Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 7th, 2012

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Solid majorities of American Internet users oppose copyright enforcement when it is perceived to intrude on personal rights and freedoms. Support for internet blocking schemes was 16%." – BSOD


"But who am I kidding? It's been a while since the U.S. Congress had the actual interests of U.S. citizens in mind." – Paul Venizia



































January 7th, 2012




Survey Shows Piracy Common and Widely Accepted
BSOD

The Copy Culture Survey has finally been released (via submarine) and it's an interesting read for opponents of SOPA.

Here's a little more info about the survey itself:

“The Copy Culture survey was sponsored by The American Assembly, with support from a research award from Google. The content of the survey and its findings are solely the responsibility of the researchers. The U.S. survey was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. The results are based on interviews on landline and cellular telephones conducted in English with 2,303 adults age 18 or older living in the continental United States from August 1-31, 2011. For results based on the entire sample, the margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points.”

The surveys findings show pretty much what everyone other than Lamar Smith expected. According to the survey; copyright infringement among family and friends is common, the survey reveals that 46% of adults and 75% of young people have bought, copied, or downloaded some copyright infringing material. 70% of those surveyed said it's reasonable to share music files with friends and family. Solid majorities of American Internet users oppose copyright enforcement when it is perceived to intrude on personal rights and freedoms. Support for internet blocking schemes was 16%, SOPA is not all that popular.

They also find that legitimate services can compete with anything that's better than an antique business model. 46% of pirates claim that they pirate less since the emergence of streaming services. All in all it's an interesting read, check it out here (pdf).
http://activepolitic.com:82/News/201..._Accepted.html





Piracy Is Not A Problem; SOPA Is Not A Solution
Terry Hancock

Recently, as I was browsing the shelves of my local used book store, I realized that I was engaged in "piracy" of exactly the same kind as what the legacy entertainment industry has slammed as a scourge so terrible that it is worthy of giving up our online freedoms to protect. This is what SOPA is supposed to protect us from.

Not one of the books or videos on these shelves would share one cent of what I paid with the author. Which is exactly the "moral panic" we're being sold about copies on the internet.

But in fact, if you feel you need to read what somebody has to say, while simultaneously avoiding paying them anything (because the author or publisher is a sex offender, a racketeer, or, say, Disney), then buying a copy from a used bookstore is one way to act out that ethical intent. Another way is to voluntarily pay a "tip" or "donation" to an online author who you do like, but whose work is almost entirely freely available online without paying (obligatory shameless plug for my book). Or, if that's a little too difficult, you can just choose to buy a copy of the work from a channel that shares profit with the author.

This turns out to be a better business model than you might think, and pioneering people -- authors, artists, filmmakers, and musicians -- are making it work.

Many people will tell you why SOPA is bad and how: it will promote censhorship, it will break the internet, it will put the United States on par with oppressive regimes, and in the end, it won't actually work.

But what I want to say is this: we don't need it. It's an attempt to solve a business problem of a changing market which already has solutions by making laws to protect the currently wealthy publishers, who haven't done a very good job of supporting artists anyway.
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/...a_not_solution





Why Politicians Should Never Make Laws About Technology
Paul Venezia

In the weeks leading up to the SOPA vote (or delayed vote, as it were), I perused my representative's website, looking for a phone number or other means of contact to inform them of the bill's odiousness and potentially catastrophic fallout. I'm reasonably sure they'd heard it before, but had been blithely ignoring it. This simple act underscored a problem possibly bigger than SOPA: the fact that as with far too many of our elected officials, technology legislation isn't even on his radar.

The contact form on his website was apparently his preferred method of communication. I headed over and clicked a drop-down menu to select the subject of my missive. The usual suspects were there: defense, environment, budget, even transportation and agriculture -- but no "technology." All I could do was select "other."

[ InfoWorld's Paul Venezia thinks you should demand Net neutrality as a basic right [1]. | The Carrier IQ scandal leads Paul to proclaim enough is enough [2]. ]

To frame this clearly: I was using the most advanced technological form of communications ever developed to contact my elected representative about pending legislation regarding the most technological form of communications ever developed. However, the list of 17 possible topics didn't even include technology.

To politicians, this doesn't seem strange. To them, adding "technology" to this list would be like adding "plumbing" or "animal husbandry." Who could possibly care about the underpinnings of our worldwide internetwork enough to contact their representative about it?

Very few politicians get technology. Many actually seem proud that they don't use the Internet or even email, like it's some kind of badge of honor that they've kept their heads in the sand for so long. These are the same people who will vote on noxious legislation like SOPA, openly dismissing the concerns and facts presented by those who know the technology intimately. The best quote from the SOPA debates: "We're operating on the Internet without any doctors or nurses on the room." That is precisely correct.

The life of a politician doesn't match well with that of highly skilled techies. The old stereotype of the computer geek shying away from social interaction isn't terribly far off. Most computer gurus process data in binary form: There are truths and there are untruths. When Chris Dodd stated, "The entire film industry of Spain, Egypt and Sweden are gone [3]" due to piracy, a few minutes with Google would prove him absolutely wrong. A techie would simply discard that statement -- while many politicians appear to believe opinions have the same standing as facts, even when those opinions are based on demonstrable falsehoods. Say it with enough conviction and it counts.

That doesn't fly with techies. After all, if you start inserting vague notions into code or network architecture, at best it doesn't work very well, and at worst, everything breaks. Developing legislation isn't much different -- if it's built on bullcrap, it's a bad idea and it'll cause problems.

The only problem is that you can't run a debugger against legislation, and it will always compile without errors -- before it becomes law. Only after it goes into production do the flaws appear. To a techie, that's even more motivation to make sure it's exactly right. To a politician, it doesn't matter.

But who am I kidding? It's been a while since the U.S. Congress had the actual interests of U.S. citizens in mind. There's very little motivation to do the right or even the appropriate thing these days, and that's certainly not limited to turds like SOPA. If there were a true techie caucus in the federal government today -- a group composed of actual computer and math professionals -- my guess is that it wouldn't last long. There's far too little reason and logic within that body for minds that require those very elements to operate.

The best we can do for the short term is to throw everything we can behind legislation to reinstate the OTA (Office of Technology Assessment) [4]. From 1974 through 1995, this small group with a tiny budget served as an impartial, nonpartisan advisory to the U.S. Congress on all matters technological.

For the reasons stated above, it's not surprising that Newt Gingrich and others succeeded in dismantling the office as part of the 1995 "Contract with America" nonsense. Just as the United States was entering a period of monumental and unprecedented technological development and growth, while the world was rocketing forward to the vast networked environment we inhabit today, the U.S. Congress destroyed its logic center. The OTA was the closest thing it had to a technological brain.

If that isn't a metaphor for the current state of politics in the United States, I don't know what is.

This story, "Why politicians should never make laws about technology [5]," was originally published at InfoWorld.com [6]. Read more of Paul Venezia's The Deep End blog [7] at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter [8].

Data Center
Federal Regulations
Government

Source URL (retrieved on 2012-01-04 06:22AM): https://www.infoworld.com/d/data-cen...hnology-182374

Links:
[1] http://www.infoworld.com/t/federal-r...45?source=fssr
[2] http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-cent...69?source=fssr
[3] http://boingboing.net/2011/12/18/hea...ed-to-out.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_...ogy_Assessment
[5] http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-cent...?source=footer
[6] http://www.infoworld.com/?source=footer
[7] http://www.infoworld.com/blogs/paul-...?source=footer
[8] http://twitter.com/infoworld





The Danger of an Attack on Piracy Online
David Carr

By invoking the acronym SOPA right at the get-go, I may be daring many of you to check the next column over for something a little less chewy. After all, SOPA, which stands for Stop Online Piracy Act, sounds like a piece of arcane Internet government regulation — legislation that entertainment companies desperately care about and that leaves Web nation and free-speech crusaders frothing at the mouth. The rest of us? What were we talking about again?

Stay with me here.

SOPA deals with technical digital issues that may seem to be a sideshow but could become crucial to American media and technology businesses and the people who consume their products. The legislation is the rare broadly bipartisan piece of apple pie. The House Judiciary Committee is expected to resume hearings on it this month and all indications are that it will approve the measure, setting up a vote in the full chamber. The Senate is also expected to vote on its own version of the bill when it returns from the holiday break.

Virtually every traditional media company in the United States loudly and enthusiastically supports SOPA, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for the rest of us. The open consumer Web has been a motor of American innovation and the attempt to curtail some of its excesses could throw sand in the works of a big machine on which we have all come to rely.

Rather than launch into a long-winded argument about why the legislation is a bad idea — it is, as currently written — I thought it might be worthwhile to boil SOPA down into a series of questions.

A NONEXISTENT PROBLEM? Hardly. Regardless of what Web evangelists tell you, SOPA is an effort to get at the very real problem of rogue Web sites — most operating from overseas — offering illicit downloads of movies, music and more. The Motion Picture Association of America cites figures saying that piracy costs the United States $58 billion annually.

Mark Elliot, an executive from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a letter to The New York Times that such piracy threatened 19 million American jobs. Those figures surely include some politically motivated hyperbole, but anybody who has spent time around a twentysomething consumer knows that piracy is a thorny fact of life for content companies.

In an effort to stanch the flow, on Oct. 26 Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, introduced the legislation that has come to be known as SOPA. The Senate version, called the Protect IP Act, is seen by tech companies as less onerous because it targets domain name providers and ad networks and not Internet service providers. Both bills seek to create remedies to pirated content because most of the foreign-based sites operate outside of the United States’ legal system.

WOULD IT FIX THE PROBLEM? Probably not, and even if it made some progress toward reining in rogue sites, the collateral damage would be significant. Under the terms of each proposed bill, the federal Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, could seek a court order against a Web site that illegally hosts copyrighted content and then wall off the site permanently.

Under the House version, private companies would be allowed to sue Internet service providers for hosting content that they say infringes on copyright. That represents a very big change in the current law as codified in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants immunity to Web sites as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content upon notification.

WHY ALL THE ALARM? The bill has exposed a growing fracture between technology and entertainment companies. Digitally oriented companies see SOPA as dangerous and potentially destructive to the open Web and a step toward the kind of intrusive Internet regulation that has made China a global villain to citizens of the Web.

Entertainment companies think that technology companies are aiding and abetting thieves on a broad scale, but the legislation is alarming in its reach, potentially creating a blacklist of sites and taking aim at others for unknowingly hosting a small fraction of copyrighted material. In a joint letter to Congress, Google, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Yahoo, eBay and many other companies made it clear that they perceived a broader threat in the effort to thwart pirate sites.

“We support the bills’ stated goals — providing additional enforcement tools to combat foreign ‘rogue’ Web sites that are dedicated to copyright infringement or counterfeiting,” the letter read, which was published in a full page ad in The Times.

“Unfortunately, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities, private rights of action and technology mandates that would require monitoring of Web sites.”

Laurence H. Tribe, the noted First Amendment lawyer, said in an open letter on the Web that SOPA would “undermine the openness and free exchange of information at the heart of the Internet. And it would violate the First Amendment.”

You can see why big Internet guys are upset by SOPA. Maybe you and I should be, too.

WHY THE POLITICAL SUPPORT? Various amendments intended to tone down SOPA or limit its damage were voted down by large majorities in the House Judiciary Committee in mid-December, an indication that the indignation of various constituencies on the Web is having little impact.

That’s partly because entertainment companies have deep and long-lasting relationships inside the Beltway. Maplight, a site that researches the influence of money in politics, reported that the 32 sponsors of the legislation received four times as much in contributions from the entertainment industry as they did from software and Internet companies.

There is also a cultural divide at work, according to Yancey Stickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, a Web site that helps raise funds for creative projects, and a critic of SOPA.

“The schism between content creators and platforms like Kickstarter, Tumblr and YouTube is generational,” he wrote in an e-mail. “It’s people who grew up on the Web versus people who still don’t use it. In Washington, they simply don’t see the way that the Web has completely reconfigured society across classes, education and race. The Internet isn’t real to them yet.”

The debate has highlighted how little Congress knows about the Internet they are proposing to re-tool. In a piece often cited on the Web, the computer culture journalist Joshua Kopstein watched the debate in Congress in which members bragged about their online ignorance, and he wrote an open letter on the technology Web site Motherboard titled, “Dear Congress, It’s No Longer O.K. to Not Know How the Internet Works.”

Whether they know what they are doing or not, lawmakers seem intent on moving forward.

Congressional supporters of piracy legislation have been in a big hurry because the Web is starting to come alive with opposition — nearly 90,000 Tumblr users have phoned members of Congress and more than a million people have signed an online petition protesting the legislation.

Last week, in a much talked about blog post, Declan McCullagh of CNet speculated that even though big Web companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook are outgunned in terms of political connections, they have the capability to turn their sites into billboards denouncing SOPA and utilizing their close, constant relationship with consumers.

I like my movies (and music and television) as much as the next couch potato, probably more. And I wouldn’t steal content for any reason, in part because I make a living generating a fair amount of it. But it’s worth remembering that the film industry initially opposed the video cassette recorder and the introduction of DVDs, platforms that became very lucrative businesses for them and remarkable conveniences for the rest of us.

Given both Congress’s and the entertainment industry’s historically wobbly grasp of technology, I don’t think they should be the ones re-engineering the Internet. The rest of us might have to just hold our noses and learn enough about SOPA to school them in why it’s a bad idea.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/b...cy-online.html





It Is Time To Stop Pretending To Endorse The Copyright Monopoly
Rick Falkvinge

There is a saying in the political discussion in Sweden: "Anything you say before but in a political statement doesn't count." We've seen a lot of that practice in recent years with increasingly horrendous cultural monopoly laws.

People in corporate and political suits alike are climbing on top of one another to be the most statesmanlike in stating "We are fully committed to the copyright monopoly, but these proposed enforcement laws are just nuts," worded in all the synonyms you can find in a thesaurus.

