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Old 26-03-14, 07:09 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 29th, '14

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"There is nothing that links the IP address location to the identity of the person actually downloading and viewing Plaintiff’s videos, and establishing whether that person lives in this district." – Judge Ursula Ungaro


"It's a bit like having somebody steal your property, you report it to the police, and after a lot a dilly-dallying, a senior police officer approaches you offering to give two-thirds of your property back to you, if you give them one third." – Karl S. Kruszelnicki






































March 29th, 2014




The Sweet Irony Of Popcorn Time
Matthew Panzarino

So the big fun story of last week was this streaming movie app called Popcorn Time. Essentially, it aggregated torrent links and packaged them with artwork and a nice interface that allows one-click streaming of movies.

Popcorn Time is incredibly illegal almost anywhere, but it’s also almost impossible to stop people from using it without ISP intervention. Even though the original version of the app has been killed off, the project has already been forked and replicated by a new group. Now that the concept is out there I doubt it will ever go away completely — whatever iteration may come.

The absolutely lovely irony here is that Popcorn Time is doing for distribution of pirated movies exactly what the movie industry needs to do for itself.

Torrents are confusing and a mess. My mom could not download a torrent app, find a torrent that was not a virus and download a movie on her own with no help. But she could definitely download Popcorn Time. As fast and available as torrents are, they’re still fragmented, dangerous and complicated. They require a modicum of technical familiarity and engender some risk every time you place your trust in an un-verified link.

Popcorn Time unifies them under one roof — in exactly the agnostic, friendly way that the movie industry in aggregate has been so unable to do for its own products.

In contrast, streaming movies with one click is a much more complicated and tortuous affair. Titles are split across a strata that include a variety of creators, distributors, technologies and pay gateways. There is no such thing as a one-price-plan that offers unfettered access to any movie you want to watch, and even if you want to rent an item you’re going to have to have at least 2-3 accounts on services from Apple, Netflix, Amazon or half a dozen others in order to guarantee the flick you want to see will be available when and if you want to see it.

The torrent landscape — the illegal download market — has its own crumbling architecture of groups and sites risen and fallen. But the pirates are out-innovating the studios — and apps like Popcorn Time prove that the movie industry is not being held back because of technology, it’s the lawyers.

Because the technology exists to make this happen easily. Services like Ultraviolet are proof of that. Many main-stream companies have even turned to torrents for use in delivering updates. If you’ve played World Of Warcraft in the past few years you’ve likely utilized torrents to get updates, whether you realize it or not.

The other major media business — music — was struck by a very similar bombshell with Napster. Never before had the main stream been able to one-click download a song or album as easily — even if they wanted to pay.

The point isn’t that Popcorn Time marks the first time that you can download movies illegally — but it is drop-dead simple. It democratizes movie piracy in the same way Napster did for music.

Also, as my colleague Ryan Lawler pointed out to me when we were chatting about this, broadband connections have gotten a lot faster since Napster made its debut. Downloading a movie can take as little as 15 minutes, about the time it took to download an album back then.

The music industry underwent a series of changes as a result of Napster. Albums broke into singles, digital surpassed disc and that has all culminated in the rise of the subscription over the pay-per-play model.

Then Apple came along and essentially formalized the Napster model — throwing the labels a lifeline in their distressed and desperate hour.

Content deals in the media business are made on 5-10-year cycles, and always have been. These included fractured elements like video on demand windows, theatrical release, streaming rights and broadcast rights — all of which are promised to separate entities with their own ‘middle man’ businesses. And each of those businesses have lawyers whose job it is to negotiate those deals in the most binding, most profitable way.

Look at how technology has changed life in the last 10 years. Thanks to smartphones and easily available high-speed wireless internet, it’s unrecognizable. So we’re still beholden to content deals made for — quite literally — a different culture.

I don’t even have anything with a disc drive in it besides game consoles — and I only buy discs when I know I might play them once or twice through and then sell them.

Last night I was watching Shark Tank — and two young co-founders presented them with a business that rented e-textbooks, called Packback Books. College students are able to rent textbooks by the day when they need to reference them, adding up to a couple hundred dollars in savings per semester. These guys had exactly the kind of product we talk about every day on TechCrunch. 4/5 of the sharks 100% did not get it, at all. Kevin O’Leary especially was insistent in talking about why the powerful incumbent textbook publishers would never let this happen — largely informed by his years of negotiation and frustration with those publishers.

Which only served to make it that much more evident that those same publishers are ripe for someone to undermine their way of doing business, in a way that could change the industry.

I haven’t done any due diligence on Packback and or Popcorn Time, and this is not an endorsement.

But it strikes me that this is exactly the kind of thing that will need to happen for the movie industry to come to its senses. There will be no major shakeup of the back-room deals (though powerful people like Apple’s Eddy Cue have been at it for years). Instead, someone will find a way to make those deals obsolete entirely.

I’m not a piracy advocate, and never will be. I have friends in the movie and media business who are technicians, craftsmen — not high rollers. Their salary, like it or not, is directly related to you paying for a movie. It’s not the paying — it’s the way you pay. It’s not the renting — it’s the way you rent. It’s not the profits — it’s the greed. Something has to give.

It may start somewhat innocuously, with a revenue share rental model — or perhaps Netflix’s backdoor content creator strategy will tip the scales.

Or maybe an app will make it so easy to pirate films that the aging carapace of a hundred years of the movie business will slough away for a new model.

But, sooner or later, it will happen.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/22/the...-popcorn-time/





Why Movie Streaming Sites So Fail to Satisfy
Farhad Manjoo

A team of web designers recently released an astonishingly innovative app for streaming movies online. The program, Popcorn Time, worked a bit like Netflix, except it had one unusual, killer feature. It was full of movies you’d want to watch.

When you loaded Popcorn Time, you were presented with a menu of recent Hollywood releases: “American Hustle,” “Gravity,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “12 Years A Slave” and hundreds of other acclaimed films were all right there, available for instant streaming at the click of a button.

If Popcorn Time sounds too good to be true, that’s because it was. The app was illegal — a well-designed, easy-to-use interface for the movie-pirating services that have long ruled the Internet’s underbelly. Shortly after the app went public, its creators faced a barrage of legal notices, and they pulled it down.

But like Napster in the late 1990s, Popcorn Time offered a glimpse of what seemed like the future, a model for how painless it should be to stream movies and TV shows online. The app also highlighted something we’ve all felt when settling in for a night with today’s popular streaming services, whether Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, or Google or Microsoft’s media stores: They just aren’t good enough.

“Netflix Instant Thinking About Adding Good Movie,” an Onion headline joked recently. It was funny because it was true — and it’s not getting better.

In the music business, Napster’s vision eventually became a reality. Today, with services like Spotify and Rdio, you can pay a monthly fee to listen to whatever you want, whenever you want. But in the movie and TV business, such a glorious future isn’t in the offing anytime soon.

According to industry experts, some of whom declined to be quoted on the record because of the sensitivities of the nexus of media deals involved, we aren’t anywhere close to getting a service that allows customers to pay a single monthly fee for access to a wide range of top-notch movies and TV shows.

Popcorn Time isn’t an achievable dream; it’s a cruel joke about a future we won’t realize any time soon

Instead of a single comprehensive service, the future of digital TV and movies is destined to be fragmented across several services, at least for the next few years. We’ll all face a complex decision tree when choosing what to watch, and we’ll have to settle for something less than ideal.

For those of us with even slightly selective preferences, we’ll have to pick between different rental and subscription services offering different catalogs of programs, none very extensive, at vastly different price points. This sort of hassle and inefficiency sounds antithetical to the ethos of the Internet, where it seems to be your right to get everything cheap and fast. But for now, the Internet has met its match: Hollywood.

“When I started in this business in the early 2000s, it was technology — the actual delivery of video in high-definition over the Internet — that was the impediment to creating these services,” said Blair Westlake, who until earlier this month was Microsoft’s executive in charge of media licensing. “Now the devices and broadband speed aren’t an issue. The problem is the business side.”

