunning pile of horse shit.” Turns out, that actually happens. It’s not a joke at all. Marketing departments just plain don’t give a fuck. For example, one critic’s review of Live Free or Die Hard got shortened from “hysterically overproduced and surprisingly entertaining” to “hysterically… entertaining.” Sometimes they’ll even take the blurb from parts of the review where the critic was referring to a different movie entirely or the genre as a whole, like when a blurb used for Definitely, Maybe turned out to be from the critic’s description of the romantic comedy genre as a whole and not his actual thoughts on the film.

Another fun trick Hollywood likes to use is trying to woo critics with free screenings, food, set visits, and other goodies. The people who take the bait are called quote whores. If your film needs a good review, they’re there to give it. One of the most infamous is a critic named Earl Dittman, who is the film critic for a publication called Wireless Magazine. You’ve probably never heard of Wireless, and that’s because they apparently have zero subscribers and no web presence, and yet that doesn’t stop film studio marketing departments from using his blurbs like they’re gold. In fact, Dittman was the center of a lot of controversy when an e-mail he sent to Fox contained not one, but ten different blurbs for the movie Robots and instructions for the studio to pick and use whichever one they liked best. But at least Earl Dittman’s a real guy.

David Manning, however, is a different story. In 2000, Sony Pictures created the fictitious Manning and claimed that he worked for The Ridgefield Press, a real newspaper. Unfortunately, they didn’t foresee someone actually asking the paper if they’d ever heard of the guy, because, you know, they hadn’t. All of his blurbs were concocted by Sony Pictures’ marketing department. Fox pulled similar shit, using footage of employees pretending to be ordinary movie-goers for promotional material.

In the spirit of Hollywood review tactics, I’m going to build a review of my most recent articles from an e-mail that the Film School Rejects editors sent me.

“Ashe, we’re getting really sick of telling you this, but if you… don’t… keep… posting these ridiculous[ly wonderful]… articles, we’re going to have to let you go.” -Cole Abaius, Film School Rejects

It gets darker (and shittier) further down the rabbit hole…

3. Copyright Bullshit

Now, I’m not going to sit here and say that copyright sucks and it should be abolished, because I think it’s a useful tool for creators who want to protect their work from douchebags who might rip it off. What sucks is the way that big film companies use copyright as a bludgeon to keep people away from their intellectual property.

See, originally, copyright was limited to a maximum of 28 years. If you created something, you had 28 years to get all you could out of it, because after that it became public domain. Since those days, copyright terms have been extended numerous times, and each time one company has been leading the charge: Disney.

Each time the copyright on Steamboat Willie is about to run out, Disney loses their shit and lobbies the government to pass another copyright extension law. Although a popular explanation for this is that they’d lose the rights to Mickey Mouse if Steamboat Willie were to become public domain, that’s not the case. Mickey Mouse is actually a trademarked property, and trademarks are perpetual as long as the company continues to use it. (If you haven’t noticed, Disney uses the fuck out of Mickey Mouse.) The simple fact is that Disney still makes lots of money selling DVDs and merchandise relating to Steamboat Willie.

In fact, Duke University compiled a list of all of the films that could have entered the public domain this year if Disney hadn’t argued for the law to be changed in 1976. Movies like On The Waterfront and Seven Samurai, and even the first two books of The Lord of the Rings would be in the public domain now, free for anyone to use and enjoy and remix and learn from. As it stands now, Steamboat Willie remains under copyright until 2023, and even fairly boring things like the very first issue of Sports Illustrated are protected until 2050. You can imagine what that means for movies that came out this year.

Here’s something funny, though: Some legal experts believe that Steamboat Willie may have never been registered for copyright at all. Nowadays, the very act of creating something gives you copyright, whether you register it or not, but back then, you had to specifically register the copyright for the works you wanted protected, and you had to label it in a very certain way afterward. A Disney researcher, Gregory Brown, believes that Walt Disney may have improperly formatted the copyright notice on Steamboat Willie, thus making the copyright void. In fact, a law student at Arizona State University researched Brown’s claims and agreed with him. Not only that, but a George Washington University copyright expert agreed with both of them and published a paper saying so. It was at this point that Disney took notice of the issue and actually threatened to sue him for “slander of title.” Holy shit, Disney.

2. Strangling Consumer Choice

If you’re like many millions of other Netflix customers, you were probably pissed off when they jacked up their prices last month, effectively doubling the cost of some people’s subscriptions. And before that, you were probably annoyed when they started putting out their DVDs 28 days after they went on sale. And maybe you’re mad now that they’re losing their contract with Starz because they had an argument about money.

