Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 28th, '11

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May 28th, 2011




Senate Panel Approves Controversial Copyright Bill

The PROTECT IP Act would target ISPs and search engines with court orders
Grant Gross

A U.S. Senate committee has unanimously approved a controversial bill that would allow the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders requiring search engines and Internet service providers to stop sending traffic to websites accused of infringing copyright.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act, or PROTECT IP Act, which would also allow copyright holders to seek court orders requiring payment processors and online ad networks to stop doing business with allegedly infringing websites.

The bill, introduced two weeks ago, now awaits approval by the full Senate.

The legislation will allow the DOJ to target the "worst of the worst" foreign websites dedicated to digital piracy or selling counterfeit goods, said Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and lead sponsor of the bill. Intellectual property theft is "unacceptable," Leahy, chairman of the committee, said in a statement.

"Few things are more important to the future of the American economy and job creation than protecting our intellectual property," Leahy added. "At a time where our country is beginning to regain its economic footing, businesses face an additional hurdle, the severity of which is increasing by the day -- digital theft."

Several groups criticized the bill. A recent paper from five Internet engineers said the bill could "threaten the security and stability of the global DNS" by encouraging widespread circumvention of DNS (domain name system) filters.

The bill would do little to stop copyright infringement online while opening up payment processors and online ad networks to multiple lawsuits from copyright holders, added Sherwin Siy, deputy legal director for Public Knowledge, a digital rights group.

The PROTECT IP Act "threatens the security and global functioning of the Internet, and opens the door to nuisance lawsuits while doing little if anything to curb the issues of international source of illegal downloads the bill seeks to address," he said in a statement.

The bill would create a list of blocked Internet sites, added Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a tech trade group. "At a time when U.S. businesses are increasing[ly] confronted with barriers to Internet trade and censorship abroad, a government committed to Internet openness should not be in the business of blacklisting Internet sites," he said in a statement.

Several other groups, including the Motion Picture Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, applauded the committee's vote, however.

The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade group representing ISPs (Internet service providers) that could be targeted by court orders authorized in the bill, also voiced support for the legislation.

"By cracking down on rogue websites that have for too long encouraged the theft of valuable content and intellectual property, the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 sends a strong message that this illicit practice will no longer be tolerated," NCTA President and CEO Michael Powell said in a statement.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/arti...opyright_bill/





U.S. Government Starts New Round of ‘Pirate’ Domain Seizures
Ernesto

US authorities have resumed “Operation In Our Sites” and have seized several domain names associated with copyright infringement or counterfeit related crimes. Among the new targets are two sites that linked to copyrighted films hosted on third party streaming sites such as megavideo.com and veoh.com. Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has yet to officially announce the new operation.

Over the past several months a series of domain name seizures by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made headlines across the Internet.

Under the flag of “Operation In Our Sites” the authorities shut down a dozen file-sharing and streaming sites and many more accused of selling counterfeit goods.

Today ICE continued the operation with a 4th round, and the first one since February this year. Although the authorities are yet to give an official comment on the new seizures, TorrentFreak was able to confirm the following targets:

* Re1ease.net
* Watchnewfilms.com
* Dvdcollectionsale.com
* Dvdscollection.com
* Dvdsetsonline.com
* Newstylerolex.com

The first two domains are accused of copyright-related offenses, but did not host any copyrighted films themselves. Both Re1ease.net and Watchnewfilms.com linked to popular movie streaming sites such as Veoh.com and Megavideo.com. The rest of the domains appear to be connected to sales of counterfeit goods.

The new targets were most likely put forward to ICE by movie industry groups. In April of this year ICE director John Morton admitted that his organization was acting based on “tips from industry representatives,” among others.

The authorities are also aware of the fact that the domain seizures themselves are not really an effective tool. As pointed out before, more than half of the piracy-related domains that were seized by Operation In Our Sites simply continued under a different name.

Morton replied to this critique by emphasizing that the seizures also act as “public education about pirating.”

To quash allegedly copyright infringing sites more effectively U.S. lawmakers introduced the PROTECT IP Act last week. Aside from domain seizures, the new bill will also make it possible to block sites on an ISP level, to censor search engines, and to cut funding of allegedly copyright-infringing websites.

TorrentFreak is closely monitoring developments in Operation in Our Sites 4 and if any additional domains are seized we will update this report accordingly.
http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-governme...izures-110521/





Norway Government Publishes Anti-File-Sharing Proposals

Norway is the latest country to propose amendments to its copyright law to make it easier for content owners to tackle online piracy, though the Norwegian government has shied away from any sort of three-strikes system, instead making it legally easier for rights owners to identify individual file-sharers, and to get injunctions to order ISPs to block copyright infringing websites.

The former will relax data protection rules which, in Norway, currently limit who can monitor the activities of individuals on the internet. They will also simplify the process by which rights owners can force ISPs to reveal the name and contacts of suspected file-sharers based on the IP address they are using.

More interesting, though, is the newly proposed injunction system which will make it easier for the content industries to get websites guilty of rampant copyright infringement blocked (at least to those not savvy enough to work their way around ISP instigated blocks).

Such a system is also included in the UK’s Digital Economy Act alongside the British take on three-strikes, though with a proviso that, unlike with three-strikes, further parliamentary consideration must be given to any injunction system before it goes live. Some other countries, most notably Spain, have also decided to go the speedy injunction route instead of establishing some sort of three-strikes process that targets actual individual file-sharers.

The big debate in most countries is whether government regulators should have the power to order such website blocking, or whether injunctions should only be available via the courts system, albeit via some sort of fast-track judicial process. And the Norwegian government’s proposals put forward both these options. Those who fear any web blocking could lead to excessive censorship generally oppose both options, though will oppose the former much more vehemently.

Norway’s government is now asking for those affected by any change to copyright law to comment on the proposals, so it remains to be seen what is actually passed down the line.
http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/article...ing-proposals/





BT and TalkTalk to Fight Plans on Filesharing

Britain's largest internet service providers are taking battle against the Digital Economy Act to the court of appeal
Josh Halliday

BT and TalkTalk, Britain's largest internet service providers, have launched a second attempt to overturn government plans to curb illicit filesharing.

The two ISPs are taking their long-running battle against the Digital Economy Act to the court of appeal, after losing a high court judicial review of the legislation last month.

BT and TalkTalk believe that the act infringes internet users' "basic rights and freedoms", and did not receive sufficient parliamentary scrutiny when it was "rushed through" in the dying days of the last government in April 2010.

Government plans to send thousands of warning letters to alleged illegal downloaders – a measure introduced by the act – are set to begin in the first half of next year.

"Both companies believe the High Court's conclusions on many of the other important and complex issues put before it were not robust enough to provide the certainty and clarity which the companies sought. This is why they are seeking leave to take the matter before the court of appeal," the companies said in a joint statement on Friday.

BT and TalkTalk are appealing against four of the five grounds of the judicial review, arguing that the act is broadly "inconsistent with European law". The ISPs have raised concerns about how the legislation works alongside European Union directives on technical standards, authorisation, e-commerce, as well as privacy and electronic communications.

Both companies said the plans are a "disproportionate interference with the rights of internet service providers, subscribers and internet users and with the concept of freedom of expression."

However, the telecoms firms said they will not challenge the act on this basis because there is an "exceptionally high threshold" of proving that it is a disproportionate answer to illicit filesharing.

Mr Justice Parker, the high court judge who threw out BT and TalkTalk's judicial review of the Act last month, rejected the companies' initial appeal against the ruling earlier this month.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ns-filesharing





Pirate Bay Sued in Finland in Bid to Halt Music Track Sharing
Kati Pohjanpalo

The Pirate Bay file-sharing website was sued in Finland by a group of 23 Finnish record labels, who are seeking to prevent the illegal distribution and downloading of copyrighted music in Finland.

The Finnish unit of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry filed the suit at the Helsinki District Court today, it said in a statement on its website. The group asked the court to order telecommunications company Elisa Oyj (ELI1V) to prevent its customers from using the website.

Elisa said it opposes illegal distribution of copyrighted content and plans to wait for the court to rule on the case, according to an e-mailed statement from the Helsinki-based company. The case won’t impact services provided to customers, Elisa said.

Pirate Bay is the largest file-sharing site using BitTorrent software, which allows users to download and share files for free. Pirate Bay has said the site is a network where users put up content to share with other users and that there is no copyrighted material on the site. Its four founders were sentenced to one year in prison each in April 2009 by a Swedish court. Three of the men had their jail sentences reduced on appeal on Nov. 26, 2010.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-0...k-sharing.html





Ballmer Bares China Travails
Owen Fletcher and Jason Dean

Rampant piracy means Microsoft Corp.'s revenue in China this year will only be about 5% of what it gets in the U.S., even though personal-computer sales in the two countries are almost equal, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told employees in a meeting here.

Mr. Ballmer's candid remarks provided a glimpse at the software giant's struggle with piracy in what will soon be the world's largest PC market. In China, copies of Microsoft's core Office and Windows programs are still available on street corners for $2 or $3 each, a fraction of their retail price, despite efforts by the company to curb theft.

In his address to employees at the company's new Beijing offices, Mr. Ballmer said Microsoft's revenue per personal computer sold in China is only about a sixth of the amount it gets in India. He noted that Microsoft's total revenue in China, population 1.3 billion, is less than what it gets in the Netherlands, a country of fewer than 17 million.

In addition to discussing the recent Skype deal as well as software piracy issues in China, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says Google has taken a "failed approach" to tablets so far and says Microsoft is planning something unique. Photo from AP.

The company has worked hard to improve its ties with Beijing, while the U.S. government steadily ratcheted up pressure on China to improve copyright protections for American companies.

While visiting the U.S. in 2006, Chinese President Hu Jintao hailed Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as a "friend of China" and dined at Mr. Gates's home, seeming to signal greater government favor for the company, as Mr. Hu also made new pledges to protect intellectual property. But Microsoft has continued to struggle in a market where piracy remains rampant in homes and offices.

The stakes are only getting larger. Already the biggest market for cars, cellphones, and commodities like iron ore, China is on track to surpass the U.S. as the world's largest PC market next year, according to IDC. This year, the market research firm projects PC unit shipments in China are likely to increase 12% to 71 million units, just shy of the 75 million units in the U.S., where it expects sales to be flat.

"We're literally talking about an opportunity that is billions of dollars today" if China's intellectual property rights protection were at the level of India's, Mr. Ballmer said Wednesday in Beijing.

He made the remarks to hundreds of employees—many wearing Microsoft T-shirts, in a crowded room in Microsoft's new research-and-development building, which he said cost Microsoft $400 million. PC sales in China will be "as big as the U.S. market this year," he said, yet "our revenue in China will be about a twentieth of our revenue in the United States."

CEO Steve Ballmer spoke at the opening of Microsoft's new research center in Beijing on Wednesday.

The statement suggests Microsoft's revenue in China is close to $2 billion. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2010, Microsoft reported U.S. revenue of $36.2 billion out of a world-wide total of $62.5 billion.

A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Ballmer appeared to reject the argument, common in China, that many Chinese consumers use pirated software because authentic versions are too expensive.

"I'm not saying everybody in China could afford to buy a PC... but if you can, you could afford the software," he said.

The Microsoft chief is under pressure to improve the company's financial performance and revive its flagging stock. Micorosft shares gained 48 cents to $24.67 at 4 p.m. Thursday.

Microsoft, which lost its crown as the most valuable tech company to Apple Inc. last year, is now in danger of slipping behind International Business Machines Corp. On Wednesday, hedge fund manager and investor David Einhorn said it was time to replace Mr. Ballmer.

Microsoft has also long groused about piracy in China, but up until Mr. Ballmer's remarks has provided little detail on its impact.

The company has historically tried a collaborative approach with Chinese officials, securing deals to require Chinese PC makers to ship their products with legitimate copies from factories.

China's government has acknowledged problems but says it is taking steps to improve the situation. Among other measures, the government has ordered all state institutions to buy licensed software.

The Business Software Alliance, an industry advocacy group, estimates 78% of the PC software installed in China last year was pirated, down from 86% in 2005.

Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan said Wednesday in a meeting with Mr. Ballmer that a government campaign launched late last year has had "significant results" against violations of intellectual property rights, China's State Council said in a statement.

Microsoft opened its first China office in Beijing in 1992, and struggled for years with a string of departures by senior China executives. Many in China also began to resent Microsoft's efforts to fight piracy, which it pursued partly through lawsuits against infringers.

Despite its frustrations, Microsoft has continued to invest in China. Ya-Qin Zhang , chairman of Microsoft's Asia-Pacific R&D Group, said in February Microsoft planned to increase its R&D staff of roughly 3,000 people in China by around 10% this year.

Taking questions from staff Wednesday, Mr. Ballmer also discussed the increasingly competitive tablet sector. Microsoft is working on what its "unique contribution can be" in the tablet area and it will have "more news about that in the not-too-distant future," he said without elaborating.

He took a swipe at rival Google, saying it "has taken a failed approach so far" to tablets, while also acknowledging that Apple Inc.'s strategy with the iPad has been successful.

Google didn't reply to a request for comment.

Microsoft has struggled to gain traction in tablets, while Google's Android software is expected to gain share in a market currently dominated by Apple. Market researcher Gartner predicts that about 20% of the 69.8 million tablet devices sold this year will use Android, second to Apple's operating system, with 69%. By 2015, Gartner forecasts, 39% of the 294.1 million tablets sold will use Android, compared with 47% using Apple software.

Mr. Ballmer also acknowledged some telecom carriers are concerned about a potential drain on their business from Skype, which Microsoft this month said it plans to acquire for $8.5 billion—although he also rejected those concerns as unwarranted.

On Skype, Mr. Ballmer said Microsoft is likely to integrate "real [Internet Protocol]-based communication into a phone," though the company would need regulatory approval first and some telecom operators "want to make sure that that's not the only phone we offer." Skype lets users make phone calls via Internet networks, which some operators worry could enable users to avoid paying operator fees.

Mr. Ballmer dismissed those concerns. "The fact of the matter is, the best thing for the phone companies, the best thing for the consumer, the best thing for us, will be to innovate in the future of communication," he said.

The executive later travelled to India, where on Thursday he said Microsoft is looking to work with Finnish mobile handset maker Nokia Corp. to develop "next-generation" mobile devices. India will be a priority market for the company, given that Nokia is a market leader in mobile handsets in the world's fastest-growing telecom market and the second-largest market after China, he said.

"Certainly our partnership with Nokia is an important step forward with us...but the key there is not only to innovate on software, which we will work together over time, but also work on next-generation hardware innovations with them," Mr. Ballmer said while addressing a conference in New Delhi.
—Stefanie Qi contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...248544826.html





Hurt Locker Makers Target Record Breaking 24,583 BitTorrent Users
Ernesto

After being honored with an Oscar for best motion picture last year, the makers of The Hurt Locker have now also secured the award for the biggest file-sharing lawsuit the world has ever witnessed. By targeting at least 24,583 alleged BitTorrent users, Voltage Pictures hopes to recoup millions of dollars in settlements to compensate the studio for piracy-related losses.

March last year the law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver imported the mass litigation “pay up or else” anti-piracy scheme to the United States.

The initial customers of the lawyers – who are also known as the U.S. Copyright Group – were relatively unknown indie film producers. But this changed when the makers of the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker (Voltage Pictures) joined up and sued 5,000 alleged file-sharers.

Voltage Pictures always threatened that this figure was just the start, and it now turns out that they were speaking the truth. In their quest to recoup their claimed losses, the studio has now added nearly 20,000 new defendants to the lawsuit, bringing the total up to 24,583.

This turns the Hurt Locker case into the largest BitTorrent lawsuit in history, breaking the two week old record set by The Expendables case earlier this month.

In a status report obtained by TorrentFreak, Voltage Pictures lawyers give the U.S. District Court of Columbia an overview of the massive list of alleged BitTorrent downloaders they filed complaints against. This report reveals that most defendants are subscribers of Comcast (10,532), followed by Verizon (5,239), Charter (2,699) and Time Warner (1,750).

The report also provides details on the agreements the lawyers have struck with various ISPs regarding the release of subscribers’ personal information. There is currently no agreement with Comcast, while Charter has promised to look up 150 IP-addresses a month and Verizon 100 a month for all ongoing BitTorrent lawsuits.

The above indicates that it may take several years before some ISPs hand over the requested information. It would take Verizon more than a decade to look up all the personal details in the various BitTorrent lawsuits, which begs the question of how long an ISP is allowed to store such private details.

The Hurt Locker case is currently being handled by former RIAA-lobbyist Judge Beryl Howell. She now has to decide if Voltage Pictures is allowed to proceed their legal endeavor and under what restrictions.

During the course of the year many of the defendants in the Hurt Locker case who were already subpoenaed have claimed innocence. However, last week Judge Howell decided to dismiss all 119 motions to dismiss, quash, and for protective orders en masse, adding them to the pool of targets.

Defendants whose ISPs give up their personal details are expected to receive a settlement offer from Voltage Pictures. The ultimate goal is not to take any of the individual cases to court, but to get alleged infringers to pay a substantial cash settlement to make legal action go away.

The math shows that this scheme could turn out to be extremely profitable for the parties involved. If ‘only’ 10,000 of the alleged infringers eventually pay a $2,000 settlement this would bring in $20 million. In comparison, that’s more than the $17 million The Hurt Locker grossed at the U.S. box office.
http://torrentfreak.com/hurt-locker-...-users-110523/





Nude Nuns Mass BitTorrent Lawsuit Killed, Clone Lives On
David Kravets

A California film company on Monday dropped its copyright infringement lawsuit against 5,865 BitTorrent users who allegedly downloaded the movie Nude Nuns with Big Guns between January and March of this year, but an identical lawsuit by a different company is ongoing for now.

Camelot Distribution Group dismissed its case following a dispute about whether it legally owns the movie’s rights, and after skeptical questions from the judge in the case over Camelot’s mass-litigation strategy.

Jessica Kelly, a Camelot vice president, said Camelot might refile the case in San Francisco, where “we have a better chance.”

Camelot’s March 7 lawsuit was one of a nationwide surge of suits collectively targeting more than 130,000 BitTorrent users for pilfering indie films, porn and exploitation flicks from the internet. Unlike the RIAA’s former litigation campaign, which targeted only a handful of defendants at a time, the film companies have been suing thousands of defendants by internet IP address, and then asking federal judges to order ISPs to identify the subscribers by name.

U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson in Los Angeles last month asked Camelot to explain why it was suing so many people at once, and appointed the EFF to defend the rights of the 5,865 IP addresses. Corynne McSherry, an intellectual-property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, suspects that the reason the plaintiff’s lawyers are getting cold feet is because “this case is getting more expensive to litigate than they’d hoped.”

The Nude Nuns lawsuit, first reported by Threat Level, was among the largest of its type. But after our report, it emerged that Camelot’s claim to the film was in dispute. One of the company’s creditors, Incentive Capital of Utah, claims it has legal ownership over Nude Nuns, and in May it filed its own mass lawsuit against the same 5,865 IP addresses.

Joseph Pia, Incentive Capital’s attorney, said in a telephone interview Tuesday that Incentive has not decided whether it will continue pursuing its BitTorrent case now that Camelot has dropped its lawsuit. So far, the court has not allowed either party to issue subpoenas to internet services providers.

“We are exploring our options,” Pia said.

Incentive Capital claims it took ownership of the film in February after foreclosing on and assuming Camelot Distribution Group’s titles because of an allegedly soured loan. That was two weeks before Camelot filed the mass copyright lawsuit claiming it owned the rights.

For its part, Camelot claims the ownership switch was a “usurpation of its assets,” according to court documents.

The dispute centers on a $650,000 loan that Incentive provided to Camelot last year, which was used by Camelot to acquire the rights to Nude Nuns and other low-grade movies.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...nuns-curtains/





The Luxury Lifestyle of the "Hard-Up" File-Sharing Lawyer
Nicole Kobie

The file-sharing lawyer who avoided a £200,000 fine by pleading hardship continues to live in a £700,000 home with a Bentley parked on the drive.

Andrew Crossley was the sole solicitor at ACS Law, a firm now notorious for sending letters to accused illegal downloaders, demanding hundreds of pounds in settlements against the threat of legal action.

Those letters drew the attention of online activists, 700 of whom targeted the ACS Law website last September with a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack.

That exposed a database of emails, which contained details of 6,000 accused file-sharers and the content they were said to have downloaded – including pornographic material.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) earlier this month announced it would have fined Crossley £200,000 for the security breach, but reduced the fine to a mere £800 after Crossley submitted a signed statement claiming he was now of “limited means.”

That Crossley lives on “limited means” might come as a surprise to his neighbours on the quiet street of his leafy West Sussex home, where PC Pro located Crossley earlier this week. A similar 2,900-square-foot, five-bedroom home on the private lane recently sold for £730,000 – close to the £710,000 that Crossley paid when he bought the house with his partner in 2009.



Parked on the drive out front of the detached house is a gleaming Bentley Arnage – a vehicle popular with Premiership footballers. When we asked Crossley how ownership of the luxury car – which costs up to £170,000 new – squared with his claims of “limited means”, he told us the car wasn’t his, although he refused to disclose who the current owner was.

High earnings

The ICO’s proclamation that Crossley couldn’t afford a higher fine raised eyebrows, as ACS Law was accused by lawyers representing the alleged file-sharers of making substantial amounts of money before the “speculative invoicing” model was brought to an end. The defending barrister claimed Crossley earned up to £180,000 a month from the invoicing.

“Mr Crossley was going to make vast sums, but adverse publicity put an end to that,” said Guy Tritton, a barrister representing some of the accused told the Patents County Court. “If you make £180,000 in just one month, things are going pretty well.”

Crossley disputes the assertion of wealth, saying the fortune he supposedly made from sending the settlement letters is “mythical”.

“Rumours of my expansive wealth are much exaggerated,” he told PC Pro. Asked how much money was left after ACS Law was closed, he said the “smallish amount” was doled out to his remaining clients, and “I was paid what I was due".

As evidence of his financial status, Crossley said he had shown the ICO recent bank statements and signed an affidavit. While still registered as a solicitor, he is currently unemployed.

Crossley is currently under investigation by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, following accusations that he "bullied" people into making payments, which he denies.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/367624/t...sharing-lawyer





Dropbox Users Save 1 Million Files Every 5 Minutes
Jennifer Van Grove

Four-year-old file storage startup Dropbox has experienced explosive growth in the past year, jumping from 5 million users to more than 25 million users.

And together, these users are now saving more than 300 million files each day and 1 million files every five minutes. In total, Dropbox users have saved more than 100 billion files, CEO and co-founder Drew Houston said.

Houston, speaking at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco on Monday afternoon, shared the massive figures in a presentation detailing how his startup has managed to scale under such enormous demand.