He added: “There is a little bit of never say never — as consumer tastes change, there is a path you can see this business changing, and maybe someday somebody will come along and say we’re going to create something like a Spotify for movies. But it won’t be over the next five years.”

The main reason you won’t see a comprehensive, all-you-can-eat movie plan soon is something called “windowing,” the entertainment industry term for the staggered way movies are released to various outlets.

Like salmon, Hollywood movies are governed by rigid life cycles. First, a movie is released in theaters. A few months later, it heads to second-run outlets like airlines and hotel pay-per-view, and later it goes to Blu-ray, DVD and digital services that allow you to purchase or rent films à la carte.

Then, about a year after a film’s theatrical release, trouble kicks in. That’s when a movie is made available to pay-TV channels like HBO, Starz and Epix. These premium periods are exclusive; when a movie gets to a pay channel, it often can’t be shown on any other streaming service. This usually means it gets pulled from à la carte rental services, too. Right now, HBO is showing “This Is 40,” “The Hobbit” and “Moonrise Kingdom,” among other titles. Because of the network’s exclusive hold over those titles, you can’t rent those films from any other digital service.

Windowing also explains why Netflix’s movies feel so old. It takes about five to seven years after a movie first hits theaters for all its pay-window restrictions to expire. Only then does it become available to all-you-can eat services like Netflix. These salmon aren’t spring chickens.

Why are movies released in this staggered way? And why can’t the system change to accommodate an all-you-can-eat plan? Money, of course.

HBO and other premium networks have agreed to pay billions of dollars for the exclusive run of major studio films. HBO has said that, despite the cultural cachet of its original programs, movies are its most popular content; consequently, it has purchased rights to about half of all the movies released by major studios in the United States until beyond 2020. At least in this decade, then, a monthly movie plan that offers all of the movies isn’t going to happen.

As Netflix has grown, it has begun to compete with premium channels for certain studio deals. This has led to speculation it’s aiming to snap up all such deals so it can one day create a truly great, comprehensive movie service.

But Netflix isn’t promising such a move. Last year, in a memo outlining its “long-term view” of its place in the future of media, the company said it “can’t compete on breadth of entertainment,” and instead described itself as a “focused passion brand.” Again, money is a hurdle. Snapping up rights to lots of movies will be expensive, pushing Netflix to raise its prices. It’s not clear if customers will tolerate that.

“People often ask us, ‘Why can’t you charge me $20 to give me everything I want?’ ” said Jonathan Friedland, Netflix’s chief spokesman. “The answer is, at $20 you still wouldn’t get everything you want — and we’d lose half our customers.”

This doesn’t even address the further complication of television shows, whose rights are governed by a completely different windowing regime from that of movies. Mr. Friedland noted that unlike movies, multiyear TV series could get more popular with age. This gives networks an incentive to gain long-term exclusive rights to popular shows, which is why Netflix and Amazon have been competing with HBO to create their own original series.

But exclusivity breeds fragmentation. The more companies we have creating exclusive content, the more different services you’re going to have to choose between or pay for.

“Just like there’s no one TV network that gives you everything, there’s not going to be one app that gives you everything, and we know that’s frustrating for the consumer,” Mr. Friedland said.

But there isn’t much Netflix can do to address that disappointment. If you want to get access to a lot of content — from top-flight TV dramas to new movies to sports — you’re going to have to pay for several services. You’ll choose between Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, basic cable, Hulu or Showtime. Or maybe you’ll just get all of them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/27/te...l-stay-so.html





Aereo: Yes, We’re a Rube Goldberg Device. And We’re Proud of it.
Brian Fung

Ahead of oral arguments scheduled for next month, streaming media service Aereo has filed an opening brief to the Supreme Court in response to TV broadcasters who've accused the company of copyright infringement.

Aereo argues that its product — which grabs live TV signals out of the air and streams them on the Internet to Aereo subscribers — is just a Web-enabled version of more traditional recording technology, like VCRs and DVR.

"Any consumer with an antenna is entitled to receive, watch and make a personal recording of that content," the firm wrote in its brief, filed late Wednesday.

Broadcasters are fearful that if Aereo's model takes off, it could rob them of revenues they might otherwise get from cable companies, who pay TV stations for the right to carry broadcast programming. Aereo doesn't pay those fees.

"We're hopeful the Supreme Court will reject the Rube Goldberg business model of Aereo," said Dennis Wharton, the top spokesperson for the National Association of Broadcasters, "which we believe is designed solely to evade copyright law."

Aereo's brief, however, embraces the Rube Goldberg label: Exploiting loopholes is the whole point, the company says.

"If [broadcasters] believe a technology that operates within existing laws to allow individual consumers to watch television shows [broadcasters] have offered for free is causing them economic harm, they are entitled to ask Congress to change those laws," the brief states. "But this Court should not rewrite the Copyright Act in an effort to protect petitioners from logical and lawful advances in technology."

Broadcasters say Aereo should be required to pay them for carrying their programming over the Internet — much like what cable companies do in exchange for delivering broadcast programming to people's TV sets. But Aereo founder and chief executive Chet Kanojia said the cable industry actually provides Aereo with a strong defense.

In 2008, a federal court ruled in Cartoon Network vs. CSC Holdings, known as the "Cablevision case, that using cloud-based DVRs, which store a copy of a broadcast on a server to be played back to viewers later, didn't amount to copyright infringement. Kanojia believes Aereo's technology does effectively the same thing.

"'Cablevision' has served as a crucial underpinning to the cloud computing and cloud storage industry," Kanojia said in a statement Wednesday. "A decision against Aereo would upend and cripple the entire cloud industry."

Earlier court decisions, such as a famous case in the 1980s known as the Betamax decision, effectively made it legal to record TV shows for later personal viewing.

Aereo and the broadcasters are scheduled to face off at the court on April 22.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...e-proud-of-it/





This Little-Known iOS Feature Will Change the Way We Connect
Christina Bonnington

A new iOS app called FireChat is blowing up in the App Store. But it’s not the app itself that’s causing such a stir, it’s the underlying networking technology it taps into.

The idea behind FireChat is simple. It’s a chatting app. After registering with a name — no email address or other personal identifiers required — you’re dropped into a fast-moving chatroom of “Everyone” using it in your country. The interesting aspect, however, is the “Nearby” option. Here, the app uses Apple’s Multipeer Connectivity framework, essentially a peer-to-peer feature that lets you share messages (and soon photos) with other app users nearby, regardless of whether you have an actual Wi-Fi or cellular connection.

You read that correctly. You’re able to send and receive messages even when you don’t have a data connection. FireChat accomplishes this magic by allowing each device to connect directly to others nearby using Bluetooth, peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, or traditional Wi-Fi networks. Because you’re connecting directly with other users, you don’t actually need to be connected over Wi-Fi or a cellular network.

Needless to say, this is a big deal. Engineer Mattt Thompson notes that Apple’s Multipeer Connectivity APIs “allow developers to completely reimagine how mobile apps are built, and to redefine what is possible.” The technology can be used for everything from “collaborative editing and file sharing, to multiplayer gaming and sensor aggregation.”

Apple gives a good high-level overview of how the Multipeer Connectivity Framework works on its developer site. Basically, your phone goes through separate discover and session phases. In the former, the app browses for other users nearby while simultaneously broadcasting to peers that it is available to connect to. This allows you to be invited into a “session” with multiple users all daisy-chained together. Once a session invitation is accepted, you can directly communicate with those other users independent of a cellular signal or Wi-Fi access. This creates what’s known as a wireless mesh network.

“Mesh networking is like this unicorn,” FireChat’s Christophe Daligault says. “We’ve been talking about it for 20 years. DARPA has put a lot of money into it. But it hasn’t really taken off in a big way anywhere.”