It’s almost like Netflix got tired of making money or something. Why do they keep doing all this stupid stuff? Well, simply put, it’s not really their fault. You see, film studios aren’t the biggest fans of things like Netflix, Redbox, or Hulu. You know, those things that allow you to pick and choose what you want to watch when you want to watch it for a reasonable, affordable price. The reason is that it eats into their sales of DVDs and pay-per-view rentals, for which they get a much higher cut of the profit. As DVD sales drop, movie studios panic.

So, instead of adapting their business model to a format that consumers obviously prefer, they’d rather try to turn back the clock and take away the distribution methods people love and enjoy. That means demanding more money from Netflix to lease their movies, ever-increasing delays between a DVD’s release and its availability out of Redbox machines, and putting Hulu, a service created by the content creators themselves, up on the auction block when it ended up being too successful. The Time Warner CEO has even taken to blasting Netflix in the press for the last year, describing them as a “fading star.” You’d fade, too, if someone wrapped their hands around your throat.

1. Stealing Scripts

Remember Art Buchwald from earlier? The guy who almost got screwed by Paramount before a judge stepped in and told them to cut that shit out? Well, there’s a little more to that story. A few years before the big court case, Buchwald was already a successful humor writer and satirist, even winning himself a Pulitzer for his work. Then he set his sights on Hollywood, and he pitched Paramount an idea for a movie about an African prince who moves to America to find a bride. He suggested Eddie Murphy as a lead actor. (That’s right, kids. People used to want Eddie Murphy in their movies.)

Paramount took the pitch, but then had trouble getting it off the ground. Eventually, the rights returned to Buchwald and he pitched it to Warner Bros. Shortly after they began work on it, though, Warner Bros. killed the project. Turns out, there was a similar film going into production at Paramount. It was a movie about an African prince who moves to America to find a bride. Oh, and it starred Eddie Murphy, who was also given writing credit. That movie, of course, was Coming to America. Buchwald was furious and immediately took Paramount to court, which instigated the events discussed back in the Hollywood Accounting entry. So Buchwald didn’t just get screwed, he almost got double-screwed. But he’s not the only one.

Turns out, some of those crazy people who constantly crop up and say Hollywood producers ripped off their scripts aren’t so crazy. In fact, it turns out that it’s a dirty little secret of Hollywood’s that stealing scripts is almost commonplace. Jeff Grosso wrote a script about his life as a professional Texas Hold ‘Em player and had it turned down by Miramax, only for them to turn around and begin production on an identical project that became the Matt Damon film Rounders. Another writer, Reed Martin, pitched his idea and, like Buchwald, even recommended the perfect actor for his script– Bill Murray. Months later, an exceptionally similar movie, Broken Flowers (starring Bill Murray, of course), went into production without Martin. Although Martin’s claim was initially rejected, he’s recently filed an appeal based on the outcome of one part of Jeff Grosso’s legal battle over Rounders.

The problem is that while scripts can be copyrighted, ideas cannot. So, if Hollywood gets pitched an idea and likes it, but doesn’t want to deal with the whole “paying for the script” thing, they can just hire someone to write another script based on “their” idea. Since they have much bigger, meaner lawyers than your average spec script writer, the writer kinda gets boned. So even the mythical “original idea” in Hollywood? Yeah, it may not be so original after all.
http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/fea...bout.php/all/1





Rip A DRM’d DVD Disk To ISO Format With BDlot DVD ISO Master [Windows]
Justin Pot

Watch everything on your favorite DVD, including special features and commentary, from a single file on your hard drive. With the right software you can overcome the file protections on your DVDs and watch them on your computer anytime.

BDlot DVD ISO Master is a free piece of software that does what very few free programs can do – bypass the various Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies used to stop people from ripping DVDs, including Disney’s infamously tricky protection.

Watching movies on a computer, especially a laptop, is convenient. Sometimes it’s not convenient to watch them from a DVD, though. Perhaps your laptop doesn’t have a DVD drive. Perhaps you’re about to travel and don’t want the clutter of a physical DVD along for the the trip. Whatever the reason, ripping your DVDs can make them easier to watch on the go.

We’ve shown you how to rip entire DVDs to your hard drive in the past, but that tutorial focused on ripping DVDs to video files. With BDlot DVD ISO Master you can easily create an ISO file containing all the information on a DVD, which can be watched on your computer or burned to a blank DVD as a backup.

A Brief Explanation

We all know what a DVD is – a disk with files on it. These disks have a variety of uses, but most DVDs people buy in stores are movies. So that’s clear, but what is an ISO? And what is DRM? Good questions.