In the past year, Dropbox has added 35 employees to meet demand, growing from a 20-person team to a 55-person company. Roughly 50% of the startup’s team is comprised of engineers, Houston said.

Part of Dropbox’s ability to scale successfully, said Houston, is the startup’s focus on hiring fewer, better engineers and creating an office environment that its employees want to work in. The startup does not force mandatory office hours, nor does it instruct team members on how or where to work, Houston shared.

Another key, stated the CEO, is to set and reset company goals on a quarterly and annual basis in order to minimize overhead and reduce waste.

But when boiling it down to just the basics, Houston’s advice to founders is to, “Build the right thing, and build things right.” If forced to choose just one, founders should build the right thing, he says.
http://mashable.com/2011/05/23/dropbox-stats/





Video-Sharing App Viddy Hits 500,000 Downloads
Brenna Ehrlich

Video-sharing app Viddy has already hit a major milestone just six weeks after its launch.

Today, the company announced its iPhone app, which we called “an Instagram for video,” has been downloaded 500,000 times.

If you recall, Viddy is a social video app that lets users apply filters and other effects to short clips shot on their iPhones.

Panic at the Disco recently launched a campaign to crowdsource its next video via the platform. The band has several million Facebook fans alone, so we can see how signups would be accelerating in part due to that initiative.

Regardless, the strong initial interest in this app hints at a growing trend of social video-sharing in the mobile sphere, coming in on the heels of the photo-sharing frenzy.

We’re interested to see if and when Viddy reaches the one-million-downloads mark.
http://mashable.com/2011/05/23/viddy-500000/





Google is Blocking Android Market Movie Rentals on Rooted Devices Because of Copy Protection
Richard Lawler

Rooting your Motorola Xoom won't stop you from getting an LTE hardware upgrade, but it will throw up a roadblock if you're trying to watch movies rented from YouTube / Android Market. Android Central points out a Google support document that details the "Failed to fetch license for [movie title] (error 49)" message users will see when they try to play a movie on a rooted Android device. Only Xooms with Android 3.1 have access to the service right now, but once support rolls out to all Android 2.2 or higher devices in a couple of weeks some will have to choose between their superuser privileges and Google's nascent movie offerings (at least until someone figures out a workaround anyway). So far rooting and jailbreaking hasn't put a stop to other movie rental services for mobiles (iTunes, Netflix) so even if Google blames the movie studios for the policy, it seems like an odd restriction for the company behind the "open" platform to have.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/21/g...rooted-devices





Playboy Bypasses Apple's App Store

The magazine's new Web app provides uncensored content, low resolution, no offline access, and drawbacks that make Playboy a poor model for digital publications
Darrell Etherington

Playboy finally arrived—uncensored—on the iPad Thursday, but not through Apple's prudish App Store. It came as an iPad-optimized Web app, which means it doesn't have to abide by the App Store's rules or share subscription revenue with Apple. Sounds like a sweet deal. Is it a model that will be attractive to other magazines?

Obviously, Playboy had little choice but to go the route of a Web app with its uncensored iPad offering. While Playboy does have an app in the App Store, that doesn't offer anything near the content of the magazine. Because of restrictions against nudity and pornography in the App Store guidelines, it never could. But there are advantages to Playboy's approach that extend beyond sidestepping the censors.

The magazine doesn't have to deal with Apple's in-app subscription system, or the tithes the company expects from publishers in exchange for using it, for instance. The $8 monthly subscription fee that Playboy charges for access to its Web app goes directly to its bottom line without having to take out a 30-percent cut for Apple. Playboy also gets complete control over its relationship with the consumer. When you fill out your valuable personal info at sign-up, Playboy gets instant access to that info, without Apple's pesky permissions dialog getting in the way.

Playboy's Web app also does a pretty good impression of a native app. The app detects orientation rotation, and provides you with either a single page or two-page layout accordingly. It switches smoothly between pages with swipe animations. Table-of-contents items are hyperlinked, so you can just tap on an article title to jump to that piece. If you add a shortcut icon to your iPad's home screen, you might not even notice the app is housed in a browser.

A Low-Res Digital Magazine Copy

But while the Web app well resembles a native app, a native app it is not. That means it comes with drawbacks, such as no offline access, the occasional stutter when switching orientations, and an experience that doesn't go very far beyond being a scanned digital representation of the print original. There are, for instance, no interactive features within the magazines themselves. Even the most recent issue (every single Playboy issue ever published is available to subscribers as a nice bonus) has fairly low-res text that's hard to read and rendered somewhat fuzzy by JPEG artifacts. Also, two-page features and ads have a visible seam down the middle that rarely, if ever, matches up correctly.

Nor does Playboy support multitasking. It asks for your login credentials every time you jump out of and back into the app. But the Web app's biggest failing is that it doesn't do any local caching; if you're not connected to the Internet, you have no access to any content. Most native iPad magazine apps, by contrast, provide you with offline access once an issue has been fully downloaded to your device.

Playboy may derive some potential benefit for itself by avoiding the institution that is Apple's App Store, but it's not doing customers any favors. The Web app only superficially resembles a native one, and I suspect App Store reviewers would've greeted the low-res scans with underwhelming scores had Apple's family values not precluded the possibility entirely.

The bottom line is that if publishers want to cut Apple out of the equation, they need to take extra care to ensure that the product they come up with is one that users are willing to venture afield to find. The App Store may be a confining space, but it takes care of a lot of legwork related to marketing and discovery. Staying outside the gates requires a lot more effort than it seems Playboy has proven willing to put in.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...520_789566.htm





Female Magazine Fans Flock to Nook Color
Jeremy W. Peters

Even as the iPad remains the favorite son of the magazine business, publishers are discovering that the Barnes & Noble Nook Color is a very promising younger daughter.

The Nook Color has surprised publishers of women’s magazines like O, The Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan and Women’s Health by igniting strong sales that rival — and in some cases surpass — sales on the iPad.

The success was not so easily predictable for a device that has been on the market only since November and faces stiff competition from Apple, Amazon and the Android-based tablets.

“We didn’t really know what to expect,” said Liz Schimel, executive vice president for digital media for Meredith, publisher of Family Circle, Better Homes and Gardens and other women’s magazines. “We regarded it as sort of a test. Would the Nook magazine experience resonate with consumers? We were extremely pleasantly surprised. I think Barnes & Noble has been very smart about creating a whole brand and a campaign that’s really targeted at their core mass audience which overlaps nicely with our audience.”
Recent best-seller lists for magazines on the Nook Color bear this out. Magazine top sellers include US Weekly, Shape, Women’s Health and Every Day with Rachael Ray. Men’s magazines like Maxim and Men’s Health rounded out the top 20 late last week, but they were the outliers.

On the surface, the reason for the strong performance of female-oriented publications on the Nook is relatively straightforward. Generically speaking, the iPad and other tablets are men’s toys, while the Nook Color and other e-readers are more popular with women. According to data from Forrester Research, 56 percent of tablet owners are male, while 55 percent of e-reader owners are female. Women also buy more books than men do — by a ratio of about 3 to 1, according to a survey last year by Bowker, a research firm for publishers — and are therefore more likely to buy devices that are made primarily for reading books.

But publishers also believe the resonance of the Nook Color among women highlights the vast difference in consumer markets. Some women, at least, seem to prefer their electronic reading devices to be simpler, something they can read on. Tablets with Rock Band, GT Racing and high-res cameras? That’s guy stuff.

And Barnes & Noble has marketed the $249 Nook Color toward females. Ads show women and girls reading it in various states of relaxation and repose: at the beach, in bed, on the couch. On Barnes & Noble’s Web site, a bubbly woman named Kate walks users through a guided tour on how to use the device.

The company has not said how many Nook Colors it has sold, beyond putting the figure in the millions and saying that it is the most successful product in Barnes & Noble’s history. But since November, the company said more than 1.5 million magazine subscriptions and copies of single issues had been sold on the Nook Color. This week, in an attempt to build on the success of its reading devices, Barnes &Noble is expected to debut a new e-reader.

Apple and Amazon do not release sales figures, and the data that publishers report about sales through the iPad and the Kindle are limited. But their top sellers include far more magazines with heavily male audiences, like Wired and Rolling Stone.

The Nook Color and its black-and-white counterpart were most likely part of what made Barnes & Noble so appealing to Liberty Media, which last week made a cash offer of $17 a share, around $1 billion, for the bookseller.

Meredith publishes two magazines, Family Circle and More, on the Nook Color and has plans to add more because the sales have been strong. Nook Color subscriptions are outselling the magazines Meredith publishes on the iPad, where only single-issue sales are available, by about 2 to 1. Hearst, which publishes O and Cosmopolitan, is selling tens of thousands of subscriptions on the device each month. Rodale Inc., which publishes Women’s Health, Runner’s World and Prevention on the Nook Color, is selling about five times as many subscriptions through Barnes & Noble as it is selling single issues on the iPad.

The bookseller offers 136 magazines in its digital newsstand — a range from The Economist to Country Living. Sales for most magazines now are small, around several thousand each.

“It really took off right away, which was tremendous for us,” said Gregg Michaelson, president and chief marketing officer of Rodale, which publishes a number of magazines on the Nook Color. “When we look at the numbers across our titles we’re seeing about five times the number of paid subscriptions on the Nook than we see in single-issue sales on the iPad. That’s pretty interesting to me.”

Publishers credit a longstanding and lucrative partnership with Barnes & Noble as a big part of the success — a far cry from the contentious relationship with Apple. The bookseller is the No. 2 seller of newsstand copies of magazines, behind only Wal-Mart. Subscriptions — a question publishers are still trying to resolve with Apple — were available immediately after the Nook Color went on sale, and readers are enticed to buy with free two-week trial periods. After that, publishers set the price of subscriptions at generally low rates. US Weekly is on the higher end at $5.99 a month; Woman’s Day is on the low end at 99 cents.

Despite being on the market with the iPad for more than a year, Apple cleared the way for magazines to begin selling subscriptions only in February. And even then the major magazine publishers balked because of the terms of Apple’s subscription policy, the main sticking point being that magazines were not given data about who their subscribers were. Barnes & Noble shares that data more readily.

Relations have warmed in recent weeks, with both Hearst and Condé Nast, the second and third largest American magazine publishers, reaching agreements to sell subscriptions. Time Inc., the industry leader, is still trying to reach a deal on the broad parameters of a subscription model.

Not only have the terms of selling magazines on the Nook Color been comparatively easy to negotiate, but the process of creating electronic versions of magazines is also far easier and less expensive than it is to create an iPad edition. Publishers need only send a PDF of their latest issue, and Barnes & Noble takes care of the rest.

“As soon as a magazine is ready to send its pages to the printer, they send them to us,” said Jonathan Shar, Barnes & Noble’s digital newsstand manager. “It’s very efficient, and that’s part of our strategy. We knew that was important to publishers.”

That makes magazines on the Nook much less of an app and more of a traditional reading experience.

So what about the small fortune that publishers have poured into developing tablet editions that dazzle the senses with sleekly produced animation, live video and audio? They’re fine for the men, but a lot of women think there is nothing wrong with plain old words and pictures.

“Nook Color really taught us an important lesson in that consumers in their interests are really diverse,” said David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines. “We have those that want a really enhanced edition with cinematic elements which you find in iTunes, and those who want a more straightforward version of their favorite magazine where the benefit is portability.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/b...ia/23nook.html





Liberty Says Nook Inspired B&N Bid
Jessica E. Vascellaro and Nat Worden

Liberty Media Corp. executives laid out their rationale for their surprise bid for Barnes & Noble Inc., touting the potential of the bookseller's Nook e-reader and the vast network of retail stores it can use to promote it.

Liberty Media Chairman John Malone and chief executive Greg Maffei told investors Monday that the potential for the Nook platform to become the e-book application of choice for consumers on all tablet devices built on Google Inc.'s Android operating system helped motivate the company's bid for the ailing bookstore chain.

Their first comments about the deal came as Ron Burkle's Yucaipa Cos.'s Monday purchased 603,000 additional shares of Barnes & Noble stock, a sign that the investor, who launched an unsuccessful proxy battle for seats on the company's board last year, wants more of a say over a deal. The move, disclosed in a regulatory filing, boosts his ownership to 19.7%.

Last year, in response to Mr. Burkle's campaign, Barnes & Noble shareholders approved a "poison pill" provision that makes it extremely expensive for an outside investor from acquiring 20% or more of the bookseller's shares.

Liberty last week made an offer to purchase 70% of Barnes & Noble, valuing the bookseller at $1.02 billion. Mr. Maffei said the offer is being reviewed by a special committee of Barnes & Noble board members, which the book retailer established last August to review incoming offers as it put itself up for sale.

Mr. Malone, who is also Liberty's controlling shareholder, said Liberty should know if they have a deal "fairly quickly" but that it would take many more months to complete one.

"We're coming in after a failed auction to execute what the board has sought," Mr. Malone said, adding that price or other offers could be issues.

Investors appeared to believe on Monday that a higher bid could be in the offing, as the stock was up 26 cents to $18.59 as of 4 p.m on the New York Stock Exchange, significantly higher than the $17 a share offered by Liberty Media Thursday.

Mr. Maffei cautioned that the company must still line-up financing for a deal and seal an agreement with Barnes & Noble Chairman Leonard Riggio, whose participation its offer is contingent upon. Mr. Riggio has expressed openness to working with Liberty, according to people familiar with the matter, but has not agreed to terms under which he would partner for a bid. One key question is whether Mr. Riggio would be locked into a partnership with Liberty or if he could work with another potential suitor if one emerges, the people familiar with the matter said.

Barnes & Noble declined to comment.

Barnes & Noble is being especially careful about how the process is handled because a Liberty bid could include Mr. Riggio, a company insider, these people said. As a result, Barnes & Noble isn't being informed of the special committee's work and meetings until it is necessary and meets corporate governance standards, these people added. The company also acted quickly to publicly disclose the Liberty bid because it could involve Mr. Riggio, the people said.

Liberty executives' comments came during a special shareholder meeting previously scheduled to approve Liberty's split-off of two of its tracking stocks. The measures passed, paving the way for the spin-offs to be completed.

On Tuesday, Barnes & Noble is expected to present a new version of the Nook e-reader in the face of intensifying competition with Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle and Apple Inc.'s iPad tablet. On Monday, rival Kobo Inc., the Toronto-based e-book retailer, introduced a new $129.99 e-reader with a touch screen that's expected to begin shipping in early June.

Mr. Maffei, who singled out Apple's success at using its stores to promote its iPads, said Liberty estimates that Barnes & Noble has around 25% of digital book sales.

Taking aim at Amazon, Mr. Malone also said Amazon's strong lead in the nascent e-book market could be hampered by the publishing industry's interest in not allowing one retailer to become too powerful, a dynamic he said could benefit Barnes & Noble.

Mr. Malone also said that he believes the financial woes of Barnes & Noble's chief retail competitor Borders Group Inc., combined with its strong brand and store presence, will give the company's physical stores an enduring role.

"I've been a Barnes & Noble customer myself for many, many years," Mr. Malone said. "The stores will shift around, but there will be a physical presence for a long, long time to come, and it will be a profitable presence."
—Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Gina Chon contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...702121294.html





Survey Finds E-Book Piracy Occurs Among a Surprising Demographic
Audrey Watters

Digital piracy. It's an illicit activity undertaken by college students in their dorm rooms or by teenagers in their parents' basements, right? Wrong, according to a recent survey by the British law firm Wiggin. Or wrong when it comes to e-book digital piracy at least.

According to the firm's annual Digital Entertainment Survey, one in eight women over age 35 who owns an e-reader admits to having downloaded an illegal version of an e-book. That compares to just one in 20 women in the same age group who admits to having pirated music.

If copyright infringement is indeed becoming more popular among an age group that's never really participated in digital piracy, that's certainly bad news for publishers, who The Guardian surmises "fear they could suffer a similar fate to the record labels that have struggled to replace lost physical sales."

After all, it isn't just women over 35 that are putting unlicensed content on their e-readers. Across all ages and both genders, some 29% of e-reader owners admitted that they pirate books. And for tablet owners, that number is even higher - 36%. It doesn't stop there: 25% of these people said they planned to continue to download pirated material.

Their reasons for doing so are varied: e-book prices, for example, already owning the same book in print, and the lack of availability of e-book titles in certain countries.

E-Books: The New Napster?

The High Low suggests this makes e-books "the new Napster," as digital books become as popular and as novel (no pun intended) as mp3s were 15 years ago. But there may be a couple of key differences here. With Napster, it was often just a song or two that was downloaded, not an entire album. With books, people aren't pirating chapters. Moreover, unlike Napster there isn't really one clear go-to site where people can find unlicensed books, and there may be no clear legal target as there was in the case of the music-sharing site.

The question remains, however, if the increasing popularity and sales of tablets and e-readers will mean that digital e-book piracy rises accordingly.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...a_surprisi.php





G-8 Leaders to Call for Tighter Internet Regulation
Eric Pfanner

Leaders of the Group of 8 industrialized countries are set to issue a provocative call for stronger Internet regulation, a cause championed by the host of the meeting, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, but fiercely opposed by some Internet companies and free-speech groups.

The G-8 leaders will urge the adoption of measures to protect children from online predators, to strengthen privacy rights and to crack down on digital copyright piracy, according to two people who have seen drafts of a communiqué the G-8 will issue at the end of a meeting this week in Deauville, France. At the same time, the document is expected to include a pledge to maintain openness and to support entrepreneurial, rather than government-led, development of the Internet.

This balancing act was reflected Tuesday in a speech by Mr. Sarkozy, who convened a special gathering of the global digerati in Paris on the eve of the G-8 meeting. Calling the rise of the Internet a “revolution,” Mr. Sarkozy compared its impact to that of two previous transforming episodes in global history: the age of exploration and the industrial revolution.

The Internet revolution “doesn’t have a flag, it doesn’t have a slogan, it belongs to everyone,” he said, citing the recent uprisings in the Arab world as examples of its positive effects.

Before an audience that included top executives of some of the world’s largest Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon and eBay, he added, however: “The universe you represent is not a parallel universe. Nobody should forget that governments are the only legitimate representatives of the will of the people in our democracies. To forget this is to risk democratic chaos and anarchy.”

The pre-Deauville meeting in Paris, called the E-G8 Forum, is providing a public window into the debates that have shaped the expected G-8 communiqué — in addition to serving as a soapbox for Mr. Sarkozy as he gears up his campaign for re-election next spring.

Mr. Sarkozy’s push to turn Internet governance into a G-8 issue, elevating it to the level of more traditional topics like trade, currencies, terrorism or climate change, has been applauded by companies in industries like music, which have been ravaged by digital piracy. But it has drawn concern from Internet companies and outright criticism from some people who see a threat to the openness that has characterized the Internet to date, at least in most Western societies.

During a panel discussion Tuesday, Yochai Benkler, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, told Finance Minister Christine Lagarde of France that he thought the French approach to online copyright protection was “the wrong way to go.”

“You can make the Internet safe for Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, or you can make it safe for the next Skype or YouTube,” he said, asking her to relay that message to the G-8 leaders in Deauville.

Ms. Lagarde promised to do so, but added that she thought the rights of content owners and Internet companies could be reconciled.

Mr. Sarkozy is not alone in calling existing laws and regulations inadequate to deal with the challenges of a borderless digital world. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said this week that he would ask Parliament to review British privacy laws after Twitter users circumvented court orders preventing newspapers from publishing the names of public figures who are suspected of having had extramarital affairs.

But France has gone further than many other Western countries in pushing for what Mr. Sarkozy has called a “civilized Internet.” Among his initiatives are a so-called three-strikes law that threatens persistent digital pirates with the suspension of their Internet connections. Another new French law authorizes the government to filter out Web sites containing illegal content like child pornography.

The G-8 communiqué, which is still being finalized by the G-8 leaders’ sherpas, or policy emissaries, is not expected to contain specific prescriptions like these. Instead, it will include broad pledges to deal with privacy, piracy and child protection, the people with knowledge of the talks said.

In some cases, even general agreement has been difficult. On digital piracy, for example, Russia, which has been the home of some notorious file-sharing services, is said to have raised objections. And while there had been speculation before the E-G8 Forum that Mr. Sarkozy might call for the creation of a new international body to oversee the Internet, this idea was apparently rejected.

Rod Beckstrom, chief executive of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees the Internet address system, gave qualified support to Mr. Sarkozy’s prescriptions, saying the mix of public- and private-sector groups that oversee the global network needed to cooperate more closely.

“To keep the Internet open and unified, the multi-stakeholder community needs to build better relationships with government,” Mr. Beckstrom said. But he added that he thought efforts to control the content of the Internet would prove futile: “I think there are a lot of global leaders trying to grasp at air.”

Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, said technology, rather than regulation, could take care of many of the challenges facing the Internet, including potential limits on capacity as more and more video traffic and other bandwidth-heavy content passes through telecommunications networks.

“Before we decide there is a regulatory solution, let’s ask if there’s a technological solution,” he said. “We will move faster than any of these governments, let alone all of them together.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/t...gy/25tech.html





France Lobbies G8 for Internet Control and Censorship
Cory Doctorow

Sarkozy's French government is hosting an "EG8" summit on Internet policy and have invited lots of technical people to attend in the guise of coming up with recommendations on Internet governance. But as documents reveal, the Sarkozy agenda is control and censorship. Jeremie from La Quadrature du Net sez,

A detailed analysis of exchanges between the French President and his former Minister of Foreign Affairs on G8 related matters appears in tomorrow's edition of the French magazine Marianne. La Quadrature du Net has had access to sources that confirm the existence of a control-oriented policy, explicitly hostile to the support to the freedom of expression on the Internet, in blatant contrast with the farcical 'G8 forum' smokescreen. Governments must be made accountable for the positions they take on these issues when they speak behind close doors.

"The Elysee (French Presidency) does not want to hear anything about cyberdissidents or freedom of expression, it wants 'control'." - Frederic Martel, Marianne, 21-27 May 2011 (about the reasons behind the cancellation of a pre-G8 international conference on freedom of expression online)

This conclusion, based on factual evidence, confirms what we have claimed for months now: despite public statements that try to conceal it and the staged smokescreen of the "eG8 forum", the French presidency of the G8 has constantly tried to prevent any statement that would declare the Internet as a universal space of freedom and an essential tool for democracy, or that would promote adequate protection against online censorship and control.

This policy directly originated from the French presidency, and was imposed on the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Other G8 governments (and not just Russia) also support control and restriction to free online communications, though they have not be caught in the act in such an obvious manner.