Mesh networks have been successfully implemented on the small scale, though. Sonos, for instance, creates a wireless mesh network with its audio products in the home — as long as one is connected to the internet via the Sonos Bridge, other devices can communicate with one another regardless of whether they are in range of the bridge. Miracast is also a small scale form of mesh networking.

But Apple’s implementation has the potential to make mesh networking useful on a grand scale. After all, a lot of people have iOS devices (over 700 million were sold by last October). And many are using the latest Multipeer Connectivity-supporting version of iOS. The company has essentially provided a necessarily massive platform where developers can harness the power of mesh networking.

FireChat has done a great job exploiting it already. The app has seen an astounding uptick in downloads over its first week in the App Store. It jumped to the number one spot in Social Networking in countries like Australia, Taiwan, and in Latin America, and is doing extremely well in a number of other markets too.

Indeed, the ability to connect without technically being connected has obvious benefits. If you’re out in the woods camping and need help, you could broadcast your needs in the hope someone picks it up. At a conference or music festival, when communication lines are normally completely clogged, you could share photos, plans, and thoughts with friends around you. Similarly, during a natural disaster, you could help locate loved ones and people in need, even with non-operational cellular towers.

Those in countries limiting its users’ access to the Internet or social media could also spread their message without fear of recourse. There is no way to tie an individual to their device other than with his or her username, which you can change at will. Messages also get deleted as soon as you close the app: anonymous, and ephemeral, Daligault says. The only hitch is, in Nearby mode, you don’t have any choice over who receives your messages — they go out to anyone within range.

This type of networking technology could disrupt other industries, too, diminishing the need for cloud services or storage (why upload to Dropbox when you can drop it directly)? And with easy access to peer-to-peer connections, file sharing (legal or illegal) becomes a snap. An untraceable snap (assuming bandwidth holds up).

In a time when the idea of any sort of digital privacy increasingly seems laughable, this type of networking promises true privacy and anonymity. On top of that, it’s a way of communicating that cannot be centrally controlled or shut down, Daligault says. And that is truly exciting.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2014/...-connectivity/





Tor Usage in Turkey Surges During Twitter Ban
Andrea Peterson

Since Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan implemented a ban on Twitter late last week, Tor usage in the country has surged -- with connections nearly doubling from around 25,000 direct connects in the country to over 40,000, according the the anonymous browsing tool's internal metrics.

At first the Twitter ban was relatively easy to circumvent and quickly backfired as Twitter exploded with activity in the country. Because most ISPs were implementing the ban by Domain Name System redirection, users could simply change their DNS server to rely on a public server outside the country who wasn't engaging in the same misdirection. But on Saturday, researchers saw a shift in the way the block was implemented. Instead of DNS redirection, Twitter now appears to be blocked at the IP level.

But there are still a few ways to circumvent the ban, including using a Virtual Private Network to forge an encrypted tunnel outside of Turkey, using SMS (the method tweeted about by Twitter's policy account near the beginning of blocking efforts), and Tor. Because the anonymous browsing tool reroutes users' traffic through onion nodes throughout the world, it helps users bypass local censorship.

While there is a bit of a learning curve to Tor, it's clearly gaining traction in Turkey since the ban began:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...g-twitter-ban/





Turkish Court Upholds Appeal Against Twitter Blockage: Media

A Turkish court upheld an appeal on Wednesday to end a blockage of Twitter which has provoked public outrage, local media said, though it was not immediately clear whether that meant the bar would be removed.

Turkey's telecoms authority (TIB) blocked access to Twitter on Friday as Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan battles a corruption scandal which has seen a stream of anonymous postings purportedly revealing government wrongdoing appear on the social media platform in recent weeks.

The blockage triggered local and international criticism days ahead of critical elections.

Turkey's bar association described the move as an "arbitrary decision" that was against the law and launched an appeal at the Ankara administrative court. Its earlier attempt to challenge the blockage failed when a court in Istanbul said there was no legal ruling for it to overturn.

Friday's blockage came hours after Erdogan vowed on the campaign trail to get rid of Twitter. He said late on Tuesday that the network "was threatening national security" and that it had refused to cooperate with the Turkish authorities.

Erdogan has cast the audio postings as part of a plot contrived by his political enemies to unseat him ahead of the nationwide local elections on Sunday, which are widely being seen as a referendum on his 11-year rule.

Reuters has not been able to verify the authenticity of the recordings.

Telecoms regulators have said their blockage was based on four court orders and was imposed after complaints from citizens that Twitter was violating privacy.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/0...A2K0CB20140326





Whispers, Secrets and Lies? Anonymity Apps Rise
AP

At a time when Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are pushing people to put forward their most polished, put-together selves, a new class of mobile applications aims for a bit more honesty.

Among the latest is Secret, created by two former Google engineers who were looking for a way to let people deliver genuine feedback to co-workers. With the app, friends and friends of friends can share their deepest and darkest thoughts, along with gossip, criticism and even plans to propose marriage, under a cloak of near-anonymity.

"This idea that you have to craft this perfect image online," says Secret's 30-year-old co-founder Chrys Bader-Wechseler. "That's stressful. We want to remove that stress." Secret joins a handful of apps such as Confide, Whisper and Yik Yak that have become popular -- and in some cases, notorious -- in recent months, by offering users a way to communicate while cloaking their identities.

What happens when people are free to say what they want without a name and profile photo attached? It's an experiment in human nature that harkens back to the early days of the Web, when faceless masses with made-up nicknames ruled chat rooms and online message boards.

In the past decade, anonymity has been fading. As Facebook soared to dominate online social networks, the trend shifted toward profiles, real names and the melding of online and offline identities. But as people's online social circles grew from friends to parents, grandparents, in-laws, colleagues and bosses, many became increasingly reluctant to share as openly as they once did.

"People go on Facebook and say they just got engaged. But what you don't see is `I am going to propose today,' " says Secret co-founder and CEO David Byttow, 32.

Launched in 2012, Whisper is especially popular with teenagers and 20-somethings, with the bulk of its users under 24. Yik Yak, released late last year, made headlines recently when a California high school went into lockdown after someone used the app to post an anonymous bomb threat.

Although anonymity apps are being criticized as platforms for bullying, supports say they can be tools for preventing mischief. They also have a cathartic value for some users.

"My baby boy passed away recently. I saw his picture today and cried. I cried because I love him and miss him. I'm a guy, so no one thinks to talk to me," read a recent post on Secret.

Another recent Secret message read: "Fact: It's downright scary to hire your first woman onto an all-male team." On Secret, users are told when a friend has posted a secret -- they just don't know which friend. Whisper, meanwhile does not tell users how, or if, they are connected to a person posting.

"I am a closeted gay guy and the sheer number of hot fraternity guys on campus is a special kind of hell," read a recent post on Whisper.

Whisper CEO Michael Heyward, 26, says the company's app does not allow people to "use anonymity to hurt anyone else." Users, for instance, can't put proper names into posts unless the names belong to public figures. So Justin Bieber is okay. Justin from Spanish class is not. Whisper also employs 120 human moderators to comb through posts in real time.

"There is no safer space," Heyward says of Whisper. The company announced a partnership with media site BuzzFeed on Monday, in which BuzzFeed writers will use content posted on Whisper as source material for articles. The deal, reported in the New York Times, does not have a financial component.

Secret, meanwhile, has been especially popular in Silicon Valley and its satellite technology communities outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. Startup gossip -- from personal attacks on company founders and venture capitalists to acquisition rumors that turned out to be false -- has been a mainstay of Secret in the less than two months since its launch.

Secret tries to add a layer of accountability to anonymous posts by showing users' secrets to their friends and allowing only friends, or friends of friends, to comment on each shared post. Bader-Wechseler is quick to point out that the app is not exactly anonymous. Anonymish, maybe.

To sign up, users can provide their mobile phone number, email address or both. When you post a secret, your phone and email contacts who are also on Secret will be able to see it. If they tap a heart icon indicating that they "love" your secret, then their friends will be able to see it too. You won't know which of your friends is on Secret.