An ISO file is, simply put, an exact copy of a DVD disk. This means that an ISO file from a ripped movie DVD includes not only the movie itself but also the menu and the special features. These files are a useful starting point if you want to burn DVDs, but can also be a great format from which to watch DVDs on your hard drive.

What is DRM? It’s basically software added to DVDs, and many other kinds of media, to make it harder to copy the contents. This is meant to stop piracy, but can also stop innocent people from watching a DVD they legally own from their hard drive. BDlot gets around this.

Using BDlot DVD ISO Master

So, with that cleared up, let’s take a look at BDlot. To begin, of course, you’ll need to download BDlot DVD ISO Master. This Windows program is easy to install, and once you get it running you’ll see a simple interface. The first thing you’ll want to do is choose your source and destination:

This is simple enough: pick the DVD you’re trying to rip as your source, then pick where the file should be made. Note that this file will be rather large – typically upwards of 5GB – so choose a hard drive with lots of space.

You can also pick which sorts of DRM protection you want to remove:

There’s nothing wrong with leaving everything checked, of course, and doing so makes it more likely that you can actually play the DVD later. Once you’re ready to rip, all you need to do is click the big blue button – that will start the process. It may take a few hours, but at the end, you’ll have a ready-to-play ISO.

A variety of video players can open ISO files; I recommend VLC which plays just about everything. Most media centers, including Boxee, can also open ISO files. Let us know any other programs you find that can open ISO files in the comments below.

Want to burn an ISO to DVD? This program supports that too; just enter the burn mode and get started. You’ll need a DVD burner, of course.
Supported DRM

So what DRM can this tool remove? Here is the official list:

• CSS
• CPRM
• CPP
• APSUOPs
• ARccOS
• Rip-Guard
• Disney X protection

Conclusion

This is a great tool for ripping your DVD collection so you can watch it on the go. While it may not work for watching DVDs on portable devices like the iPad, it is great for those of us who want to watch our DVDs on our computers.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/rip-drm...aster-windows/





Hacking in the Netherlands Took Aim at Internet Giants
AP

Attackers who hacked into a Dutch Web security firm have issued hundreds of fraudulent security certificates for intelligence agency Web sites, including the C.I.A., as well as for Internet giants like Google, Microsoft and Twitter, the Dutch government said on Monday.

Experts say they suspect the hacker — or hackers — operated with the cooperation of the Iranian government, perhaps in attempts to spy on dissidents.

The latest versions of browsers including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox are now rejecting certificates issued by the firm that was hacked, DigiNotar.

But in a statement on Monday, the Dutch Justice Ministry published a list of the fraudulent certificates that greatly expands the scope of the July hacking attack that DigiNotar acknowledged only last week. The list also includes certificates that were sent to sites operated by Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype, AOL, the Tor Project, WordPress, and by intelligence agencies like Israel’s Mossad and Britain’s MI6.

DigiNotar is one of many companies that sell the security certificates widely used to authenticate Web sites and guarantee that communications between a user’s browser and a site are secure.

In theory, a fraudulent certificate can be used to trick a user into visiting a fake version of a Web site, or used to monitor communications with the real sites without users noticing.

But in order to pass off a fake certificate, a hacker must be able to steer his target’s Internet traffic through a server that he controls. That is something only an Internet service provider, or a government that commands one, can easily do.

Technology experts cite a number of reasons to believe the attack is connected to Iran. Notably, several of the certificates contain nationalist slogans in Farsi, the language spoken by most Iranians.

“This, in combination with messages the hacker left behind on DigiNotar’s Web site, definitely suggests that Iran was involved,” said Ot van Daalen, director of Bits of Freedom, an online civil liberties group.

So far, only a handful of users in Iran is known to have been affected.

The attack on DigiNotar closely resembles one in March of the United States security firm Comodo Inc., which was also attributed to an Iranian.

Although no users in the Netherlands are known to have been victimized directly, the breach has caused a major headache for the Dutch government, which relied on DigiNotar to authenticate most of its Web sites.

In a news conference on Saturday, the Dutch justice minister, Piet Hein Donner, said the safety of Web sites — including the country’s social security agency, police and tax authorities — could no longer be guaranteed.

He advised users who wanted to be certain of secure communication with the government to use pen and paper.

The Dutch government took over management of DigiNotar, a subsidiary of Vasco Inc., which is based in Chicago, but kept the Web sites operating as it scrambled to find replacement security providers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/t...-in-scope.html





DigiNotar Hacker Comes Out
Mikko

Almost from the beginning of the DigiNotar CA Disaster (report here), we had a reason to believe the case was connected to "ComodoGate" — the hacking of another Certificate Authority earlier this year, by an Iranian attacker.