All the G8 documents must be made public, as well as each country's position on Internet freedoms or control issues. Freedom of expression and democracy can not be sacrificed for the benefit of some economic or political self-serving interests.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/20...ies-g8-fo.html





While in France, Watch What You Download
Eric Pfanner

More than 800 members of the global digerati are to gather this week in Paris, at the invitation of President Nicolas Sarkozy, to discuss the future of the Internet. Here are a few tips for participants in the so-called E-G8 Forum.

Travel light It has been warm and dry in Paris this spring, and the forecast calls for more of the same.

Watch what you download France, remember, recently enacted a law to crack down on digital piracy of music and movies, the centerpiece of Mr. Sarkozy’s efforts to help content creators and copyright owners get remunerated for their work. Under the law, repeat offenders face the threat of a suspension of their Internet access.

Or do they? How is the so-called three strikes system actually performing? Do those attending E-G8 have anything to fear?

Not during the two days of the forum — that much is clear. Last week, after a data leak had been discovered, the government agency enforcing the law said it had temporarily severed its connection with the company supplying it with details about alleged offenders.

The French data protection authority, CNIL, said it was investigating the breach at the company, Trident Media Guard, which works on behalf of content owners, rather than the agency, called Hadopi. The findings will not be known for several weeks.

Not to worry, Hadopi said. It still has plenty of dossiers to process in the meantime and will keep sending out warnings to those suspected of sharing files illegally.

What of the Internet users who have already heard from Hadopi? The agency says it has sent out tens of thousands of admonishments via e-mail and, in some cases, is moving on to a second warning, by registered mail.

There are tentative signs that this may be working. In a survey published this month by Hadopi, 7 percent of French Internet users said they had received a warning or knew someone who had. Seventy-two percent of the recipients said they had stopped or reduced their illegal file-sharing activity as a result.

So far, however, this does not seem to have translated into a turnaround for the ailing recorded music industry. The industry’s French trade association says sales in the first quarter fell 5 percent. While digital sales rose 13 percent, to a modest €26 million, or $37 million, CD sales continued to fall.

Meanwhile Hadopi is broadening its educational role by reviewing applications from digital music services for labels certifying that their offerings are legal. When this is complete, the agency wants to set up a Web site providing links to approved services.

But the data protection agency recently criticized Hadopi for delays in meeting one requirement of the law: that it detail the ways in which Internet users can secure their private networks against illegal file sharing. As long as such software is unavailable, it could be difficult for the agency to secure court orders to execute the third of three strikes, which would cut off Internet access.

It is not even clear that Mr. Sarkozy wants things to advance to that stage.

In a speech last month when he introduced a new agency called the National Digital Council, which will advise the government on technological matters, Mr. Sarkozy let it slip that he thought Hadopi was an “imperfect solution,” rather than “an end in itself.” He even appeared to suggest that he would consider ditching Hadopi if Internet companies found fair ways to remunerate content creators.

The Élysée Palace quickly went into damage-control mode, expressing Mr. Sarkozy’s “full support” for Hadopi.

“Neither the merits of Hadopi’s actions nor the need for a determined fight against piracy have been cast into doubt by the president of the republic,” it said in a statement.

So we repeat: Watch what you download. This is your second warning. And, on second thought, a raincoat is never a bad idea in Paris.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/t...y/23cahce.html





France Attempts to "Civilize" the Internet; Internet Fights Back
Nate Anderson

For some time, French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy has talked about his dream of a “civilized” Internet, but this dream has long been a nightmare for those who worry that “civilization” is really a code for “regulations favorable to big business and the national security state.” To make his vision a reality, Sarkozy helped to create this week's e-G8 meeting currently underway in the Tuileries Gardens next door to the Louvre—and the critics are fuming.

"I was invited to the e-G8 and declined," said author and activist Cory Doctorow recently. "I believe it's a whitewash, an attempt to get people who care about the Internet to lend credibility to regimes that are in all-out war with the free, open 'Net. On the other hand, I now have a dandy handwriting sample from Sarkozy should I ever need to establish a graphological baseline for narcissistic sociopathy."

Internet governance and civil society groups issued a statement charging that the "e-G8 Forum is organized by large Industry with access given only to industry and government actors… Big businesses already have a disproportionately large influence on public policy processes. For governments to sanction a dedicated meeting with top G8 leaders and officials to plan the global agenda for Internet related policies is inappropriate."

The French Internet activists at La Quadrature du Net have been even tougher. Governments "have entered an alliance with some of these companies, united in the fear of the new capabilities afforded to individuals by the Internet and computers," said spokesperson Jérémie Zimmermann.

So when Sarkozy took the stage of the e-G8 this morning, suspicions about his true motives were already rampant. And he did little to dispel them.

Be reasonable

It took Sarkozy only minutes to go from extolling the "third globalization" brought about by Internet companies—after the Age of Exploration and the Industrial Revolution—to delivering a parental lecture about "responsibility."

"You have a tremendous responsibility that weighs upon you," he told the assembled luminaries, who included people like Google's Eric Schmidt, and he demanded that Internet companies join national governments to jointly exercise the responsibilities. “The responsibility has to be shared between you and us.”

In Sarkozy's view, the dominant need right now is for control over this amazing, but rambunctious, resource we call the Internet. A few samples provide the overall flavor:

• "Although technology in and of itself is neutral, and must remain so, the way that Internet is used is not neutral."
• "The universe that you represent is not a parallel universe which is free of rules of law or ethics or of any of the fundamental principles that must govern and do govern the social lives of our democratic states."
• "Don't forget that behind the anonymous Internet user there is a real citizen living in a real society and a real culture and a nation to which he or she belongs, with its laws and its rules."
• Artists "must not be despoiled of the fruit of their talent. That doesn't simply ruin them, but far worse, it enslaves them."
• Governments "wish to enter into dialogue with you so that we can defend one another's interests."
• "[I am] calling for collective responsibility."
• "What I am calling for is for everyone to be reasonable."

But "reasonable" turns out to be a contested idea. So does "civilized." Sarkozy made clear that his top concerns at the moment involve intellectual property (Internet companies must not "contribute to drying up this cultural wealth") and monopolies (some Internet companies have set up "empires"), apparently code for companies like Google.

France is famous for passing the world's toughest three strikes law against alleged Internet copyright infringers. As the European Digital Rights group notes French politicians use that law to bill themselves as the "world's pioneer of the civilized Internet."

Secondarily, Sarkozy called for better privacy protections—and not just for citizens in the face of rampant online tracking and data collection. No, people must be free to "lead their lives in peace," a cryptic comment that might indicate support for regulation preventing the Internet publication about facts regarding people's "private lives."

As e-G8 organizer, the ad mogul Maurice Lévy summed it up today, saying, "How can we go further? How, too, can we be even more respectful of the rights of others—their intellectual creations and their private lives?" (France's national data and privacy regulator, CNIL, did lament today that the e-G8 didn't go further by hosting sessions on things like the "right to be forgotten.")

The conference, which was suggested by Sarkozy but privately funded by companies like Orange, Google, eBay, Microsoft, HP, and more, concludes tomorrow.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ights-back.ars





Can We Kill Off This Myth That The Internet Is A Wild West That Needs To Be Tamed?
Mike Masnick

We recently wrote about Nicolas Sarkozy's push to convince the tech world and the "digerati" that it's time to clamp down on internet freedoms. While he was more blatant and direct about it, we're seeing a similar theme elsewhere, and frequently see such claims in our comments as well. It's all based on this idea that the internet is some sort of "wild west" that is a haven for all sorts of illegality, and that needs to come to an end.

The problem is that this is a myth. It makes for a compelling narrative, but it's a myth nonetheless.

The latest version of this, is a horrible, dangerous and ridiculous editorial from Martin Kettle, at The Guardian, who insists that it's time to bring the internet "under control."

Yet whatever one's qualms about Sarkozy and his plan, he is surely on to something that should not be so sweepingly dismissed. Looking at British politics this week, it is hard to make an intellectually serious case that internet regulation issues should not be raised. Not only has the balance between parliament, the courts and the media been made to look irrelevant over superinjunctions by the twitterati, but almost the first act of the new Scottish government on Thursday was to promise a clampdown on internet sectarian hate postings. The fact that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg also popped up this week with the casual suggestion that children under 13 should be able to use social networking sites dramatically underlines the argument that there are issues of importance to discuss here.

Let's take these things one by one. First, on the issue of the superinjunction, it suggests the exact opposite of what Kettle is arguing. It's pointing out the ridiculousness of analog-era regulations in a digital age. That's not a case for controls. It's a case for removing controls. The issue of hate speech is another one where people overreact emotionally. The best way to counter hate speech (which is almost always ignorance) is with more speech. "Clamping down" only convinces those who hate that they're "onto something" and that they're being persecuted. Finally, Zuckerberg's claim -- which he's already pointed out involved taking his words out of context -- was just that there could be socially useful reasons why younger people might be helped if they could have accounts, but over aggressive internet controls prevent that. Again, that seems to argue against control, not for it.

The internet cannot exist in some undiscussable and untouchable dimension of human activity. It is a human creation. It affects human lives in all sorts of increasing ways. Morality and the rule of law should apply on the internet as elsewhere in human conduct. As such, it is an absolutely proper subject for governments to consider, though naturally with sensitivity.

And here's the myth at work. The internet does not exist as untouchable. Morality and the rule of law do apply to the actions people do there. The question is whether those laws are appropriate. In many cases, it appears they're not.

We have got to get past the fallacy that rules that existed in the pre-internet era are obsolete because the internet makes it so difficult to enforce them. To obey the injunctions of the courts over privacy, for example, is in principle right, not wrong. The fact that the internet makes it possible to circumvent those injunctions does not negate their worth or seriousness. It merely makes it imperative to consider the ways in which such constraints can be fairly enforced in the new media. That may not be as difficult as it may seem.

No, the fallacy is not that these laws are obsolete because they're difficult to enforce. It's that they're obsolete because many of them don't make any sense, such as these injunctions that seek to merely protect the rich and famous from having their own embarrassing actions discussed. Furthermore, some of these laws aren't "difficult" to enforce, they're impossible to enforce. And it's not because the internet is some "wild west," but because it's a very different platform of communication -- a many to many platform, which the world has not had before. We've had one-to-one and one-to-many forms of communication, but a many-to-many platform really does change some important fundamentals when it comes to speech.

Far more important are the questions of internet access to unsuitable material, especially but not solely by children, as well as the danger to children from inadequately policed social media. Merely to write such a sentence is to invite outrage in some quarters, but these issues are all too easy for a society to ignore until they return to haunt us.

And the proper response, if there is "unsuitable" (unsuitable to whom, by the way?) content is to go after those who produced and distributed it. Not to seek to block access and sweep it under the rug. That's denial. Let's live in reality.

It is beyond serious dispute that the internet has placed much greater amounts of pornography within far easier reach of many more people, including children, than at any other time in human history. And it is inconceivable that this is a development without destructive consequences.

"Destructive"? That certainly seems like hyperbole. Do you have any evidence to support destructive? I agree it may be inappropriate, but there are ways to deal with this that don't involve regulations. It's called educating children as to what's appropriate, and how to deal with content that is inappropriate should they come across it.

To argue for controls over the internet may not be cool. But the internet was surely not meant to be this way. The geniuses who created the modern web and made it so exciting did not do so in order to create the largest pornography bombardment in human history, to have a global email system weighed down by spam, to encourage hostile hacking into national security secrets, to embolden sectarian bigots to violent threats or mere gossipers to say ill-considered things under the protection of pseudonymity.

No, they meant to create a platform for communication in a many-to-many fashion and they knew that, as with any platform for communication, it can be used for both good and bad purposes. The response shouldn't be to automatically reach for the regulation button, with all its unintended consequences and heavy handed results, but to understand what it means to live in a world of much freer communication.

The problems can be solved by staying out the way. Kettle talks about spam and pornography. Yet, I almost never see spam any more. Why? Because technologists came in and built filters. I never see pornography either. And not because of any laws or filters, but because the websites I surf don't display any, and contrary to the myth makers, it's pretty difficult to "accidentally" run into porn. I do a lot of surfing and can't recall ever accidentally coming across any.

The internet isn't some wild west that needs taming. It's a new and different system that is sometimes used for bad purposes, but much more frequently used for very, very good purposes. And, because so many people have natural incentives to minimize the bad, they tend to take care of themselves naturally, by those who actually understand the system, and not by those who seek to implement laws and controls that don't fit the system.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...be-tamed.shtml





Is File-Sharing Really So Heinous?

File-sharing may herald the end of CDs and DVDs, but it still remains beneficial to music and film-makers, even if the European Commission takes a different view - writes Francesco Guarascio.

In a draft document - obtained by PublicServiceEurope.com - outlining the European Union's executive strategy to protect copyright - the Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier upholds the traditional view that file-sharing causes significant economic losses. That a French commissioner maintains such a position should not come as a surprise. France was the first country in Europe to try to introduce repressive legislation against free downloading.

What's more, the French are fiercely protective of their "chansonettes" and local films. They always have done their best to shield the sector, as they do with many other national treasures. But this paternalistic behaviour is far from justified. The repressive approach is, in fact, based on the idea that freely exchanging movies or songs protected by copyright harms authors and the entire industry, which stands behind it.

It is certainly true that sales of CDs and DVDs have fallen since the emergence of websites such as Pirate Bay or file-sharing platforms like eMule. But is it also right to assume that the entire cultural industry suffers as a result of this? Has the whole economy really been hit?

A recent study by the London School of Economics denies this hypothesis. It concludes that the fall in sales of physical copies of recorded music cannot be attributed solely to file-sharing, but can be explained by a combination of factors - including changing patterns of music consumption, reduced disposable household income for leisure products and increased sales of digital content through online platforms.

Or more simply put – perhaps, people do not buy CDs because they prefer to listen to music on a new wave of stylish mp3 players rather than on clumsy CD players. The LSE is not alone in providing this analysis of the situation. In another study, thee Harvard Business School also confirms that file-sharing can only be blamed for 20 per cent of the reduction in music sales. On the other hand, other studies demonstrate how file-sharing is contributing to new consumption patterns like growing sales of concert tickets, which offset the losses in certain specific sectors.

Research carried out by the University of Amsterdam reaches the conclusion that "file-sharing has created a net benefit to the economy and society in both the short and long term". The analysis continues: "The direct impact on sales of file sharing is minimal and there are indications that the 'lost' money can be made up in other ways."

This is the common view in many extra-EU industrialised countries. The Canadian government, for example, proved that those who file-share spend most money on legal content. And the Norwegian Business School found that "file-sharers purchase ten times as much content as they download for free". Views are very different in higher echelons of the EU. In 2009 France launched a repressive policy against online copyright infringements, labelled the "three-strike" approach.

Users are warned twice before seeing their connections cut. The law raised many concerns and was initially rejected by the French Constitutional Council, which deemed that it breached human rights. A milder version was later approved and the law is currently in force. The UK followed suit. The Digital Economy Act, which was passed in 2010, envisages a graduated response to tackling peer-to-peer online activities - but legal issues remain unresolved.

One of the key problems is that is not easy to distinguish a rule-breaker from a legal downloader. To do so with no risk of cutting the wrong connections, online traffic should be filtered. But doing so would be a huge and expensive operation, the financial burden of which would mainly fall on the shoulders of Internet service providers, who mostly happen to be powerful telecoms companies like British Telecom.

In an unusual coalition - telecoms giants are fighting on the same side as civil rights activists. But their alliance may not last. Spain could be inaugurating a new legislative trend based on a recently-approved law, which sets up a government authority entrusted with shutting down illegal websites. This super-censor partially lowers the policing requirements imposed on ISPs.

Barnier's line is a mix of filtering and monitoring. The commission "should tackle the infringements at their source," reads his draft document, to be presented publicly on Tuesday. "Source" is likely to mean the websites and platforms where copyrighted content is freely available - in line with the Spanish approach. But to reach this end, Brussels recommends "fostering cooperation of intermediaries, such as internet service providers", which is what is implied by the graduated-response approach. And ISPs are certainly not going to rejoice at being transformed in policemen of the net.

"The commission has failed to provide the evidence that a revision is necessary," says Kostas Rossoglou, legal officer at European consumers' organisation BEUC. "It deliberately ignores the data provided by governments, academics and civil society that highlight the positive economic impact of file sharing," he claims. In the synthetic battle between authors and consumers of culture, the winners are likely to be obscure industry forces.
http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/a...lly-so-heinous





Why We Haven't Seen Any Lawsuits Filed Against The Government Over Domain Seizures: Justice Department Stalling
Mike Masnick

We've been covering the various illegal domain seizures by the US government quite a bit, and with the latest round, I did want to loop back on one point: how come none of the seized sites have sued the government yet? We've heard a few times that the lack of lawsuits from those who have had their domains seized is "evidence" that they know the seizures were legal and that they would lose any court case. I began to wonder about this myself, and spent the last two weeks contacting people on all sides of these cases and found the answer to be exactly the opposite: it's not the site holders who are scared. It's the Justice Department, and they seem terrified to have one of these cases actually go to court.

What was really incredible was how everyone I spoke to involved in these cases (even though not at all connected with one another) had an identical story: they'd all love to take their cases to court, but they're waiting for the government to actually get in touch with them. If it was just one site, there would be no story. But I spoke to people associated with many sites, and the story was nearly identical. To hear John Morton and other proponents of domain seizures talk about it, it's "easy" for the owners of seized sites to protest and file suit against the government over the seized sites. Tragically, the reality has turned out to be quite different. Many of the sites were not even officially notified about the seizure until months later. Prior to that, they weren't even told what the sites were accused of, let alone who was doing the accusations. You try responding to a government action against you completely blind. You don't know who you're suing or for what.

Even once notified, the "notification" often came in the form of an "offer" from the government to effectively give up any and all legal claims against the government. From there, the process sounds like something out of the movie Brazil. Any attempt to speak to the government has been met with either a total lack of response or directing people to someone else, who then won't respond. Some of the people navigating this situation said it took months just to figure out who in the government they should be discussing the issue with -- and once it was figured out, actually getting those individuals to respond to basic questions that are normally answered as a matter of course in discussions prior to any litigation, has been an exercise in futility.

Basically, the same story was heard over and over again: the Justice Department doesn't seem to want these lawsuits to proceed and is stalling as much as possible and trying to avoid the legality of the seizures from being tested. At the same time, the site holders are eager to take these issues to court and are tremendously frustrated and distressed over the idea that the US government can simply seize domains without hearing, notice or effective process of appeal. However, nearly all of them expect that it will eventually end up in court (though one suggested that we might all be dead before a case moves forward at this rate).

Of course, I reached out to the government as well. I spoke to the press office of the part of the Justice Department involved in these cases, and beyond pointing me to the press releases they put out, they had no comment. I asked if there was an official process to protest domain seizures and was promised they'd get back to me. It's been a week and no one has gotten back to me. Separately, I reached out to people in other parts of the government that are heavily involved in the seizures, and despite multiple people promising to respond with details of the process, or to pass on my question to others who might know the process, days have gone by with no further response.

So, apparently it's "easy" to protest these seizures, but the people most involved in these seizures don't want to even let us (or those who it matters most to!) know what the process is. After talking to so many people on this, it's become abundantly clear that the lack of lawsuits has nothing to do with the strength of the government's case, but the very opposite. Multiple site owners would like to file suit, but can't. The government, who insists that it's easy to protest their wholesale seizure of a domain without prior notice or hearing can't even provide me a straight answer to what the process is to protest such a seizure. It's almost as if the government never even expected anyone to want to protest such censorship and were totally caught off-guard by this.

But the real tragedy is for the folks who ran these sites. Even as many have found alternative homes, they're frightened and disillusioned by the US government. They don't feel they did anything wrong, and yet were blindly punished by the US government, declared as criminals with no clear recourse -- and when they sought out information or details, have been met with the bureaucratic equivalent of a brick wall. We can all disagree over whether or not these domain seizures are legal or productive, but I would hope we can all agree that those who have had their domains seized should at least have a clear path to protest their innocence if they believe that they did not commit the crime Homeland Security, the Justice Department and a magistrate judge already declared them guilty of committing.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...stalling.shtml





Telstra Proudly Declares Intent to Cut Off Bandwidth Hogs

Telstra has no qualms about cutting off and throttling anyone it believes is illegally filesharing over its network, said Michael Lawrey executive director for network and technology at the Australian operator.

After proclaiming itself a “really customer centric” carrier, Lawrey went on to compare modern day networks to heavy smokers, saying they were becoming huffier and puffier. So, how to unclog the congested, data mucus laden pipes? By using internet filtering in reverse, said Lawrey.

Accusing “downloaders of illegal content” for almost all of Telstra’s network congestion, Lawrey said Telstra was in favor of just cutting them off, or severely throttling their bandwidth, through a system of signature verification.

“Those guys downloading pirated movies,” he said, “I’d love to see them complain to regulators!”

He did admit, however, that the carrier may well get it wrong, and throttle innocent surfers too.

“Is it a perfect science? No,” he told the audience at the TM Forum Innovation Spotlight in Dublin, Ireland adding, “But if it cuts out 80% of the non-value adding traffic, good!”

Telstra has long been a proponent of harsh network management, but remains convinced that despite criticism, its plan is the one to follow.

“We have caps on all our mobile plans. We copped a beating from everyone for that, but we’ve proven to be right,” he expounded before begrudgingly adding that he found Telstra’s data caps “really quite generous.”

That so-called generosity, however, would be short lived, warned Lawrey, noting “We probably haven’t even used our fair use small print yet. But we will.”

While trying to tempt customers into buying more expensive “differentiated data services,” and finding all kinds of value adds – including a potential deal with Netflix – to entice them, Lawrey showed no great love for high bandwidth users chewing their way through 80% of Telstra’s current data.

“I’d rather not have those 80% as customers, I’d rather someone else had them as customers,” he admitted, making no bones about the fact that customers perceived as abusing “fair usage” policy would be disconnected.

“There are tools open to the tier one telcos,” said Lawrey, attempting to convert his fellow operators to join the throttle brigade under the guises of “traffic management.”

“Surely, if you use signatures to identify high bandwidth users and choke them off, you’ll essentially be driving them to encrypt and go through VPNs?” asked a member of the audience.

“Well, if people want to find ways to try to get around our system, we’ll have to deal with that as we see it,” Lawrey replied.

Not that we want to seem nit-picky, Telstra, but surely if you’re promoting your platform as a service model, then saying you would rather not provide the service you claim you can actually provide is not a very good angle.

Also, we don’t see how Telstra throttling heavy users while trying to upsell Netflix to people who barely use their phones is particularly helpful. Or logical. Either you can cope with the data deluge, or you can’t. Decide.
http://unplugged.rcrwireless.com/ind...andwidth-hogs/





New "ShaperProbe" Tool Detects ISP Traffic Shaping
Nate Anderson

Two researchers at Georgia Tech can tell you exactly how American ISPs shape Internet traffic, and which ones do so. Bottom line: of the five largest Internet providers in the country, the three cable companies (Comcast, Time Warner, Cox) employ shaping while the telephone companies (AT&T, Verizon) do not—though that fact is less significant for the user experience than it might first sound.