Secret says it ensures security by encrypting posts and without uploading contact information to its servers. The app also offers a panic button of sorts, called "unlink my posts." When a user clicks it, any link between them and all previous secrets they have posted is removed.

Katy Nelson, an early user of the app who heard about it from a friend who works at Secret, says she finds herself commenting on posts more than sharing secrets herself. This is especially true "when I see secrets where people are being really vulnerable, asking for advice about a relationship, substance abuse," she says.

"The ease of honesty that anonymity gives you is really cool," says Nelson, who works for a nonprofit group in Washington DC. She acknowledges that such honesty would not be possible on Twitter or Facebook.

"The stakes on a public platform with your name attached are just higher," she says. "It's not safe to be brutally honest, or make yourself really vulnerable."

Online anonymity is often synonymous with bullying, harassment and nasty comments. That's why sites from YouTube to the magazine Popular Science and Huffington Post have moved away from anonymity in recent months. But Heyward and Byttow argue that the new apps are different, filling a need for honesty that's only possible when identity is stripped away.

"Even though we are sharing more online than ever before, I think we have become more guarded," Heyward says. "It's like people are living their digital lives in front of a window. No one is not going to show their best self ... Identity can feel sort of shackling, But if you remove that, it can lead to intimacy."

But Steve Jones, a professor who studies online culture and communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago, believes there's a "significant degree to which people want to be associated with their words," get comments, likes and acknowledgements for them. Anonymity apps, he says, could have a difficult time maintaining a business model because they are exposing themselves to a lot of liability.

"I don't want to dismiss the optimistic view that the makers of these apps have," he says. "But I don't have that much evidence yet that these apps are appealing for a better nature."
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...se-5345704.php





Top EU Court Backs Internet Bootlegging Ruling

Decision could raise costs for Internet service providers
Gabriele Steinhauser

The European Union's highest court said on Thursday that Internet service providers may have to block access to websites that infringe copyrights.

The ruling, which confirms an opinion last year from the European Court of Justice's advocate general, could raise costs for Internet service providers in the 28-country EU, but leaves leeway for national courts to decide on the best course of action to fight copyright violations.

The ECJ had been asked to give its interpretation of the bloc's copyrights law by Austria's highest court. That court is hearing a case between Austrian Internet provider UPC Telekabel Wien GmbH on the one side and two movie companies, Germany's Constantin Film Verleih GmbH and Austria's Wega-Filmproduktionsgesellschaft mbH, on the other.

The two movie companies wanted UPC to block access to kino.to, an site that allowed users to stream or download movies under their copyright.

UPC argued that it shouldn't be responsible for policing copyrights on a site that was completely separate from its own operations and where there was no court ruling establishing unlawful actions by its own customers. It said any blocking measures could easily be circumvented by users and would be excessively expensive.

The ECJ disagreed. The EU's copyrights law "does not require a specific relationship between the person infringing copyright and the intermediary against whom an injunction may be issued," it said. It also wasn't necessary for copyright holders to prove that the protected content was actually being accessed through the providers they were targeting.

The ECJ also said that injunctions against copyrights infringements from national courts can leave it to Internet providers to decide on the most effective way of preventing violations.

UPC said it took note of the ruling, adding that it believed decisions on blocking access to websites and other online content should be up to national courts and lawmakers. "We are content, however, that the European Court of Justice has now provided direction on the way such decisions should be taken in the future," UPC added.

—Frances Robinson contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_e...MDIwNzEyNDcyWj





Judge: IP-Address Is Not a Person and Can’t Identify a BitTorrent Pirate
Ernesto

An important ruling in Florida has made it more difficult for copyright holders to extract cash settlements from alleged BitTorrent pirates. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro dismissed a lawsuit filed by Malibu Media, arguing that the IP-address evidence can't identify the person who actually downloaded the pirated file.

Over the past several years hundreds of thousands of alleged BitTorrent pirates have been sued by so-called ‘copyright trolls’ in the United States.

The rightsholders bringing these cases generally rely on an IP address as evidence. They then ask the courts to grant a subpoena, forcing Internet providers to hand over the personal details of the associated account holder.

The problem, however, is that the person listed as the account holder is often not the person who downloaded the infringing material. Although not many judges address this crucial issue early on, there are exceptions, such as the one raised by Florida District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro.

Judge Ungaro was presented with a case brought by Malibu Media, who accused IP-address “174.61.81.171″ of sharing one of their films using BitTorrent without their permission. The Judge, however, was reluctant to issue a subpoena, and asked the company to explain how they could identify the actual infringer.

Responding to this order to show cause, Malibu Media gave an overview of their data gathering techniques. Among other things they explained that geo-location software was used to pinpoint the right location, and how they made sure that it was a residential address, and not a public hotspot.

Judge Ungaro welcomed the additional details, but saw nothing that actually proves that the account holder is the person who downloaded the file.

“Plaintiff has shown that the geolocation software can provide a location for an infringing IP address; however, Plaintiff has not shown how this geolocation software can establish the identity of the Defendant,” Ungaro wrote in an order last week.

“There is nothing that links the IP address location to the identity of the person actually downloading and viewing Plaintiff’s videos, and establishing whether that person lives in this district,” she adds.

Even if Malibu Media can accurately show that the copyright infringer used the Internet connection of the account holder connected to IP-address 174.61.81.171, they still can’t prove who shared the file.

“Even if this IP address is located within a residence, the geolocation software cannot identify who has access to that residence’s computer and who would actually be using it to infringe Plaintiff’s copyright,” Judge Ungaro explains.

As a result, the court decided to dismiss the case for improper venue. The ruling is crucial as it’s another unique order confirming that an IP address alone is not enough to launch a copyright infringement lawsuit.

Copyright Troll watcher SJD points out that the same Judge has also issued orders to show cause in two other Malibu Media cases, which are also likely to be closed.

While not all judges may come to the same conclusion, the order definitely limits the options for copyright holders in the Southern District of Florida. Together with several similar rulings on the insufficiency of IP-address evidence, accused downloaders have yet more ammunition to fight back.
http://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-not-person-140324/





A Report Card on the Nation’s 4-Year-Old Broadband Plan — from the Man Who Wrote it
Brian Fung

Blair Levin once served the Federal Communications Commission as chief of staff to Reed Hundt. In 2009, Levin returned to the FCC to help draft the government's road map for enhancing nationwide broadband access. On Friday, the National Broadband Plan turned four years old. Here's how we're doing, according to the plan's former executive director.

Brian Fung: Let's do a diagnostic here, four years out. What's your report card on American broadband?

Blair Levin: I'd start the diagnostic with two core ideas. One is my favorite line from the plan — "This plan is in beta and always will be." Lots of things have changed, and I think the important thing is to understand where you want to go and then course-correct as you go.

The second was, rather than judge the United States the way most people do by international rankings — which are very problematic because they both cherry pick data and are backwards-looking — what we've tried to focus on are, 'What are the things that lead to leadership down the road?' and there really are four.

One is, are you driving fiber deeper? Are you using spectrum more effectively? Are you getting everybody on? And are you using the platforms to deliver public goods more effectively? It's mixed on all of them. But one of the surprising things is that if you'd asked me two years ago on number one, I would've said "No, we're not, and that's very troubling." But now I think we are.

What changed for you?

Google Fiber, primarily. Google, AT&T, C-Spire, Century Link, Brighthouse Cable — there's a lot of activity. We're not out of the woods yet, but if you look at it from the perspective of 2009, there really weren't any major communities for which there was any plan to get a 1 Gbps connection. Now, I think that at least by 2015, there will be a number of American communities that are significant that have the best networks in the world. That's actually progress. Google Fiber came out of the discussion we had with Google about the plan. It was kind of the planning activity that helped spark this thing.