This connection has now been confirmed.

After ComodoGate, the hacker — who called himself ComodoHacker — sent a series of messages via his Pastebin account. Then at the end of March 2011, it went silent. We've been keeping an eye on it, just in case the attacker will post something related to the Diginotar case.

And he just did.

In his latest post, ComodoHacker claims that he is the one that hacked DigiNotar as well. He also claims he still has access to four other "high-profile" CAs and is still able to issue new rogue certificates (including code signing certificates).

As a proof to show that he really did infiltrate DigiNotar, he shares the domain administrator password of the CA network: Pr0d@dm1n. DigiNotar would be able to confirm if this was accurate or not.

The same hacker seems to be active on Twitter as well, under the nickname "ich sun" at @ichsunx2.

The Certificate Authority system is in bad shape indeed. For some answers on what we should do next, we recommend watching this video of Moxie Marlinspike's Black Hat 2011 talk.
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002231.html





E Ink Promises Thinner, Lighter, Higher Resolution, and Color E-Paper Displays
Matthew Humphries

E Ink is already doing swift business in the growing e-reader market, but just like any technology company, it can’t sit still for fear of being overtaken or made redundant. With that in mind, the company has used IFA 2011 to show us some future products and the latest updates to its displays that are coming to market.

E Ink’s biggest success to date has to be the monochrome display found inside the best selling e-reader on the market: the Amazon Kindle. At IFA 2011 E Ink revealed some interesting facts about that monochrome display including how much potential it has for the future.

First of all, the displays are made in rolls of up to 1km in length and over a meter wide. Those rolls are then cut to specification, connectors attached to allow integration with a circuit board, before being shipped to partners like Amazon. In other words, E Ink has no trouble producing millions of these displays in short order, showing us why Amazon has been able to meet demand for the Kindle despite its huge popularity.

The resolution on the Kindle is SVGA, a mere 800 x 600 pixels and 167dpi. What you may not have known is that Kindle E Ink display is already capable of much higher resolutions, up to 12x SVGA in fact. The bottleneck isn’t the screen tech, but the underlying electronics capable of handling such a high resolution display.

Anyone wondering what comes next for the Kindle also got a hint from E Ink as to whet we can expect from the next iteration of the device. E Ink is working with Epson to produce a chip capable of controlling a 300dpi e-paper display. If the Kindle remains a monochrome device, that higher resolution display is sure to feature in the next generation.

If Amazon decides to create a Kindle Color instead, E Ink also has that covered with its latest Triton display. Triton uses the exact same monochrome E Ink screen, but overlays it with an RGBW color filter capable of 4,096 colors. That won’t challenge an iPad for color output, but then the Triton display retains the two month battery life, no power use when displaying a static image, and can be viewed easily in direct sunlight. We also can’t see any reason it wouldn’t also work with the forthcoming 300dpi screen.

The good news is that Triton display isn’t in development, it’s actually already in mass production and will feature in a number of new e-readers coming to market soon. Unfortunately, E Ink didn’t tell us when or who is producing them.

We can also look forward to E Ink’s displays getting thinner, lighter, and a lot more durable (shatterproof). The current generation display is laminated on to a glass substrate which has to be protected. That means devices need to be thicker to offer that protection, and that glass sheet makes them heavier. E Ink has come up with a plastic alternative to the glass which is thinner, lighter, and does not require the same level of protection while also not impacting the quality of the display output. In real terms, the existing E Ink displays are 200 microns thick where as the new ones are only 100 microns.

Moving from glass to plastic also means E Ink can put their displays in more products. One of the first examples is credit cards, which can now have a multi-digit display for added security while not being any thicker than a standard card. Of course, this latest gen screen also means we can look forward to thinner, lighter e-readers too, as well as some rather unique uses such as an E Ink watch:

E Ink also revealed their sales figures for the past few years purely for e-reader displays. In 2009 they shipped 3 million displays, in 2010 that increased to 10 million. This year they expect it to reach 25-30 million showing there’s certainly a growing market for low-power, highly-visible screens.
http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets...plays-2011095/





From Scroll to Screen
Lev Grossman

Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes. We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all.

The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was circa 1450, when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type. But if you go back further there’s a more helpful precedent for what’s going on. Starting in the first century A.D., Western readers discarded the scroll in favor of the codex — the bound book as we know it today.

In the classical world, the scroll was the book format of choice and the state of the art in information technology. Essentially it was a long, rolled-up piece of paper or parchment. To read a scroll you gradually unrolled it, exposing a bit of the text at a time; when you were done you had to roll it back up the right way, not unlike that other obsolete medium, the VHS tape. English is still littered with words left over from the scroll age. The first page of a scroll, which listed information about where it was made, was called the “protocol.” The reason books are sometimes called volumes is that the root of “volume” is volvere, to roll: to read a scroll, you revolved it.