Partha Kanuparthy and Constantine Dovrolis wanted to measure Internet shaping, so they built a tool called ShaperProbe to do so. The tool relies on users from around the country running tests in which the user's computer transmits data at a constant bit rate, while ShaperProbe's 48 Linux-based server instances watch incoming traffic to see if that rate degrades in predictable ways over time. Using the M-Lab infrastructure, ShaperProbe has collected more than 1 million trial runs from 5,700 ISPs over the last two years.

The resulting paper (PDF) documents the first accurate attempt to “measure traffic shaping deployments on the Internet.”

Emptying the bucket

Traffic shaping hardware generally relies on the concept of a “token bucket.” Traffic management hardware will generate a digital token for each Internet user at a predetermined rate. These tokens fill a virtual token bucket; transmitting packets over the Internet removes tokens from the bucket. If the bucket empties, no more data can be transmitted until a new token is deposited.

The practical result is that the user sits down to her computer with a full token bucket and can immediately blast data through her connection as fast as the connection can go. But after some interval of time, usually measured in seconds, this sort of full-throttle data transmission empties the token bucket and the user is now limited to transmitting at the token generation rate.

ShaperProbe measures the length of time it takes for traffic shaping hardware to make a "level shift" to a slower speed limit on the line. Charting this data enough times, and from enough different users with different Internet access tiers, allowed Kanuparthy and Dovrolis to estimate the token bucket parameters—and thus to figure out exactly when and how traffic shaping kicks in for any particular ISP's speed tier.

Traffic shaping isn't necessarily some devious attempt to give users less bandwidth than expected; it can also be used to let users transmit "bursty" files more quickly than their speed tier would otherwise allow, shaping them down to their chosen tier only after some set amount of time. This is how Comcast markets its "PowerBoost" technology, for instance.

Kanuparthy and Dovrolis

The use of shapers can also be dictated by the underlaying access tech. The researchers note that DSL providers can “dynamically change link capacity instead of shaping, while a cable provider is more likely to shape since DOCSIS provides fixed access capabilities." It can also be applied to the entire Internet link or more narrowly to specific kinds of traffic— which, as the researchers note, is "relevant to the ‘heated’ network neutrality debate."

The research shows that Comcast, Road Runner (from Time Warner Cable), and Cox all use downstream shaping—but only Comcast and Cox also use upstream shaping. Neither AT&T nor Verizon shape in either direction.

The research is separate from a recent million-dollar Google grant to other Georgia Tech researchers looking at ways to detect Internet censorship or throttling, but it was funded by a previous 2009 Google grant. It also runs on the Google-funded M-Lab hardware network. As Google noted in its most recent Georgia Tech grant, it hopes to create tools to that "users could determine whether their ISPs are providing the kind of service customers are paying for, and whether the data they send and receive over their network connections is being tampered with by governments and/or ISPs."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ic-shaping.ars





Draft Horses Bring Fiber Optics to Remote Locations
Eric Blokland

For over three decades Claude Desmarais has been laying line with draft horses. Fred has been on the job for five years now. VTD/Eric Blokland

Two miles above the village of Greensboro Bend on Stannard Mountain, a crew of linemen for FairPoint Communications takes a break. A garter snake slinks around the rear wheel of a work truck parked on sparsely-populated Norway Road. One of the linemen picks up the snake by its tail. It wriggles as he brings it close to Claude Desmarais, a 67-year-old lineman who stands over six feet tall.

Desmarais remarks that he has no plans — and no need — to retire from his work — which is negotiating tough terrain with his Belgian draft horse Fred. Snakes, however, give him the freaks.

“You don’t get close to me with that snake,” he says, a Kingdom lilt in his speech.

“What about Fred?” says the lineman, dangling the snake as he moves past Desmarais.

“Wouldn’t bother him,” says Desmarais. “Just me.”

Fred, the draft horse standing next to Desmarais, is unperturbed by the snake or much else. The muscled 1,700-pound cable-hauling Belgian is in full draft regalia. Studded leather flaps keep his eyes on the task at hand. A leather collar wraps around his neck, bearing the hames, or a frame from which the traces span Fred’s torso and connect to an iron whippletree trailing behind.

The hames, now wrought from aluminum instead of the traditional wood, are about all the progress Desmarais has seen in draft horse technology since he started contracting with power and telecommunications companies over three decades ago.

“My part of it has always been the same,” says Desmarais.

It’s perhaps a fitting irony that Fred is the anachronistic vehicle for broadband installation in remote areas of the Northeast Kingdom. Without Fred pulling his weight in fiber-optic cable, however, FairPoint would be hard-pressed to meet its 2013 goal, set by Gov. Peter Shumlin, to bring Internet to every home in the state.

For the moment, Fred walks around untethered, content to munch the grass that linemen occasionally pluck for him. Idling, he begins to toe the ground near a utility pole. Mud whorls behind his hooves. The linemen look on, amused: after a few more hesitant steps, Fred plunges into a mud puddle and rolls around.

“Guess he’s hot,” says Dave Hastings, the soft-spoken crew leader from Monroe, N.H.

Hastings and his crew are headquartered at a FairPoint garage in St. Johnsbury. Although Hastings has worked from that location since 2000, like him, most of his crew hails from out of state.

“Did you tell him I worked for your dad, too?” Shouts Mike, a younger lineman pulled in from his regular post in Portland, Maine. He dangles from a harness atop a utility pole, unmistakable in a neon International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers T-shirt. He’s one of four Mainers on the crew. The only Vermonter is Phil, a quiet guy from the southern part of the state. They’re all pulling 70-hour weeks, and they live at a Comfort Inn.

Fred grazes his way among flowering Trillium and crab apple trees while Hastings’ crew unsnarls a lasher, their primary tool for laying line. It’s a metal cylinder the size of a block of firewood that binds newly-laid fiber-optic cable to an existing line strung between utility poles. After laying the fiber-optic cable along the ground, the crew works backward, sliding the lasher along the existing line 15 feet overhead to raise the new fiber-optic cable and secure it. When it jams or reaches a utility pole, the crew stops to run a ladder, or kick their way up the wooden poles using metal hooks bound to the insoles of their boots.

FairPoint is one of a handful of companies that is working to lay fiber-optic cable to homes even in the most remote areas of the state.

It’s the end-of-the-dirt road, last miles that have been a challenge for private broadband companies like VTel, Sovernet, FairPoint, Burlington Telecom and Comcast.

The problem is as old as rural electrification. Vermont’s difficult terrain and sparse population make it unprofitable to develop rural infrastructure — a situation that left the towns of Victory and Granby dark until 1963, when Central Vermont Public Service finally ran electricity to those towns.

Gov. Peter Shumlin has said Internet access is a necessity of the modern age, and he has pledged to bring broadband to every last mile by 2013. Gov. Jim Douglas also promoted the virtues of the Internet and attempted to provide service by 2010, but his ambitions were thwarted by the Great Recession and the unwillingness of private companies to invest money in an expensive infrastructure outlay that didn’t guarantee profitable returns.

The Shumlin administration has access to capital that was unavailable just a few years ago. Vermont’s congressional delegation helped to secure $410 million in federal money earmarked for broadband development.

Areas that have been neglected like the remote stretch of Norway Road between Greensboro Bend and Stannard with maybe a dozen homes on it, have become the locus of FairPoint’s state-supported efforts.

The difficulty of getting cable to “every last mile,” is where Fred, the cable-carrying draft horse, comes in.

“Hopefully it pays off,” says Hastings.

“We could maybe get a four-wheeler in here,” he continues, gesturing to the cleared swath of boggy, fern-studded terrain that he’s working in today. But definitely not a truck, and Fred’s impact is nearly invisible. Residents rarely complain about a draft horse tromping through their yards.

As a so-called “telephone horse,” Fred starts the morning by towing 48-fiber cable (so called because of the 48 individual strands of glass cables wound into an inch-thick band) from a massive spool on the rear of a FairPoint truck. Then he backtracks with the crew, drawing the overhead lasher along utility wires between poles. They pause frequently to jump poles and troubleshoot snags, and Desmarais, Fred’s owner and handler, unhooks the whippletree from the lasher’s line to let Fred wander.

Fred is 14, and he’s been laying line for five years. Desmarais, who lives in Westmore, has laid line with draft horses for 31 years, and he learned to drive a team on his father’s farm in Barton when he was young. He travels to Amish country in the Midwest at least once a year to appraise new equipment and buy a horse, if one catches his eye–as Fred did one year while Desmarais was in Indiana. Desmarais has four draft horses, another Belgian and two Percherons: a second team lays line for FairPoint elsewhere in the state.

“Bell, NYNEX, New England Telephone, Verizon…” says Demarais, listing the companies who’ve contracted him for his draft-horse services over the decades.

Desmarais has never lacked for work, even as fleets of diesel utility trucks and versatile machinery became the standard for laying cable. And he’s noticed a small resurgence in draft horses in Vermont recently. “More draft horses are coming around. People are starting to use them a little bit,” he says.

Desmarais’ current client hopes to wrap up with Fred by this June. “We’re on schedule, or ahead of schedule,” says Hastings. He’s been working with Desmarais and Fred on broadband since April 2010, working 55 hours a week in the winter — “with the snow up to your belly button” — and around 70 hours during the longer summer light. On a good day, he says, they’ll string 8,000 feet of cable.

This cable connects, in turn, to electric cabinets scattered around the area. The cabinets power signals — Internet-bearing signals — along three and half miles or so of cable, explains Hastings. All the fiber-optics cables in the area ultimately snake into Greensboro, where a regional office generates the signal bringing YouTube and Hulu to the northwestern foothills of Stannard Mountain.

Having hauled the lasher a couple hundred yards, Fred’s again released to wander among the dandelions as Mike spikes his way up another pole. They’ll go on like this, the FairPoint crew leapfrogging Fred and Desmarais and vice versa, all the way down Norway Road — or until dark falls. After a night’s rest, they’ll be up here again tomorrow for a 7:30 a.m. start. “I’ve been on three weeks now,” says Mike. “I think I got a day off coming up.”

A while later, just south of Morrisville on a busy Route 12, flaggers slow traffic. A FairPoint truck, its arm extended with a worker in the bucket, runs a lasher stringing new fiber-optic cable along the highway. The truck inches along, laying line no faster than Fred’s plodding pace up on Norway Road.
http://vtdigger.org/2011/05/22/draft...ote-locations/





Special Report: Sony Stumbles: Did Stringer's Makeover Fail?
Tim Kelly and Kenneth Li

Had Sony stuck with the Airboard portable computer it launched in 2000, Satoru Maeda rather than Apple's Steve Jobs might have been feted as the creator of tablet PCs.

"I was the inventor of the Airboard," says Maeda between mouthfuls of fried prawn and dumplings at a Chinese restaurant in downtown Tokyo.

He was referring to a flat panel device that predated the iPad by a decade yet boasted video, touch screen typing and Internet access.

A hefty price tag and patchy picture quality were among the reasons the product, which in hindsight looks like it was ahead of its time, didn't initially take off. Internal politics and a series of disruptive divisional reorganizations ensured the product never got the management focus it needed to succeed, Maeda says.

Morphing it into Location Free TV -- a device through which you can watch local TV channels anywhere -- wasn't enough to convince Sony or the marketplace that it was going to work. The project once touted as being as revolutionary as the Walkman was dropped entirely in 2008.

Maeda said he knew a year earlier that Sony under Howard Stringer, who became CEO in 2005, was going to kill his invention. His boss sent him an e-mail saying he was taking it over.

Soon after, he quit the company he had joined in 1979 when Sony launched the Walkman and was one of the coolest companies around. It was a heyday Stringer pledged to restore, but Maeda, who is now at audio visual equipment maker JVC Kenwood, no longer sees returning.

"Sony old boys liked Airboard and Location Free TV because it was doing something new, which is what they did at Sony," said Maeda. "The current Sony people have no experience with such things because they haven't introduced any new products for about 10 years."

Still beset by turf wars, secrecy, complacency and a bloated innovation-killing corporate bureaucracy, Maeda and other Sony refugees insist their former employer is in dire straits and Stringer, who is 69, is running out of time to deliver on his promise of reinventing the company.

Certainly Stringer can boast of his role in developing 3D film-making and the victory of the Sony-backed Blu-ray technology in the next generation format wars. But Sony, despite its iconic brand, remains out of step with the rest of the global technology world and its talent for crowd-pleasing innovation has largely evaporated.

A hacking scandal in April that exposed more than 100 million accounts on its online gaming network to possible data theft not only hurt its image but threatens an online strategy meant to unite a disparate corporation and could upset a carefully crafted succession plan for when Stringer steps down.

It wasn't so much the security breach itself but the delays in informing customers of the problem and Sony's subsequent inability to quickly close other weak spots vulnerable to hackers that has left a stain.

"Too big to succeed comes to mind," a former senior manager involved until recently with Sony's PlayStation game console told Reuters, declining to be identified because of the sensitivity of the comments. "I was at PlayStation, considered the most flexible of the Sony units, but ironically that was crippled by over-secretive IT security, a lack of a coherent management structure and a lot of deadwood at the top. It was harder to work across Sony units than to work with outside partners," he said.

It isn't only former insiders who see the magnitude of the problems.

A procession of top executives at U.S. technology companies who spoke at a Reuters Global Technology Summit last week didn't mince their words when asked about Sony. Robert Glaser, chairman of Internet media software company RealNetworks Inc, likened Stringer's task of rehabilitating Sony to "introducing capitalism to a Soviet-bloc country after 50 years of communism."

Cautionary Tale

The erosion of Sony's standing is a cautionary tale of what can happen to technology companies when innovators move on. Back when Sony, led by co-founder Akio Morita, launched the Walkman, it proved an inspiration to the founders of the then little known startup company: Apple Computers.

"Sony had the most incredibly well thought out products in the world. We wanted to be like that from day one," Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, told Reuters recently. At the time, "no other company in the world was the model for consumer electronics."

As Japan's seemingly unstoppable economy expanded through the 1980s, Sony remained the consumer electronics benchmark as Morita handed over the creative mantle to maverick Norio Ohga, a trained opera singer who caught the founder's attention by writing to complain about the quality of Sony's audio tapes.

Ohga, who died in April aged 81, is best remembered for convincing the world to give up vinyl in favor of CDs and for green-lighting one young executive's ploy to beat Nintendo at its own game with the PlayStation.

The serial successes, though, bred complacency. "If you had the Sony name on the back of your shirt you were fine, so they stopped thinking," Maeda says.

In 1989, the Japanese economic juggernaut stalled and the benchmark Nikkei index topped out just shy of 39,000, marking the start of an asset value slump that continues to sap Japan's economic vitality 22 years later. That same year, amid a frenetic Japanese pursuit of landmark overseas assets, Sony made its first big mistake.

The company bought Hollywood studio Columbia Pictures for $3.9 billion from the Coca Cola Company. It was a business and culture that Sony didn't fully understand and became a big distraction for management.

Five years later as Ohga handed Sony over to Nobuyuki Idei it was forced to write off $2.7 billion from the purchase after a string of costly box-office flops.

Seven years later, Apple's Steve Jobs, inspired by Sony's Walkman, launched the iPod digital player. It was a seminal event for Apple and a huge warning for Sony.

In one move, Apple ended Sony's dominance of the music player market and left little doubt that Sony was heading for a full blown crisis.

Back in 2000, Sony's market value had been more than seven times Apple's. Today, Sony's market value is only one eleventh of Apple's, and its share price is little changed from 1995 -- the year it launched the digital camcorder.

Too Ordinary

When Stringer was appointed Sony's Chairman and CEO in 2005 he was keen to show that he could revitalize the company's reputation for creativity. As a Welshman running a Japanese company, but who understood its corporate culture, he was seen as having a better chance of shaking it up than most.

After a bruising first year of heavy losses, he was anxious to kick off the annual management meeting at Tokyo's Grand Prince Hotel New Takanawa on an optimistic note. Stringer trotted out a group of what he claimed were the 50 brightest engineers that Sony had to show the 1,200-strong crowd of managers gathered in the ballroom.

"These are our future," Stringer boasted of the group of the cleanest, most well-composed assemblage of geeks, recalls one former Sony executive in attendance that morning.

They "were the equivalent of scrubbed, West Point recruits," he said in reference to a prestigious U.S. military academy. "No tattoos, no piercings, no 14-year-olds," the former Sony manager said. "I remember saying, 'We're so screwed.' No one in that group was going to say 'Why the fuck do we need a (computer) mouse.'"

Sony's problem, offers Hironobu Yokota, a procurement manager who left Sony in 1995 because "all the misfits had left," is that it has become ordinary, a condition he says is worsening.

"I have consulted for Sony several times since I left. Looking at it from the outside, it is basically getting worse and worse," explains Yokota.

Even the engineer Sony eventually picked to do battle with Apple is now among the Sony refugees, and has become one of its fiercest critics to boot.

Koichiro Tsujino, who spearheaded the development of Sony's Vaio laptop, left the company in 2006 and later headed up Google's Japanese unit before recently establishing his own cloud computing company. His last project at Sony had been to develop a rival to the iPod.

Tsujino blames much of his former employer's problems on failures of corporate governance and petty jealousies that he says crushed what had been a creative atmosphere much like that at Google now.

"The biggest difference between Google and Sony is that Google doesn't waver," says Tsujino.

"Japanese companies, including Sony, tend to waver. Sony is typical of this. That was how it was when I left. They start working on an Internet project, but when it doesn't work out they will drop it in a year," said Tsujino at his office in Tokyo.

Sony, he insists, needs someone like Ohga -- unafraid to be "absurd, irrational and outrageous."

As more Sonyites from the golden era depart, the only traces left behind of famed innovator Morita is the air of elitism, says Osamu Katayama, a business writer who in 2010 published a book "The Stringer Revolution: What has he changed at Sony."

Morita he explains tried to become a pillar of the Japanese establishment, his ambition to head the prestigious Keidanren business lobby. As a result "Sony has a very strong sense of being elite," says the author, who also dismisses Sony under Stringer as an "ordinary company."

"Somebody needs to change Sony. I thought Stringer would change things a bit more, but it seems there were limits to what he could do," says Katayama.

Sony could still find inspiration from its humble beginnings. "Nobody knows about the days when Sony was just a neighborhood workshop and nobody tries to retain that spirit as they do at Honda," Katayama says, noting that Honda, for instance, eschews memberships in the clubs of Japan's corporate elite, yet manages to retain the entrepreneurial spirit and atmosphere of a street corner workshop.

Honda still lets its engineers roam. It is renowned for giving them creative free rein to conduct fundamental research that may never end up as a product -- engineers have unraveled the genome of rice, experimented on cockroaches to see how they avoid collision and designed and built a small jet aircraft.

Google is known for having established similar creative time for its staff, while Jobs at Apple is known for keeping his core development team to a size where he can remember everyone's name.

Hacking Exposes Weaknesses

Stringer has sought to unleash creative juices by establishing partnerships between disconnected business units, a strategy he can claim has at least started to result in hybrid products such as Xperia Play -- everyone outside Sony refers to it as the PlayStation phone -- from handset operation Sony Ericcson.

The massive Internet security breach the company suffered in April is all the more difficult for the company to come to terms with because it risks hurting that strategy by damaging an online service that connected the dots.

"The PlayStation network and (entertainment platform) Qriocity were really intended to be a bridging and ecosystem approach, trying to tie together the TVs, the PlayStation, PSP, really tying in all of those devices together into a complete ecosystem," says Mark Harding, an analyst who follows Sony for U.S.-based investment company the Maxim Group.

"If people lose faith and trust in the security of a commerce platform or an ecosystem platform like that, it does do damage to the strategy," he added.

In the biggest-ever theft of data on record, hackers stole details from more than 100 million accounts of Sony's PlayStation Network and PC-based online gaming service as well as its Qriocity music service. It prompted outrage from users, 90 percent of whom are based in the United States and Europe, not just because the company closed the network down but because it waited a week to announce the breach.

Critics, including the hacker community and Wall Street analysts, laid the blame squarely on Sony, for going to war with hackers and programmers who have dared to crack the code in its systems.

In 2001, Sony threatened legal action against one owner of the Aibo, Sony's robot dog, after the owner posted software showing other owners how to make the Aibo dance. Earlier this year, it took George Hotz to court after the famed hacker, known for unlocking Apple's iPhone, cracked open the PlayStation 3 to let owners run their own software.

This contrasts with the behavior of many other major technology companies, who at least seek a partial accommodation with elements in the hacking community, and certainly don't go out of their way to make enemies.

The Internet breach sparked thousands of comments on the official PlayStation fan page on Facebook and on its blog, some of them from users who said they would switch to rival games networks, such as Xbox Live, a Microsoft Corp product.

Sony insists it wasn't too slow to admit the breach, although Sony watchers speculate that Sony may have been loath to admit it had been hit by hackers and wanted to play down the attack.

It took Stringer another two weeks before breaking his silence on the issue and then he unapologetically defended the delays, saying they weren't bad by corporate standards.

Speaking at a press roundtable last Tuesday, where he fed journalists breakfast on the 30th floor of Sony's New York headquarters to mark the sixth birthday of the PlayStation 3 games console, Stringer downplayed the breach, describing it as "hackers stealing games that were already free."

"You're telling me my week wasn't fast enough? We had to know what had been stolen rather than leaking information out piece by piece and panicking customers," he said.

The defiance didn't go down so well with some PlayStation customers. One blogger on website techdirt.com concluded: "CEO Howard Stringer apparently has come to the conclusion that there's still plenty of room for more foot in Sony's mouth."

To make matters worse, there were disclosures about three other problems with the security of Sony websites last week.

The company was forced to shut down a site it set up to help users affected by April's breach after it found what it called a "security hole."

Then, Internet security firm F-Secure disclosed that a hacked page on a Sony website in Thailand directed users to a fake site posing as an Italian credit card company. And, separately, Sony's So-Net unit that provides Internet service in Japan alerted customers that an intruder had broken into its system and stole virtual points worth $1,225 from account holders.

It all adds to the loss of appeal compared with Apple and other rivals.

Apple's suite of products -- from its iMac PCs, its iPod digital music players and content-providing iTunes stores, plus its wildly successful iPhone and iPad tablet computers -- have won legions of fans for their integration and sleek designs.

This is much less the case for Sony's Vaio computers, PlayStation games, Sony Ericsson mobile phones, MP3 players, Bravia televisions and trove of music and movies.

"The standard has to be, 'Where is the product I'm going to line up the night before to buy?'" says Steve Jacobs, a former vice president of broadband strategy and alliances at Sony Electronics in the United States, alluding to the throngs that wait hours and days ahead of Apple gadget launches.