On number three, adoption, I don't think we're doing as well. But to the extent we're doing better, it's because of Comcast Internet Essentials, also a program that came out of the plan. I think the government is not doing what it should be doing in getting everybody on.

If you had to write the next draft of the National Broadband Plan, would would it be about?

The next plan is about open data. Using data to deliver services. How do government processes all transform to the IP platform.

Let me turn back to Comcast briefly. Some critics say that the cable industry's consolidation generally, and Comcast's vertical integration in particular, could potentially threaten the Internet. What's your take on that?

For a lot of different reasons and I hope you'll forgive me I've decided not to talk publicly about what I think about the merger. I may do it in a few months, but right now I'm actually conflicted.

Okay, so let me ask about this, then: The whole debate about interconnection and paid peering. Is that something you considered—

—We actually didn't get into that in the plan. We stayed away from it, and the reasons we did that is really two fold: Our understanding was that that was something the commission was going to do before the plan was released. The plan was required by an act of Congress in February of 2009. I got hired in June. Julius Genachowski came on board in July, and the first thing he wanted to do was net neutrality. So we actually didn't deal with it at all.

Is that something that you wish you'd tackled, in hindsight?

No, and there are two reasons for that. One is that if we'd done that we would have done nothing else. As a practical matter, if we had told people we were going to be involved in that decision-making, I would've been called into every ex parte meeting. But the real thing is, I don't think we would've added much value. That was a mature policy debate that goes back a long way. And frankly, anything — I can't think of anything we could've said, even if I'd had 100 percent foresight that would've added value to that debate.

Continuing along that line, is there anything you wish you'd dealt with that you didn't?

We really wanted to deal with data. That is to say, privacy and security. Because data is really the fuel that drives all this. There's a tremendous amount of value there. You wrote a really interesting piece about Colombia, in which you noted that they're giving people a locker in the cloud. And collecting people's education and medical data. That's a great idea. I wish we'd come up with that.

I just saw earlier this week that the city of Los Angeles is suing Time Warner Cable. Why is it that cities are throwing themselves at companies like Google for fiber and the relationship with incumbents is so bad?

There's a relationship between how Google Fiber has woken up cities to how they need to control their own bandwidth destiny. Google Fiber has raised all kinds of questions about the relationship between cities and their broadband.

About 40 years ago, the deal was between the cities and cable, which is you get a monopoly for multi-channel video, but you gotta do certain public-interest things. Now the world is very different. The incumbents argue correctly that they face all kinds of competition in various markets they didn't face before, and that therefore they shouldn't be required to do certain things that in the past they've been required to do. They make a good point.

On the other hand, the communities say, "Wait a minute. You have all kinds of economic opportunities. And we depend on you for certain things." We need that infrastructure to deliver world-class education now. That was not true when those old social contracts were being done. So what you have is a situation where both sides that were subject to the earlier social contract are discontent. And Google comes in and says, "How about a new social contract? We don't want to make you pay money, but if you change your rules and regulations in a way that make it easier for us to deploy, we can deploy."

We might just be creating a new kind of cable monopoly if we give Google the ability to build out all this fiber and then Google becomes the next incumbent, though, right?

You know, at a time when Google has less than 1 percent of the market, it's amusing. What you've said, others have said. I don't dismiss it, I just say: Wouldn't that be a nice problem to have?

Whatever harm you think there might be from a non-net neutrality regime, which is that somebody gets bad service — or, whatever problem you think might be caused by a net neutrality regime, which is that people don't invest — those are the two principal debates. If everybody gets a 1 Gbps connection at an affordable price, those two problems are solved.

That's something I did not see when we were doing the plan, because we weren't focused on the issue. But my view now is that bandwidth abundance should really be the north star of FCC policy.

One last question on Comcast. We were talking about Internet Essentials. How much skin is it off of Comcast's back to offer this deal if it's already paid the cost of bypassing every home with cable?

That's a great question. Let me give you an answer that might surprise you: I hope, nothing. (Laughs)

Here's what I mean by that: The great thing about those Comcast Essentials and Google Fiber, to me, is that you have two companies who are situated to do something which creates a public good. But they're doing it in a way that also creates private value. The reason that's great for me is that, at the end of the day, charity is not sustainable.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...-who-wrote-it/





A New Facebook Lab Is Intent on Delivering Internet Access by Drone
Vindu Goel

Watch out, Google. Facebook is gunning for the title of World’s Coolest Place to Work. And its arsenal includes unmanned drones, lasers, satellites and virtual reality headsets.

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, announced on Thursday that the company was creating a new lab of up to 50 aeronautics experts and space scientists to figure out how to beam Internet access down from solar-powered drones and other “connectivity aircraft.”

To start the effort, Facebook is buying Ascenta, a small British company whose founders helped to create early versions of an unmanned solar-powered drone, the Zephyr, which flew for two weeks in July 2010 and broke a world record for time aloft.

“We want to think about new ways of connectivity that dramatically reduce the cost,” said Yael Maguire, engineering director for the new Facebook Connectivity Lab. “We want to explore whether there are ways from the sky to deliver the Internet access.”

It’s the second head-spinning announcement from Facebook this week and the third this year. On Tuesday, the company said it would spend at least $2 billion to buy Oculus VR, a Southern California start-up that is developing virtual reality headsets for playing games and other uses. Last month, it said it would buy WhatsApp, a messaging app that offers free texting around the world, for as much as $19 billion.

The lab is part of Mr. Zuckerberg’s ambitious Internet.org project to bring the Internet to the two-thirds of the world’s population without Internet access. Working with partners like Qualcomm and Nokia, Facebook is working on technology to compress Internet data, cut the cost of mobile phones and extend connections to people who can’t afford them or live in places that are too difficult to reach.

That last part of the problem — reaching the 10 percent of the world’s population that are in areas difficult to reach via traditional Internet solutions — is the initial focus of the connectivity lab, said Mr. Maguire.

Currently, satellites can deliver Internet to sparsely populated areas with spotty Internet connections, but the cost is very high, said Mr. Maguire.

Facebook wants to explore whether access could be delivered more cheaply both through both new types of satellites and unmanned aircraft.

The company envisions drones that could stay aloft for months, even years, at a time at an altitude of more than 12 miles from the surface of the earth — far above other planes and the ever-changing weather.

And to make the network more efficient, Mr. Maguire said, the planes would transmit data to each other using lasers before finally sending it back down to the earth.

“You need to create an Internet in the sky,” he said.

Mr. Maguire acknowledged that the whole thing sounds a bit pie in the sky. “We want to pursue a lot of directions — some risky that might not work,” he said.

But the end goal of connecting the world to the Internet is important to Facebook and the company is determined to get there, he said.

Matthew Eastwood, an analyst with IDC, a technology research firm, said Facebook was trying to serve a population that no telecommunications provider had ever made money from. “You have to give them credit for thinking the way the telcos don’t.”

Facebook’s recent initiatives immediately bring to mind similar pie-in-the-sky efforts by its much bigger Silicon Valley rival, Google.

Google has its own head-mounted computing project, called Glass. It’s trying to bring the Internet to the middle of nowhere through a network of high-flying balloons. The company has also developed self-driving cars, aggressively acquired robotics companies and has dabbled in an array of science projects that wouldn’t seem to relate to its core, ad-driven business.

“The more I think about it — drones and virtual reality and the excessive amount of money they’re paying for WhatsApp — they’re making these decisions in lieu of having a solid business practice in place,” said Brian Blau, an analyst at the research firm Gartner. “Sometimes I get the feeling that Facebook is really just trying to keep up with the Joneses.”

Or perhaps the Googles.

Mr. Maguire, star of a recruiting video posted on Internet.org, played down the idea. He said he was not even trying to poach anyone from Google as he looked to add about 40 more rocket scientists, plane designers and laser communications wizards to his team.