Why? Why do people feel forced to phrase their views on policy like that?

If the enforcement laws are nuts, but still needed for the monopoly to be effective, why is the part before the "but" there -- where people say they support the copyright monopoly, but are firmly rejecting the laws needed keep it in effective existence for a few more years?

For I believe that the copyright industry is actually right that these ridiculous laws are needed to sustain the copyright monopoly. General-purpose networked computers, free and anonymous speech, and sustained civil liberties make it impossible to maintain this distribution monopoly of digitizable information. As technical progress can't be legislated against, basic civil liberties would have to go to maintain the crumbling monopoly. And these are the laws we're seeing on the table.

There comes a tipping point when somebody says that this entire system of cultural monopolies is absurd. A tipping point where the part before the "but" is unceremoniously and collectively dropped, the part that didn't count anyway. A tipping point where everybody just stops pretending to support it. I think it is time to create that point on the history line.

For what is the copyright monopoly, anyway? It is a set of monopolies from the era of guild-regulated commerce, when privately dictated monopolies were the norm and the expected. Specifically, the eldest tradesmen in every guild dictated what, where, and how trade happened within that craft. The copyright monopoly is a remnant from this era that should have been thrown out with the establishment of free enterprise laws in the 1850s.

Also, it is not really one single monopoly, but five quite different ones that are lumped together under a common umbrella term.

The first two types of copyright monopoly are commercial monopolies on duplication and public performance. These are the monopolies usually broken by today's free communication, the monopolies that can't coexist with today's technology and sustained civil liberties.

Then, there are two kinds of moral rights - droits morals. There is the right for the creator to prevent any performance, derivation, remix, satire, etc. of a piece that they do not approve of, and there is the right for a creator to be credited as such.

(I actually support this last right -- the right to credit. But does it really require legislation? The social, corporate and academic penalties for plagiarism are much higher than those of the law. Why is that particular law needed, then?)

The fifth monopoly isn't technically part of the copyright monopoly, but is frequently called "copyright" anyway. It is the so-called "neighboring rights" that were the result of the record industry's corporativization as IFPI in then-fascist Italy: the duplication monopoly over specific recordings. This, too, is broken by today's free communication.

I sometimes hear the old guard say that there would be no culture if there was no copyright monopoly. That is an outrageous insult to creators all over the world today. We create not because of a monopoly, but because of who we are; we have created and shared culture since we learned to put red paint on the inside of cave walls. Today, about eight years' worth of video are uploaded to YouTube every day.

People today create not because of the copyright monopoly, but despite it.

The second common question is how the artists shall get paid. That, too, is a red herring. First of all, it is not a policy problem, and second, it is not a problem at all.

This pretense from the old guard goes well in hand with the origins of the copyright monopoly. It was never for the artists at all. When the copyright monopoly was first created on May 4, 1557, it was a means of censorship of political dissent. It lapsed in 1695. When it was reinstated in 1709, it was at the request of printers and distributors who had gathered their families on the stairs of English Parliament to claim that no culture would be printed or distributed if they didn't get their monopoly reinstated.

Nobody at the time thought to claim something as preposterous as the copyright monopoly being a precondition for people wanting to create culture. It never was.

On the contrary, it is a guild-era instrument. To show a parallel, buttonmakers in France in the 1600s went berserk when tailors bypassed them and made buttons out of cloth instead. They demanded the right to invade people's homes and search their wardrobes for violations of the guild privileges. Sound familiar?

Another parallel also happened in France, where certain popular printed cloth fabrics were monopolized. People manufactured them anyway, and the nobility responded with increasingly harsh punishments for violations of their monopolies, up to and including death by torture. Even the death penalty didn't stop that copying. How far is the copyright industry prepared to go? They never answer that question.

Any law must be necessary, effective, and proportionate: it must identify a real problem that needs legislation, it must solve that problem, and it must not create worse problems in the process. No aspect of the copyright monopoly meets these three legislative quality criteria. Therefore, I reject the concept as a whole.

I reject and oppose this monopoly that was never for the creators, but always for the distributors: a guild whose time is up and obsolete, and which has no business trampling on our civil liberties.

Let's see more people drop that part before the "but". If the copyright industry is right in saying that these laws are required to maintain the copyright monopoly, and I think they are, then that just underscores how we should stop pretending to endorse this guild-era monopoly, and instead say it is time for it to go.

And nobody will think the worse of you for stating that opinion. Quite the opposite. Nobody expects an honest politician or corpsuit.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...monopoly.shtml





Website Blocking Law Implemented By New Spanish Government
enigmax

Spain’s new government has wasted no time in approving tough new legislation to combat unauthorized file-sharing. After less than two weeks in power, the Partido Popular government has fully implemented the so-called Sinde Law. Spaniards can look forward to previously legal sites being blocked by ISPs or shut down completely, all within 10 days of a rightsholder complaint.

In the last decade Spain has truly emerged as one of file-sharing’s safe-havens. Countless court decisions have affirmed that P2P indexing sites operate legally, with most cases against site operators going in favor of the defendants.

This state of affairs led to huge pressure on Spain from the United States, and behind closed doors the two countries drafted new laws in preparation for a time when Spain was ready to clamp down on file-sharing. That time has come.

After taking power in mid-December, Spain’s incoming Partido Popular (People’s Party) government has now fully approved their pending Sustainable Economy Law (LES), legislation designed to stop Spanish Internet users from accessing file-sharing sites.

Deputy Prime Minister Maria Soraya Saenz de Santamaria announced at a press conference that the so-called Sinde Law, named after outgoing Minister of Culture Ángeles González-Sinde, will now be fully implemented.

The legislation, which will give the authorities the power to swiftly close file-sharing sites or have them blocked at the ISP level, was actually passed by the Spanish Parliament in February 2011, but the former government failed to enact a supporting regulatory framework and it has laid dormant since.

In her speech, Santamaria said that the new law’s objective was “to protect against the plundering of intellectual property rights” and to ensure that Spain “joined the international standard in the fight against online piracy.”

The decision on whether to shutter or block file-sharing sites will sit with the Intellectual Property Committee. This panel will have the power to take action against those providing illegal content and entities providing infrastructure, all within 10 days of a complaint by rightsholders.
https://torrentfreak.com/website-blo...rnment-120102/





US Threatened To Blacklist Spain For Not Implementing Site Blocking Law
enigmax

In a leaked letter sent to Spain’s outgoing President, the US ambassador to the country warned that as punishment for not passing a SOPA-style file-sharing site blocking law, Spain risked being put on a United States trade blacklist . Inclusion would have left Spain open to a range of “retaliatory options” but already the US was working with the incoming government to reach its goals.

United States government interference in Spain’s intellectual property laws had long been suspected, but it was revelations from Wikileaks that finally confirmed the depth of its involvement.

More than 100 leaked cables showed that the US had helped draft new Spanish copyright legislation and had heavily influenced the decisions of both the government and opposition.

Now, another diplomatic leak has revealed how the US voiced its anger towards outgoing President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero last month upon realizing that his government was unlikely to pass the US-drafted Sinde (site blocking) Law before leaving office.

In a letter dated December 12th and sent by US Ambassador Alan D. Solomont to the Spanish Prime Minister’s office, the US expressed “deep concern” over the failure to implement the SOPA-style censorship law.

“The government has unfortunately failed to finish the job for political reasons, to the detriment of the reputation and economy of Spain,” read the letter obtained by El Pais.

Racing against the clock in the final days of the government, Solomont had one last push.

“I encourage the Government of Spain to implement the Sinde Law immediately to safeguard the reputation of Spain as an innovative country that does what it says it will, and as a country that breeds confidence,” he wrote.

But along with the pleas came the stick.

In the letter, which was also sent to Minister of Culture Ángeles González-Sinde after whom the law is named, Solomont noted that Spain is already on the Special 301, the annual report prepared by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) detailing ‘trade barriers’ based on intellectual property issues.

Solomont’s threat was that should Spain not pass the Sinde Law (described by some as the Spanish SOPA) then the country would be degraded further and placed on the Priority Watch List. This serious step would mean that Spain was in breach of trade agreements and could be subjected to a range of “retaliatory actions”.

In the event Zapatero’s government left office without passing the law, but the incoming Partido Popular (People’s Party) were quickly pressured by the US to take the necessary action.

In another media leak it’s now been revealed that American Chamber of Commerce in Spain chief Jaime Malet wrote a cautionary letter to incoming Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy. He warned of the potential flight of foreign investment from Spain and urged him to take action on the protection of intellectual property once in office.

“[The law's] lack of approval before the elections has been a blow to the country’s seriousness in this matter of such importance,” said Malet, while urging Rajoy to “to retrieve the consensus reached.”

Rajoy’s government quickly responded and fully implemented the legislation within 10 days of taking office.
https://torrentfreak.com/us-threaten...ng-law-120105/





With Congress on Break, SOPA Fight Continues
Doug Gross

Members of Congress may be on vacation, but that hasn't calmed critics who say an effort to stamp out online piracy would create an unprecedented threat to free speech on the Internet.

Far from fading from memory, the Stop Online Piracy Act (along with a related Senate bill) has become a rallying point for Web freedom advocates in a debate that has pitted Hollywood and other business interests against some of the biggest titans of the technology world.

Interest in the debate spiked again this week when one of the bill's opponents suggested that online heavyweights such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter had considered a "nuclear option" -- temporarily shutting down their sites in protest -- to raise awareness about the bills, which await lawmakers when they return this month.

When contacted by CNN, none of those companies would confirm that such a drastic move had ever been considered. By Friday, the advocate whose comments had fueled the speculation appeared to back away from claims that a Web blackout was still likely to occur.

"Internet and technology companies will continue to educate policymakers and other stakeholders on the problems with the (legislation)," Markham Erickson, director of Web trade association NetCoalition, said in a statement. "An 'Internet blackout' would obviously be both drastic and unprecedented."

Part of the urgency comes from critics' fears that the legislation, which has opponents and supporters on both sides of the political aisle, is going to move quickly once Congress reconvenes.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, has announced plans to push that chamber's companion bill, the Protect IP Act, as soon as they return January 23. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, also a Democrat, and other senators have promised to filibuster, a move that would prevent leaders from calling for a vote until the following day.

"We hope that the Senate will cancel its scheduled vote on PIPA so that we can get back to working with members on how to address the concerns raised by the (Motion Picture Association of America) and others without threatening our nation's security or future innovation and jobs," Erickson said.

The future of SOPA itself is a little murkier. It was being considered in a House committee last month, when the wave of protests and proposed amendments from members led that committee's chairman to postpone consideration until later.

Both bills are intended to help put a stop to foreign websites that illegally post, and sometimes sell, intellectual property from the United States. Federal law-enforcement agencies would be empowered to shut down those sites and cut off advertising and online payments to them.

At stake, say supporters, are American jobs. Every free piece of content scraped to be sold, or given away, online takes money out of the pockets of record companies, movie producers and other content creators and their millions of employees.

Pharmaceutical companies, sports leagues and video-game makers have also voiced support.

"Especially in this time of economic recovery, we cannot stand by and watch while American companies and the jobs they support are being bled by foreign criminals who are taking advantage of a massive loophole in our law enforcement capabilities," wrote Steve Tepp, who works on counterfeiting and piracy issues for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "These illicit enterprises are not tolerated in the brick and mortar marketplace, so why would we allow them to flourish unchecked online?"

The pro-legislation Copyright Alliance cites a report from the International Chamber of Commerce saying that piracy and counterfeiting cost businesses $775 billion annually and puts 2.5 million jobs at risk worldwide.

Some of the amendments proposed in Congress would ensure that the bill applied only to foreign-based websites. But with multiple versions flying around the Capitol, and legislation prone to being tweaked right up until the last minute, critics fear that its impact could be chilling.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, has been outspoken against the efforts.

The bills "give the U.S. government and copyright holders extraordinary powers including the ability to hijack DNS (the Internet's naming system) and censor search results (and this is even without so much as a proper court trial)," Brin wrote last month on his Google+ page as Congress was considering the measures. "While I support their goal of reducing copyright infringement (which I don't believe these acts would accomplish), I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world."

The list of companies that signed off on a NetCoalition statement condemning SOPA reads like a who's-who of the Internet. Yahoo, Zynga, Twitter, eBay, Foursquare, AOL, Mozilla, Etsy and LinkedIn are just some of the names.

In addition to putting existing sites at risk, critics say the piracy bills could hurt innovation by making investors less likely to sink money into start-up sites that could be shut down if the run afoul of the law.

Critics overwhelmingly agree that something needs to be done to combat online piracy. Many, including Google and Facebook, support a more-limited proposal by Wyden and Republican Rep. Daniel Issa, called the OPEN Act, which they say would combat digital piracy without giving license to shut down legitimate websites.

"Butchering the Internet is not a way forward for America," Issa said when the plan was introduced last month. "The OPEN Act empowers owners of intellectual property by targeting overseas infringers while protecting the rights of lawful Internet entrepreneurs and users."

As happens on the Internet, passions have run high as opponents have tried to mobilize.

Web registrar and hosting company GoDaddy reaped the Internet whirlwind for its support of the act. A massive effort to convince people to move their sites to other hosts was launched on Reddit and other sites. Eventually, GoDaddy announced that it had reconsidered its position.

In response to a post on tech blog CNET, in which the author calls the motion-picture association "evil" and says "Hollywood wants the Internet to die," Recording Industry Association of America Chairman Cary Sherman called for a calmer debate while taking a shot at one of the tech industry's biggest names.

"It is ironic sometimes that we are faulted for protecting our rights. Yet technology companies like Apple are among the most litigious defenders of their intellectual property patent rights," Sherman wrote in a response column. "I suspect that regardless of what we do, some critics ... will attack us.