Scrolls were the prestige format, used for important works only: sacred texts, legal documents, history, literature. To compile a shopping list or do their algebra, citizens of the ancient world wrote on wax-covered wooden tablets using the pointy end of a stick called a stylus. Tablets were for disposable text — the stylus also had a flat end, which you used to squash and scrape the wax flat when you were done. At some point someone had the very clever idea of stringing a few tablets together in a bundle. Eventually the bundled tablets were replaced with leaves of parchment and thus, probably, was born the codex. But nobody realized what a good idea it was until a very interesting group of people with some very radical ideas adopted it for their own purposes. Nowadays those people are known as Christians, and they used the codex as a way of distributing the Bible.

One reason the early Christians liked the codex was that it helped differentiate them from the Jews, who kept (and still keep) their sacred text in the form of a scroll. But some very alert early Christian must also have recognized that the codex was a powerful form of information technology — compact, highly portable and easily concealable. It was also cheap — you could write on both sides of the pages, which saved paper — and it could hold more words than a scroll. The Bible was a long book.

The codex also came with a fringe benefit: It created a very different reading experience. With a codex, for the first time, you could jump to any point in a text instantly, nonlinearly. You could flip back and forth between two pages and even study them both at once. You could cross-check passages and compare them and bookmark them. You could skim if you were bored, and jump back to reread your favorite parts. It was the paper equivalent of random-access memory, and it must have been almost supernaturally empowering. With a scroll you could only trudge through texts the long way, linearly. (Some ancients found temporary fixes for this bug — Suetonius apparently suggested that Julius Caesar created a proto-notebook by stacking sheets of papyrus one on top of another.)

Over the next few centuries the codex rendered the scroll all but obsolete. In his “Confessions,” which dates from the end of the fourth century, St. Augustine famously hears a voice telling him to “pick up and read.” He interprets this as a command from God to pick up the Bible, open it at random and read the first passage he sees. He does so, the scales fall from his eyes and he becomes a Christian. Then he bookmarks the page. You could never do that with a scroll.

Right now we’re avidly road-testing a new format for the book, just as the early Christians did. Over the first quarter of this year e-book sales were up 160 percent. Print sales — codex sales — were down 9 percent. Those are big numbers. But unlike last time it’s not a clear-cut case of a superior technology displacing an inferior one. It’s more complex than that. It’s more about trade-offs.

On the one hand, the e-book is far more compact and portable than the codex, almost absurdly so. E-books are also searchable, and they’re green, or greenish anyway (if you want to give yourself nightmares, look up the ecological cost of building a single Kindle). On the other hand the codex requires no batteries, and no electronic display has yet matched the elegance, clarity and cool matte comfort of a printed page.

But so far the great e-book debate has barely touched on the most important feature that the codex introduced: the nonlinear reading that so impressed St. Augustine. If the fable of the scroll and codex has a moral, this is it. We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e-book.

The codex is built for nonlinear reading — not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel. Indeed, the codex isn’t just another format, it’s the one for which the novel is optimized. The contemporary novel’s dense, layered language took root and grew in the codex, and it demands the kind of navigation that only the codex provides. Imagine trying to negotiate the nested, echoing labyrinth of David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” if it were transcribed onto a scroll. It couldn’t be done.

God knows, there was great literature before there was the codex, and should it pass away, there will be great literature after it. But if we stop reading on paper, we should keep in mind what we’re sacrificing: that nonlinear experience, which is unique to the codex. You don’t get it from any other medium — not movies, or TV, or music or video games. The codex won out over the scroll because it did what good technologies are supposed to do: It gave readers a power they never had before, power over the flow of their own reading experience. And until I hear God personally say to me, “Boot up and read,” I won’t be giving it up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/b...to-screen.html





Project Gutenberg Founder Michael S. Hart has Died
Carolyn Kellogg

Project Gutenberg announced Wednesday that founder Michael S. Hart has died. Hart, 64, died Tuesday in Illinois.

Project Gutenberg provides free e-books of thousands of works that are in the public domain. Hart first got the idea of sharing significant documents electronically early, in 1971.

In an obituary posted on its site, Project Gutenberg writes:

Hart was best known for his 1971 invention of electronic books, or eBooks. He founded Project Gutenberg, which is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects. He often told this story of how he had the idea for eBooks. He had been granted access to significant computing power at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On July 4 1971, after being inspired by a free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he decided to type the text into a computer, and to transmit it to other users on the computer network. From this beginning, the digitization and distribution of literature was to be Hart's life's work, spanning over 40 years.