“You’re not going to find that expertise in the traditional Internet-based communities,” he said. “We think the talent comes from elsewhere.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/te...-by-drone.html





AT&T Complains it Needs More Money for Infrastructure Upgrades. No, it Doesn’t.
Brian Fung

AT&T is making a bold promise to consumers: If federal regulators drop their attempt to strengthen net neutrality, subscribers will actually pay less for Internet than they would otherwise.

The gist of AT&T's argument is that the rise of bandwidth-intensive applications, such as streaming video, puts undue burdens on the company. If content firms like Netflix paid their fair share, broadband providers could reduce the cost to consumers. The implied threat, however, is that your Internet bills could actually go up if content companies refuse to pay a toll. A standoff seems inevitable.

But there is a third option: ISPs could accelerate upgrades to the country's broadband infrastructure now. It's not like they can't afford it.

In AT&T's view, it's only fair for content companies to pay for the use of the network (and for infrastructure upgrades), just as customers pay for their own use of the network. While that's a matter for debate in itself, AT&T's more significant implication is that payments by Netflix and other content providers are a necessary condition for further upgrades.

If companies like Netflix pay up, ISPs will be free to plow more resources into building infrastructure and lowering bills for people like you and me, according to AT&T. Failing to do that, AT&T hints, will lead to the opposite: It will "force" AT&T to pass costs that content companies should otherwise pay onto the consumer.

"It’s simply not fair for [Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings] to demand that ISPs provide him with zero delivery costs – at the high quality he demands – for free," wrote Jim Cicconi, AT&T's top public policy official, in a blog post Friday. "Nor is it fair that other Internet users, who couldn’t care less about Netflix, be forced to subsidize the high costs and stresses its service places on all broadband networks."

This reasoning makes it sound like there are only two options: Content providers must capitulate, or the consumer gets it. Yet what's gone overlooked is that broadband companies have extremely deep pockets, while many of the most innovative Web firms operate on less substantial margins. A look at AT&T's financials show that it has substantial profits and could likely afford to invest more.

Here's what the entire broadband industry spent on capital expenditures every year going back to 1996, according to the industry group U.S. Telecom. These figures include investments by companies on property and equipment that would reasonably be defined as broadband infrastructure. In 2012, the most recent year for which there was data, the industry as a whole invested $68 billion in capital expenditures.

Meanwhile, in 2013, AT&T turned a profit of $49 billion. If the company had funneled every penny into capex (not that it should have), that $49 billion would cover 72 percent of the industry total in 2012. (For comparison, Verizon and Comcast reported profits of $42 billion and $30 billion in 2013, respectively.) Analysts say a company's first duty is to its shareholders, and that's true as far as 21st-century business principles go. Yet that commitment is a relatively recent one, and not the only standard for success (even if it is the most commonly accepted one).

It's not like there isn't already surging demand for greater bandwidth, either. Cities are practically throwing themselves at Google for access to high-speed fiber optic lines. In Austin, AT&T itself is increasing speeds for consumers amid rising competition from Google Fiber and other rivals. Cisco estimates that by 2017, U.S. Internet users will consume enough data to fit on 9 billion DVDs every month. It's not clear why AT&T needs evidence of even more demand before it will commit to building infrastructure at a faster clip — especially when it makes tens of billions a year in profits.

To say that regulators must decide between increasing costs on companies like Netflix or raising prices on consumers is to present a false choice. Rising demand is a fact of the industry. Meeting that demand is what network operators are built to do.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...-no-it-doesnt/





Movie Box Office Figures Largely Flat for 2013
Michael Cieply

Most of the lines in the many graphics included in the Motion Picture Association of America’s annual market report, released on Tuesday, were nearly flat — as usual.

The domestic box office for 2013 was up a barely perceptible 1 percent, to $10.9 billion from $10.8 billion, while the worldwide take rose 4 percent, to $35.9 billion from $34.7 billion. Domestic theater admissions were about the same, 1.34 billion for the year, down slightly from 1.36 billion in 2012.

As for gender trends, men bought half the movie tickets in the domestic marketplace — as was the case in the previous three years.

But one of the report’s few eye-catchers was a chart, on Page 22, of movie releases. Among larger studios, the total number of releases fell 11 percent in 2013, to just 84, down from 94 last year, and off 32 percent from a recent peak of 124 in 2006.

Subsidiaries, including divisions like Fox Searchlight and Focus Features, saw their releases fall 12 percent to 30 films, down from 34 in 2012, and off 63 percent from a peak of 82 in 2007.

Among companies that do not belong to the association — whose membership is limited to Walt Disney, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner — the number of film releases was down 1 percent, to 545 films in 2013, from 549 in 2012.

While that change was small, it marked a striking halt to what had been three years of rapid growth in the number of nonmajor studio films, which by 2012 had risen about 37 percent from 399 in 2009.

The M.P.A.A. is a Washington-based trade group that represents film studios and monitors worldwide trends in the movie business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/26/bu...-for-2013.html





Man Who Exposed Target Security Breach Is Focus of Sony Movie Deal (Exclusive)
Borys Kit

Richard Wenk is on board to write the screenplay adapted from the New York Times article "Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly."

Sony has picked up the rights to the New York Times article "Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly," which focused on cyber security blogger Brian Krebs. Krebs, with his site KrebsonSecurity.com, was the first person to expose the credit card breach at Target that shook the retail world in December.

Richard Wenk, the screenwriter who wrote Sony's high-testing big-screen version of The Equalizer, is on board to write what is being envisioned as a cyber-thriller inspired by the article and set in the high-stakes international criminal world of cyber-crime.

Escape Artists' Steve Tisch, Todd Black and Jason Blumenthal are producing as are Todd Hoffman and Richard Arlook. David Bloomfield will executive produce.

Nicole Perlroth's New York Times article told of Krebs, who has the appearance of a mild-mannered accountant but writes with a 12-gauge shotgun by his side, is an expert in the digital underground and is on a first-name basis with some of the biggest cyber-criminals in the world, many of whom are Russian.

Krebs started as a technology reporter for the Washington Post, where he developed his niche in the security domain. When his editors wanted him to broaden his beat, he refused and was let go. That's when he created his own blog, which hit it big when he was first to report about Target’s breach in security in December when millions of credit card numbers were stolen.

For his work, Krebs had his identity stolen half a dozen times and had fecal matter and heroin sent to his house. Once, a SWAT team was called to his home just as his mother was arriving in an incident of "swatting" committed by hackers.

The cybersecurity project reteams Wenk with Escape Artists, as both are behind Equalizer, which is due September 24. Wenk, repped by Gersh, the Arlook Group and Schreck Rose, is already working on a sequel.

Storied Media Group repped the New York Times.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...ecurity-689782





DOJ Pushes to Expand Hacking Abilities Against Cyber-Criminals
Jennifer Valentino-DeVries

The U.S. Department of Justice is pushing to make it easier for law enforcement to get warrants to hack into the computers of criminal suspects across the country.

The move, which would alter federal court rules governing search warrants, comes amid increases in cases related to computer crimes.

Investigators say they need more flexibility to get warrants to allow hacking in such cases, especially when multiple computers are involved or the government doesn’t know where the suspect’s computer is physically located.

The Justice Department effort is raising questions among some technology advocates, who say the government should focus on fixing the holes in computer software that allow such hacking instead of exploiting them. Privacy advocates also warn government spyware could end up on innocent people’s computers if remote attacks are authorized against equipment whose ownership isn’t clear.

The Justice Department declined to provide further comment beyond the original documents.

The government’s push for rule changes sheds light on law enforcement’s use of remote hacking techniques, which are being deployed more frequently but have been protected behind a veil of secrecy for years.

In documents submitted by the government to the judicial system’s rule-making body this year, the government discussed using software to find suspected child pornographers who visited a U.S. site and concealed their identity using a strong anonymization tool called Tor.

The government’s hacking tools—such as sending an email embedded with code that installs spying software — resemble those used by criminal hackers. The government doesn’t describe these methods as hacking, preferring instead to use terms like “remote access” and “network investigative techniques.”