"But surely there is a place for reasoned conversation, for rational discourse, for genuine efforts to understand each other."
http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/06/tech/w...act/index.html





Video Game Industry Still Supports Anti-Piracy Bill
Stephen C. Webster

Despite a flurry of reports suggesting that the world’s largest video game companies have dropped their support for the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — a bill which critics say could break the fundamental structure of the Internet in the U.S. — that assumption appears premature.

The Internet was set aflutter the day before New Year’s Eve after Business Insider noticed that Nintendo, Electronic Arts (EA) and Sony Electronics had removed themselves from a list of official SOPA supporters curated by the House Judiciary Committee.

The disappearance of these influential corporations sparked a wave of reports that the largest video game makers in the world had dropped their support for the bill. Those reports, however, are not correct.

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the gaming industry’s lobby, still officially support SOPA. It’s members include Sony, Nintendo, EA, Microsoft and numerous other gaming companies which, as members, support SOPA by proxy (although Microsoft has hedged its bets and advocated major changes to the bill). Much like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the film industry’s largest lobby, its members do not individually appear on the House Judiciary Committee’s list, but they still absolutely support the legislation unless otherwise stated.

One of the ESA’s core functions is to serve as a bulwark against online piracy for the gaming industry, much as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) acts for the music industry. They act on tips from their members and sponsor their own piracy monitoring service that works with government officials and targets individual sites with takedown requests, and spend millions lobbying Washington every year on behalf of gaming companies.

More importantly, the ESA signed on behalf of their members an open letter to Congress sent in September that strongly urged lawmakers to support SOPA.

“The United States cannot and should not tolerate this criminal activity [piracy],” their letter concludes. “Not only are jobs and consumers at risk, but rogue sites contribute absolutely no value to the U.S. marketplace. The operators of rogue sites break laws, do not pay taxes, and skirt accountability. In light of these concerns, we urge you to enact carefully balanced rogue sites legislation this year. We commend both the House and the Senate for their attention to this important issue and look forward to working with you in support of that goal.”

In the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a lobby which includes the heaviest hitters in development like Apple, Microsoft and Adobe, members have outright quit over their disagreement with SOPA. Due to that internal resistance, the BSA has not yet openly endorsed SOPA, lobbying instead to see it altered in such a way that balances censorship concerns with the need to fight copyright infringement.

The ESA, on the other hand, remains committed to the bill. It’s members, recently removed from the House Judiciary Committee’s list, have not revised their positions — they’ve merely adjusted optics, in the face of a backlash from their most loyal customers.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/3...spite-reports/





Eight Top Internet Firms Back Alternative To SOPA
Dave Copeland

Several of the largest Interent firms - including Google, Facebook and Twitter – are backing alternate legislation being proposed to the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP Acts.

The OPEN act sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., would allow the International Trade Commission to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties withe foreign websites that are targeted by patent infringement claims.

SOPA, and its Senate counerpart, PIPA, on the other hand, would force search engines and websites to block links to sites that are listed as being "dedicated" to copyright infringement. SOPA has been widely endorsed by traditional media companies, but Web firms and free speech advocates have likened it to government-enforced censorship.

"[The OPEN Act's] approach targets foreign rogue sites without inflicting collateral damage on legitimate, law-abiding U.S. Internet companies by bringing well-established international trade remedies to bear on this problem," AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga wrote in a letter to Issa and Wyden in December.

The OPEN Act does have some flaws, and in some points parralells SOPA, as noted by technology and law blogger Eric Goldman. Goldman notes that, like SOPA, OPEN "assumes there is a problem with foreign rogue websites that needs to be solved...and more importantly, attacking the money supply to supposed bad actors remains too blunt an instrument."

"While OPEN can't really be fixed to resolve my two structural concerns, my hope is that the discussion about OPEN will force rightsowners to provide *credible* evidence of harms that they or consumers are suffering (no more self-serving hype, please), and that such evidence will force us to think carefully about how 'rifle shot' solutions (as opposed to shotgun solutions) can ameliorate those harms," Goldman said.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...ve_to_sopa.php





Cato Institute Digs Into MPAA's Own Research To Show That SOPA Wouldn't Save A Single Net Job
Mike Masnick

One of the things we've noticed in the debate over SOPA and PIPA is just how the other side is really lying with statistics. We've done a thorough debunking of the stats used by the US Chamber of Commerce to support both bills, as well as highlighted the misleading-to-bogus stats used by Lamar Smith in his support of the bill.

But every day, more bogus stats are rolled out. Julian Sanchez, over at the Cato Institute, has decided to dig into one specific bogus number, the supposed claim of $58 billion in "losses," and to show how the numbers don't hold up to any scrutiny. In fact, using the details of where the numbers came from, Sanchez makes the case that SOPA won't save a single net job for the US economy. Read on to find out how.

First off, the $58 billion comes from an absolutely laughable report for the Institute for Policy Innovation, done every year by Stephen Siwek at a firm called Economists Incorporated. We've challenged this ridiculous number in the past, but not to the level of detail that Sanchez has here. He starts out by bringing up (as we have many times), Tim Lee's excellent debunking of the ridiculous "ripple effects" that Siwek/IPI always use, despite them being a trick to double, triple, quadruple, etc count the same dollars:

In IPI-land, when a movie studio makes $10 selling a DVD to a Canadian, and then gives $7 to the company that manufactured the DVD and $2 to the guy who shipped it to Canada, society has benefitted by $10+$7+$2=$19. Yet some simple math shows that this is nonsense: the studio is $1 richer, the trucker is $2, and the manufacturer is $7. Shockingly enough, that adds up to $10. What each participant cares about is his profits, not his revenues.

It turns out that the $58 billion comes from this process, making use of a dubious multiplier on a different MPAA report that claimed merely $6.1 billion in losses for the US movie industry, multiplied to about $20 billion -- as the portion of the "losses" that come from movies. But, as Sanchez notes, that number itself is highly questionable:

That original $6.1 billion figure, by the way, was produced by a study commissioned from LEK Consulting by the Motion Picture Association of America. Since even the GAO was unable to get at the underlying research or evaluate its methodology, it’s impossible to know how reliable that figure is, but given that MPAA has already had to admit significant errors in the numbers LEK generated, I’d take it with a grain of salt.

Okay, but even if we assume that $6.1 billion is accurate, Sanchez explains how that's not even what's at stake with SOPA, since the $6.1 billion is a global number:

Believe it or not, though, it’s actually even worse than that. SOPA, recall, does not actually shut down foreign sites. It only requires (ineffective) blocking of foreign “rogue sites” for U.S. Internet users. It doesn’t do anything to prevent users in (say) China from downloading illicit content on a Chinese site. If we’re interested in the magnitude of the piracy harm that SOPA is aimed at addressing, then, the only relevant number is the loss attributable specifically to Internet piracy by U.S. users.

Again, we don’t have the full LEK study, but one of Siwek’s early papers does conveniently reproduce some of LEK’s PowerPoint slides, which attempt to break the data down a bit. Of the total $6.1 billion in annual losses LEK estimated to MPAA studios, the amount attributable to online piracy by users in the United States was $446 million--which, by coincidence, is roughly the amount grossed globally by Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

Okay. So now we're down from $58 billion to... $446 million. That's less than 1% of the original number. But, still, you might say, $446 million is a fair chunk of change (and the $58 billion doesn't just include movies, but other content, like music and software). So perhaps something like SOPA still makes sense to protect a few jobs? Nope. Again, Sanchez points out how this ignores reality:

As one expert consulted by GAO put it, “effects of piracy within the United States are mainly redistributions within the economy for other purposes and that they should not be considered as a loss to the overall economy.” In many cases--I’ve seen research suggesting it’s about 80 percent for music--a U.S. consumer would not have otherwise purchased an illicitly downloaded song or movie if piracy were not an option. Here, the result is actually pure consumer surplus: The downloader enjoys the benefit, and the producer loses nothing. In the other 20 percent of cases, the result is a loss to the content industry, but not a let loss to the economy, since the money just ends up being spent elsewhere. If you’re concerned about the overall jobs picture, as opposed to the fortunes of a specific industry, there is no good reason to think eliminating piracy by U.S. users would yield any jobs on net, though it might help boost employment in copyright-intensive sectors.

In other words, we're right back where we started. The whole thing is based on the bogus assumption that money not spent on movies (which, again, have been making a ton of money lately) somehow disappears from the economy. But that's simply not true. So, really, why is it that anyone in the press, or in elected office, is allowed to quote that bogus $58 billion number without it being challenged?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-net-job.shtml





Online Community Reddit Driving Opposition to Piracy Bill
Gautham Nagesh

Members of Congress and their staff have grown used to scouring the Web, Twitter and Facebook to see where voters stand before finalizing their positions. But the heated debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has turned the social news website Reddit into an unlikely rallying point for opponents of the bill.

"[SOPA] would kill Reddit," Reddit general manager Erik Martin told The Hill. "We're a platform so normally we would not take a stand on any political issue but this one would end our ability to run the site."

The website where users submit and vote for links has a proven track record launching online memes and viral videos, but the specter of SOPA has turned the community's attention squarely toward Washington. The results have been eye-opening for Washington and Silicon Valley alike.

SOPA would empower the government and copyright holders to obtain court orders forcing search engines, domain name registrars and other Web firms to sever ties with foreign websites deemed rogue. The bill has strong support from the content industries, which argue foreign piracy is sapping revenue and costing the nation jobs.

But the technology community has struck back fiercely, arguing the bill would stifle innovation and eventually restrict free speech. Last week a protest thread started on Reddit against the domain name registrar GoDaddy prompted a large-scale boycott of the firm, forcing GoDaddy to reverse its support for the bill and trumpet the news.

The boycott and most of the other organizing efforts currently underway on Reddit are organic, driven by the grassroots community of loyal users that dictate which stories top the site's feed. But Reddit, owned by Conde Nast parent company Advanced Publications, has joined Tumblr, Mozilla and other Web firms in declaring open opposition to SOPA.

Martin said the site's users are solidly opposed to SOPA and in turn Reddit has encouraged them to contact their members of Congress and watch the Judiciary Committee's hearings on the bill online. He said the hearings helped users realize "how willfully ignorant a lot of the people were about the technology involved and about the effects of the law."

Martin said the hearings also helped users realize SOPA is not a partisan issue, since there are supporters and opponents on both sides of the aisle. Users have now turned their attention to the White House, boosting a petition urging President Obama to veto the bill past the required number of signatures to merit an official response, and are targeting members of Congress that support SOPA.

Martin believes the cumulative effect of all the online protests will eventually be enough to halt SOPA's progress and said the scale of the movement is much larger than efforts on the site to support President Obama and Ron Paul in 2008.

"This definitely the first time we've seen something like this, that's been written about in the national headlines daily," Martin said. "Reddit was much smaller [in 2008], a different animal.

Martin said Reddit is supportive of the alternative online piracy bill offered by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) dubbed the OPEN Act. He said consultations with legal experts and what can be gleaned from the text suggest to Reddit that OPEN is a more sensible, targeted solution to attacking online piracy.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...to-piracy-bill





Smith Says Reddit SOPA Protestors are 'Not Legitimate or Large in Number'

Speaking to political publication Roll Call, SOPA sponsor and House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) took shots earlier this week at critics of the bill that has gained as much bi-partisan opposition as it has support.

"The criticism of this bill is completely hypothetical; none of it is based in reality," Smith said in a statement to Roll Call. "Not one of the critics was able to point to any language in the bill that would in any way harm the Internet. Their accusations are simply not supported by any facts."

When asked about online opposition to the bill from places such as Reddit, Smith was quite dismissive.

"It’s a vocal minority, he said. "Because they’re strident doesn’t mean they’re either legitimate or large in number. One, they need to read the language. Show me the language. There’s nothing they can point to that does what they say it does do. I think their fears are unfounded."

On support from colleagues on his side of the aisle Smith said that the "most important thing [is], they haven’t told me not to go forward. I’m expecting support."

Anyone that watched the markup sessions noted that many members from both sides of the aisle were not happy with the fact that committee did not spend enough time consulting experts before moving to mark up the legislation.

"It’s time to pull the nerds in," Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said.

"There’s an opportunity to negotiate, even big bills like this, before the markup commences. And your chances of being successful are greater in those negotiations than they are in the open debate," Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said.

Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.), a staunch critic of the bill in its current form, said the intense criticism of the bill was the result of the short amount of time the committee had to deal with the issue.

"We’ve had controversy over bills before that are dealing with a comprehensive topic, but we’ve always had more time to deal with them, so that the kinds of large differences that you see laid out here have been taken care of in the past," Lungren said.

Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), the boldest critic of the bill, has made the markup process difficult, alongside Lungren and others. Recently Issa changed his Facebook profile picture a black box with "censored" in white letters to protest the bill.
http://gamepolitics.com/2012/01/04/s...arge-number039





Lawmakers Seem Intent on Approving SOPA, PIPA
Grant Gross

Early this year, the U.S. Congress appears likely to move forward with two controversial copyright enforcement bills, even with vocal and widespread opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act in the Internet community.

The two bills, SOPA and PIPA for short, appear headed toward approval this year, unless opponents can change the minds of many lawmakers. Dozens of lawmakers have voiced support for the bills, despite reports from digital rights group Fight for the Future that more than 1 million people have sent email messages [1] to Congress in opposition.

The U.S. Senate is expected to begin floor debate [4] on PIPA shortly after senators return to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 23, and supporters appear to have the votes to override a threatened filibuster by Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and a handful of other lawmakers.

Both bills have strong support in Congress and among some segments of U.S. industry. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Motion Picture Association of America, two powerful trade and lobbying groups, are among the 400-plus organizations supporting the bills [5]. Other supporters include the National Football League, Time Warner, L'Oreal, and the Fraternal Order of Police.

Several supporters of the two bills declined to make predictions, but it's hard to ignore the numbers in Congress so far.