Sony's stumbling is happening in a world where companies like Apple and Google are moving at an astonishing speed. "Sony has to change if it's to compete in that race," says Geoff Blaber, an analyst with UK-based technology research firm CCS Insight. "Sony is seeking to deliver content and services across multiple devices and platforms, but product groups and corporate structure is very, very fragmented compared to Apple."

Sony declined to make Stringer or another top executive available for interviews for this story.

Its head of corporate communications, Shiro Kambe, said in a statement the company "will continue to aim to capitalize on the unique strengths our rivals do not have - such as the broad deployment of our products globally and our diverse business line."

He said that a realignment in March and some other initiatives would "further integrate the full range of Sony's assets" and allow for the next phases of the company's growth and development.

Kambe also said that Sony's founding principles -- "creating an environment that stresses a spirit of freedom and open-mindedness, where employees could fully exercise their skills and abilities" -- was still true today. The company had unveiled numerous exciting products in the past few months, he added.

Gushing Praise

Most at risk of taking the blame for Sony's latest debacle is Stringer's right-hand man, Kazuo Hirai, who was anointed by Stringer in March to eventually carry the CEO baton.

"Since he is in charge of networks, he is the obvious candidate to take charge of sorting this out," Katayama said. "Of course, if he can't manage that the way up will be blocked."

For the moment, Hirai is getting gushing praise from Stringer. While he was being piped in through a video conferencing connection into the New York roundtable last Tuesday, Stringer described him as "very helpful and very demonstrative." Gamers, insisted Stringer, "like Kaz."

Yet it is difficult to think that Hirai won't have to take some of the blame, potentially damaging his chances of being the next CEO.

Stringer's next best choice, said an analyst who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, could be Hiroshi Yoshioka. He is an executive, who along with Kunimasa Suzuki, Yoshihisa Ishida and Hirai, is a member of Sony's elite management team. Stringer refers to them as the four musketeers.

Yoshioka is an engineer by training and the executive who runs Sony's non-consumer businesses, including semiconductors, batteries and other key components. The analyst suggests he would have difficulty in struggling to unite Sony's non-cooperating units.
An alternative figure who may play a key role is George Bailey. Stringer hired the former IBM technology guru in 2009, for the newly created post of Chief Transformation Officer.

Bailey, who reports directly to Stringer, was brought in to help accelerate Sony's turnaround.

"While the groundbreaking iPod was only launched in October 2001, Jobs initially built a team, restructured the supply-chain and partnered with value-chain companies," CLSA analyst Atul Goyal said in a report comparing Sony and Apple. "Now, we believe it is Bailey's turn to do the same at Sony. We argue that Sony is just such a turnaround or transformation story."

Whoever follows Stringer to the top of Sony, pressure will be on the new boss to quickly exit from thin-margin or loss-making operations such as phones, televisions, and peripheral businesses, including financial services, analysts predict.

"I would be very focused on a narrow set of products," advises the CEO of web security company Symantec, Enrique Salem, also speaking at the Reuters Summit. "If you look at what happened at Sony over the last 15 years, they've diversified their portfolio and I would pick one or two things I wanted to spend all of my time on to make sure they are the very best in the market."

Another of Sony's options may be to seek closer cooperation with U.S. Internet giant Google.

Sony is already warming to Google's Android operating system -- notably partnering with the Internet search leader on Google TV. The U.S. company could help tie together the Japanese company's treasure trove of content and products with Google's software and innovation -- if that were to happen, industry watchers argue, Sony could then hope to take on Apple.

"It is now moving in the right direction but does not have the luxury of time that it had 10 years back," said CLSA's Goyal.

Whoever ends up running Japan's best known consumer electronics brand for the next 10 years should look to give its best people the space and flexibility to work and think freely, Apple co-founder Wozniak said.

"It's kind of like the liberal arts side of the company. The emotion, the heart has to be as strong as the brain and the engineering. Right now that doesn't really happen. Companies are all based on the money guys and who has done what before," he said.

Stringer Legacy

For Stringer, the legacy he leaves may be that of the cost-cutter rather than the renaissance man he promised to be when he became the first foreigner to lead the Japanese company.

With Morita, Stringer shares a colorful past. Morita was the son of a soy sauce maker and a former Imperial army soldier. Stringer too served in the military, conscripted to fight in Vietnam after he arrived in the United States in 1964 with $100 he had earned as a truck driver after graduating from Oxford University.

Landing a job as a journalist at CBS after his discharge, he eventually went on to run the American broadcaster. He was knighted in 2000, an award he shares with Morita who was made an honorary knight in 1993.

Stringer, who is described on the company website as less of a numbers' guy than a creative leader, has had successes such as the Blu-ray optical discs victory over the alternative format HD-DVD. However, Sony under his watch has yet to find the game-changer able to wow consumers like an iPhone or an iPad.

Unlike Morita, remembered as the creative force behind the Walkman, Trinitron televisions and other hits that made his company a household name, or hands-on innovator Jobs, Stringer has been happy to let others show off the goods.

Jobs, a consummate salesman has personally launched Apple's most successful products over the past decade. Stringer on the other hand was not present at the launch of either of Sony's most important products of recent years, its new hand-held game device and the tablet computers it hopes can claim top spot behind Apple's iPad.

In the absence of any must-have gadget emerging from Sony's labs, Stringer has not been squeamish about cutting fat to lift the company's bottom line, a strategy that has delivered results for him throughout his career from CBS onwards.

"Stringer cut fixed costs especially for production sites, making Sony more resilient to stagnant revenue growth," said Yasuo Nakane, an analyst at Deutsche Securities in Tokyo. It has allowed him to keep pace with productivity improvements at rivals such as LG and Samsung.

Before taking over as CEO, Stringer had burnished his belt-tightening reputation by cutting $700 million in expenses at Sony's U.S. operations. More recently, in 2009, as Sony struggled during the post Lehman shock recession, he pared $3 billion more off Sony's costs by laying off 16,000 workers and halving the number of suppliers it uses to 1,200 companies.

Prudent management, however, isn't enough to lift the despair that has descended not just on Sony but on some other major companies in deflation-ravaged Japan since the bubble burst two decades ago.

In its May edition, Japan's Bungei Shunju, a widely read current affairs magazine, lamented the demise of Sony in a piece quoting an engineer who had left for a rival consumer electronics firm.

"It's obvious the days will never again come when we marveled at the quality of sound from a Sony FM radio, or the beauty of the images on a Trinitron TV, or the inspiration of the Walkman," the magazine said. "We shouldn't expect Sony to shine as it once did."

Pondering Sony's future again over his dumplings in Tokyo, Airboard creator Maeda is equally as glum. "I don't think Sony can change," he says. Not unless, he adds, "Sony has a leader like Steve Jobs."

(Additional reporting by Isabel Reynolds and Nathan Layne in Tokyo, Liana Baker in New York, Poornima Gupta in San Francisco and Jim Finkle in Boston)

(Editing by Martin Howell)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...74M0J520110523





A Movie Lover’s Plea: Let There Be Light

Many theaters misuse 3-D lenses to show 2-D films, squandering brightness, color
Ty Burr

As if rising ticket prices and chatterbox patrons weren’t enough, moviegoers in the Boston area are being left in the dark thanks to the regular misuse of the lenses on new digital projection equipment at many of the region’s major theater chains. But almost no one at the theaters or their corporate headquarters is willing to talk about it.

A walk through the AMC Loews Boston Common on Tremont Street one evening in mid-April illustrates the problem: gloomy, underlit images on eight of the multiplex’s 19 screens (theaters 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, and 18, to be specific). These are the auditoriums using new digital projectors that are transforming the movie exhibition business, machines that entirely do away with celluloid. The “film’’ comes in the form of a software file, and the projector pumps it onto the screen at high intensity.

Why, then, do so many of the movies look so terrible? This particular night “Limitless,’’ “Win Win,’’ and “Source Code’’ all seemed strikingly dim and drained of colors. “Jane Eyre,’’ a film shot using candles and other available light, appeared to be playing in a crypt. A visit to the Regal Fenway two weeks later turned up similar issues: “Water for Elephants’’ and “Madea’s Big Happy Family’’ were playing in brightly lit 35mm prints and, across the hall, in drastically darker digital versions.

The uniting factor is a fleet of 4K digital projectors made by Sony — or, rather, the 3-D lenses that many theater managers have made a practice of leaving on the projectors when playing a 2-D film. Though the issue is widespread, affecting screenings at AMC, National Amusements, and Regal cinemas, executives at all these major movie theater chains, and at the corporate offices of the projector’s manufacturer, have refused to directly acknowledge or comment on how and why it’s happening. Asked where his company stands on the matter, Dan Huerta, vice president of sight and sound for AMC, the second-biggest chain in the US, said only that “We don’t really have any official or unofficial policy to not change the lens.’’

A description of the problem comes from one of several Boston-area projectionists who spoke anonymously due to concerns about his job. We’ll call him Deep Focus. He explains that for 3-D showings a special lens is installed in front of a Sony digital projector that rapidly alternates the two polarized images needed for the 3-D effect to work.

“When you’re running a 2-D film, that polarization device has to be taken out of the image path. If they’re not doing that, it’s crazy, because you’ve got a big polarizer that absorbs 50 percent of the light.’’

They’re not doing that, and there’s an easy way to tell. If you’re in a theater playing a digital print (the marquee at the ticket booth should have a “D’’ next to the film’s name), look back at the projection booth.

If you see two beams of light, one stacked on top of the other, that’s a Sony with the 3-D lens still in place. If there’s a single beam, it’s either a Sony with the 3-D lens removed or a different brand of digital projector, such as Christie or Barco.

The difference can be extreme. Chapin Cutler, a cofounder of the high-end specialty projection company Boston Light & Sound, estimates that a film projected through a Sony with the 3-D lens in place and other adjustments not made can be as much as 85 percent darker than a properly projected film.

That’s dark enough for Hollywood director Peter Farrelly to complain loudly when his comedy “Hall Pass’’ had its promotional screening in two of the Common’s theaters prior to opening this past February. Farrelly went from one screening where the 3-D lens had been removed to a second in which the lens was still on, and he couldn’t believe his eyes.

“I walked into the room and I could barely see, and my stomach dropped,’’ the filmmaker said. “The first screening looked spectacular and the second was so dark, it was daytime versus nighttime. If they’re doing this for a big screening, I can’t imagine what they do for regular customers. That’s no way to see a movie.’’

So why aren’t theater personnel simply removing the 3-D lenses? The answer is that it takes time, it costs money, and it requires technical know-how above the level of the average multiplex employee. James Bond, a Chicago-based projection guru who serves as technical expert for Roger Ebert’s Ebertfest, said issues with the Sonys are more than mechanical. Opening the projector alone involves security clearances and Internet passwords, “and if you don’t do it right, the machine will shut down on you.’’ The result, in his view, is that often the lens change isn’t made and “audiences are getting shortchanged.’’

After multiple requests, Sony declined through a spokesman to respond to questions about its digital projection equipment. Executives at the major theatrical chains are equally unwilling to discuss the matter. When contacted for this article, a spokesman for Regal, the nation’s largest multiplex operator, e-mailed the following statement: “Patron response has been overwhelmingly positive toward digital cinema and all of the associated entertainment options provided by this technology.’’

A spokeswoman for Norwood-based National Amusements, the ninth-largest chain in the country, responded to detailed questions by saying “We are not experiencing any issues with the Sony 4K systems.’’

If they talk about it at all, the chains claim that individual multiplex managers are the ones to decide whether to switch out the 3-D lens for 2-D showings. Dan Huerta, Vice President of Sight and Sound for AMC, the second-biggest chain in the US, said, “Obviously, if we know there’s a 2-D movie that’s going to be shown through a 3-D lens, we would have to make sure that the manager or a technical person could make the call.’’

Yet some theater employees scoff at that notion. “I can tell you who’s not [making the call], and it’s not the manager,’’ said one projectionist who has worked at a number of area theaters, including the Common, and who also preferred to remain anonymous. This man — let’s call him the Phantom Projectionist — believes that unspoken AMC corporate policy is to keep 3-D lenses on for 2-D showings.

“If we knew a house would be opening ‘Harry Potter’ and it wasn’t going to be 3-D,’’ he said, “I would ask them to swap the lens out and it would either go nowhere or come back with a negative from the regional technician, usually with the impression that it came from above.’’

Digital projection can look excellent when presented correctly. Go into Theater 14 at the Common, newly outfitted with a Christie 4K projector, and you’ll see a picture that is bright and crisp, if somewhat colder than celluloid. (You’ll also hear a busted sound channel that makes the actors sound tinny and faraway— but that’s a different article.)

Digital is the future — the Common plans to be all-digital by July — if only because it saves studios millions of dollars a year on processing film prints. Why, then, did Regal and AMC sign contracts in early 2009 — and National Amusements in June 2010 — with Sony, the one manufacturer whose projectors feature the external 3-D lens that’s too expensive and difficult to easily remove for 2-D showings?

The reason appears to be a basic business quid pro quo. Sony provides projectors to the chains for free in exchange for the theaters dedicating part of their preshow ads to Sony products. Unfortunately, the 3-D boom took off in late 2009 and Sony had to come up with a retrofitted solution. Said the Phantom Projectionist, “To me it feels like they’re serving people pigeon burgers and telling them its grade-A beef.’’

But what if audiences don’t notice or don’t care that they’re eating pigeon burgers? When queried by a reporter, moviegoers exiting showings at the Common recently were hard-pressed to pinpoint problems with what they’d just seen.

An older couple leaving the under-illuminated 7:15 “Win Win’’ showing thought the film looked fine; another patron praised its “creative lighting.’’ Walking out of the 7:05 showing of “Source Code,’’ Gerry Jurrens, 62, of Kingston, N.J., admitted that “in some places it seemed a little grainy, but it still looks better than what I’ve got at home.’’

Educating audiences and overcoming this inertia can be difficult. Boston Light & Sound’s Cutler said, “We have a tendency to walk in the door, we’ve paid our money, bought our popcorn, and we want to sit down and watch something. We’re loath to get up and leave because we’ve put that much effort in.’’

Still, the basic benchmarks of quality are easy to spot. In the opinion of the anonymous Deep Focus, “You should have a good, bright, clear, sharp picture and clean sound. That’s really it. It should be very easy to run a good show off digital and it stuns me that the chains can’t even manage to do that.’’

Herb Nipson agrees, and with four decades experience as a Boston-area projectionist he’s worth listening to. “I think audiences have to be a lot more proactive now,’’ he said, “because audiences are the only group that has any real concern for the quality of the image. They’re the only ones watching it.’’
http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/arti...s_in_the_dark/





Citing Public Interest, Judge Rules for ‘Hangover II’
Noam Cohen

A federal judge on Tuesday allowed the movie “Hangover Part II” to be released for the Memorial Day weekend, rejecting a request by a tattoo artist who says that the movie violates his copyright by using a face tattoo he made for Mike Tyson on a central character in the movie.

But even as Judge Catherine D. Perry of Federal District Court in St. Louis gave an important victory to Warner Brothers Entertainment, the studio that is releasing “Hangover Part II,” she made clear that her sympathies were entirely on the side of the artist, S. Victor Whitmill.

She said that Mr. Whitmill had a “strong likelihood of prevailing on the merits for copyright infringement” and that most of the arguments put forward by Warner Bros. were “just silly.”

Mr. Whitmill made the Maori-inspired tattoo for Mr. Tyson in 2003 in Las Vegas. In testimony on the lawsuit, he described how he had spent four hours conferring with Mr. Tyson and then inking the tattoo face, steering him from a pattern he proposed with “hearts and diamonds around the eye area” to a creation inspired by tribal art.

Shown on Mr. Tyson’s face, the tattoo has appeared in numerous movies, including the original “Hangover,” which made more than $250 million, and the documentary “Tyson.” But in the sequel to “Hangover” the tattoo was shown on the face of another character, Stu, played by Ed Helms.

With the tattoo’s use in the movie or promotional items like movie posters, iPhone apps or Big Gulp cups at 7-11, Mr. Whitmill had “lost control over the image he created,” Judge Perry ruled.

By her own reasoning, the judge conceded, she should have enjoined the studio from releasing the film -– a decision that could have cost the studio as much as $100 million. But ultimately she concluded that the harm to the “public interest” from stopping the release of the movie outweighed the harm to Mr. Whitmill.

“The public interest does favor protecting the thousands of other business people in the country as well as Warner Brothers, and not causing those nonparties to lose money, and I think it would be significant, and I think it would be disruptive,” she said from the bench, rather than issuing a written ruling. “I think that tilts the public interest in favor of Warner Brothers on this because all over the country people would be losing money if I were to enjoin this movie.”

The consolation for Mr. Whitmill is that he will be entitled to compensation. “Although the intangibles he’s losing can’t be completely known or quantified, there is some amount of money that will come close,” she offered.

Warner Brothers, in a statement, focused on the good news in the decision: “We are very gratified by the Court’s decision which will allow the highly anticipated film, ‘The Hangover Part II,’ to be released on schedule this week around the world. Plaintiff’s failed attempt to enjoin the film in order to try and extract a massive settlement payment from Warner Bros. was highly inappropriate and unwarranted.”

The lawyer representing the studio in the lawsuit, Frederick J. Sperling of Schiff Hardin of Chicago, added: “The court’s ruling protects the interests of the public as well as those of Warner Bros.”

The lawyer for Mr. Whitmill, Michael A. Kahn, focused on what was to come: “While we are disappointed that the motion was denied, we are quite pleased by Judge Perry’s findings. … Judge Perry recognized copyright law protects tattoos and that Warner Bros. had no permission to use Mr. Whitmill’s artwork in the movie. We look forward to further vindicating our client’s rights at trial in the near future, including a permanent injunction preventing further distribution of the movie.”

All signs pointed to a settlement and the judge herself was encouraging those efforts. But the two sides were combative in court on Monday at a hearing before Judge Perry.

Cross-examining Mr. Whitmill, the lawyer representing Warner Bros., Mr. Sperling, said that the other side had “demanded $30 million to settle your claim.” Mr. Kahn objected, and the judge agreed. Mr. Kahn later said that Mr. Sperling had been unfair in mentioning that number in court

For all of the discussion and theorizing about whether tattoos — which after all are creations made on someone else’s body — could be copyrighted, Judge Perry could not have been more clear cut.

“Of course tattoos can be copyrighted,” she said. “I don’t think there is any reasonable dispute about that. They are not copyrighting Mr. Tyson’s face, or restricting Mr. Tyson’s use of his own face, as the defendant argues, or saying that someone who has a tattoo can’t remove the tattoo or change it, but the tattoo itself and the design itself can be copyrighted, and I think it’s entirely consistent with the copyright law.”

As for the “fair use” defense offered by the studio, which argues that the ability to parody the artwork should trump Mr. Whitmill’s copyright claims, Judge Perry was equally summary in her judgment: “This was an exact copy. It’s not a parody.”

“This use of the tattoo did not comment on the artist’s work or have any critical bearing on the original composition. There was no change to this tattoo or any parody of the tattoo itself. Any other facial tattoo would have worked as well to serve the plot device.”

Mr. Whitmill stuck by view that he had no problem with Mr. Tyson’s use of the tattoo, including on a Tyson action figure that Mr. Sperling showed him.

“Because that’s his identity,” Mr. Whitmill replied. “You know, I’m looking at the action figure here, since 2003, that’s what Mike Tyson looks like now. I have no objection to that whatsoever.”
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...r-hangover-ii/





Doctors and Dentists Tell Patients, "All Your Review Are Belong To Us"
Timothy B. Lee

When I walked into the offices of Dr. Ken Cirka, I was looking for cleaner teeth, not material for an Ars Technica story. I needed a new dentist, and Yelp says Dr. Cirka is one of the best in the Philadelphia area. The receptionist handed me a clipboard with forms to fill out. After the usual patient information form, there was a "mutual privacy agreement" that asked me to transfer ownership of any public commentary I might write in the future to Dr. Cirka. Surprised and a little outraged by this, I got into a lengthy discussion with Dr. Cirka's office manager that ended in me refusing to sign and her showing me the door.

The agreement is based on a template supplied by an organization called Medical Justice, and similar agreements have been popping up in doctors' offices across the country. And although Medical Justice and Dr. Cirka both claim otherwise, it seems pretty obvious that the agreements are designed to help medical professionals censor their patients' reviews.

The legal experts we talked to said that the copyright provisions of these agreements are probably toothless. But the growing use of these agreements is still cause for concern. Patients who sign the agreements may engage in self-censorship in the erroneous belief that the agreements bar them from speaking out. And in any event, the fact that a doctor would try to gag his patients raises serious questions about his judgment.

As we dug into the story, we began to wonder if Medical Justice was taking advantage of medical professionals' lack of sophistication about the law. Doctors and dentists are understandably worried about damage to their reputations from negative reviews, and medical privacy laws do make it tricky for them to respond when their work is unfairly maligned. Although Dr. Cirka declined repeated requests for an interview, his emailed statements (and the statements of his staff) suggest he doesn't understand the terms of the agreement he asks his patients to sign.

In any event, we think censoring patients is the wrong way for doctors to deal with online criticism. Consumers understand that no business satisfies 100 percent of its customers, and the medical profession is no different. If a dentist is worried that negative reviews will harm his reputation, he should respond by providing more information about his practice to prospective patients, and by encouraging his satisfied patients to post positive reviews online. The revelation that he is trying to censor his patients' reviews will do far more damage to his reputation than an occasional negative review ever could.

Just sign here

The agreement that Dr. Cirka's staff asked me to sign on that February morning began by claiming to offer stronger privacy protections than those guaranteed by HIPAA, the 1996 law that governs patient privacy in the United States. In exchange for this extra dollop of privacy, it asked me to "exclusively assign all Intellectual Property rights, including copyrights" to "any written, pictorial, and/or electronic commentary" I might make about Dr. Cirka's services, including on "web pages, blogs, and/or mass correspondence," to Dr. Cirka. It also stipulated that if Dr. Cirka were to sue me due to a breach of the agreement, the prevailing party in the litigation will pay the loser's legal fees.

This seemed fishy to me, so I asked for more information. I had a long conversation with Dr. Cirka's office manager, who insisted that the agreement was not intended to censor the truthful reviews of Dr. Cirka's patients. Rather, she said, it gave Dr. Cirka a tool to remove fraudulent reviews. She said they were especially concerned about non-patients (such as competitors, ex-spouses, or former employees) writing fake reviews to damage Dr. Cirka's business.

She didn't have a good answer when I pointed out that the agreement's text didn't say anything about fraudulent reviews. She also couldn't explain how the agreement could bind non-patients, who by definition will not have signed it.