Right now, investigators who want to search property, including computers, generally need to get a warrant from a judge in the district where the property is located, according to federal court rules.

In a computer investigation, that might not be possible, because criminals can hide behind anonymizing technologies. In cases involving botnets—groups of hijacked computers—investigators might also want to search many machines at once without getting that many warrants.

Some judges have already granted warrants in cases when authorities don’t know where the machine is. But at least one judge has denied an application in part because of the current rules. The department also wants warrants to be allowed for multiple computers at the same time, as well as for searches of many related storage, email and social media accounts at once, as long as those accounts are accessed by the computer being searched.

“Remote searches of computers are often essential to the successful investigation” of computer crimes, Acting Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman wrote in a letter to the judicial system’s rulemaking authority requesting the change in September. The government tries to obtain these “remote access warrants” mainly to “combat Internet anonymizing techniques,” the department said in a memo to the authority in March.

Some groups have raised questions about law enforcement’s use of hacking technologies, arguing that such tools mean the government is failing to help fix software problems exploited by criminals.

“It is crucial that we have a robust public debate about how the Fourth Amendment and federal law should limit the government’s use of malware and spyware within the U.S.,” said Nathan Wessler, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who focuses on technology issues.

A Texas judge who denied a warrant application last year cited privacy concerns associated with sending malware when the location of the computer wasn’t known. He pointed out that a suspect opening an email infected with spyware could be doing so on a public computer, creating risk of information being collected from innocent people.

A former computer crimes prosecutor serving on an advisory committee of the U.S. Judicial Conference, which is reviewing the request, said he was concerned that allowing the search of multiple computers under a single warrant would violate the Fourth Amendment’s protections against overly broad searches.

The proposed rule is set to be debated by the Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules in early April, after which it would be opened to public comment.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2014/03/27/...yber-criminals





Obama to Propose Ending NSA Bulk Collection of Phone Records: Official
Roberta Rampton

President Barack Obama plans to ask Congress to end the bulk collection and storage of phone records by the National Security Agency but allow the government to access the "metadata" when needed, a senior administration official said on Monday.

If Congress approves, the Obama administration would stop collecting the information, known as metadata, which lists millions of phone calls made in the United States. The practice triggered a national debate over privacy rights when the extent of the surveillance program was exposed last year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Instead, the government would have to get permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review data about the time and duration of telephone calls that it believes may be connected to terror attacks, according to the New York Times, which first reported the plan.

Obama, who on Monday met with world leaders in The Hague, has been grappling with a backlash to U.S. government surveillance programs since classified details about the extent of data-gathering were first leaked by Snowden.

Snowden is currently in Russia under temporary asylum.

Obama has defended use of the data to protect Americans from attacks. His plan seeks to hold on to "as many capabilities of the program as possible" while ending the government's role in controlling the database, the official said on background.

"The president considered those options and in the coming days, after concluding ongoing consultations with Congress, including the Intelligence and Judiciary committees, will put forward a sound approach to ensuring the government no longer collects or holds this data," the official said in a statement.

The Obama administration will renew the NSA's telephone metadata program until Congress passes new authorizing legislation, the official said.

Obama made some decisions about changes to the programs in January, including a ban on eavesdropping on the leaders of friendly or allied nations.

But he had charged his Attorney General Eric Holder and intelligence agencies to make additional proposals for the metadata program by March 28, when it comes up for reauthorization.

The New York Times said the administration will propose that telephone companies keep the data. But companies will not be required to hold on to the data any longer than they normally do, the Times said.

The administration had considered requiring the companies to hold on to data for longer than 18 months. The administration rejected that idea after concluding newer data is most important for investigations, the Times said.

Two top lawmakers on the House of Representatives' intelligence panel were slated on Tuesday to unveil a bipartisan measure on metadata use.

The bill, sponsored by Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger, would require the government to "serve a directive" on telecommunication companies for data, the Washington Post reported, citing congressional aides.

Their bill would not require court approval of the request before it was made, but the court could order the data expunged if it was later found not to be linked to suspicious activity, the Post reported.

The U.S. government began collecting metadata shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. A surveillance court allowed the data collection based on a legal provision known as Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

NSA officials and lawmakers such as Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have defended the bulk metadata program, saying it helps the government "connect the dots" between terrorist plotters overseas and co-conspirators inside the United States.

But others said it went too far. One U.S. district judge has criticized the program as an "arbitrary invasion" of privacy.

The Times said the administration's proposal would also include a provision clarifying whether Section 215 of the act could be used in the future to allow bulk phone data collection.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton and Peter Cooney; Editing by Eric Walsh and Ken Wills)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A2O03O20140325





Kim Dotcom Launches Party For New Zealand Elections

“This is a movement for the freedom of the Internet and technology”, says the fugitive millionaire – who cannot stand for election in New Zealand himself
Max Smolaks

Kim Dotcom, a German entrepreneur wanted by the US authorities for copyright infringement and money laundering in connection with his Megaupload venture, has launched a political party in New Zealand. However, not being a citizen, he cannot stand as one of the candidates.

The Internet Party manifesto says it will fight for for net neutrality, faster broadband and online privacy, and plans to contest the next parliamentary election in September.

Dotcom came to prominence as the founder of cloud-based file hosting service Megaupload which was shut down by New Zealand authorities in January 2012 on behalf of the US Department of Justice. He is accused of illegally earning around $175 million through the website, while causing losses of at least $500 million for the US entertainment industry.

The entrepreneur continues to battle extradition, with the next hearing scheduled for June. If convicted in the US, he faces a sentence of up to 20 years.

Earlier this week it emerged that one of Dotcom’s recent projects – a successor to Megaupload called Mega – is now valued at around £108 million thanks to a ‘reverse takeover’ deal.

The Dotcom Party

Dotcom has never made a secret of his political ambitions. After stepping down as the director of Mega in September 2013 and previewing an online music service called Baboom in January, the fugitive millionaire got to work on the Internet Party, all this while out on bail.

The Internet Party promises to enable faster, cheaper Internet connections, reform copyright legislation and boost the country’s technology sector through incentives and benefits. It also plans to introduce a New Zealand-sponsored digital currency similar to Bitcoin, and get out of the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence agreement, which the country shares with Australia, Canada, the UK and the US.

The Party needed 500 paying members to run for the elections, and achieved this goal in seven hours. Registration was open through the website and a specially developed mobile app. “The Internet Party app is symbolic of everything the Internet Party represents,” said Dotcom. “We’re a breath of fresh air, and a dose of common sense, for a tired and adversarial political system that has lost touch with modern New Zealand and the Internet generation.”

The launch didn’t go without issues – earlier this week Dotcom admitted he owned a signed first edition of Mein Kampf, and a local news publication accused him of sympathising with the Nazis.

The entrepreneur told the New Zealand Herald that the allegations were a ‘smear campaign’ organised by political rivals. He explained that he was a collector, and also owned items that had belonged to Churchill and Stalin.

To become a part of the next government, the Internet Party needs to win an electoral seat or secure five percent of the vote – which is not that unlikely, given Dotcom’s popularity in the country and his engagement with the public.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...ections-142543





UK Govt: DVD and CD Ripping Will Be Legalized This Summer
Ernesto

The UK Government has published a guide informing consumers about an upcoming revision of copyright law which will legalize CD and DVD copying for personal use. The changes go into effect in June, and will also broaden other forms of fair use, including parody and quotation rights.

To most consumers it is common sense that they can make a backup copy of media they own, but in the UK this is currently illegal.

After a public consultation and a thorough inspection of local copyright legislation, the UK Government decided to change current laws in favor of consumers. The changes have been in the planning stage for a few years, but this summer they will finally be implemented.

Starting in July people are free to make copies of DVDs, CDs and other types of media, as long as it’s for personal use. To inform the public about these upcoming changes the Government has just released a consumer guide, summing up citizens’ new rights.