PIPA has 41 co-sponsors in the 100-member Senate. The votes of just 19 more senators would be needed to override a filibuster from Wyden and his allies.

In the House of Representatives, the Judiciary Committee will continue a markup of SOPA when lawmakers return to Washington. During the first three days of the markup in December, lawmakers opposed to SOPA introduced about 20 amendments intended to water down the bill. All of them failed, by roughly two-to-one margins in the committee.

"I'm not very encouraged, quite frankly," said Paul Ferguson, senior threat researcher at Trend Micro, a cybersecurity vendor with concerns about the bills. "There's a lack of technical knowledge here in the legislative process."

Ferguson and other Web security experts have questioned provisions in both bills that would allow court orders forcing Internet service providers to block subscriber access to foreign websites accused of copyright infringement and domain name registrars to stop resolving queries that direct traffic to those sites.

The filtering provisions in both bills would set back the decade-long effort to roll out DNSSEC, a suite of security tools for the DNS, Ferguson said. "It seems like all the technical concerns are just being dismissed out of hand," he said.

The bills would also allow the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders to seek court orders blocking payment processors and online advertising networks from doing business with foreign sites accused of infringing copyright.

The DOJ-requested court orders could also bar search engines from linking to the allegedly infringing sites.

Other opponents of SOPA and PIPA seem a bit more optimistic about derailing the bills. While some powerful entertainment and content groups support the bills, "on the other hand, you have everybody else, including millions of Americans," said Michael Petricone, senior vice president of government affairs at the Consumer Electronics Association, a large trade group opposed to the bills.

Opposition is growing because U.S. residents are hearing that the bills would hurt the Internet, Petricone added. "There are plenty of people in both the House and Senate that are doubting the wisdom of the bills," he said.

The bills have hit a couple of speed bumps in recent weeks. Giant domain-name registrar Go.Daddy withdrew its support for SOPA [6] after threats of a customer boycott, and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has defended tough copyright laws in the past, questioned several provisions in SOPA [7].

"The federal government needs to protect intellectual property rights," wrote James Gattuso, senior research fellow in regulatory policy at the foundation. "But it should do so in a way that does not disrupt the growth of technology, does not weaken Internet security, respects free speech rights, and solves the problem of rogue sites."

In addition, since Dec. 18, more than 46,000 people have signed a WhiteHouse.gov petition [8] calling for President Barack Obama to veto SOPA. A second petition, calling for Obama to stop PIPA, has generated more than 51,000 signatures since Oct. 31.

The Obama administration has promised to issue an official response to all petitions that generate more than 25,000 signatures within a month.

Opponents of the bills are waiting for the White House's official position, said Heather Greenfield, spokeswoman for the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a tech trade group opposed to both bills.

The White House "has responded to petitions about alien life on earth, so we imagine they'll respond to the ones about SOPA, too," she said.

CCIA is also encouraged that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and main sponsor of SOPA, has promised to hold a hearing on the cybersecurity implications of the bill, Greenfield said.

"We're optimistic that if members really understood the Internet architecture and cybersecurity measures, they would not support SOPA as written," she added. "Instead, members who are really committed to combatting online piracy would look for effective ways to do that without compromising cybersecurity or the open architecture of the Internet."

Lammakers continue to hear from opponents of the bills, she said. "Members of Congress say their phones are ringing with calls from thousands of Internet users who are furious Congress plans to censor and regulate the Internet -- ahead of understanding what they're doing," she said. "So this could be the netroots issue, and it's hard to say yet how that's going to impact support."

Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. Grant's e-mail address is grant_gross@idg.com.

The Industry Standard
Internet
Federal Regulations
Intellectual Property

Source URL (retrieved on 2012-01-07 01:17PM): https://www.infoworld.com/d/the-indu...pa-pipa-183328

Links:
[1] http://americancensorship.org/infographic2.html
[2] http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/...96?source=fssr
[3] http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-...ce=ifwelg_fssr
[4] http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/...w-filibuster-w
[5] http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rogue Websites/List of SOPA Supporters.pdf
[6] http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...port_from_SOPA
[7] http://www.heritage.org/research/rep...d-consequences
[8] https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petition...ation/g3W1BscR





Filesharing Web Site Sued to Reveal Infringing Users

Company demands identities of alleged copyright infringers
Kate O'Flaherty

FILESHARING WEB SITE 4Shared has been sued by a company that is trying to obtain the identities of those who allegedly uploaded copyrighted files.

According to Torrent Freak,Modulo Security Solutions filed the lawsuit in US federal court in an attempt to expose the alleged uploader of its confidential documents.

4Shared is thought to be the largest filesharing web site with 10 million registered users and more than 2.5 billion page views each month. The web site already allows rightsholders to send takedown notices to remove copyrighted files that they claim were posted without permission.

Modulo told the court that it plans to take civil action against the alleged uploader for copyright infringement related offenses, and it needs 4Shared to hand over their personal details for it to do so.

The company said that although 4Shared removed the files, 4Shared would not release information on users without a court order.

The lawsuit was filed "ex parte" so 4Shared would not be notified about the legal proceedings, as Modulo didn't want the cyberlocker to delete the information before the case came to court.

The complaint said, "Petitioner submits this petition on an ex parte basis because the information that it seeks from Respondent is highly susceptible to deletion or otherwise may be destroyed, either intentionally or inadvertently."

Although the lawsuit is different than traditional 'piracy' cases that have come up in the past, the 4Shared case could be watched closely by other copyright holders. If 4Shared is ordered to hand over its customer information including names and IP-addresses, other rightsholders might adopt the same tactic to pursue alleged 'pirates' in the future.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...fringing-users





Music File-Sharing Case Still Alive

The Recording Industry Association of America has requested that the court grant it “30 minutes of argument time to address these important issues upon which this court has not previously opined.”

The case of the Brainerd, Minn., mother of four found responsible in November 2010 for $1.5 million in damages to the Recording Industry Association of America remains alive more than five years after it was commenced.

The RIAA appealed and recently filed briefs in support of its position. The recording group has requested that the court grant it “30 minutes of argument time to address these important issues upon which this court has not previously opined.”

Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s briefs in support of her position are due to be filed Friday.

In two earlier trials, Thomas-Rasset was found liable for distributing 24 songs on the KaZaA peer-to-peer file-sharing network. A federal jury in Minneapolis was charged with determining how much money she owed the record companies. After hearing two days of testimony, jurors decided in 2010 that Thomas-Rasset should pay $62,500 for each of the 24 songs she illegally distributed.

In April 2006, plaintiffs Capitol Records Inc., Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, Warner Bros. Records Inc., and UMG Recordings Inc. brought the suit against Thomas-Rasset seeking damages for copyright infringement.

Thomas-Rasset argued that the recording industry was unable to present evidence of any harm she personally caused the plaintiffs and that any damages permitted under the Copyright Act would be unconstitutional.

Saying any award greater than $2,250 per song would be “monstrous and shocking,” the district court reduced the jury’s award of $62,500 per song to $2,250 per song.
http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/eve...cle/id/219119/





Xunlei Makes File-Sharing Social and Local, Probably Banned from Apple’s App Store
Steven Millward

Xunlei has added social and location-based (LBS) features to a new file-sharing service, and released an app for iPhone called Xunlei Linju – the last word means “neighborhood” in Chinese – that hasn’t, and likely never will be, accepted into Apple’s tightly-controlled iTunes app store.

The Windows PC software and accompanying iPhone app for Xunlei Linju allow users to request certain files – such as music, movies – from anyone on the new P2P social network. A request can then be filled by sharing the file to only one person, who might then go on the share it with others. Alternatively, users will get a free 5-gigabytes of cloud storage – or 8-gigs for members – where you can store files and grant access to certain people to take them from your cloud locker. Plus, the social aspect of the site has all the usual features such as profiles, avatars, and messaging.

The Xunlei Linju app for Windows - browse users, chat, request file-shares, and more.

The location-based element is harder to figure out, since one’s position on the earth is irrelevant when it comes to P2P file-sharing – but anyway, the Windows Linju app (pictured above) asks you to specify a fixed location while the iPhone app uses GPS to pin-point you more precisely and let you chat and file-share with people in your locale, if you wish.

The Linju iPhone app is being hosted on a Chinese iOS and Android app store called Mobile91 and is unlikely to get past Apple’s rigorous screening process which also weeds out apps that might enable the piracy of digital content.

Xunlei is best-known in China for its original P2P file-sharing platform, though it also has a fairly popular video-streaming site that has licensed video content. There were plans afoot last summer for the company to IPO in the US before it was cancelled over reported fears of its liabilities related to potential copyright claims. Now that Xunlei seems to be investing even more in its P2P-oriented services, it’s unlikely to be touched with a barge-pole by potential investors overseas.
http://www.penn-olson.com/2012/01/05...ng-iphone-app/





BitTorrent Takes On Dropbox With Personal File Sharing
Janko Roettgers

BitTorrent Inc. launched a personal file sharing application called Share Thursday that aims to give users an alternative to paid cloud storage companies and media sharing over social networks. Share makes it possible to transfer files without any size limits to an unlimited number of personal contacts. Files are cached in the cloud, so users don’t have to be online at the same time to complete transfers.

On Wednesday, BitTorrent Chief Strategist Shahi Ghanem told me the company is relying on Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services to provide this kind of caching infrastructure. Files are taken off the cloud as soon as they are sufficiently shared by peers. The app will initially be Windows-only, but Mac users will be able to download an alpha version of the company’s µTorrent client that will offer them the same kind of personal file sharing functionality. Future Windows versions of µTorrent will also offer Share functionality.

BitTorrent isn’t the first company to try to combine P2P and personal media sharing. Companies like Pando have long offered personal file transfers, but typically limit the size of files that can be transferred to manage hosting costs. Others like Podmailing were more aggressive, but eventually had to shut down due to exploding hosting costs.

Ghanem told me BitTorrent plans to avoid this kind of fate by building out its own P2P-powered personal cloud storage system. The system isn’t up and running yet, but the idea is that users will receive free storage for their files by sharing some hard drive space and bandwidth with other users.
http://gigaom.com/2012/01/05/bittorrent-share-app/





What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012?

Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1955

Current US law extends copyright protection for 70 years after the date of the author’s death. (Corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication.) But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years). Under those laws, works published in 1955 would be passing into the public domain on January 1, 2012.

What might you be able to read or print online, quote as much as you want, or translate, republish or make a play or a movie from? In this centennial year of the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic (April 15, 1912), how about Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember? Lord first published A Night to Remember in 1955. If we were still under the copyright laws that were in effect until 1978, A Night to Remember would be entering the public domain on January 1, 2012 (even assuming that Lord or his publisher had renewed the copyright). Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2051. This is because the copyright term for works published between 1950 and 1963 was extended to 95 years from the date of publication, so long as the works were published with a copyright notice and the term renewed (which is generally the case with famous works such as this). All of these works from 1955 won't enter the public domain until 2051.

Why Johnny Can't Read New Public Domain Books . . . .

What other works would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978 copyright laws? You might recognize some of the titles below.

• Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can't Read: And What You Can Do About It
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, the final installment in his Lord of Rings trilogy
• The Family of Man, Edward Steichen’s book of photographs showing the diversity and universality of human experience
• Michihiko Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 8–September 30, 1945, translated by Warner Wells, md
• Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen, the second book in his Sword of Honour trilogy
• The first English translation of Thomas Mann’s last novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years (1954), by Denver Lindley
• C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, the sixth volume his The Chronicles of Narnia
• Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
• Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee’s play about the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” Inherit the Wind

Till the End of Eternity?

1955 was also a great year for science fiction fans — it marked the publication of classics such as Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity, Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (the basis of two classic Hollywood movies), and Arthur C. Clarke’s Earthlight. Instead of seeing these enter the public domain in 2012, when you would be free to create and share your new reimaginings of or homages to these works, we will have to wait until 2051—a date that itself may seem like science fiction.

The same is true for historical resources. It has been 150 years since the beginning of the United States Civil War (1861–65); under the pre-1978 copyright law, you could edit and distribute a wealth of materials from 1955 to teach and learn about the war, including Bruce Catton’s Banners at Shenandoah: A Story of Sheridan’s Fighting Calvary, Earl Schenck Miers’ The Web of Victory: Grant at Vicksburg, Fletcher Pratt’s The Civil War and Civil War in Pictures, and Katherine M. Jones’ collection Heroines of Dixie – Confederate Women Tell Their Story of War. But these remain copyrighted until 2051.

Other pieces of history may remain off limits as well. These range from the first issue of Sports Cars Illustrated (renamed Car and Driver) and the first issue of William F. Buckley’s National Review, to the May 9, 1955, episode of I Love Lucy featuring Harpo Marx and Lucille Ball and Elvis Presley’s first television appearance (on Louisiana Hayride, March 5, 1955), to artworks such as Pablo Picasso’s Don Quixote, Rene Magritte’s Masked Apples, and Ansel Adams’ Half Dome Blowing Snow, 1955.

The (Life Plus) 70 Year Itch . . .

Think of the movies from 1955 that would have become available this year. You could have shared clips online with your friends. You could have shown the full films in your local theater. You could have spliced and remixed and made documentaries about them. Instead, here are a few of the movies that we won’t see in the public domain for another 39 years:

• The Seven Year Itch, directed by Billy Wilder; starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell
• Lady and the Tramp, Walt Disney Productions’ classic animation
• Mister Roberts, directed by John Ford; starring Henry Fonda, James Cagney, and Jack Lemmon
• Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly
• The thriller The Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton; starring Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters
• Two of James Dean’s three major motion pictures: East of Eden, directed by Elia Kazan and co-starring Raymond Massey and Julie Harris; and Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray and co-starring Natlie Woods, Sal Mineo, and Jim Backus
• Hollywood versions of major Broadway musicals such as Oklahoma! and Guys and Dolls
• Richard III, Laurence Olivier’s film version of the Shakespeare play, co-starring Claire Bloom, Cedric Hardwicke, Nicholas Hannen, Ralph Richardson, and John Gielgud

Chained Melodies, and Molecules . . .