In fact, she seemed genuinely puzzled by my objections and gave the impression that I was the first person to raise these concerns. But she wouldn't budge on letting me see Dr. Cirka without signing, and she refused to give me a copy of the agreement so I could seek legal advice. Needless to say, I said "no thanks" and am now in the market for a different dentist.

In a written statement, Dr. Cirka acknowledged that the text of the agreement was provided by Medical Justice, and repeated his staff's line that the agreement is focused on fraudulent reviews written by competitors and disgruntled employees. He expressed concern that HIPAA would prevent him from responding properly to negative reviews. And he seemed as stumped as his assistant when I asked him to explain how the agreement could bind people who never signed it. His refusal to talk on the phone made it hard to judge if he really didn't understand this point, or was just pretending not to.

Empty threats?

We can't find any evidence that Medical Justice-style agreements have ever actually been used to censor online reviews. Dr. Cirka told Ars that he has never attempted to remove a fraudulent review using the copyright assignment policy. And Yelp told us that they "have never elected to remove a review in response this type of takedown request." The experts we talked to said they've gotten similar statements from other review sites.

That's probably because the agreement isn't likely to hold up in court. Ars talked to Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at Princeton's Center for Information Technology who founded the Chilling Effects clearinghouse for copyright takedown notices. She said a medical professional seeking to use the copyright assignment to censor a review would have at least two serious legal problems.

First, courts are unlikely to find the agreement to be a valid transfer of copyright. Blanket, prospective copyright assignments can be valid, but only in certain circumstances. For example, employees can assign any works created on the job to their employer. But online reviews don't fit into any of the usual categories of "works made for hire," and any doctor who claims her patients write reviews on her behalf is likely to be laughed out of court. Second, even if the assignment is valid, courts are likely to find that review sites are entitled to publish them under copyright's fair use doctrine.

Yelp shares Seltzer's assessment, telling Ars that "there are any number of reasons to believe the agreements don't hold water as a legal matter." Yelp spokeswoman Stephanie Ichinose signaled a readiness to fight these agreements, which she says "put the needs of doctors ahead of a patient community that has surprisingly few places to turn for helpful information about the medical profession."

"We are happy to support a patient's right to free speech," Ichinose said.

Seltzer told Ars that a dentist who tried to remove the review of someone who hadn't signed the agreement would face particularly severe problems in court. Under the "notice and takedown" procedure spelled out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the person seeking to have material removed must certify, under penalty of perjury, that he holds the relevant copyrights. But if the author of a review never signed an agreement, then a doctor's claims to hold the copyrights would be a blatant lie, and he would face penalties under the DMCA.

"Completely unethical"

The growing use of censorious copyright assignments recently caught the attention of law professors Jason Schultz and Eric Goldman, who created a site called Doctored Reviews to educate doctors and patients about the phenomenon.

When Ars asked Schultz about medical professionals who ask their patients to sign these agreements, he was scathing. "It's completely unethical for doctors to force their patients to sign away their rights in order to get medical care," he said. He pointed out that patients seeking treatment can be particularly vulnerable to coercion. Patients might be in acute pain or facing a life-threatening illness. Such patients are in no position to haggle over the minutia of copyright law.

And it gets worse. The "mutual privacy agreements" promise not to exploit a loophole in HIPAA that allows doctors to sell patient information for marketing purposes. But Schultz said that loophole was closed several years ago. Which means that recent versions of the Medical Justice agreement (including the one I was asked to sign) are lying to patients when they promise more protections than are offered under federal law. The Medical Justice website still claims that patients are "granted additional privacy protections" under the law, but doesn't elaborate or back up this claim.

Schultz had even harsher words for Medical Justice. The organization repeatedly refused to talk to Ars Technica, and Schultz speculates that this is because they "skewered themselves" in previous statements to the press. And he says that the organization's story keeps changing as they've received more and more bad press. Early versions of the MJ agreement flatly prohibited patients from making public statements about the services they have received. Later, he said, they realized that these explicitly censorious provisions looked bad and removed them. But they reserved the right to block patient reviews using the copyright provisions. Now they're refusing to talk to the press at all, but their clients are claiming, implausibly, that they're focused on censoring non-patients.

"There's this question about whether Medical Justice is deceiving doctors," Schultz said, by selling them a product that won't work as advertised. Not only are review sites unlikely to comply with a takedown request, but attempting to take down reviews could expose doctors themselves to legal liability for abuse of copyright law and possibly for violating anti-SLAPP laws.

"Doctors are busy," Schultz said. "Someone hands them a form and says it will solve their problems" with negative reviews. "They're not lawyers." They might have decided to adopt the form without fully understanding the consequences.

The ham-handed response taken by Medical Justice and its clients may also reflect the fact that doctors and dentists are finding themselves suddenly disoriented in a new, more competitive marketplace. "The Internet is the great equalizer." Schultz told Ars. "Other people have had to deal with harsh reviews for a very long time. And finally, an elite profession is also having to deal with it." It's easy to sympathize with the "emotional trauma" of being unfairly criticized on the Internet, he said. But doctors shouldn't be immune from the kind of public scrutiny that most other professions now face.

Positive responses to negative feedback

So how should doctors respond when unfair criticism of their work appears online? Although federal privacy laws make it difficult for doctors to address individual patient complaints in a public forum, Schultz says nothing in federal law prevents doctors from talking generally about their practices and procedures. And Doctored Reviews notes that many patient complaints focus on non-confidential subjects such as "parking, wait times, and staff attitudes." Medical offices can respond to this type of complaint in the same way that any other business would.

Second, Schultz said, medical professionals can do more to engage with patients who have complaints. Most review sites allow businesses to send private messages to complaining customers. Doctors, or members of their staff, can use this mechanism to contact patients and provide additional information or explore ways to address the patient's concerns. In some circumstances, a disgruntled patient may be persuaded to update the review.

Third, Schultz emphasized that consumers expect even the best business to have a few negative reviews. "When you have some negative reviews, it gives credibility to the site and to the positive reviews because it seems more balanced," he said. So doctors with dozens of positive reviews shouldn't sweat the occasional 1-star rating.

Most importantly, there's a great deal of room for innovation by review sites. Patients value fair and accurate reviews as much as doctors do. So review sites that do a better job of weeding out fraudulent reviews will be more trusted by consumers in the long run. For example, Schultz suggested that review sites could require patients to submit reviews under their real names, and actively investigate allegations of sock-puppetry. As the competition among review sites grows more intense, sites with higher-quality reviews will prosper.

Of course, there are some prejudicial statements that these kinds of private solutions can't fix. For example, Schultz acknowledged that they are unlikely to be an adequate response if someone writes a review accusing a doctor of child molestation. But, he said, the law already offers robust tools for dealing with those kinds of extreme scenarios.

A doctor facing a false accusation of that type can and should sue the accuser for defamation. A plaintiff can subpoena review sites and ISPs to unmask an anonymous poster's identity. Indeed, under those circumstances, a copyright assignment statement is likely to be wholly inadequate, not only because it's unlikely to get the review removed, but also because the doctor will want to actually win a defamation lawsuit in order to clear his name.

Conclusion

Dr. Cirka seems to have been engaging online in exactly the ways Schultz recommends. He's posted responses to the handful of low-ranking Yelp reviews of his services, encouraging patients to get in touch with him to resolve their concerns. And his website features extensive information about his services, policies, and staff.

Yelp says it has never taken down a negative review in response to a Medical Justice-style copyright assignment. So it's likely that Dr. Cirka's glowing 4-and-a-half star average rating on Yelp fairly represents his dental work. We can't rule out the possibility that his "privacy" agreement has caused self-censorship of dissatisfied patients, but we suspect he'd have an excellent Yelp ranking regardless.

Which means the person most harmed by Dr. Cirka's decision to adopt the Medical Justice copyright assignment is probably Dr. Cirka himself. I may be the first prospective patient he lost as a result of this agreement, but if the Medical Justice agreement continues generating bad press for him, I'm not likely to be the last.

We think the lessons here are pretty obvious. If you're a patient whose doctor or dentist asks you to sign a "mutual privacy agreement," find yourself a different doctor or dentist. And if you're a medical professional, please respect your patients' right to freedom of speech. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it's likely to be better for your bottom line in the long run.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ree-speech.ars





Britain's Battle Over Privacy Law Descends to Farce
Keith Weir

An increasingly farcical game of cat-and-mouse between Britain's media and celebrities, Twitter users and the judiciary prompted Prime Minister David Cameron to promise a review of the country's privacy laws on Monday.

For weeks British media have been fighting the growing use by the rich and famous of "super injunctions" -- English court orders which prevent publication of unwelcome stories and prohibit journalists from even reporting that a ban is in place.

A newspaper in Scotland, which has its own legal system, ran a photograph on Sunday of a top player with an English soccer club over an article calling it "unsustainable" to bar reporters from naming the man identified in hundreds of Twitter postings as among celebrities using court orders to stifle sex scandals.

Rival fans taunted the player during a weekend match, adding to the furor over his efforts to maintain his anonymity.

Cameron, in a television interview, said: "It is rather unsustainable, this situation, where newspapers can't print something that everyone else is clearly talking about.

"The danger is that (court) judgments are effectively writing a sort of new law, which is what parliament is meant to do," he added, laughing off a question about whether he knew which soccer star was at the center of the newspaper row.

Scotland's Herald newspaper on Sunday published a picture of the soccer player, with a black band across his eyes and the word "censored" in capital letters. Scotland has its own legal system, making it harder to pursue the newspaper.

For weeks, English newspapers have responded to bans taken out by a number of celebrities, including other sports stars and actors, by making apparently bland references to them in gossip columns in the knowledge that many readers, having read up on the Internet, will spot the barbed comments behind the stories.

Lawyers representing the player have also asked U.S.-based Twitter via a London court for information about the users of the messaging website who published details of his private life.

Attempts by British celebrities to keep aspects of their private lives secret using strict court orders have been undermined by Twitter users posting allegations on the website.

Politicians have also used parliamentary privilege to disclose that former Royal Bank of Scotland head Fred Goodwin had won a gagging order. Goodwin came under fire for taking a generous pension despite his bank needing a state rescue.

Critics, including a tabloid media that thrives on celebrity gossip and scandal, say courts are being used to stifle freedom of speech and shield the famous from scrutiny. Those in favor of court orders say they protect people's right to privacy.

One of Britain's top judges recommended on Friday that media organisations should be told in advance about applications for gagging orders against them.

Scotland's most senior politician Alex Salmond said on Monday that the Herald should not be pursued by the English courts for publishing the player's photo.

"It looks to me like the English law, English injunctions look increasingly impractical in the modern world," said Salmond, a nationalist who heads Scotland's devolved government.

"It seems that everyone is out of step except the English courts," he told BBC radio.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...74M30Y20110523





China's 'Great Firewall' Creator Pelted with Shoes

Twitter user claims to have mounted egg and shoe attack on Fang Binxing at Wuhan University
Tania Branigan

A growing number of China’s estimated 477 million internet users are frustrated by curbs on their online activities. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

Chinese police are seeking a man who said he threw eggs and shoes at the architect of China's "great firewall", the world's most sophisticated and extensive online censorship system.

The claims were cheered by many internet users, in a reflection of growing anger among them about increasingly stringent controls. Admirers showered the anonymous young man with flippant promises of everything from Nike trainers to replace his lost footwear, to iPads, sex and jobs.

The office of Fang Binxing – who is known as the father of the great firewall – denied the attack had happened, while Wuhan University in Hubei province, where the incident reportedly happened, told the Guardian it was not aware of it. No photographs have surfaced of the event.

But Associated Press said police were sent to the university to investigate a shoe-throwing incident targeting Fang on Thursday, citing an officer at the Luojiashan public security bureau.

A Hong Kong activist had posted a message noting that Fang, the president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, was giving a speech at Wuhan and urging students to "prepare".

The Twitter user who claimed to have pelted him, who posts under the pseudonym @hanunyi, wrote: "The egg missed the target. The first shoe hit the target. The second shoe was blocked by a man and a woman.

"I didn't think this little thing would get such a big response," he added several hours later, following the online outpouring of glee.

@hanunyi, who said he was not a student at the university, was still tweeting on Friday. Responding to one comment warning he might be detained, he noted: "So far, not yet. Just woke up. Thank you."

Other students appeared to have planned similar protests, but backed out. One Twitter user wrote: "We noticed that our professor and our graduate supervisor were there and immediately lost courage."

While many of China's estimated 477 million internet users appear largely indifferent to the firewall because they use almost solely domestic sites and services, a growing number of young people are frustrated by curbs that not only prevent them accessing foreign news and social media sites, but increasingly make it hard or even impossible to use apparently uncontroversial sites, such as the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

Earlier this year Fang closed a microblog within days of opening it after thousands of Chinese internet users left comments, almost all of them deriding him. They attacked him as "a running dog for the government" and "the enemy of netizens".

He later told the Global Times newspaper: "I regard the dirty abuse as a sacrifice for my country."

Fang told the state-run newspaper that internet controls were not tough enough, a comment that presaged increasingly tight controls. He complained in particular of the use of virtual private networks to evade censorship technology – saying he had six VPNs at home so that he could test the strength of the firewall.

Shortly afterwards, addressing graduating students in a speech that focused on patriotism and western hegemony, he warned: "Political chaos in north Africa and the Middle East has enticed the great expectations of anti-China forces ... More than ever, democracy activists abroad are taking advantage of the internet. They are inciting netizens to take up planned, step-by-step action and bring about political chaos in China, accomplishing their goal through the work of others.

"Now the question is, Who is it that wants turmoil in China after all? Who is it that wants China to sink into the mire of chaos?"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011...r-pelted-shoes





Suit Claims Cisco Helped China Pursue Falun Gong
John Markoff

Cisco, the maker of Internet routing gear, customized its technology to help China track members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to a federal lawsuit filed last week by members of the movement.

The lawsuit, which relies on internal sales materials, also said that Cisco had tried to market its equipment to the Chinese government by using inflammatory language that stemmed from the Maoist Cultural Revolution.

The suit was filed Thursday in Federal District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose by the Human Rights Law Foundation on behalf of members of Falun Gong. It contends that Cisco helped design the controversial “Golden Shield” firewall that is used to censor the Internet and track opponents of the Chinese government. The lawsuit names several Cisco executives, including the chairman and chief executive, John T. Chambers.

It seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages and to enjoin Cisco from unlawful activity.

When evidence of the company’s activities in China became public in 2008 through a leaked PowerPoint presentation, Cisco disassociated itself from the marketing materials, stating that they were the work of a low-level employee. On Friday the company said in a statement that there was “no basis” for the allegations and that it intended to “vigorously” defend itself.

“Cisco does not operate networks in China or elsewhere, nor does Cisco customize our products in any way that would facilitate censorship or repression,” the company stated.

The suit claims that additional Cisco marketing presentations prove that it promoted its technology as being capable of taking aim at dissident groups. In one marketing slide, the goals of the Golden Shield are described as to “douzheng evil Falun Gong cult and other hostile elements.” Douzheng is a Chinese term used to describe the persecution of undesirable groups. It was widely used by the Communist Party in the Cultural Revolution.

The 52-page lawsuit describes the Golden Shield as a system intended to censor Internet traffic flowing into China, and to identify and monitor opponents of the Chinese government. The suit states that Falun Gong members who used the Internet were tracked by the Golden Shield and then apprehended.

Members of the group who were arrested were tortured, and one member was beaten to death, the lawsuit says. Another plaintiff who was arrested has since vanished, the suit claims, and is presumed to be dead.

The lawsuit challenges Cisco’s assertion that it did not help design the firewall system or customize technology that it sold to meet government surveillance and censorship requirements.

Terri Marsh, a lawyer for the Human Rights Law Foundation in Washington, said the group had compiled detailed information about Cisco’s role in the design of Chinese information centers that host Falun Gong database applications connected to network surveillance and tracking systems. This information will be disclosed in court during the discovery phase of the trial, Ms. Marsh said.

The lawsuit states that other documents lay out design suggestions to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security on how to pursue dissidents effectively.

The lawsuit is based on the Alien Torts Statute, a federal law that permits foreign nationals to bring lawsuits in United States federal court claiming violations of international law. They also have brought charges under the Torture Victim Protection Act and under California state law.

The suit names three Falun Gong members, Ivy He, of Canada; Liu Guifu, of New York State; and Charles Lee, an American citizen who was arrested when he went to China in 2003 and was held until 2006. It also is brought on behalf of eight unidentified Chinese citizens, who include those who were tortured and killed or are missing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/t...y/23cisco.html





Forever Young? In Some Ways, Yes
David Hajdu

BREAK out the guitar-shaped cake pans.

Today is Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday, an occasion that essayists, bloggers and magazine writers have been celebrating for weeks. Mr. Dylan surely deserves the attention, but he’s only one in a surprisingly large group of major pop-music artists born around the same time.

John Lennon would have turned 70 last October; Joan Baez had her 70th birthday in January; Paul Simon and George Clinton will reach 70 before the end of this year. Next year, the club of legendary pop septuagenarians will grow to include Paul McCartney, Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Brian Wilson and Lou Reed. Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia would have also been 70 in 2012.

Perhaps this wave of 70th birthdays is mere coincidence. There are, after all, lots of notable people of all ages. But I suspect that the explanation for this striking cluster of musical talent lies in a critical fact of biography: all those artists turned 14 around 1955 and 1956, when rock ’n’ roll was first erupting. Those 14th birthdays were the truly historic ones.

Fourteen is a formative age, especially for people growing up in social contexts framed by pop culture. You’re in the ninth grade, confronting the tyrannies of sex and adulthood, struggling to figure out what kind of adult you’d like to be, and you turn to the cultural products most important in your day as sources of cool — the capital of young life.

“Fourteen is a sort of magic age for the development of musical tastes,” says Daniel J. Levitin, a professor of psychology and the director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University. “Pubertal growth hormones make everything we’re experiencing, including music, seem very important. We’re just reaching a point in our cognitive development when we’re developing our own tastes. And musical tastes become a badge of identity.”

Biography seems to bear this out. When Robert Zimmerman (the future Bob Dylan) turned 14 as a freshman at Hibbing High School in Minnesota, Elvis Presley was releasing his early records, including “Mystery Train,” and Mr. Dylan discovered a way to channel his gestating creativity and ambition. “When I first heard Elvis’s voice I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody, and nobody was going to be my boss,” Mr. Dylan once said. “Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.”

Mr. McCartney, the son of a big-band musician, abandoned his first instrument, the trumpet, after hearing Presley. “It was Elvis who really got me hooked on beat music,” Mr. McCartney has been quoted as saying. “When I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ ” — which was released in 1956, when Mr. McCartney turned 14 — “I thought, this is it.”

The timeline of music history is dotted with such moments. A hundred years ago, the model for 20th-century music took form with Irving Berlin’s popular appropriation of the black music of the day, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” The song sold more than a million copies on the platform of its time, sheet music. The year was 1911, when three future innovators of vernacular, cross-racial music — Sidney Bechet, Jimmie Rodgers and Fletcher Henderson — all turned 14.

In 1929, when the singer Rudy Vallee mastered and exploited the emerging electronic technologies of the microphone and the national radio broadcast to become a progenitor of an intimate, naturalistic style of singing derided by adults as “crooning,” both Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra turned 14.

When the Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, the 14-year-olds (or soon to be) who were around to experience pop music’s new superstars included Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Gene Simmons and Billy Joel.

I can’t help wondering what a 14-year-old with Mr. Dylan’s gifts and hungers would have done if he had been born three or four years earlier and had hit his teens when pop music was in its pre-rock lull, anesthetized by the over-sugared tunes of Teresa Brewer and Vic Damone. Back then, the drive-ins raged with cool pulp-movie delinquents, like Marlon Brando in “The Wild One.” Would Mr. Dylan, a movie nut in childhood, have gone into screen acting to channel his rebellious spirit?

Every age makes its own kind of genius. For hints of what the cultural giants of the future will be doing in their own time, we’d be well served to look in the ninth-grade lockers of today. Perhaps one day we’ll witness the transmutation of social networking into an as-yet-unimaginable kind of art — 140-character sonnets or mash-ups of media we haven’t heard or seen yet. Whatever we’ll be celebrating as the legacy of the 70-year-olds of 2067, it will surely belong to the 14-year-olds of 2011.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/opinion/24hajdu.html





Gil Scott-Heron, Poet And Musician, Has Died
Daoud Tyler-Ameen

Gil Scott-Heron died Friday afternoon in New York, his book publisher reported. He was 62. The influential poet and musician is often credited with being one of the progenitors of hip-hop, and is best known for the spoken-word piece "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."

Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. He spent his early years in Jackson, Tenn., attended high school in The Bronx, and spent time at Pennsylvania's Lincoln University before settling in Manhattan. His recording career began in 1970 with the album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, which featured the first version of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." The track has since been referenced and parodied extensively in pop culture.

Scott-Heron continued to record through the 1970s and early '80s, before taking a lengthy hiatus. He briefly returned to the studio for 1994's Spirits. That album featured the track "Message to the Messengers," in which Scott-Heron cautions the hip-hop generation that arose in his absence to use its newfound power responsibly. He has been cited as a key influence by many in the hip-hop community — such as rapper-producer Kanye West, who closed his platinum-selling 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with a track built around a sample of Scott-Heron's voice.

Scott-Heron struggled publicly with substance abuse in the 2000s, and spent the early part of the decade in and out of jail on drug possession charges. He began performing again after his release in 2007, and in 2010 released a new album, I'm New Here, to widespread critical acclaim.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2...ician-has-died





Miro 4 Hopes to Fill Android's iTunes Void
Seth Rosenblatt

The open-source audio and video jukebox Miro debuts a new version today that wants to be iTunes for Android. Miro 4 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, adds simple and effective desktop-to-Android synchronization to the program, which also offers media file conversion, torrent management, podcast catching, and media discovery. The Android syncing features focus on music and videos and includes built-in app browsing and management via in-program access to the Google Android Marketplace and the Amazon.com Android Marketplace.

"We set the bar very high. We want to be the open iTunes," said Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, which publishes Miro and the Miro Video Converter, a separate program that also comes baked into the standard Miro. "Millions and millions of people use iTunes and they do because they accept the restrictions, like with Internet Explorer. We see ourselves as the new Firefox." He also added that Miro has "around two million" monthly users.

Except for the lack of over-the-air synchronization, the new Miro is basically the old Miro plus DoubleTwist. If you haven't checked out Miro in a while, since Miro 3's redesigned interface the feature-heavy program has gotten much easier to use. It heavily resembles iTunes, with a left nav for navigating between your audio, video, connected devices, Amazon MP3 store, and Android marketplaces. The new right nav links to recently watched videos, recently songs played, and recent downloads, while the center of the program is where your media discovery and playback happen.