Hart was an ardent technologist and futurist. A lifetime tinkerer, he acquired hands-on expertise with the technologies of the day: radio, hi-fi stereo, video equipment, and of course computers. He constantly looked into the future, to anticipate technological advances. One of his favorite speculations was that someday, everyone would be able to have their own copy of the Project Gutenberg collection or whatever subset desired. This vision came true, thanks to the advent of large inexpensive computer disk drives, and to the ubiquity of portable mobile devices, such as cell phones....

Michael prided himself on being unreasonable, and only in the later years of life did he mellow sufficiently to occasionally refrain from debate. Yet, his passion for life, and all the things in it, never abated.

Frugal to a fault, Michael glided through life with many possessions and friends, but very few expenses. He used home remedies rather than seeing doctors. He fixed his own house and car. He built many computers, stereos, and other gear, often from discarded components.

Michael S. Hart left a major mark on the world. The invention of eBooks was not simply a technological innovation or precursor to the modern information environment. A more correct understanding is that eBooks are an efficient and effective way of unlimited free distribution of literature. Access to eBooks can thus provide opportunity for increased literacy. Literacy, the ideas contained in literature, creates opportunity.

In July 2011, Michael wrote these words, which summarize his goals and his lasting legacy: “One thing about eBooks that most people haven't thought much is that eBooks are the very first thing that we're all able to have as much as we want other than air. Think about that for a moment and you realize we are in the right job."


Over the years, Project Gutenberg has expanded the format of its electronic offerings to keep up with emerging technologies. Many of its e-books are available as plain text documents, HTML and epub formats. Like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg's content is edited and vetted by volunteers -- and all its e-books are free.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jack...-has-died.html





U.S. Must Reveal Some Cellphone Tracking Cases: Court
Jeremy Pelofsky and James Vicini

The government must tell the public how it tracked suspects by cellphone without having given a judge detailed reasons for the tracking in some cases, an appeals court ruled on Tuesday, in a case pitting new technology against privacy rights.

A leading civil liberties group claimed victory in one of several cases making its way through the court system weighing privacy rights against law enforcement using data available through the proliferation of new technologies like the Global Positioning System (GPS), cellphones and laptop computers.

"I highly doubt that the 90 percent of Americans who carry cell phones thought that when they got cellphone service they were giving up their privacy in their movements," said Catherine Crump, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who argued the case.

The group has argued that prosecutors are getting information about a suspect's location with a judge's approval -- but without a warrant providing probable cause, which is typically needed in criminal cases for a warrant.

The ACLU questioned how often prosecutors have used applications for such information and sued to get details, a challenge the Justice Department said would violate the privacy of those under investigation or prosecuted.

A federal judge in 2010 ruled the Justice Department must reveal those cases that used such information in which the suspect was convicted, a decision upheld by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

"The disclosure sought by the plaintiffs would inform this ongoing public policy discussion by shedding light on the scope and effectiveness of cell phone tracking as a law enforcement tool," Judge Merrick Garland wrote in the unanimous decision.

Appeal Possible

Disclosure would, for example, provide information about the kinds of crimes the government uses cellphone tracking data to investigate, the appeals court said.

Citing privacy rights, the district court judge refused to order the government to reveal other cases in which such applications were used, such as the acquittal of a suspect or a sealed case.

The appeals court sent that issue back to the lower court for more proceedings to determine the extent of those cases.

The Justice Department could appeal the ruling to the full appeals court or to the Supreme Court, which already has agreed to consider another privacy case involving new technology.

Later this year the Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether law enforcement should have obtained a warrant before attaching a GPS device to a suspect's vehicle.

Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller said the agency was reviewing the decision and had not decided on its next step.

After surveying several U.S. Attorneys' offices, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Justice Department, some 255 cases were identified in which an application for cellphone location information was used.

The government has offered to identify the nature of the charges as well as whether a motion to suppress that information was filed and the outcome. The ACLU said it was open to ideas on how to provide the public details of the information as a possible settlement.