If you wanted to find guitar tabs or sheet music or record your own version of some of the great music of the 1950s, January 1, 2012, could have been a productive day for you under the old copyright laws — Unchained Melody (Hy Zaret & Alex North), Ain’t That a Shame (Antoine “Fats” Domino and Dave Bartholomew), Blue Suede Shoes (Carl Perkins), Folsom Prison Blues (Johnny Cash), The Great Pretender (Buck Ram), Maybellene (Chuck Berry, Russ Fratto, & Alan Freed), and Tutti Frutti (Richard Penniman (aka Little Richard), Dorothy LaBostrie, & Joe Lubin), would have all become available.

What if you were interested in scientific developments in 1955 (the year that Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates were born)? Many copyrighted scientific journal articles about, for example, the synthesis of DNA- and RNA-like molecules, the effect of placebos, the experimental confirmation of the existence of the antiproton, fibre optics, or the synthesis of mendelevium remain behind paywalls (see here, here, here, here, and here.) (Not all scientific publishers work under this kind of copyright scheme. “Open Access” scientific publications, like those of the Public Library of Science, are under Creative Commons attribution licenses, meaning that they can be copied freely from the day they are published.)

The Public Domain Snatchers . . .

Most of the works highlighted here are famous — that is why we included them. And if that fame meant that the work was still being exploited commercially 28 years after its publication, the authors would probably renew the copyright. (This is true for many of the works featured on this page, though even a surprising percentage of successful works exhaust their commercial potential very quickly.) But we know from the Copyright Office that 85% of authors did not renew their copyrights (for books, the number is even higher — 93% did not renew), since most works exhaust their commercial value very quickly.

Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Up to 85% of all copyrighted works from 1983 might have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2012.

That means that all these examples from 1955 are only the tip of the iceberg. If the pre-1978 law were still in effect, we could have seen 85% of the works created in 1983 enter the public domain on January 1, 2012. Imagine what that would mean to our archives, our libraries, our schools and our culture. Such works could be digitized, preserved, and made available for education, for research, for future creators. Instead, they will remain under copyright for decades to come, perhaps even into the next century. Think of the cultural harm that does. In addition, because most of these works are orphan works — works that are still presumably under copyright, but commercially unavailable and with no identifiable copyright holder — no one is benefiting from continued protection, while the works remain both commercially unavailable and culturally off limits. (You can read more about the current costs associated with orphan works here and here.) It seems that The Public Domain Snatchers is not the stuff of fiction.

1 Many works published in 1955 are already in the public domain because the copyright holder did not comply with notice, renewal, or other copyright formalities. However, tracking down this information can be difficult (you can read just one of many illustrative examples collected by the Copyright Office here). Therefore, users often have to presume these works are copyrighted or risk a lawsuit (only works published before 1923 are conclusively in the public domain). You can read more about copyright terms from this excellent chart and from the US Copyright Office’s guide.
  
It is also difficult to determine whether foreign works are in the public domain. Generally speaking, as a result of international agreements, foreign works published after 1923 are still under copyright in the US as long as one of the following is true: they were published in compliance with US formalities, they were still copyrighted in their home countries as of 1996, or they were then published in the US within 30 days of publication abroad. You can learn more about copyright terms for foreign works from the Copyright Office guide here.
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicd.../2012/pre-1976





The Year When Rock Just Spun Its Wheels
Jon Caramanica

Every week since the end of May the band Sublime With Rome has had at least one song, sometimes two, on Billboard’s Rock Songs chart or its Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart, often both. The most successful have been “Panic” and “Take It or Leave It,” both true to the band’s mission to reincarnate the band Sublime, whose singer, Brad Nowell, died in 1996, and whose ska-lite Sublime With Rome both covers and, in its originals, shamelessly apes.

It is pure historical re-enactment, interrupted only to write new material in the style of the band it’s standing in for, like the hired hand who steps in for the mystery-novel author who keels over before finishing a trilogy. It’s designed to satisfy fans who still crave the feeling, if not quite the author himself. It quenches pre-existing thirst.

Anomaly? No. The same can be said of almost the whole of major-label rock these days, a musical universe in crisis like no other, full of old bands spinning their wheels, praying for one more summer out under big-tour sheds, and their young reinforcements, not much more than a field of dullards who are the artistic equivalent of grocery store generic brands.

2011 may well be remembered as the most numbing year for mainstream rock music in history. (For the purposes of this article, that’s more or less rock released on American major labels, regardless of origin, and played on mainstream rock radio stations.) The genre didn’t produce a single great album, and the best of the middling walked blindly in footprints laid out years, even decades, earlier. Plenty of juggernauts — U2 and Bruce Springsteen, among others — took the year off, but the genre’s failings are creative, not commercial. At this point rock is becoming a graveyard of aesthetic innovation and creativity, a lie perpetrated by major labels, radio conglomerates and touring concerns, all of whom need — or feel they need — the continued sustenance of this style of music. The fringes remain interesting, and regenerate constantly, but the center has been left to rot.

Declaring a genre dead is the worst, least imaginative sort of proclamation, so let’s call it zombified: it moves, it takes up space, it looks powerful from afar — with oodles of bands working hard, and some even making money — and garish up close. It lacks nutrients. How else to explain the critical consensus around a band like Foster the People, whose album, “Torches” (StarTime/Columbia), was one of the most lauded rock albums of the year by an emerging band, even though it did little to add to the soul-infused lite-rock of the 1980s. And what of the Black Keys, who have committed themselves to undistinguished garage-soul and have cruelly outlasted their onetime peers the White Stripes? Their latest, “El Camino” (Nonesuch), is one long airless, swingless jam, a flat boogie primer for foreigners and marketers. Or take a less acclaimed but still popular band: the colossally dopey Hot Chelle Rae, which on “Whatever” (RCA) recalls the early breakthroughs of pop-punk bands like Sum 41 and Blink-182, though with sprinkles of power-pop and hip-hop.

These bands at least are doing their best to resist the tides around them, borrowing from different influences than their far more numerous neighbors. Those bands — Nickelback on “Here And Now” (Roadrunner), Chevelle on “Hats Off to the Bull” (Epic), Disturbed on the B-sides collection “The Lost Children” (Reprise) — all released big albums this year that work the post-grunge rock spectrum, to varying degrees of success but with equal amounts of innovation, which is to say little. The burly guitars are the same, as are the melancholy choruses, the assertive but not affirming drumming and the sense that this has all been done before, and better (in some cases by Nickelback itself, several years ago). Daughtry almost fell into this same trap, as it has in the past, but avoided it by taking its morbid power rock and moving toward Bon Jovi hopefulness on its new album, the largely enjoyable “Break the Spell” (19/RCA).

Even for those whose version of arena rock didn’t lean so heavily on groaning, this was a terrible year full of creative flops, and often commercial flops, by long-reliable acts that failed to arouse even their typical level of interest: Evanescence’s “Evanescence” (Wind-Up), Blink-182’s “Neighborhoods” (DGC/Interscope), Coldplay’s “Mylo Xyloto” (Capitol). That’s to say nothing of the airless comeback albums by bands well past their sell-by date: the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “I’m With You” (Warner Brothers), Limp Bizkit’s “Gold Cobra” (Interscope), R.E.M.’s “Collapse Into Now” (Warner Brothers), Sum 41’s “Screaming Bloody Murder” (Island). There was also the outrageously fraught “Lulu” (Warner Brothers), by Lou Reed and Metallica, which defied most categorization yet somehow still falls neatly into this one.

Scale in and of itself need not be a deterrent to creativity; look at hip-hop, where plenty of sonic innovations take place on the biggest stages, proffered by the biggest stars. Even major-label country, no firestorm of originality, has been riskier in the last decade than major-label rock, which is hiding out in a few comfortable modes, hoping no one will ask much more of it.

But it wasn’t so long ago that major-label rock had bursts of vitality; at least two infusions of energy in the last two decades kept it slightly unpredictable. There was Nirvana’s breakthrough in 1991, which brought grunge to the mainstream and also unapologetically splattered the advances of 1980s alternative rock — college rock back then — all over a huge canvas. And a decade ago came the arrival of bands like the Strokes, the White Stripes and several others whose creative vision revolved around a definite article, who ascended quickly from the indie-rock underground to something grander without sacrificing the fundamental quirks that helped them connect in the first place.

The veteran band with the best 2011 was Foo Fighters, which continued its quest to average-out all the great rock albums from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s on “Wasting Light” (Roswell/RCA). The band won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Rock Video, besting four younger but probably not better bands (the Black Keys, Mumford & Sons, Foster the People and Cage the Elephant); in his acceptance speech, the frontman, Dave Grohl, once of Nirvana, took a stand that almost certainly fell on deaf ears: “I just want to say, never lose faith in real rock ’n’ roll music, you know what I mean? Never lose faith in that.”

About an hour after Mr. Grohl’s speech, the lone rock band of the night performed: Young the Giant, which made a tepid showing as if to rebuke Mr. Grohl for his empty hope. Which was a shame, because that band’s self-titled debut (on Roadrunner) is one of the year’s most careful major-label releases, a modest reframing of the breakthrough indie rock of the 1990s that, while pushing no boundaries, still felt promising, a foundation for something riskier. The same could be said of Needtobreathe, which has done a good job of being the next Kings of Leon, except with a more potent motor; its album “The Reckoning” (Atlantic) felt dangerous in places, as apt to seek out idiosyncratic harmonies as sticky melodies.

These bands are a couple of rare bright spots working in the major-label system. Add to that pile Paramore, which didn’t release an album this year. It stands out not only for its ability to match manic energy and powerhouse melodies, but also that it’s fronted by a woman, Hayley Williams, one of the most convincing singers in mainstream rock. It doesn’t help that some bands are beginning to bypass major labels altogether. The Gaslight Anthem, for example, has the potential to make huge, sweeping, pastoral post-Springsteen anthems, but thus far it has committed to doing so on an independent label.

Can you blame it? Too often major labels continue to commit resources to bands whose albums linger on the Rock Albums chart for months, free of ambition. 30 Seconds to Mars recently set a Guinness World Record for most shows performed in a single album cycle (over 300), which, viewed cynically, means it was easier for them to play old songs than write new ones. The album in question, “This Is War” (Virgin), was released in 2009 and only certified gold a few weeks ago. It’s a post-industrial, post-prog yelp-fest, a faint tracing of an early Nine Inch Nails album, and were it not for the fact that its lead singer is Jared Leto, it might have fizzled some time ago.

But here’s to another 300 shows by 30 Seconds to Mars, if only as a reminder of the band’s fundamental flimsiness, and of the flimsy system that props it up. It’s a living funeral, and it’s got to come tumbling down sometime.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/a...-chevelle.html





Spotify's Daniel Ek: The Most Important Man In Music

Daniel Ek created a free, Facebook-enabled platform that could save the recording industry from piracy–and iTunes.
Steven Bertoni

It’s a typically damp, dark November afternoon in Stockholm, and Daniel Ek is ill. Over the past month the 28-year-old chief executive of Spotify has worn himself down jetting from his Swedish base to San Francisco, New York, Denmark, the Netherlands and France to visit his expanding sales force and launch his music service in one or another of the dozen countries it now operates in.

But there’s no rest for the weary. Next week he’s scheduled to return to New York to unveil Spotify’s new platform in front of his first-ever press conference—a platform that he admits still isn’t ready for a public debut. “I should be home in bed,” sighs Ek, his voice weak and scratchy, “but we need to get this thing perfect.” So the bald, barrel-chested Ek zips his white hoodie to his chin, swaps tea for his morning cup of coffee—the first of six he throws down in a typical day—and heads into an office that resembles a university library during finals. The pool table has been traded for more IKEA desks, and gray daybeds offer a place to nap between all-nighters. Forgoing his large office, which he mostly uses as a meeting room, Ek plops himself down at an open desk. Around him, a dozen engineers from nearly as many countries, united by their geek-chic uniforms—skinny jeans, printed T-shirts and cardigans—frantically bang out code on their silver MacBooks.

All this frenetic energy reflects the strange new reality of the music business. More than New York or L.A. or Nashville, this rented office space along Stockholm’s Birger Jarlsgatan has become the most important place in music, with Ek now standing as the industry’s most important player. Superstar bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers—formed the year Ek was born—now trek to Sweden to kiss the ring; he sits shotgun in vintage cars with Neil Young (his iPhone boasts a picture of them cruising in a white 1959 Lincoln Continental); he texts breezily with Bono. “Both my (maternal) grandparents were in the music industry,” shrugs Ek, “so I’m fairly grounded about the whole thing.”

The music industry has been waiting more than a decade for Ek. Or more specifically, someone—anyone—who could build something (a) more enticing to consumers than piracy while (b) providing a sustainable revenue model. In the 1990s Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker essentially broke the recording industry with their short-lived illegal download site, Napster, which Ek describes as “the Internet experience that changed me the most.” It was fast and free and limitless—through the site Ek discovered his two favorite bands, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin—and he became one of the 18-to-30-year-olds now considered a lost generation: Those who don’t believe you need to pay for music.

In building his iTunes juggernaut out of the wreckage, Steve Jobs subsequently proved that the cure could be almost as destructive as the disease. By training consumers to buy singles, rather than the CDs that had been the industry’s lifeblood, and taking an outsize cut of the action, Apple stoked the continuing #spiral. Recording industry revenue, a healthy $56.7 billion in 1999, according to IbisWorld, clocked in at about $30 billion in 2011.

Enter a third disrupter, Ek. In the current tech landscape, where Google provides the search, Facebook the identity and Amazon the retail, Ek wants Spotify to supply the soundtrack. As he describes it: “We’re bringing music to the party.” Which explains what’s keeping his sleep-addled engineers on a 24-hour cycle: Rather than a mere music player—albeit one with a revolutionary model that allows legal access to almost every song you’ve ever heard of, on demand, for free—Spotify aims to create an entire music ecosystem.