Miro 4 both looks like iTunes and communicates quite smoothly with your iTunes library. Importing more than 10,000 tracks went quickly because Miro recognizes media libraries that are pre-existing on your computer. Also like iTunes and other media jukeboxes, Miro now lets you stream and share your files to other computers running Miro on the same Wi-Fi network. Basically, you use it to manage media libraries on more than one computer.

App browsing is straightforward. Click the link in the left nav for either Google's or Amazon's market and you'll be able to access full marketplace features from within Miro. The same goes for Amazon's MP3 store.

Miro 4 does not yet support Wi-Fi syncing for Android devices, although that feature is coming said Dave Glassco, President of the Participatory Culture Foundation. Also in the works is an iPad app for media streaming and playback.

Be warned that Miro's installation process not only opts you into the Bing toolbar, Bing search engine, and resetting Bing as your home page, but if you uncheck all three, Miro asks you if you're sure you want to harm their revenue stream. That's fairly aggressive for an open-source program, although this is unfortunately not new to Miro. It's not likely to change anytime soon, either.
http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20064507-12.html





A Library of Listening, Made by You
David Pogue

Want to know the real problem with the digital age? There’s not enough to listen to.

I mean, what is there, other than your iPod music, your phone, AM/FM radio, satellite radio, podcasts, Internet radio stations, Pandora, Rhapsody, Napster, Slacker, Live365 and maybe one or two hundred other sources?

I kid, of course. The thing is, though, they’re all compromises. The free ones don’t let you choose exactly what you want to hear or when; the ones that do cost money.

But that’s about to change. One phrase should tell you all you need to know about the latest development: free TiVo for radio.

That’s the promise of DAR.fm, a Web site that lists every single radio show on every one of 1,800 AM and FM stations across the country. (It stands for Digital Audio Recorder.)

You can search, sort, slice and dice those listings any way you want: by genre, by radio station, by search phrase. It’s all here: NPR, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck. Music shows. Talk shows. Religion, sports, technology. Politics by the pound.

You don’t know or care when your show will actually be aired, or on what station. You only know that you’ve requested it. Shortly thereafter, an e-mail message lets you know that your freshly baked show is ready for listening.

You get every episode, automatically. And why not? It’s not your hard drive they’re filling up. You get two gigabytes of free storage, enough for about 100 hours of recorded shows. If you fill in the application page at MP3Tunes.com, you get a free upgrade to 10 gigabytes. That’s 500 hours of radio, which is almost enough to cover your next layover at O’Hare.

And here’s the best part: you can listen absolutely anywhere. For starters, you can listen right there on the DAR.fm Web page. The page that lists your recordings wasn’t designed by, you know, Monet, but it gets the job done. You can pause, rewind and fast-forward through your recordings, and there are 30-second skip forward/skip backward buttons.

Actually, maybe this part is even better: Many radio stations transmit the names of the songs and bands they’re playing. DAR.fm captures that information and detects song breaks. In other words, if you record a day or so of a music station, you’ve suddenly got a tidy list of songs, identified (and sortable) by title or band. You can listen to individual songs, skip the turkeys and otherwise enjoy your totally free song collection. It’s crazy cool, like a hybrid of iTunes and satellite radio.

You can also listen to your recordings on an app phone, using a free app for that purpose. (The app for iPhone is called Airband; for Android, it’s MP3Tunes; for Windows Phone 7, Locker Player; for WebOS, MP3tunes.) Can you imagine having the last few weeks’ worth of every worthwhile radio show, right on your phone? Sure, subscribing to podcasts achieves a similar goal — but not every show is available as a podcast. And this way, you never have to sync your phone with your computer.

For best results, listen when your phone is in a Wi-Fi hot spot. Otherwise, streaming music will rip through your monthly data allowance like the winner of a hot-dog-eating contest.

Or use the trick described at dar.fm/faq.php. It tells you how to download your recordings, so you can listen to them later without an Internet connection. (Yes, you can even download individual songs that you captured. The record-company lawyers must love that part.)

Even more intriguingly, you can listen to your recordings on an actual, physical radio. You know, one of those tabletop things with speakers and knobs. These days, they come with wireless Internet connections — which is all DAR.fm needs to know.

The Wi-Fi radios from Grace Digital ($80 to $200) list DAR.fm right on the main menu. Selecting that source instantly presents your list of recorded radio shows.

But Grace radios aren’t your only option. The person who created DAR.fm also runs a company called MP3Tunes.com. It’s an online storage locker for your music files, so that you can play them from any computer or phone, anywhere you go.

(If this sounds familiar, it’s because Amazon introduced a nearly identical service last month, called Amazon Cloud Player. Google just opened a “cloud music locker” service, too. Needless to say, the headlines about this “new” kind of music service drives the MP3Tunes guy crazy; his site has been in operation for four years.)

Whenever you record a show at DAR.fm, it shows up automatically in your MP3Tunes.com music locker. And the contents of that locker are viewable, and playable, on 30 different Wi-Fi radio models from various manufacturers, and even the Roku set-top TV box.

The Logitech Squeezebox is one of them, and it’s representative of how you would get to your recorded radio shows. You set up by installing an MP3Tunes app and putting it on your main menu. Thereafter, you choose MP3Tunes; then, in the next menu, Playlists. Inside, you’ll find all your recorded shows. So — another couple of steps.

(The Squeezebox can also accommodate a battery, sold separately, so “All Things Considered” can follow you around the house as you do your springtime chores.)

So here’s the bottom line: DAR.fm is a joy to use, it’s simple enough to be idiotproof, and the sound quality is very good. And it’s absolutely free.

Where’s the catch?

First, it won’t always be free. The company intends to incorporate ads at some point — not audio ads, but text ads that appear in your app or the screen of your radio.

Second, you have to wonder about the legality of all this. The company says that it’s in the clear. It points to a 2008 case involving Cablevision, the cable company, which offered its subscribers a service that could record your favorite TV shows by remote control — like a TiVo, except that the recording machines were at Cablevision and not at your house. The judge ruled that this plan was O.K. because Cablevision wasn’t actually making copies of copyrighted material; it was creating separate recording for each customer who requested it.

That’s what DAR says it’s doing. If 8,000 people all record a certain episode of “Fresh Air,” then, by golly, it makes 8,000 copies of that audio file at its headquarters. Seems wasteful, but hey — that’s what the judge wants.

Third, there are a few minor features that might be nice to add. The main one is that you have to program your recordings on the Web — you can’t do itfrom your physical Wi-Fi radio. Similarly, if you’re listening to a live show on your Wi-Fi radio, there’s no Record button.

But those complaints sound like an application for the Nitpickers Society. DAR.fm is fantastic, useful, easy to use and free. It’s real TiVo for radio. It lets you time shift, of course, but also presents the entire universe of radio broadcasting in one tidy menu. No longer must you gripe about the creeping commercialism that shut down, say, your town’s NPR affiliate or ’70s reggae station. Suddenly there are 1,800 radio stations in your town — and they program their shows according to your schedule, not theirs.

You’ve complained about having nothing to listen to for the very last time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/t...h/26pogue.html





Bitcoin Miners Busted? Police Confuse Bitcoin Power Usage for Pot Farm

Bitcoin, one of the world's newest currencies, is an open source, peer-to-peer currency that does not exist in physical form. It's owned and traded by means of an anonymous P2P network, without any third-party intermediary like a payment processor, without any government issuing or tracking the virtual currency. While there is a limit of only 21 million bitcoins to be generated by the year 2140, bitcoin is "free" to generate and is created by "bitcoin miners."

I haven't played around with bitcoin, but Launch called bitcoin peer-to-peer currency "the most dangerous project we've ever seen," suggesting it could "topple governments, destabilize economies and create uncontrollable global bazaars for contraband."

According to Big Think, bitcoin will be a bank for Anonymous. "The hacktivists now have a virtual currency that's untraceable, unhackable, and completely Anonymous."

Wired UK tried to explain how bitcoin miners dedicate their CPU/GPU to generate the virtual currency. "It's generated by Bitcoin 'miners' over time by using CPUs and GPUs to solve a cryptographic problem -- hashing some data against a function. If your computer manages to generate a hash that's numerically lower than a defined value, then you shout it out to the rest of the network, and get to pocket the newly-minted Bitcoins, while also signing a series of transactions and making sure they're legitimate."
One of the issues, other than if governments will try to outlaw bitcoin, is the high amount of electricity needed to create a single bitcoin. It might cost more to generate a bitcoin than the actual value a bitcoin is currently traded at. High electricity bills can lead to marijuana busts. And it is this unusual power consumption needed that caught my attention since it appears as a bitcoin miner has been mistaken as a person running a marijuana growing operation.

Blogger Mike Esspe captured an IRC chat that supports the rumor floating around that at least one bitcoin miner has been arrested.

In regards to if being a miner will bring the cops to your doorstep, according to the Bitcoin Miner, the power consumption will be somewhat like the electric usage for "marijuana grow-op." An example was "The Canadian town of Mission, BC has a bylaw that allows the town's Public Safety Inspection Team to search people's homes for grow ops if they are using more than 93 kWh of electricity per day." There have allegedly been reports floating in IRC of two different cases of police showing up at a bitcoin miner's residence with a search warrant.

Will it become more common to confuse bitcoin miners with weed-growing operations? It is somewhat common for police to monitor unusually high power consumption if a person is a "suspect." For example, as NetworkWorld noted, Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation. If a stakeout does not uncover anything illegal or point to a "grow house," then utility consumption records can be sought. DEA Agent Anthony Marotta said high electricity usage does not always mean the residence is an indoor pot farm and has surprised federal agents. "We thought it was a major grow operation ... but this guy had some kind of business involving computers. I don't know how many computer servers we found in his home."

It is unclear at this point if more bitcoin miners will have police show up with a warrant on their doorstep after more false positives, mistaking the power consumption to create virtual P2P currency as electricity usage needed to grow weed.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/18335...for _pot_farm





Freebie Blackhole Exploit Kit Appears on File-Sharing Websites

Good news for cybercriminals: their costs are going down
John Leyden

A free version of the Blackhole exploit kit has appeared online in a development that radically reduces the entry-level costs of getting into cybercrime.

The Blackhole exploit kit, which up until now would cost around $1,500 for an annual licence, creates a handy way to plant malicious scripts on compromised websites. Surfers visiting legitimate sites can be redirected using these scripts to scareware portals on sites designed to exploit browser vulnerabilities in order to distribute banking Trojans, such as those created from the ZeuS toolkit.

The wider availability of Blackhole comes only days after the source code of ZeuS appeared online, collectively creating what one researcher described as an arms bazaar for cyber crooks.

"If the ZeuS leak was like giving a machine gun away for free, giving away exploit kits is like providing the ammo," said Aviv Raff, CTO at security tools firm Seculert.

Earlier versions of the Blackhole exploit kit are available at no charge through file-sharing websites, but omit features that are found in the latest versions of the tool. For example, the leaked copies leave out the features that allow crooks to redirect surfers arriving at a compromised domain to different sites, depending on the operating system they are running, Threatpost reports.

The Blackhole Exploit kit featured in the tainted ads served through ad-supported versions of Spotify last month and a separate drive-by download attack involving the US Postal Service website, among others.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05...t_kit_freebie/





Data Breach at Security Firm Linked to Attack on Lockheed
Christopher Drew and John Markoff

Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest military contractor, has battled disruptions in its computer networks this week that might be tied to a hacking attack on a vendor that supplies coded security tokens to millions of users, security officials said on Friday.

The SecurID electronic tokens, which are used to gain access to computer networks by corporate employees and government officials from outside their offices, are supplied by the RSA Security division of the EMC Corporation.

RSA acknowledged in March that it had sustained a data breach that could have compromised some of its security products. Executives in the military industry said Friday that Lockheed’s problems appeared to stem from that data breach and could be the first public signs of damage from it.

The March intrusion reverberated through the computer security community. The RSA technology is used by most Fortune 500 companies and federal agencies to provide an extra layer of security when employees use their networks from customer offices, hotels or their homes.

Many of RSA’s customers have taken extra measures since the intrusion was discovered, either by adding security measures, finding alternative solutions or simply shutting off remote access. Security experts said it was possible that companies other than Lockheed had faced attacks, whether they realized it or not.

“The issue is whether all of the security controls are compromised,” said James A. Lewis, a senior fellow and a specialist in computer security issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy group in Washington. “That’s the assumption people are making.”

Neither RSA, which is based in Bedford, Mass., nor Lockheed would discuss the problems on Friday.

Officials in the military industry, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the matter, said Lockheed had detected an intruder trying to break into its networks last Sunday. It shut down much of its remote access and has been providing new tokens and passwords to many workers, company employees said.

Lockheed makes fighter planes, spy satellites and other confidential equipment. It also sells cybersecurity services to military and intelligence agencies, and some experts said its failure to take greater precautions with its own systems could be embarrassing.

“We don’t know what they went after at Lockheed,” Mr. Lewis said, referring to the hackers behind the intrusion attempt. “One possibility is that it’s a state actor, but it could also be criminals who are trying to exploit the company’s customers.”

Industry officials said military contractors, who are bombarded daily by hacking attempts, typically do not keep classified data on computers that can be entered remotely. Federal authorities have said that China, Russia and other countries sponsor hackers trying to ferret out American military and corporate secrets.

Raytheon, another large military contractor, issued a statement on Friday saying that it took “immediate companywide actions” when the RSA breach was disclosed in March. “As a result of these actions,” the company said, “we prevented a widespread disruption of our network.”

General Dynamics said it had not had any problems related to the breach. Other giant military contractors, like Northrop Grumman and Boeing, declined to comment.

Jeffery Adams, a spokesman for Lockheed, said the company would not publicly discuss specific threats or its responses.

“However, to counter any threats, we regularly take actions to increase the security of our systems and to protect our employee, customer and program data,” he said in a statement. “We have policies and procedures in place to mitigate the cyberthreats to our business, and we remain confident in the integrity of our robust, multilayered information systems security.”

Security experts said companies in many industries had increased network monitoring or changed passwords and PINs for the tokens since the RSA breach.

But some of the specialists said that until more details were known, it remained possible that the attempted intrusion at Lockheed was not tied to the RSA breach.

The RSA tokens provide security beyond a user name or password by requiring users to append a unique number generated by the token each time they connect to their corporate or government networks.

Soon after the breach in March, RSA’s chairman, Art Coviello, said the company’s investigation had revealed that the intruder successfully stole digital information from the company that was related to RSA’s SecurID products.

He did not give precise details about the nature of the information but said it could potentially reduce the effectiveness of the system in the face of a “broader attack.” The company said then that there was no indication that the information had been used to attack its customers.

Some computer security specialists said at the time that the compromised information was a file of master keys — long numbers — that are a part of the RSA encryption system. If the intruder did gain those numbers, it would make it possible to fashion an attack based on independently generating the keys used by individual customers.

RSA officials have said that the intrusion was only partly successful.

Mr. Lewis, the security specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the intruders had been detected as they were trying to transfer data by security software provided by the NetWitness Corporation, a company that provides network monitoring software. In April, NetWitness was acquired by RSA’s parent company, EMC.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/business/28hack.html





Spammers Establish Their Own Fake URL-Shortening Services

For the first time ever, spammers are establishing their own their own fake URL-shortening services to perform URL redirection, according to Symantec.

This new spamming activity has contributed to this month’s increase in spam by 2.9 percentage points, a rise that was also expected following the Rustock botnet takedown in March.

Under this scheme, shortened links created on these fake URL-shortening sites are not included directly in spam messages. Instead, the spam emails contain shortened URLs created on legitimate URL-shortening sites.

These shortened URLs lead to a shortened-URL on the spammer’s fake URL-shortening Web site, which in turn redirects to the spammer’s own Web site.

To make things more interesting, these new domains were registered several months before they were used, potentially as a means to evade detection by legitimate URL-shortening services since the age of the domain may be used as an indicator of legitimacy making it more difficult for the genuine shortening services to identify potential abuse.

“With legitimate URL-shortening services attempting to tackle abuse more seriously, spammers seem to be experimenting with ways to establish their own services to better avoid disruption,” said MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst. “However, as long as new URL-shortening services are being created, we expect spammers to continue abusing them.”

Other report highlights:

Spam: In May 2011, the global ratio of spam in email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources increased by 2.9 percentage points since April 2011 to 75.8% (1 in 1.32 emails).

Viruses: The global ratio of email-borne viruses in email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources was one in 222.3 emails (0.450 percent) in May, a decrease of 0.143 percentage points since April.

Endpoint threats: The most frequently blocked malware targeting endpoint devices for the last month was the W32.Ramnit!html, a worm that spreads through removable drives and by infecting executable files.

Phishing: In May, phishing activity was 1 in 286.7 emails (0.349 percent), a decrease of 0.06 percentage points since April.

Web security: Analysis of Web security activity shows that approximately 3,142 Web sites each day were harboring malware and other potentially unwanted programs including spyware and adware, an increase of 30.4 percent since April 2011. 36.8 percent of malicious domains blocked were new in May, an increase of 3.8 percentage points since April. Additionally, 24.6 percent of all web-based malware blocked was new in May, an increase of 2.1 percentage points since last month.

Geographical trends:

• Russia became the most spammed in May with a spam rate of 82.2 percent.
• In the US 76.4 percent of email was spam and 75.3 percent in Canada and 75.4 percent in the UK.
• In The Netherlands, spam accounted for 77.5 percent of email traffic, in Germany 75.5 percent, 75.1 percent in Denmark and 73.9 percent in Australia.
• Spam levels in Hong Kong reached 75.2 percent and 74.0 percent in Singapore. Spam levels in Japan were 72.3 percent.
• In South Africa, spam accounted for 75.9 percent of email traffic and 74.8% in Brazil.
• The UK had the highest ratio of malicious emails in May, as one in 91.7 emails was blocked as malicious in May.
• In the US virus levels were 1 in 540.3 and 1 in 334.5 for Canada. In Germany, virus levels reached 1 in 435.9, 1 in 1,197 in Denmark and 1 in 330.1 for The Netherlands.
• In Australia, 1 in 513.5 emails were malicious and, 1 in 377.2 for Hong Kong, for Japan it was 1 in 1,164 compared with 1 in 706.7 for Singapore.
• In South Africa 1 in 178.7 emails contained malicious content and in Brazil it was 1 in 378.3.

The complete report is available here.
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=11071





Apple Plans Update to Address MacDefender Malware
Dennis Fisher

Apple is planning to release an update specifically designed to protect users against the MacDefender malware that has been circulating for the last couple of weeks. The update for Mac OS X will automatically find and remove the malware on an infected machine and also will warn users if another infection attempt is detected.

The planned update from Apple is a rare move by the company, whose users until quite recently haven't had to contend with much of a malware problem. The MacDefender scareware attack emerged in early May and is being used by attackers to trick users into downloading and installing a malicious application. Like other scareware attacks, MacDefender tells users that they have a piece of malware on their machine and they need to install MacDefender to help remedy the problem.

Of course, the download is malware itself and has the aim of stealing users' credit card information. Apple is telling concerned users that if they notice an infection attempt, they should try to close their browser or even force quit the application and then delete the installer.

"A recent phishing scam has targeted Mac users by redirecting them from legitimate websites to fake websites which tell them that their computer is infected with a virus. The user is then offered Mac Defender "anti-virus" software to solve the issue," Apple said in its advisory on the MacDefender issue. This 'anti-virus' software is malware (i.e. malicious software). Its ultimate goal is to get the user's credit card information which may be used for fraudulent purposes.

"In the coming days, Apple will deliver a Mac OS X software update that will automatically find and remove Mac Defender malware and its known variants. The update will also help protect users by providing an explicit warning if they download this malware."

The good news is that the MacDefender malware is not particularly difficult to uninstall and doesn't remain persistent on the machine after you attempt to delete, as some Windows-based malware will. Here are the steps that Apple recommends for users who have been infected by MacDefender:

• Move or close the Scan Window
• Go to the Utilities folder in the Applications folder and launch Activity Monitor
• Choose All Processes from the pop up menu in the upper right corner of the window
• Under the Process Name column, look for the name of the app and click to select it; common app names include: MacDefender, MacSecurity or MacProtector
• Click the Quit Process button in the upper left corner of the window and select Quit
• Quit Activity Monitor application
• Open the Applications folder
• Locate the app ex. MacDefender, MacSecurity, MacProtector or other name
• Drag to Trash, and empty Trash

Apple said that the MacDefender attack is exploiting machines running OS X 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6. The company did not specify when the update will be available, but said that it will be delivered through the Software Update mechanism or the Support Downloads Web site.

In addition to the emergence of MacDefender, May saw the release of a Mac crimeware kit that is designed to help attackers build attack tools specifically for OS X.
https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/a...malware-052511





Apple’s iOS 4 Hardware Encryption has Been Cracked
Matthew Humphries

Russian company ElcomSoft is claiming to have cracked the 256-bit hardware encryption Apple uses to protect the data on iOS 4 devices, and is offering software that allows anyone to do it.

ElcomSoft is well-known as a corporate security and IT audit company, working with law enforcement agencies, the military, and intelligence agencies to recover data and perform forensics on devices. Its latest work has managed to open up the data stored on any device running iOS 4 by circumventing the hardware encryption chip Apple uses.

Rather than relying on a hardware dump from such a device, which will be encrypted amd may be missing some of the important data a forensic investigation needs, ElcomSoft can now gain full access to what is stored on a gadget such as the iPhone 4. This includes historical information such as geolocation data, browsing history, call history, text messages and emails, usernames, and passwords. They can even recover data deleted by the user from the device.

Until now, anyone running an iOS 4 device has been safe in the knowledge their data was protected and the encryption too strong to be cracked in any usable timeframe. What ElcomSoft did was to create a toolkit that allows for the extraction of the encryption keys from such a device. With those keys it’s possible to decrypt an image taken from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Once that is done a forensic tool such as FTK or Guidance EnCase can be used to look at the data in great detail.

Gaining access to the stored data on the device does not take long due to the ElcomSoft tools taking full advantage of the GPU or multiple GPUs in a system. However, you need access to the device in order to decrypt the data, not just an encrypted image from a device. This is because ElcomSoft brute-force the passcode which has to be done on the device, and with something like an iPhone 4 that takes around 40 minutes to achieve.

ElcomSoft offer this iOS 4 forensic toolkit to security and law enforcement agencies, but anyone can purchase the software to extract the encrypted data on a device. The application is called the ElcomSoft Phone Password Breaker and costs around $320 for the Professional edition. The speed of decryption on a home PC depends on your setup with Password Breaker supporting up to 32 CPUs and 8 GPUs.
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/a...cked-20110525/





How to Intercept Skype Calls

Linguists bypass encryption and rebuild conversations base on speech patterns.
Darren Pauli

Researchers have discovered trick that allows encrypted VoIP calls like Skype to be deciphered without the need to crack encryption.