“Copyright law is being changed to allow you to make personal copies of media you have bought, for private purposes such as format shifting or backup,” the UK’s Intellectual Property Office writes.

“The changes will mean that you will be able to copy a book or film you have purchased for one device onto another without infringing copyright.”

The UK Government stresses that the changes will make current copyright law more reasonable, and doesn’t expect that copyright holders will suffer any significant harm. However, the changes could generate extra revenue for the technology sector, increasing revenue by £31 million per year.

“This measure will benefit technology firms by removing barriers and costs and improving entry to technology markets which rely on consumers being able to make private copies,” the government concluded previously.

Under the updated law people will also be able to legally store copies of their music and movies in the cloud. However, the Government stresses that giving others access to your files will remain illegal.

“You will be permitted to make personal copies to any device that you own, or a personal online storage medium, such as a private cloud. However, it will be illegal to give other people access to the copies you have made, including, for example, by allowing a friend to access your personal cloud storage,” the guide explains.

Similarly, people are free to sell any media they purchase, but all backup copies will have to be destroyed.

The mismatch between the law and public opinion became apparent through a Government-commissioned survey, which found that 85% of consumers already thought that DVD and CD ripping was legal. More than one-third of all consumers admitted that they’d already made copies of media they purchased.

Besides the new private copying rights, the upcoming amendments will also broaden people’s fair use rights. For example, people no longer have to ask permission to quote from or parody the work of others, such as a news report or a book, as long as it’s “fair dealing” and the source is recognized.

From a public point of view the amendments are certainly a welcome change to the restrictive copyright laws that are in place currently, but they are also fashionably late. For those who are interested, a full overview of the upcoming changes is available here.
http://torrentfreak.com/uk-dvd-cd-ri...summer-140328/





Ex-MP3tunes Chief Hit with $41 Million Copyright Verdict
Nate Raymond

The former chief executive of defunct online music storage firm MP3tunes was ordered to pay an estimated $41 million on Wednesday after being found liable for infringing copyrights owned by record companies and music publishers once part of EMI Group Ltd.

Lawyers for Michael Robertson and the EMI companies are expected to take until next Tuesday to figure out exactly how much money was awarded in the complex, lengthy verdict issued by the federal jury in Manhattan.

But a lawyer for EMI, Luke Platzer, estimated after the verdict was read that it added up to roughly $41 million. The verdict included $7.5 million in punitive damages.

The verdict came a week after the same jury found Robertson and the bankrupt company liable on various copyright infringement claims.

The case marked the latest victory for the music industry in its court battles with online content providers like Napster, Grokster and LimeWire, which they have accused of illegally distributing copyrighted recordings, resulting in lost revenue and profit.

Ira Sacks, a lawyer for Robertson, said he planned to appeal, saying that many of the claims against his client were not sustainable.

Andrew Bart, a lawyer for the EMI recording labels, declined to comment. Frank Scibilia, a lawyer for the EMI publishing companies, did not respond to a request for comment.

Founded in 2005 initially as a website selling independent musicians' songs, San Diego-based MP3tunes came to be known for its so-called cloud music service that allowed users to store music in online lockers.

EMI, however, contended in a 2007 lawsuit that the MP3tunes website and a related one called Sideload.com enabled the infringement of copyrights in sound recordings, musical compositions and cover art.

The lawsuit was regarded in some circles as a barometer for how courts might view cloud-based music storage services.

In the trial, Robertson's lawyers contended MP3tunes had shut out users who abused the locker system and that many of the songs had been made available online for free by EMI as a promotion.

In the years since the lawsuit was filed, EMI was split up, with Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group buying its recording music business and a consortium led by Sony Corp acquiring its publishing arm in 2012. MP3tunes filed for bankruptcy in May 2012.

The lawsuit was only the most recent run-in between the recording industry and Robertson. In 1997 he founded MP3.com, a website that allowed users to play music the company copied from thousands of CDs it bought, as long as users could show they already owned the music.

A federal judge's ruling against MP3.com in 2000 led to a shutdown of the service and more than $160 million in estimated payouts by the company to the five major record labels and music publishers.

MP3.com was sold a year later to Vivendi Universal for about $372 million, with $120 million going to Robertson's family trust, he testified at trial. The website is today owned by CBS Corp.

The case is Capital Records Inc et al v. MP3tunes LLC et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 07-09931.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond; Editing by Dan Grebler)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A2P28M20140326





From January

Anti-Pirating Ad Music Stolen
Karl S. Kruszelnicki

If you have bought or rented a movie on a DVD sometime in the last few years, you would have had to sit through the compulsory anti-piracy video at the beginning. You know, the one with the urgent death-metal-thrash techno music in the background, and the words on the screen telling you that you wouldn't steal a car, or a handbag, or a television, or a movie. It then goes on to tell you that: "downloading pirated movies is stealing" and furthermore that "stealing is against the law" and finishes off with the bleak message that "piracy is a crime".

But here's an interesting question. That insistent, driving beat music that runs all the way through that anti-piracy ad — was it paid for, or was it pirated and stolen? The uncomfortable answer is that it was stolen.

Protection of literary property probably began in Great Britain in 1710, with the so-called "British Statute of Queen Anne". This Statute opened with the description that it was: "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Publishers …"

It then pointed out that "Printers, Booksellers and Other Persons have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing … Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors …" and that this nefarious act led "to their very great Detriment, (and) too often to the Ruin of them and their Families".

It sounds very reasonable that authors should be reimbursed for their hard work. So what's the story behind the reportedly stolen music on your DVD's anti-piracy ad?

Most countries have a music royalty collection agency. It monitors radio, TV and movies to make sure that musicians get paid when the music that they wrote is played. In Holland, the Dutch music royalty collection agency is called Buma/Stemra.

Back in 2006, Buma/Stemra approached a Dutch musician, Melchior Reitveldt, to write some music for an anti-piracy ad, with the strict proviso that this music would be played only and exclusively at a local film festival. Mr. Reitveldt wrote the music, it was played, he got paid and all was well.

But then, in 2007, he bought a Harry Potter DVD and to his surprise, there was his music in the anti-piracy ad at the beginning. His composition had been taken and used without his permission. In fact, it had been illegally used on dozens of movie DVDs, both in Holland and overseas. You probably have one at home right now.

So Mr. Reitveldt went to the Buma/Stemra music royalty collection agency to clear up this misunderstanding, and ran into a brick wall. Nothing happened for a long time, and then pathetically small refunds were offered, and then they weren't paid in full, and the delaying tactics went on and on.

Finally, in 2011, about half a decade after the original theft of his music, there was a kind of a breakthrough. Supposedly, one of the directors of Buma/Stemra music royalty collection agency, Mr Jochem Gerrits, spoke to him personally, offering to speed things up. Everything would proceed nicely, if the musician, Mr. Reitveldt, would simply sell the contested piece of music to him, Mr Gerrits. The payout would be one million Euros, and Mr Gerrits would keep one third for all his trouble and hard work, and the musician, Mr. Reitveldt, would keep two thirds.

It's a bit like having somebody steal your property, you report it to the police, and after a lot a dilly-dallying, a senior police officer approaches you offering to give two-thirds of your property back to you, if you give them one third.

Luckily, the musician recorded the conversation. The crooked director of the Buma/Stemra music royalty collection agency had to resign. In June 2012, the court ordered Buma/Stemra to repay the money.

Today, in the new world of the interweb, copyright is complicated. In the old days, if you bought a book, you could give or lend it to a friend. But it's different now. A woman in Duluth, Minnesota did the modern equivalent by sharing 24 songs that had a total retail value of $23.76. The Recording Industry Association of America sued, and the court awarded them $222,000.

In terms of the multiplication factor, that has to be a runaway, chart-busting solid gold smash hit …
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articl...29/3678851.htm

















Until next week,

- js.



















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