For a consumer, Spotify is an easy sell: The service’s 10 million active users (people who have listened in the past month) have access to 15 million songs on their desktops, all for the cost of hearing an occasional advertisement. It has the speed and ease of iTunes, the flexibility and breadth of Napster and the attractive pricing of online radio service Pandora. And unlike those predecessors, Spotify was social from the start, with tools that let you share playlists with pals—more than 1.5 billion songs have been swapped on Facebook so far.

After he was bounced as Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker begged Ek to let him invest: “Ever since Napster I’ve dreamt of building a product similar to Spotify,” his introductory e-mail read. The service impressed Mark Zuckerberg, too. “I checked it out and I thought, This is pretty amazing,” the Facebook founder tells me. “They internalized a lot of what we’ve talked about in terms of social design of apps.” That means turning the core product—in Ek’s case, a hard-fought song library—loose on third-party app developers to help Spotify evolve, making it even more tempting to potential customers.

Here’s how that social stickiness translates into revenue: You explore your friends’ playlists, discover new music with apps from Rolling Stone, Billboard and Last.fm, and build your own jukebox. Eventually you want to take it everywhere. That’s where Ek has you trapped. With Spotify you pay for portability—$10 a month buys you access to your collection on your mobile device.

This model has proven it can save the music business—in Sweden. One-third of Ek’s home country has signed up, and about one-quarter of those pay for premium access. According to Mark Dennis, who runs Sony Music in Sweden, Spotify single-handedly stemmed a decade of nonstop revenue drop when it launched in 2008; in 2011 Sweden’s music industry will likely see its first growth since the Clinton Administration, with Spotify accounting for 50% of all sales (up from 25% last year). This in a country that has long been a hotbed of piracy.

Extrapolate that on a global scale and the industry will have its magic bullet. With the stakes nothing less than the future of the recording business Ek arrived in the U.S. in July for a three-front battle with Apple, Amazon and Google. Some 400,000 Americans have already subscribed to the premium plan, according to a well-placed music executive, lending credence to Ek’s pitch that he can rescue the record labels by giving their product away for free.

The two facets of Spotify—music and technology—were introduced to Daniel Ek at age 5, when over the course of a few months he received a guitar (his mother’s parents had been an opera signer and a jazz pianist) and a Commodore 20 computer (his father left the family when Ek was a baby, but his stepfather worked in IT). He was a natural at both instruments. Within two years he was writing basic code as MTV played in the background of his family apartment in the rough neighborhood of Ragsved (known to the locals as “Drugsved”).

At 14 Ek latched onto the late-1990s dot-com mania, making commercial websites in his school’s computer lab. The going rate then for a commercial home page was $50,000, but Ek charged $5,000 and made it up in volume: He recruited his teenage friends, training the math whizzes in HTML and the artists in Photoshop. Soon he was netting $15,000 a month and buying every videogame out there (one favorite: a business game called Capitalism).

True to the first generation to grow up online, he sought to master everything Internet. He bought some servers to see what made them tick, and wound up earning another $5,000 a month hosting Web pages. At 16, obsessed with Google’s speed, he applied to be an engineer there (“Google said come back when you have a degree”) and then set out to build his own search company.

That project failed, but led to a gig at a company called Jajja, where he worked on search engine optimization. The money was good, but the high schooler wasn’t really into it. He used the paychecks to buy more servers and tuners to chase his latest obsession: recording every program on TV at once (he had no clue TiVo was pulling off the same trick). The stacks of servers in his room got so hot that Ek would strip to his underwear as soon as he walked in.

After high school Ek enrolled in Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology to study engineering. After eight weeks, realizing that the entire first year would focus solely on theoretical mathematics, he dropped out. Eventually a Stockholm-based ad network called Tradedoubler asked him to build a program to tell them about the sites they contracted with, and Ek built something so effective that the company paid him about $1 million for the rights to it in 2006; he made another $1 million selling related patents.

Then things fell apart. A self-made millionaire at 23, Ek found himself holed up alone in the woods 20 miles south of Stockholm enduring a harsh Swedish winter and a harsher bout of depression. Seeking the fast life, he had bought a three-bedroom apartment in central Stockholm, a cherry-red Ferrari Modena and entrée to the city’s hottest clubs. But it was still hard to attract girls, and the big spending attracted the wrong ones. “I was deeply uncertain of who I was and who I wanted to be,” Ek says. “I really thought I wanted to be a much cooler guy than what I was.”

Miserable, he sold the Ferrari and moved into a cabin near his parents, where he played guitar and meditated. Ek had already started three tech companies, but he now toyed with the idea of getting by as a professional musician. (Ek plays guitar, bass, drums, piano and harmonica; he doesn’t sing). “I wouldn’t be rich, but I could have made a living.” There in the woods Ek finally decided he’d somehow marry music and tech, the two passions that drove him. During this time Ek started hanging out with Tradedoubler’s chairman, Martin Lorentzon, an energetic 42-year-old who works out twice a day. A Silicon Valley veteran (Alta Vista), Lorentzon took Tradedoubler public in 2005, netting himself $70 million. No longer involved in the day-to-day operations, he too was bored and adrift. The first time Ek visited Lorentzon’s Stockholm apartment he found only a mattress and a laptop balancing on an IKEA chair. “I asked him when he had moved in,” says Ek. “When he said it had been more than a year ago, I knew he wasn’t happy.”

The pair bonded over marathons of gangster films like the Godfather trilogy and Carlito’s Way (a ritual they repeat each year). “I got a very strong feeling when I met Daniel,” says Lorentzon. “To partner up I have to like the person like a brother, because we’ll face so many problems. The value of a company is the sum of the problems you solve together.”

Ek doubted Lorentzon would leave Tradedoubler, so later in 2006 he set a one-week deadline. Before they committed to partnering, Lorentzon would have to publicly resign as chairman and #transfer a million euros of seed money into Ek’s account. The next Monday #Tradedoubler sent out a press release announcing Martin Lorentzon’s resignation. Later that day he told Ek to check his bank account. The money was there. The two men had yet to decide the type of business they would start.

Lorentzon and Ek were in a unique place: The former no longer needed the money, and the latter no longer cared about it. So they decided to ignore the dollars and aim for disruption. Their target: music. “It disturbed me that the music industry had gone down the drain, even though people were listening to more music than ever and from a greater diversity of artists,” says Ek.

Sitting in two different rooms at Ek’s apartment, the pair yelled out possible titles for a music site—without even yet knowing what it would do—when Ek misheard one of Lorentzon’s suggestions. He typed the word “Spotify” into Google. There were zero hits (today: 64 million). Ek and Lorentzon registered the name, and started working on the ad-based plan. Once that gelled, they recruited a handful of engineers and took the new team to Barcelona to party and listen to what Ek calls “weird German electro-pop.” Then they got to work.

Back in Stockholm they built a prototype based on the interface of Apple’s iTunes and the sleek black styling of Ek’s Samsung flat-screen TV. Unlike music sites that had launched with pirated music, Ek wouldn’t debut Spotify until he signed deals with the labels. “We wanted to show that we were not in it to use their content to flip the company like others have done,” Ek says.

Ek, with the help of industry lawyer Fred Davis, initially tried to get global music rights and was quickly turned down. So he aimed for European licenses, which he figured would take three months—it took two years. Ek and his team hounded label execs, pitching them that their free, ad-based model would eventually lead to more sales. No one bit. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, this sounds really interesting’ or ‘Send me over some stats,’ which really means ‘There’s no way in hell we’re going to do this,’” Ek says and laughs. “But I was 23 at the time, and I thought, Wow, this is great, we’re going to get this done.”

Ek eventually loaded Spotify with pirated songs and sent demos to industry execs. That got them noticed. “With Spotify people don’t get it until they try it,” Ek says. “Then they tell their friends.” As Ek negotiated with the music companies, Spotify burned through cash. On top of salaries and overhead, Ek and Lorentzon were pledging million-dollar advances to labels for access to their music catalogs. VCs wouldn’t touch them. To stay afloat they plowed nearly $5 million into Spotify, atop the $2 million Lorentzon had already seeded. “We bet our personal fortunes, and sometimes we bet the entire company,” says Ek. “We led with our conviction rather than rational, because rational said it was impossible.” In October 2008 Spotify went live in Scandinavia, France, the U.K. and Spain. It took nearly three more years to finalize deals in the U.S.

“He’s the only tech entrepreneur who’s had the patience to achieve what he has with the record business,” says Sean Parker, now a Spotify board member, who helped open the door to U.S. deals, including one with Facebook. “He has this Zen-like patience and an ability not to crack under pressure or get frustrated. Over and over again he puts himself in a situation where a normal person would have thrown in the towel.” As I talk with Ek in his office, he sits straight and motionless like a Swedish Buddha; the only thing moving is his mouth, not even blinking his icy blue eyes.

Such calm helps manage the chaos: Last year Ek was on the road 100 days—mostly a triangle between Europe, New York and California, a schedule that recently cost him his girlfriend of two years. When he’s in Stockholm, Ek wakes around 8:30 a.m., answers e-mail for an hour, then takes the five-minute walk to Spotify. He spends about 25% of his time recruiting; otherwise he’s at his open desk or walking the floor. “Ek’s one of the few people,” says Parker, “who can handle the technology side, the strategic side and the deal side of the business.”

Ek works in the office until 8 p.m., eats dinner out and then returns home to unwind, either by playing guitar for a few hours or juggling a rotating trio of books (most recently, the Steve Jobs biography, a primer on typography and a guide to bonzai trees). Then he hops back on e-mail, before typically turning in around 2 a.m. Lorentzon wants Ek to find a balance: more exercise, less junk food, more sleep, less work. The last goal will be tough to achieve for the foreseeable future.

Ek bounds up the sleek white stage in Greenwich Village’s Stephan Weiss Studio on Nov. 30, as dozens of typing journalists and rows of live TV cameras stand ready. Though thrilled that the new platform is set for launch, he can’t wait for the press conference to end. When Ek operated just in Europe, he could lie low. But now that Spotify has made it to America—home to the cults of Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg and Jobs—Ek must switch from programmer to preacher. For Spotify to scale, he needs to hype his platform, generate buzz and get labels, artists and now developers to be excited to partner up.

He doesn’t need to win over investors. Ek’s roster has surged over the past few years. Spotify went from some smallish Swedish funding to a heavyweight round from social media elite (Li Ka-shing, Sean Parker and Founders Fund), who collectively put in more than $50 million at a roughly $250 million valuation. This past summer DST, Accel and Kleiner Perkins reportedly invested close to $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. “Daniel was an entrepreneur that we had to, and wanted to, work with,” says Accel’s Jim Breyer. “The combination of a passion for music as well as his idea of making music as frictionless as possible for discovery and sharing is where we hit it off.” Ek still holds about 15% of the company. Thanks to all that seed money, Lorentzon owns some 20%.

With 2.5 million paying customers worldwide (85% pay the $10 a month for portable and the rest pay $5 for ad-free access), plus advertising revenue, Spotify is currently generating a run rate of around $300 million. Using Pandora as a comp, that would make Spot#i#fy worth north of $2 billion—and Ek, at 28, worth over $300 million on paper. But the company is likely worth more: Spot#i#fy has Pandora’s radio capability as well as its limitless library of shareable songs.

Plus, Pandora doesn’t have Spotify’s social media muscle—specifically, Facebook, which is embedded into Ek’s platform, and vice versa. Those billion-plus shared songs don’t happen by accident: Before cinching the deal this September, Ek’s team spent a year perfecting the app, basing five engineers at Facebook’s headquarters. “I don’t think there’s a Facebook app so well-resourced,” says Ek. “We wanted it perfect.” Adds Zuckerberg: “He clearly is very forward-thinking on where he wants to go. He’s very clear on the things he wants for the product and what he doesn’t want.”

The real threat to Ek, ultimately, isn’t his product—it’s the industry Spotify purports to save. Spotify will only be as successful as its music library, and some bands—notably his two favorites, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin—aren’t playing ball. Recently Coldplay and the Black Keys denied Spotify access to their new albums. Scooter Braun, agent to Justin Bieber, understands the thinking but tells me: “They should then tell radio not to play records for free and call YouTube and say don’t allow my music to stream on videos for free.”

More ominously, the initial music licenses expire in two years, and Ek must deliver enough cash flow to prevent the labels from demanding higher royalties—or pulling out all together. (So far, Spotify has paid them about $150 million.) Right now the labels have the leverage, and Ek has wisely brought the big players into the tent—as part of the licensing deals, Spotify granted equity stakes to the four largest music labels (Warner, Universal, EMI and Sony) and Merlin. Industry sources put their collective cut at nearly 20%.

Those stakes, while significant, aren’t enough to automatically quell an insurrection. Ultimately Ek needs to change the power dynamic before the licenses are up. He has two years to make Spotify the world’s dominant music source, a hitmaker so big no label or artist can afford to opt out.

Globally 500 million people listen to music online. With a 2% market share he has plenty of upside, albeit plenty of competition, including iTunes, burgeoning cloud services from Amazon and Google and the pirates Napster set free all those years ago. That’s another motive for opening up Spotify to developers: He’s hoping they’ll turn it into a universal music platform, while allowing him to focus all of his employees, now 500 strong, solely on growth.

“Google has 30,000 employees,” Ek says. “A part of me wonders what if they were all focused on really solving search.” He takes out his iPhone. Using its Siri voice software, he asks it when tomorrow’s first appointment begins. After a few seconds the computerized voice says 11 a.m. “Imagine if this was three times as fast or truly understood my intent,” Ek says. “It’s probably the biggest threat to Google; it’s a whole new way of interacting.”