(Editing by Howard Goller and Eric Walsh)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7856BO20110906





Patriot Act

The kitchen-sink approach to national security.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells

The authors of the Patriot Act always intended that its provisions would be permanent. The politically expedient thing to do would have been to include a sunset provision, to acknowledge a temporary moment of crisis that required special measures for prosecutors to pursue terrorists. But the lawyers wanted no sunsets; some of them had been working Al Qaeda cases since the first World Trade Center bombing and imagined a long-term struggle that could last a generation. “I said, ‘Don’t think of this as an emergency measure,’ ” Viet Dinh [P1] recalled on July 20. At the time, Dinh was an assistant attorney general under John Ashcroft and was tasked on the morning of September 12 with writing a bill to fix whatever laws might impede investigation. The scholarship provided little guidance for how to make terror investigations easier, so Dinh sent an e-mail to the nation’s U.S. attorneys and FBI agents, asking for ideas. G-men are not constitutional lawyers, and excesses were rife: Someone wanted to send neighborhood watches in search of sordid types. The attorneys at Justice made piles, winnowing as they went: “Crazy Ideas,” “Quarter-Baked,” “Half-Baked.”

In those patriotic weeks, partisan conflict dissipated easily. The Democratic Senate and the Republican House each had their own bills, and Ashcroft, smiling, said every idea in each of the drafts would be adopted unless it conflicted with another provision. Jim Sensenbrenner, the bombastic, rotund Wisconsin Republican, leaned back in his chair and said his bill was called the USA Patriot Act. There were no conflicts with that; the name was in.

“Patriot Act” was appropriately overt. Before 9/11, when politicians spoke of “patriots,” they usually meant soldiers. Now prosecutors and the FBI were reaching for the same vanity—that they were the hard tip of freedom—and the same license to pursue enemies without much oversight or meddling. When it was signed into law six weeks after the attacks, the act made it easier to wiretap American citizens suspected of cooperating with terrorism, to snoop through business records without notification, and to execute search warrants without immediately informing their targets (a so-called sneak-and-peek [P2]). Privileges once reserved for overseas intelligence work were extended to domestic criminal investigations. There was less judicial oversight and very little transparency. The bill’s symbolism mattered also, signaling that the moral deference previously given to the Special Forces would be broadened until it encompassed much of the apparatus of the American state. Local prosecutors, military policemen, CIA lawyers—these were indispensable patriots too.

The Patriot Act was mostly a Republican project at its origin, but it would have died long ago without the support of Democrats. Liberals were committed enough to the bill that it took Texas Republican Dick Armey to insist that the new privileges of the Patriot Act would indeed sunset, unless the president asked for, and Congress approved, a reauthorization. In 2005, George W. Bush convinced Congress to renew the act, and in 2010, so did Barack Obama—even though the terrorist threat seemed less urgent, and liberal scholars had concluded that the civil-liberties violations in the bill could be resolved with a few modest changes. Dinh’s original worry—that politicians might not be committed enough to renew these laws—now seems misplaced.

What Dinh didn’t anticipate was a profound shift in liberalism and, therefore, in the politics of the country. Even with a Democrat now in the White House, the liberalism that protects the right of the individual against the majority—the politics of civil rights and abortion and gay marriage—has diminished, in favor of one that aims to improve the lot of the median man. Obama’s liberalism is for the majority, not against it. This spirit, and the unlikely endurance of the Patriot Act, owes something to the central psychological events of the decade: the vitality and threat of new economic competitors, the social violence initiated by the authors of obscure financial instruments, but first and most of all September 11—each of which evoked a particular feeling, that we were all together, under attack.
http://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anni...y/patriot-act/





Global Cybercrimes Cost $114 Billion Annually: Symantec

A study by Symantec Corp, the maker of Norton computer security software, estimates the cost of global cybercrimes at $114 billion annually.

The Norton Cybercrime Report 2011 said 431 million adults were victims globally in the past year, with costs of cybercrime surpassing the combined global black market in marijuana, cocaine and heroin.

"Over the past 12 months, three times as many adults surveyed have suffered from online crime versus offline crime, yet less than a third of respondents think they are more likely to become a victim of cybercrime than physical world crime in the next year," said Adam Palmer, Norton Lead Cybersecurity Advisor.

The study also identified men in the 18-31 years age group, who access the Internet from their mobile phone, as likely victims.

(Reporting by Gowri Jayakumar in Bangalore; Editing by Jon Loades-Carter)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7861DP20110907





MPAA's Bogus 'Piracy' Numbers Mean It Thinks Downloaders Would Buy 200 More DVDs Per Year
Mike Masnick

Over the years we've had plenty of fun with the MPAA's bogus use of stats when it comes to "piracy" claims. They're really laughable, and it would actually be kind of funny... if policy makers and the press didn't actually believe those numbers and pass bad legislation based on them. Even the one time that the MPAA admitted its piracy stats were totally wrong, it was too late to stop a law that was passed on the basis of those bogus numbers.