The method, dubbed "Phonotactic Reconstruction", exploited the Linear Predictive Filter, a system used by Voice over Internet Protocol platforms to transmit conversations by creating data sets from spoken English.

Data sets were used to rebuild Skype conversations because they resemble the fragments of spoken words, or phonemes, on which they were modelled.

Linguists were helped further because the scripts and file sizes of the data sets, even after encryption, matched phonemes. Rules of spoken language mean that phonemes have a strict placement within words, which helped linguists reconstruct conversations.
While the exploit meant the University of North Carolina linguists did not need to crack encryption –an expensive process of complex mathematics and onerous compute resources – it could produce high-quality reconstructed conversations.

“Our results show that the quality of the recovered transcripts is far better in many cases than one would expect,” the researchers wrote in a paper (pdf).

“While the generalised performance is not as strong as we would have liked … one would hope that such recovery would not be at all possible since VoIP audio is encrypted precisely to prevent such breaches of privacy.”

“It is our belief that with advances in computational linguistics, reconstructions of the type presented will only improve.”

While Linear Predictive Filtering weakens cryptography because encrypted data bears a statistical relationship to the source data, it is used by VoIP systems because it provides the best type of compression.

But while reconstruction is possible, the researchers said Skype cannot be considered safe. “No reconstruction, even a partial one, should be possible; indeed, any cryptographic system that leaked as much information as shown here would immediately be deemed insecure.
http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/25...ype-calls.aspx





Ads Implant False Memories
Jonah Lehrer

My episodic memory stinks. All my birthday parties are a blur of cake and presents. I’m notorious within my family for confusing the events of my own childhood with those of my siblings. I’m like the anti-Proust.

And yet, I have this one cinematic memory from high-school. I’m sitting at a Friday night football game (which, somewhat mysteriously, has come to resemble the Texas set of Friday Night Lights), watching the North Hollywood Huskies lose yet another game. I’m up in the last row of the bleachers with a bunch of friends, laughing, gossiping, dishing on AP tests. You know, the usual banter of freaks and geeks. But here is the crucial detail: In my autobiographical memory, we are all drinking from those slender glass bottles of Coca-Cola (the vintage kind), enjoying our swigs of sugary caffeine. Although I can’t remember much else about the night, I can vividly remember those sodas: the feel of the drink, the tang of the cola, the constant need to supress burps.

It’s an admittedly odd detail for an otherwise logo free scene, as if Coke had paid for product placement in my brain. What makes it even more puzzling is that I know it didn’t happen, that there is no way we could have been drinking soda from glass bottles. Why not? Because the school banned glass containers. Unless I was willing to brazenly break the rules – and I was way too nerdy for that – I would have almost certainly been guzzling Coke from a big white styrofoam container, purchased for a dollar from the concession stand. It’s a less romantic image, for sure.

So where did this sentimental scene starring soda come from? My guess is a Coca-Cola ad, one of those lavishly produced clips in which the entire town is at the big football game and everyone is clean cut, good looking and holding a tasty Coke product. (You can find these stirring clips on YouTube.) The soda maker has long focused on such ads, in which the marketing message is less about the virtues of the product (who cares if Coke tastes better than Pepsi?) and more about associating the drink with a set of intensely pleasurable memories.

A new study, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, helps explain both the success of this marketing strategy and my flawed nostalgia for Coke. It turns out that vivid commercials are incredibly good at tricking the hippocampus (a center of long-term memory in the brain) into believing that the scene we just watched on television actually happened. And it happened to us.

The experiment went like this: 100 undergraduates were introduced to a new popcorn product called “Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Fresh Microwave Popcorn.” (No such product exists, but that’s the point.) Then, the students were randomly assigned to various advertisement conditions. Some subjects viewed low-imagery text ads, which described the delicious taste of this new snack food. Others watched a high-imagery commercial, in which they watched all sorts of happy people enjoying this popcorn in their living room. After viewing the ads, the students were then assigned to one of two rooms. In one room, they were given an unrelated survey. In the other room, however, they were given a sample of this fictional new popcorn to taste. (A different Orville Redenbacher popcorn was actually used.)

One week later, all the subjects were quizzed about their memory of the product. Here’s where things get disturbing: While students who saw the low-imagery ad were extremely unlikely to report having tried the popcorn, those who watched the slick commercial were just as likely to have said they tried the popcorn as those who actually did. Furthermore, their ratings of the product were as favorable as those who sampled the salty, buttery treat. Most troubling, perhaps, is that these subjects were extremely confident in these made-up memories. The delusion felt true. They didn’t like the popcorn because they’d seen a good ad. They liked the popcorn because it was delicious.

The scientists refer to this as the “false experience effect,” since the ads are slyly weaving fictional experiences into our very real lives. “Viewing the vivid advertisement created a false memory of eating the popcorn, despite the fact that eating the non-existent product would have been impossible,” write Priyali Rajagopal and Nicole Montgomery, the lead authors on the paper. “As a result, consumers need to be vigilant while processing high-imagery advertisements.”

At first glance, this experimental observation seems incongruous. How could a stupid commercial trick me into believing that I loved a product I’d never actually tasted? Or that I drank Coke out of glass bottles?

The answer returns us to a troubling recent theory known as memory reconsolidation. In essence, reconsolidation is rooted in the fact that every time we recall a memory we also remake it, subtly tweaking the neuronal details. Although we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them, they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. What’s disturbing, of course, is that we can’t help but borrow many of our memories from elsewhere, so that the ad we watched on television becomes our own, part of that personal narrative we repeat and retell.

This idea, simple as it seems, requires us to completely re-imagine our assumptions about memory. It reveals memory as a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. The recall is altered in the absence of the original stimulus, becoming less about what we actually remember and more about what we’d like to remember. It’s the difference between a “Save” and the “Save As” function. Our memories are a “Save As”: They are files that get rewritten every time we remember them, which is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. And so that pretty picture of popcorn becomes a taste we definitely remember, and that alluring soda commercial becomes a scene from my own life. We steal our stories from everywhere. Marketers, it turns out, are just really good at giving us stories we want to steal.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...alse-memories/





That Famous Space Shuttle Photo: When is Sharing Stealing?
Bob Sullivan


Stefanie Gordon displays the image she shot from an airplane of Space Shuttle Endeavour's final launch.
Jonathan D. Woods

Short on sleep and worried about the recent loss of her job, Stefanie Gordon boarded a Delta flight from New York to Palm Beach at 6:30 a.m. on May 16. Still miffed after a late-night Yankees loss to the Red Sox, she took a photo out the window of her airplane seat with an iPhone, tweeted it to friends when she landed, then headed off to spend the day with her father.

By the time she was sitting in the passenger seat of his car, her iPhone was practically buzzing out of her lap, teeming with messages of congratulation and requests for interviews. Gordon's now-famous photo of the space shuttle Endeavour soaring through the clouds got her an overwhelming amount of attention -- her 15 minutes of fame, Internet style. It also landed her smack in the middle of an ethical and legal debate that may be as important as the future of the Internet itself.

Gordon's photo has been viewed nearly 1 million times, and shown by media TV, Web and print news outlets around the world. She was paid by precisely five news organizations.

In a world where social media users, bloggers and even some professional journalists are increasingly comfortable simply copying the work of others and republishing it, can intellectual property rights survive? Can original content survive? And what should the world do when an amateur photographer takes a newsworthy photo and shares it on a social network?

To be sure, Stefanie did not seek this fight, and doesn't feel too compelled to be its poster child, either.

"I never even thought about what could happen,” she said. “To me, it's just a picture. I tweeted and put my phone away. ... I had four hours of sleep and wasn't thinking. I was trying to spend time with my dad. I've never been a person who feels like I need to make money off of everything. I just put it out there for people to see."

Still, she is the latest in a long line of characters made larger-than-life by the Internet's virus-like network effects. The last victim -- or recipient, depending on your point of view -- of Internet fame borne of an accidentally famous photograph was Janis Krum. He landed, quite literally, in the middle of the digital rights debate in 2009, when a passenger aircraft made an unexpected landing in the Hudson River. He took exactly one picture with his iPhone, instantly tweeted it from the ferry he was on a few feet from the plane, and went to help passengers off the floating aircraft. He earned virtually nothing from his famous photo, which was copied and used by both commercial and private publications around the world. The confusion surrounding Gordon's photo felt very familiar to him.

"It's kind of crazy that after two years there is still nothing in place to deal with this issue,” Krum said. “It's still the wild, wild West right now.” In some ways, it seems more socially acceptable to take advantage of a naïve rights holder. “Organizations say, ‘Well, it’s a regular person we don't even have to compensate them.’ They do things they wouldn’t do with a professional photographer," Krum said.

One face of Internet culture dating back to the advent of Napster holds that everything electronic should be free, and there's no harm in copying digital content. It's second nature for people who use social networks to copy and paste photographs or other media, and there's probably no changing that. On the other hand, commercial outlets that sell a product using images and videos should feel compelled to pay for content they use. Gordon and Krum’s stories show that reality is far more complicated.

The law, however, is not. The mere act of taking a photograph means the photographer holds the copyright for that picture. Sharing it on a social media site does nothing to limit or reduce that fundamental right, according to digital rights expert Mary Luria.

"Unless (you) post the photo with a message that says, 'please copy this and pass it along,' the photographer holds the copyright," said Luria, a partner in Davis & Gilbert in New York.

Misuse of content isn't new, she points out -- famous photos have been copied without credit for 150 years -- but the Internet has made it easy and, in some circles, normal.

"The culture of the Internet is this concept of sharing everything. That things belong to us, not to a person," she said. "And they are surprised when someone says, 'You've taken this, it's mine."

Not everyone thinks that way. The Associated Press paid for a license to use Gordon's photo, and to send it to all its members. (Msnbc.com also paid Gordon for the right to use her photo on the website and on television.) Many other outlets asked for her permission to republish, which she granted without charging a fee. But there were plenty of other outlets that used her photo -- and Krum's before it -- without obtaining permission. Some even used it without giving credit.

When that happens, it's up to the rights holder -- the photographer -- to file a copyright claim and demand payment. That's a bit backward, Krum says.

“There's definitely an ethics issue here," Krum said. "You have to police them, because they won't do it themselves."

The legal questions begin immediately upon taking the photo. Professionals are well-schooled in controlling the distribution of images, but amateurs often aren't. Even if their legal rights remain, it's often incredibly hard to shove the cat back in the bag after a photo has been tweeted to the world and passed around. Carolyn Wright, who operates PhotoAttorney.com, says a few moments of "What if that happened to me?" reflection now can save a lot of heartache later.

Like Gordon, it's quite possible that someone could take a photo and not realize its inherent value right away, she said.

"Gordon immediately tweeted it, and that just lets the gate open these days. It'll spread like wildfire," she said. "If people can just take a moment and recognize that they have something of value… I tell people, 'If you happen to take a picture of Elvis at McDonald’s, think about what would be the value of that."

Amateurs probably wouldn’t consider this in the middle of such excitement, but it is possible to sell more valuable exclusive rights to a news outlet, or to find an agency to do the bidding for you. The days when Newsweek and Time magazine would fight over the rights to a photo with six-figure checks are dwindling, but there is still value in exploring value ahead of publication to social media.

Asserting rights after the fact is trickier, but still possible.

The process will sound familiar to anyone who's followed the complicated issues around music and movie piracy. A photo rights holder must send a cease-and-desist notice, then send a bill. A small cottage industry has evolved of lawyers who file rights claims for photographers, Luria said.

"You don't want to sue everyone who has the photo on their site. That would be very costly," she said. Payments are limited to the amount the violating site normally pays for similar photos, which could be a few dollars.

On the other hand, firms that appropriate an image and use it for purely commercial purposes -- say, an advertisement by an airline -- could face a large lawsuit.

Photographers who want to exert their rights will have a much easier time if they file paperwork with the U.S. Copyright Office. They have 90 days to do so, and the rights are retroactive to first publication. That means someone like Gordon could decide to pursue legal action for up to three months after her 15 minutes of fame subside.

"The law, it’s accommodating to the fact that you might not think to file with the copyright office in the middle of such an event," Luria said.

Photographers often protect their rights a second way: by placing watermarks on images they publish, often including their website or phone number. These watermarks can be easily removed, but doing so can land the remover in a heap of legal trouble. The photographer can sue under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for such a removal, and claim damages of up $25,000 per incident.

U.S. law does carve out exceptions for news publications under extremely newsworthy circumstances, what's often called "Fair Use." If a piece of digital media itself becomes news, U.S. outlets can publish it under the theory that it is protected First Amendment speech.

Fair Use is the subject of widespread debate, however, and its application is wildly subjective. Luria, for example, said that in situations where news publications have no alternative access to an important image in a breaking news situation, they would be protected by fair use.

But Wright said she didn't believe courts would see the rarity of an image as a "fair use" exception from copyright law.

Meanwhile, retaining copyright doesn't mean retaining all rights. A particularly vexing problem facing users of services like Twitpic involves the ever-changing fine print in the sites' terms of service agreements. Both Gordon and Krum used Twitpic to share their photos. Currently, Twitpics' terms of service informs users that the firm has the right to resell any images loaded by original rights holders onto its servers. In other words, Gordon has the right to sell her Space Shuttle picture, but TwitPic does now, too.

"They take a non-exclusive license when you upload the image," Wright said. "Just by using the outlet, you give them that right."

Danny Sullivan, a search engine and social media expert, says it's inevitable that amateur users will increasingly find themselves in possession of powerful, newsworthy photos. He thinks it’s up to the photo services to fix the current mess.

"I think the problem is that photo-sharing services don’t allow you to easily provide copyright information,” said Sullivan, who operates SearchEngineLand.com. “If somebody comes across a photo they think is newsworthy, there is nothing there which indicates you need to license the photo. Right now we're in this vacuum."

He thinks photo sharing services could offer users simple options like, "Would you be interested in selling images?" -- and could even act as agents for consumers.

They could also help solve a practical problem that Gordon faced. When an amateur is suddenly in the middle of a news swarm, they become nearly impossible to contact, as a flood of Tweets and e-mail act as a kind of denial of service attack. Gordon had to turn off some Twitter notifications after her follower ranks swelled from 1800 to 5,000 overnight. A photo sharing site could help funnel the requests, and provide reliable contact information for media outlets.

Of course, without social media and the viral effect, there wouldn't be any need for an ethical discussion. Gordon would have merely shown the photo to her father and a few friends, and it would have quickly faded into a curiosity. So Wright, of PhotoAttorney.com, doesn't offer hard-and-fast advice to suddenly famous shooters.

"It's damned if you do damned if you don't," she said. "If you don't share your work online, then no one knows to license it."

Krum may not have gotten rich off his Hudson landing picture, but he did turn it into a new career. He was a casual photographer working on tech start-ups when he snapped that picture, but today he’s a social media consultant.

“I was kind of pushed into this realm after the photo, and I kind of embraced it,” he said. “It’s a great conversation starter.”

Gordon realizes she probably missed out on the opportunity to earn some good cash with her photo, but she is remarkably positive about it.

"There's more good than bad here," she said. "Through Twitter, I was able to make some amazing connections." Connections that, she hopes, will soon lead her to a new job in events planning or sports marketing.

Red Tape Wrestling Tips

Gordon has one simple piece of advice for the next person who finds themselves in her spot: Get advice.

"If you know anybody who specializes in these kinds of things -- a journalist, a lawyer, a friend in PR -- if they have the one minute to do it, call them and ask for advice," she said. When you are in the middle of a media crush, it's nearly impossible to understand what's going on, and to make good decisions, she said.

Even after a photo has been published, it's not too late to file with the U.S. Copyright Office (you have 90 days -- see below).

After the photo has been published online, it's up to you to watch for infringers. Software can help. A free tool called TinEye looks for digital signatures of images -- a sort of alert service for pictures -- and will report if a picture is being used.
http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2...aring-stealing





Copyfight: EFF Co-Founder Enters e-G8 "Lion's Den," Rips Into Lions
Nate Anderson

"I just arrived at the Tuileries for the #eG8, already a hoot. Unfounded smugness to rival the World Economic Forum."

John Perry Barlow—EFF co-founder, Grateful Dead lyricist, and, improbably, now a rancher—arrived in Paris and began tweeting up a storm from the e-G8 summit gathered there this week to discuss the future of the Internet.

After listening to French President Nicolas Sarkozy call repeatedly for Internet regulation and more copyright protection, Barlow added, "You'd have thought from Sarkozy's talk he was addressing a convocation of Anonymous and the Pirate Party. He wasn't."

And then it was his turn to take the stage: "I am about to enter the Lion's Den at #eG8."

Weary giants of flesh and steel

Barlow was a late addition to a panel on intellectual property; his name wasn't even included on the schedule. But he accepted the invitation even as colleagues begged him not to go and activists like Cory Doctorow turned down invitations to the event, which was seen as an industry/government cabal bent on regulating the 'Net for its own ends.

Barlow made the most of his opportunity. On stage with the French culture minister and the heads of 20th Century Fox, Universal Music France, Bertelsmann, and a French publisher, he waited though 30 minutes of opening statements filled with comments like:

• "We do not believe that you can remove 'content' from the Internet, and if you do this, what is there left? Basically, the Internet then is a set of empty pieces and boxes.” (Bertelsmann)
• "When someone comes to you and says I need a few hundred million dollars to make a movie about 10 foot tall blue people on another planet, that's not an easy decision to make. But if you do make that decision and it does turn out to be Avatar, then you'd like to be compensated." (20th Century Fox; Avatar set the world box office record)
• "In France, there are still people who maintain their criticism of this [three strikes authority HADOPI], who view it as a repressive body, whereas in actual fact it creates momentum from a pedagogical standpoint." (Minster of Culture)

When Barlow had a chance to speak, he expressed his own surprise at being on the panel, “because I don't think I'm from the same planet, actually.” He then proceeded to trash the foundational assumptions of everyone who had just spoken.

• I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call "intellectual property." I don't regard my expression as a form of property. Property is something that can be taken from me. If I don't have it, somebody else does.

• Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the Internet, which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost.

In Barlow's view, the e-G8 has been about "imposing the standards of some business practices and institutional power centers that come from another era on the future, whether they are actually productive of new ideas or not."

He added that he was more interested in talking about "incentivizing creativity by people who create things, and not large institutions who prey on them and have for years."

Part of the audience, at least, loved it—to Barlow's obvious surprise. "This is a different audience than I thought it was," he said after some applause and scattered cheering.

This quickly awoke the somnambulant panel, especially when Barlow concluded by conflating copyright issues with free speech and attacked efforts to "own" that speech.

e-G8

"Speech is free but movies cost money"

Jim Gianopulos of 20th Century Fox shot back that "no one's going to argue against free speech," if "free speech" means that someone takes a video camera and makes a movie on any subject he or she wants. But when "speech" is defined as sharing copyrighted works?

"Speech has to be free but movies cost money," he said, adding that he hears plenty about the need for new business models but doesn't see any actual alternative business models that generate the cash to fund big-budget films.

Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterand took Barlow to task for his dramatic statements. "I do not share this apocalyptic vision of some dictatorship that will be creeping back through the Internet into our lives to control our thoughts and the way in which we function," he said. Some controls on the Internet are eminently reasonable—we need "economic solutions to economic problems."

The head of Universal Music France talked about just how much money was necessary to nurture new talent. DIdn't Barlow understand economics?

"If you're spending $5 billion on new artists, we're not getting our money's worth," Barlow cracked, and he reframed his argument in economic terms of scarcity and abundance.

"Trying to optimize towards scarcity, as you are by all of your methods, is not going to be in the benefit of creation, I promise you," he said. "It's not IP enforcement that gets you guys properly paid." In his view, payment comes from building a product that people actually want to buy—and the movie industry's repeated record box office takes in recent years show that people have no problem coughing up the cash for something of value.

"I am not against being compensated for what you do," concluded Barlow.

Some of his comments were over the top—something certainly to be expected from the man who once wrote this. But seeing Barlow seated on a stage looking like a sleek spaceship, perched on a chair in front of a wall filled with corporate logos and delivering pleas for a new approach to creation based on an era of abundance certainly made for a compelling panel.

Culture Minister Mitterand opened the panel with a lengthy, placid speech about how the copyright debates had grown so "calm" recently, now that everyone had agreed on ground rules.

Barlow's biggest contribution to the e-G8 may have been the reminder that this illusion of calm is only possible in a setting where one screens out the dissenting voices—and that those voices are still raging outside.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...into-lions.ars





Sen. Ron Wyden Places a "Hold" On the PROTECT IP Act
Nate Anderson

The office of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) tells Ars that the just-passed-out-of-committee PROTECT IP Act (S. 968) isn't going anywhere once it hits the floor.

"Senator Wyden plans to hold the bill," said his office by e-mail. "We will have a longer statement shortly."

Wyden called last year's version of the Internet blacklist bill a "bunker-busting cluster bomb" when precision-guided munitions would be better suited to dealing with copyright and patent infringement on the Internet. He placed a hold on that bill, which kept it from coming to the floor.

Now, he's at it again after the PROTECT IP Act failed to incorporate enough of his desired changes.

A Senate hold is, according to the Senate, "An informal practice by which a Senator informs his or her floor leader that he or she does not wish a particular bill or other measure to reach the floor for consideration. The Majority Leader need not follow the Senator's wishes, but is on notice that the opposing Senator may filibuster any motion to proceed to consider the measure."

More controversial recently have been "secret" holds in which the name of the senator was withheld and legislation simply stopped; the Senate voted to end that practice earlier this year, though the rule won't apply until the next Congress.

Update: Wyden's office has just sent out his explanation for the hold:

“In December of last year I placed a hold on similar legislation, commonly called COICA, because I felt the costs of the legislation far outweighed the benefits. After careful analysis of the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, I am compelled to draw the same conclusion. I understand and agree with the goal of the legislation, to protect intellectual property and combat commerce in counterfeit goods, but I am not willing to muzzle speech and stifle innovation and economic growth to achieve this objective. At the expense of legitimate commerce, PIPA’s prescription takes an overreaching approach to policing the Internet when a more balanced and targeted approach would be more effective. The collateral damage of this approach is speech, innovation and the very integrity of the Internet.

"The Internet represents the shipping lane of the 21st century. It is increasingly in America’s economic interest to ensure that the Internet is a viable means for American innovation, commerce, and the advancement of our ideals that empower people all around the world. By ceding control of the Internet to corporations through a private right of action, and to government agencies that do not sufficiently understand and value the Internet, PIPA represents a threat to our economic future and to our international objectives. Until the many issues that I and others have raised with this legislation are addressed, I will object to a unanimous consent request to proceed to the legislation."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ect-ip-act.ars
















Until next week,

- js.



















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