Does he plan on building a voice activated Spotify interface? He flashes a mischievous smile. “Play me some Coldplay,” he tells the phone. Its small speakers ring out with the opening piano chords of the band’s hit “The Scientist.” “We hacked into it a few weeks ago,” Ek says, with a satisfied nod. “I’m not an inventor. I just want to make things better.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbe...-man-in-music/





Digital Music Sales Beat Physical Music Sales for the First Time
Casey Chan

It took longer than I thought it would (because physical music sales still makes the monies) but digital music sales has finally topped physical music sales. According to Nielsen and Billboard, digital music sales accounted for 50.3% of total music sales, more than half the pie. What took so long?

Well, even though physical music sales has been trending downwards (5% down in 2011) compared to digital music sales (8.4% up), physical album sales still outsell digital album sales (sorta makes sense, people still like buying albums). The difference has been that the growth of digital singles has finally grown big enough to overcome the album gap. After all, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to buy a single mp3 over a single CD or cassette or vinyl or 8track, right? Check out the full Nielsen report here.
http://gizmodo.com/5873471





EMI Sues MP3 Reseller ReDigi
Greg Sandoval

Music buyers may be able to sell their used CDs and vinyl albums, but they're not allowed to sell or distribute used digital tracks and albums in the same way, EMI said in a copyright complaint filed today in New York.

EMI, the label that represents such acts as Coldplay, The Beatles and singer Katy Perry (above) says ReDigi can't make copies of songs to create a market for used-MP3s.

EMI, one of the four largest recorded-music companies, is accusing ReDigi, the startup that enables music owners to sell their unwanted and used MP3s, of numerous counts of copyright infringement, CNET has learned. The suit doesn't come as a surprise.

ReDigi calls itself "the world's first online marketplace for used digital music," and the idea of selling "used" digital files had people in tech scratching their heads soon after a test version of the service was launched in October. The notion of selling a digital file, which can be so simply reproduced, sounded strange. A month later, CNET reported that lawyers from the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group representing the four major labels, had sent the company a cease-and-desist letter.

ReDigi did not respond to an interview request.

In its 18-page complaint, filed in a New York federal court, EMI alleged that to operate its business, ReDigi must make numerous unauthorized copies of songs and that that violates copyright law. ReDigi says it scans a user's computer hard drive to obtain a copy of the song the person wants to sell and then deletes the copy on the seller's hard drive. But there's no way ReDigi can guarantee that users haven't made copies of their music libraries and stored them elsewhere.

ReDigi CEO Ossenmacher seemed to acknowledge this in an interview with The New York Times in October. "If someone willfully wants to violate copyright law," he said, "then there may be ways that they can ultimately beat the system."

Nonetheless, he and his company assert that the sale of digital music is protected under the same "First Sale" doctrine that protects the sale of CDs, vinyl records, DVDs, and other physical goods. The company also works to protect against selling pirated music through a verification system.

In the complaint, EMI asserted that the First Sale doctrine enables owners of lawfully obtained CDs and records to sell these items but claims that ReDigi isn't distributing lawfully obtained music.

"Rather ReDigi and its users are making and distributing unauthorized copies of that original file," EMI said in the complaint. "The Copyright Act defines 'copy' and 'phonorecord' as material objects in which a work or sounds are fixed respectively...Neither ReDigi nor its users resell the original material object that resided on the original user's computer. Rather... [ReDigi and users] duplicate digital files both in uploading and downloading discrete copies distinct from the original file that originally resided on a user's computer."

EMI is saying that ReDigi is not selling the same bits and bytes that a user/seller downloads from--say , iTunes or Amazon. According to EMI's lawsuit, the law requires it to do just that.

The area of selling used MP3s is largely untested in the courts, and I couldn't find any instance in which a party tried to claim that digital songs were covered by the First Sale doctrine. On the other hand, the issue of making unauthorized copies of music has been addressed a number of times.

In the late 1990s, MP3.com, one of the trailblazers in cloud music, decided to augment its service with a feature that would enable users to access song files from the company's servers from anywhere they could connect to the Web. The company would scan a user's hard drive, see what music was there, and then give the user access to copies of the same music. Federal Judge Jed Rakoff found that copies could not be made for commercial use without the copyright owner's permission.

Then there was BlueBeat, a company that was charging 25 cents to stream remastered Beatles songs and later argued that it owned the copyright to the music it offered because they were "psycho-acoustic simulations."

BlueBeat argued that because it rerecorded the Beatles songs and ran them through filtering software, they were original works. The plaintiff in the case argued that the tracks people heard were, but for a few tiny changes, the original Beatles recordings. The judge ruled that BlueBeat needed a copyright owner's permission before distributing music commercially.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57...seller-redigi/





New Lawsuit Means All Major Labels Are Suing Grooveshark
Ben Sisario

Grooveshark, a popular digital music service that is being sued for copyright infringement by three of the four major record companies, now has problems with the one big label that it has a licensing deal with.

On Wednesday, EMI Music Publishing filed suit against Grooveshark’s parent company, the Escape Media Group, for breach of contract, saying that since striking the deal in 2009, Escape has “made not a single royalty payment to EMI, nor provided a single accounting statement.”

In the suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, EMI seeks unspecified damages. But in a series of recent e-mails and legal correspondence included with the filing as evidence, EMI asks Grooveshark for at least $150,000 in royalties.

In a statement, Grooveshark said: “This is a contract dispute that we expect to resolve.”

Grooveshark lets users upload songs to the company’s servers, which other users can then stream free. Founded in 2006, it has signed up 35 million users and attracted major advertisers like Mercedes-Benz.

With the music industry coming to rely more and more on fully licensed services like Spotify and Rhapsody that stream music by subscription, EMI’s suit highlights the legal gray zone in which Grooveshark operates.

Grooveshark says its service is legal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a federal law that protects Internet companies that host third-party material if they comply with take-down notices from copyright holders.

But the company has repeatedly run afoul of the big music companies. EMI made its licensing deal with Grooveshark only after it settled an earlier copyright infringement case. And late last year, the Universal Music Group, the largest label, filed a federal copyright infringement case against Grooveshark, with Sony Music and the Warner Music Group later joining the suit.

Last year, a consortium of investors led by Sony made a deal with Citigroup, EMI’s owner, to buy the company’s publishing division for $2.2 billion. Universal, owned by the French conglomerate Vivendi, agreed to buy EMI’s recorded music division for $1.9 billion. Both deals are subject to approval from government regulators.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...g-grooveshark/





AP and 28 News Groups Going After Aggregators
Joshua Philipp

The Associated Press and 28 other news organizations have launched a project to collect fees from aggregators who are reposting their content around the Web.

The project, knowns as NewsRight, will be a separate business that will license original news from the media companies, and collect royalties from aggregators, according to Poynter. The project was formerly known as the News Registry and News Licensing Group, and has been in the pipeline for several years now.

There are a other companies doing this already, including the non-profit Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), which represents a large list of content providers including newspapers, books, blogs, and journals. There was also the ill-fated company Righthaven, which put copyright trolls on the map by leveraging lawsuits and threats of lawsuits to collect fees from bloggers and other websites.

NewsRight is just about news organizations though, and it’s already very, very large. It currently has 28 co-investors, 30 additional companies taking part, and 800 news websites. Among its 28 partner organizations are big names including New York Times Co. and Washington Post Co., as well as “most mid-sized newspaper chains, public and private,” states Poynter.

Some of the few big names it is currently missing are in the pipeline: Gannett, Tribune, Cox and News Corp. Poynter spoke with CEO David Westin, who told them they are currently negotiating with all four to bring them on as either participants or investors.

“With Associated Press stories and content from a Who’s Who of newspapers, it will represent a significant one-stop shopping opportunity for aggregators willing to pay,” states Poynter.

NewsRight will target companies that “make heavy (and commercial) use of content originated elsewhere. They are being asked to become payers rather than free riders,” states Poynter.

The exact method isn’t clear yet. Whether this will be a massive copyright trolling campaign, or a way of news organizations to sell news online while giving something valuable, has yet to be seen.

Poynter gives mixed data on NewsRight’s use of lawsuits. It says lawsuits likely won’t be used at first, but “lawsuits and threats of lawsuits will eventually be part of the NewsRight playbook,” Poynter states. It adds, however, that lawsuits will not be the main focus. Rather, it will be “much more diplomatic and technology-driven.”

NewsRight will mainly work in a similar manner to the CCC, which depends on voluntary compliance (but this may refer to voluntary under threat of lawsuits, or being labelled as operating unethically).

The first salesperson for NewsRight will start this week, according to Poynter. The company and its 11 employees are based in the AP headquarters in New York City.
http://techzwn.com/2012/01/ap-28-new...m-aggregators/





Sweet Irony: Righthaven Sued By Company it Used to Sue Others
Nate Anderson

Righthaven is in the final throes of full collapse. The copyright lawsuit factory claimed to have less than $1,000 in operating capital when opposition lawyers attempted to collect a judgment against Righthaven, and the company's lawyers have simply been ignoring court actions and have not shown up for proceedings. One Righthaven defendant is now asking a court to hold them in contempt.

To add to Righthaven's indignities, the company is now being sued by its process server, Las Vegas-based Legal Wings, Inc. Legal Wings claims that Righthaven rang up $5,670 in charges during 2010 (note: this was even before Righthaven began listing like an oil tanker on a reef) but has refused to pay up.

"Plaintiff has made repeated demands for payment of the monies dues and owing on the Agreement, but the Defendant has failed and refused, and still fails and refuses to pay the balance owed to Plaintiff," says a new court action from Legal Wings, which wants its cash.

One gets the strong sense that Righthaven sees the legal system as a sort of winepress, terrific for squeezing smalltime bloggers until the cash flows out. But when the majesty of the law attempts to put the squeeze on Righthaven, it's fine to simply walk away.

Fortunately, Righthaven's alleged sin in this particular case is simply walking away from a $5,670 debt. Had it been something as horrific as posting a local news article on a blog, the company could be facing up to $150,000 in fines.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...sue-others.ars





Lenovo, ZTE Said Uniting to Stop Apple, Microsoft Lawsuits

Lenovo and ZTE may lead Chinese patent defense

Chinese smartphone designers are quietly forming a pact to fend off patent lawsuits from Apple, Microsoft, and Nokia, a rumor maintained Friday. Lenovo and ZTE, as well as smaller firms like Coolpad, Konka, and TCL, were said by Digitimes to be forming a collective. The details weren't given, although a patent defense would most likely involve pooling patent resources together and sharing resources on how to work around other companies' patents.

Some of the companies might not directly need help, since companies with 3G and 4G specialties like Huawei and ZTE have their own related patents.

The coalition hasn't been independently confirmed, but it would come at a time when Chinese companies are drawing legal attention as their share of the smartphone market grows. Microsoft has been pushing Huawei on a deal to make it pay a royalty on every Android device. Apple and Nokia have mostly stayed out of China, although Apple's wins against HTC could impact the overall Chinese market.

China just recently became the largest smartphone market through sheer population. Although most can't afford smartphones in the country, the size and newness of the market gives it both a larger base and more room to grow.
http://www.electronista.com/articles...atent.defense/





Text Messaging Is in Decline in Some Countries
Brian X. Chen

Perhaps to the chagrin of cellphone carriers, all signs point to text messaging’s continuing its decline in several parts of the world.

In Finland, there was a significant drop on Christmas Eve, one of the busiest days of the year for texting, Tero Kuittinen, a senior analyst at M.G.I. Research, wrote in a blog post for Forbes.

Cellphone customers on Sonera, a Finnish mobile network, sent 8.5 million text messages on Christmas Eve, down from 10.9 million on the same day the previous year, Mr. Kuittinen said, citing a report by the Finnish national broadcasting service. DNA, a Finnish carrier for younger customers, also experienced a decline, with subscribers sending 5.6 million messages, down from 5.9 million in 2010.

In Hong Kong there was a steep decline in text messaging on Christmas Day, down nearly 14 percent compared to the previous year, according to Mr. Kuittinen.

Australians, too, sent fewer text messages — down 9 percent from 2010, according to Richard Blundell, an independent blogger who hashed together data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Telstra, an Australian carrier.

The fading allure of text messaging is most likely tied to the rise of alternative services like Facebook, Twitter, BlackBerry Messenger and iMessage, which allow customers to send messages free using a cellphone’s Internet connection, analysts say.

Here in the United States, the number of text messages sent by cellphone customers is still growing, but that growth is gradually slowing, according to John Hodulik, a telecom analyst with UBS. His data, published in June, found that texting in the United States grew 10 percent in the first quarter of 2011. That was down from 16 percent growth in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Mr. Kuttinen said he predicts “SMS erosion” will hit AT&T and Verizon in the next two years.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...ome-countries/





Users Bail on Windows XP Big-Time
Gregg Keizer

Microsoft's Windows XP shed a large amount of usage share again last month as users continued to desert the decade-old operating system for Windows 7.

Windows XP lost 2.4 percentage points of share to post a December average of 46.5 percent, a new low for the aged OS in the tracking of Web metrics firm Net Applications. The month's fall nearly matched the record 2.5-point drop of October.

In the four months from September to December, XP jettisoned more than 11 percent of its share as of September 1, falling by nearly six percentage points during the period.

The four months prior to that -- May through August -- XP lost only 3.4 points, or about 8.5 percent of the share it owned as of May 1.

Windows 7 has been the beneficiary of XP's decline, gaining 2.4 percentage points last month to reach 37 percent. In the same four months that XP lost 5.9 points, Windows 7 grew by 6.4 points, taking up the slack from not only Microsoft's oldest supported OS, but also the hapless Windows Vista. (See also "How to Upgrade from XP to Windows 7.")

If the usual trend repeats, Windows XP will lose an even larger chunk of usage share this month: In both 2009 and 2010, XP's share fell 40 to 48 percent more in January than it did the previous month, most likely because of year-end purchases of new PCs equipped with Windows 7. With that in mind, XP's share could plummet by as much as 3.5 points this month.