Now, you may have seen an MPAA inforgraphic (pdf) that's been making the rounds for a couple weeks now. It's so chock full of debunked stats, they should throw themselves a party for how much falseness they can shove into a single graphic. Going through and debunking the various numbers yet again (most have already been debunked in the past) didn't seem worth it, but furdlog points us to a wonderful debunking on a movie review site, where someone actually does the math, and realizes that if the MPAA's numbers for "losses" are accurate, it means that your average downloader would be buying 200 more DVDs per year. Yeah, for the MPAA's numbers to make even a tiny bit of sense, downloaders would be buying new DVDs more than every other day.

So according to the MPAA, piracy cost them $58 billion last year, making movie piracy a bigger industry than the GDPs of 10 American states. To put it even starker perspective, look at it this way. The film industry gets about $10 billion from the box office, and about $30 billion from the after market of DVDs, streaming, etc. So they’re claiming that piracy costs them almost two-thirds of their business. At $10 per DVD, every household in the United States would be buying an additional 50 DVDs per year if they weren’t so busy downloading. The technical term for a statistic like that is “fictional.”

See, they also claim that 29 million adults have ever illegally downloaded a film. But since that’s only 13% of the adult population, it makes the figure even more absurd. By their own estimate, those adults in question would have on average purchased an additional 200 DVDs each year if only they were still on dial-up. The problem with these absurd figures pulled out of the air, is that even if they are an accurate measure of how many movies are being illegally downloaded, it is not a measure of loss. As has been argued countless times, a bunch of zeros and ones do not cost the industry a dime unless they actually represent something that would have been bought otherwise. Anyone think the average downloader would actually have bought 200 more DVDs? Hell, are there even 200 new DVDs released per year?


And yet, the press and politicians still quote these numbers as accurate.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...per-year.shtml





Pirated Movies Traced to Swedish Film Body
Rebecca Martin

The Swedish Film Institute (SFI) is facing filesharing allegations after an anti-piracy company traced films that had appeared on filesharing site The Pirate Bay to an IP address at the Institute.

”From our point of view we have done everything in our power to see if there is any substance to these allegations, but so far we have found nothing,” said SFI CEO Bengt Toll to The Local.

Two weeks ago the film production company Strix and Swedish cinema giant SF Bio approached the Swedish Film Institute (SFI) with information they had received regarding Swedish films being spread illegally from the Institute and ending up on The Pirate Bay.

These suspicions, they said, were well-known in the film industry.

The information originated with an anti-piracy company called DoubleTrace who say that they have been able to trace filesharing activity over the summer to an IP-address registered to the Swedish Film Institute.

Toll said in a statement on Wednesday that they are taking the matter very seriously.

”But for us to be able to move forward now in any sort of investigation we need to get access to their information. We have been asking for this for about a week now,” he told The Local.

According to Toll, the Institute's IT specialists have been checking everything from the activities of institute staff to that of the building's other tenants who share the same IP addresses.

”We also have large public areas, where students and researchers can surf freely,” said Toll.

In order to get to grips with the situation the Institute has commissioned an external investigation from consulting company PWC in order to provide a neutral overview into the situation.

Pending this investigation Toll feels that it is unjustifiable that these allegations are continued to be spread though the media.

”If there was evidence that we have done something criminal they should report us to the police, if not, the whole thing just amounts to rumour-mongering which will ultimately hurt the entire Swedish film industry,” Toll told The Local.
http://www.thelocal.se/36028/20110908/





Does a Terabyte of Illegal Downloads Constitute Art?
Olivia Solon

Most people try to claim ignorance when they are busted for illegally downloading files, but soon you may be able to try your luck with the argument that it's "art".

Art 404 gallery is currently exhibiting a piece by Manuel Palou called "5 Million Dollars, 1 Terabyte" which is a "sculpture" consisting of a 1 TB external hard drive containing $5,000,000 worth of illegally downloaded files. The hard drive is displayed on a pedestal at the gallery.

The files are mostly games, books, language packs, music and design software. They include some recognisable expensive packages such as Adobe Font Collection ($20,000), Adobe Creative Suite ($2,600) and various AutoCAD downloads. The bulk of the value of the files comes from mega-packages such as the 76GB Great Science Text Books ($500,000), the 135 GB Nintendo DS Rom Collection ($145,000), the PC Games 1979-2001 collection ($150,000) and the 133 GB Fiction Books 2003-2011 (a whopping $3,000,000).

You can check out the full list here (pdf).

What do you think of 5 Million Dollars, 1 Terabyte? Can you appreciate piracy as art just as some graffiti is? Or are you thinking, "Hang on, that means that I have an artwork at home called '£100,000, 500 GB'"?
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/...wnloads-as-art



















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