Heeding Microsoft's Advice

The acceleration of XP's decline shows that users have gotten Microsoft's message that the operating system should be retired.

In July, Microsoft told customers it was "time to move on" from XP, reminding everyone that the OS would exit all support in April 2014. Before that, the Internet Explorer (IE) team had dismissed XP as the "lowest common denominator" when they explained why it wouldn't run IE9.

Two months ago, as Microsoft quietly celebrated the 10th anniversary of XP's retail launch, the company touted the motto "Standing still is falling behind" to promote Windows 7 and demote XP.

XP's hastened waning -- of the 12.4 percentage points it lost in the last 12 months, almost half came in the last four -- changes the date when the old OS will likely lose its primary spot in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Projections based on Net Applications' data now indicate that Windows 7 will become the most widely used version in April, several months earlier than previous estimates.

By the time Windows 8 debuts -- October seems the most probable on-sale date -- Windows 7 will have captured between 50 percent and 52 percent of the operating system usage market.

Windows 8's share also grew very slightly last month to 0.05 percent, or five PCs out of every 10,000, from 0.03 percent in November. That OS has yet to enter beta -- Microsoft has set the release for late February -- but a developer's preview has been available for three and a half months.

Net Applications calculates operating system usage share with data obtained from more than 160 million unique visitors who browse 40,000 Web sites that the company monitors for clients. More operating system stats can be found on the company's site.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2471...p_bigtime.html





Iran Mounts New Web Crackdown

Rule calls for surveillance cameras in Internet cafes; launch of National Internet is seen nearing
Farnaz Fassihi

Iran is mounting new clampdowns on Internet expression, including rules that will impose layers of surveillance in the country's popular Internet cafes, as Tehran's political establishment comes under increasing strains from economic turmoil and threats of more international sanctions.

In the most sweeping move, Iran issued regulations giving Internet cafes 15 days to install security cameras, start collecting detailed personal information on customers and document users' online footprints.

Until now, Iran's cybercafes have been a youth-culture mainstay of most towns and neighborhoods, used not only by activists but also by other Iranians who believe the security of their home computers is already compromised.

Iranian users also have reported more blocked sites this week, as well as new barriers to accessing social-networking services. Internet connections, too, have bogged down.

The network slowdown likely heralds the arrival of an initiative Iran has been readying—a "halal" domestic intranet that it has said will insulate its citizens from Western ideology and un-Islamic culture, and eventually replace the Internet. This week's slowdown came amid tests of the Iranian intranet, according to domestic media reports that cited a spokesman for a union of computer-systems firms. He said the intranet is set to go live within a few weeks.

Taken together, the moves represent Iran's boldest attempts to control flows of online information—a persistent thorn in the side of Tehran's political establishment since activists used the Internet to plan and document mass protests against what they said was a rigged election that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to office in 2009.

The video surveillance brings Iran further into the vanguard of nations that have sought to keep tabs on Internet use. Libya under Moammar Gadhafi ran extensive web-monitoring operations. China has sophisticated website filtering and an army of censors patrolling chat rooms. China and Cuba require Internet-cafe users to present identification.

New laws on these cafes are seen as a bid to head off protests like those in 2009.

Tehran is imposing the crackdown amid a politically fraught run-up to Iran's March 2 parliamentary elections. Reformist political parties have already boycotted the vote. Meanwhile, Iran faces deepening economic pressures. International sanctions have crimped foreign sales and investments, inflation has been steep and the currency has dropped 40% against the U.S. dollar since late December.

The rial's record lows have come in part as the European Union and U.S. have threatened to place sanctions on Iran's central bank and impose an embargo on Iranian crude for what they allege is Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran denies. A recent rhetorical battle between Iranian and U.S. military officials about access to waters of the Persian Gulf—through which one-fifth of the world's oil passes daily—raised fears of a possible military confrontation.

With the latest moves, the government is aiming to sow fear ahead of elections and curtail planned protests, say activists and observers in Iran and abroad. The Iranian judiciary announced last week that any calls to boycott elections, delivered on social-networking sites or by email, would be considered crimes against national security.

"They want to execute a plan where no one has protection, so they can trace whoever is involved in what they perceive as antigovernment activity at any given moment and at any location," said Ehsan Norouzi, an Iranian cybersecurity expert who left Iran after 2009 and now lives in Germany.

Tehran hasn't directly commented on the measures. The Islamic Republic, however, has long battled the Internet's influence and tried to filter access to sites, such as pornography or even fashion, that didn't fit within the norms of a conservative Islamic society. Since 2009, Iranian officials have widened their Internet monitoring to fight what they say is a "soft war" of culture and ideology against it, That year they formed the Cyber Police, a task force drawn from various security arms, which the government says has trained some 250,000 members.

In the past week, Iranian Internet users say the government has blocked access to VPNs—secure Internet networks that are located abroad—and foiled one of the ways users have attempted to gain entry to closed websites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In recent weeks the government also has targeted a popular currency-tracking site and pages belonging to prominent politicians, among others.

"They are closing in on us, and we are already feeling the dire impact of these announcements. Everyone is afraid," a prominent student activist said in an email exchange from Iran. "It will make it very difficult for us to tell the world what's happening here."

The new rules on cybercafes, issued by the Cyber Police and published Wednesday in several Iranian newspapers, require customers at the cafes to provide their name, father's name, address, telephone and national identification numbers before logging on.

The venues must install security cameras that will let the government match users to the computer they used. They also must log each user's browsing history, including the IP addresses of every Internet page visited. This data, along with the video images, must be saved for six months and provided to the Cyber Police on demand, according to the regulation.

"These rules are aimed at promoting transparency and organization for Internet businesses and offer more protection against online abuse," according to the text of the regulation.

Internet cafe owners in Tehran expressed anger at the rules, saying they would cause customers to shun their establishments, forcing them to close. "Do they think I'm running a security shop, to ask people for their ID number and put a guard above their head to monitor their Web activity? Are they insane?" the owner of a well-known Tehran Internet cafe said by telephone.

Separately, Iran's government appears to have enlisted an army of users to promote it on the Internet.

A conservative cleric blogger based in the holy Shiite city of Qum, Ahmad Najimi, said in his blog last week that the government was paying hackers hired in the network known as the "Cyber Army" the equivalent of $7 per hour to swarm the Web with positive comments about the Islamic Republic and post negative comments against dissidents.

That is consistent with comments from the Revolutionary Guards Corps' commander in Tehran, General Hossein Hamedani, who in October announced the creation of two Cyber War centers in the capital. Gen. Hamedani said some 2,000 bloggers had been recruited and trained as Cyber Army staff.

"In the soft war against Iran, there is an opportunity for everyone to be present and we have to be ready for widespread counterattacks," Mr. Hamedani said, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.

Iran announced in March 2011 that it was funding a multimillion-dollar project to build an Iranian intranet—a necessity, its telecommunications ministry said, to offer Iranians an alternative to the un-Islamic and corrupt content on the World Wide Web. An economic affairs official called it "a genuinely halal network, aimed at Muslims on an ethical and moral level."

An Iranian newspaper this week cited Payam Karbasi, the spokesman for Corporate Computer Systems of Iran, a professional union, as saying the network would be launched in coming weeks.

The network would first run parallel to the global Internet, Iranian telecommunications officials have said, with banks, government ministries and big industries allowed to access the global Internet.

But eventually, officials have said, the entire country—which the government estimates has some 23 million Internet users—would switch over. But many experts are skeptical that Iran could pull off such a project, saying the economy would suffer if its commercial entities are closed off.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...916386248.html





Uganda Mandates Mobile Phone Users Register Phones to Fight Terrorism

In an effort to combat terrorism and reduce crime, the Ugandan government is urging all mobile phone users to register their SIM cards; beginning in March, all new and existing mobile phone numbers must be registered before they can be activated; according to the Ugandan Communication Commission, the move will allow law enforcement agencies to identify owners and track down malicious actors who use phones to conduct illegal activities
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....ight-terrorism





U.S. Government Threatens Free Speech With Calls for Twitter Censorship

“[T]he ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas....That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.”
— Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissent in Abrams v. United States, 1919

EFF has witnessed a growing number of calls in recent weeks for Twitter to ban certain accounts of alleged terrorists. In a December 14th article in the New York Times, anonymous U.S. officials claimed they “may have the legal authority to demand that Twitter close” a Twitter account associated with the militant Somali group Al-Shabaab. A week later, the Telegraph reported that Sen. Joe Lieberman contacted Twitter to remove two “propaganda” accounts allegedly run by the Taliban. More recently, an Israeli law firm threatened to sue Twitter if they did not remove accounts run by Hezbollah.

Twitter is right to resist. If the U.S. were to pressure Twitter to censor tweets by organizations it opposes, even those on the terrorist lists, it would join the ranks of countries like India, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Syria, Uzbekistan, all of which have censored online speech in the name of “national security.” And it would be even worse if Twitter were to undertake its own censorship regime, which would have to be based upon its own investigations or relying on the investigations of others that certain account holders were, in fact, terrorists.

Let's review the various calls for Twitter to censor their site and the possible causes of action:

Private Lawyers

While the unnamed U.S. official was mum about where the “legal authority” to censor would come from, the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center, an Israeli advocacy law firm, wrote a letter to Twitter saying they may be liable for criminal and civil prosecution for hosting accounts run by Hezbollah and other groups designated by the US Department of State as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) under the “material support” provisions of the Patriot Act.

Let’s start with the threat from the law firm, since it’s easily disposed of. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." In other words, Twitter cannot be held liable in a civil action for the speech of other parties using their site. While Section 230 provides an exception for federal criminal prosecutions--meaning websites can still be prosecuted by the government for violating federal law--the 2006 case Doe v. Bates held that private parties, like the law firm, are prevented from circumventing Section 230 by premising their civil claims on criminal statutes.

Congressional Bullying

Next, let’s look at Senator Lieberman. Of course a member of Congress has no actual censorship power, so he cannot himself require Twitter to block anyone. In addition, the Taliban is not on the State Department FTO list, so the Executive branch cannot demand that Twitter take any actions to censor the Taliban under the FTO laws either. According to the Telegraph, aides for Lieberman said the move was “part of a wider attempt to eliminate violent Islamist extremist propaganda from the internet [sic] and social media.” But luckily Twitter pays more attention to the First Amendment than Senator Lieberman, and has so far refused to bow to his desires. The Constitution, and a long line of judicial authority is clear that it’s not the place of a single Congressman to decide what constitutes free speech online.

For Lieberman, calling for Internet censorship is nothing new. He is the same senator who in 2010 called upon Amazon to block WikiLeaks from its servers, even though the U.S. government was constitutionally barred from censoring WikiLeaks in court. Despite having no formal power in that situation either, Lieberman set off a chain reaction that resulted in nearly a dozen intermediaries denying service to the whistle-blowing site. Since then, Lieberman has called for an Internet “kill switch,” which would hand the president unchecked power in a “cybersecurity emergency,” also to be defined by the president, and recently called on Google to institute a terrorism “flag” system to be implemented on all their blogs.

Executive Branch

So private parties and grandstanding Congressmen cannot require Twitter to turn off accounts of those accused of terrorism. Can the Executive? As to Senator Lieberman’s threats, the Executive has not even triggered its authority to declare groups FTOs in the instance of the Taliban, so the answer is no.

As for groups that are FTOs, like Hezbollah and Al-Shabaab, some have pointed to the “material support” laws that were broadened as a result of the Patriot Act and the 2010 Supreme Court case, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project--which held that outside groups coordinating advocacy with a known terrorist group violated the “material support for terrorism” law. While the law is written very broadly, something EFF has long criticized, it has never been interpreted by any court to reach a situation like Twitter. Indeed, in the Humanitarian Law Project case, the Supreme Court, suggested just that. The case focused on specific prohibition on providing “personnel,” “training,” and “expert advice or assistance” for a Department of State-designated terrorist group, and the Court held that the statute “cover[s] only a narrow category of speech to, under the direction of, or in coordination with foreign groups that the speaker knows to be terrorist organizations.”

Twitter is clearly not coordinating, or under the direction of, any FTOs. The company offers a service to hundreds of millions of people, corporations and organizations. It also has no way to track everything said by every person using it, or even to know whether an account is administered by an actual FTO, as opposed to say, a person or group that simply chose that name. This puts it in a difficult position even if it did want to reach out and preemptively censor. Moreover, criminalizing, or even trying to criminalize a neutral communications service like Twitter would set a dangerous precedent --like criminalizing pens and pencils or typewriters and computers based on what people choose to say when using them.

Material support laws as interpreted by the Supreme Court are overbroad, capturing speech that would otherwise be constitutional. Yet even so, we don’t think the material support law can constitutionally reach Twitter here, nor should the Executive try to make it. This is not only because of our concern about the law and free speech, but it would be counterproductive to the government’s own interest.

The Streisand Effect

If Twitter is not required by law to ban the accounts, then shutting down these groups' accounts--no matter how odious their speech--would be a level of censorship the social networking site has heretofore avoided, and with good reason: As Wired points out, "The loss of an official Twitter account would by no means silence terrorist groups. Instead, it would make them go through the inconvenience of relying on less centrally-accessible sock puppet accounts or fanboys to repost messages and links from other outlets."

Indeed, shutting down the pages of determined groups often results in the content being publicized more widely. This phenomenon—known as the Streisand Effect—is a strong argument for the old adage that the best response to "bad" speech is more speech, not censorship.

Kenya’s military—Al-Shabaab’s primary adversary—apparently agrees. In a tweet dated December 20, 2011, Kenyan military spokesperson Major Emmanuel Chirchir stated: “The US is considering closing HSM account. Al Shabaab needs to be engaged positively and twitter [sic] is the only avenue.”

Apparently, when anonymous U.S. officials leaked their desire to censor Twitter in the New York Times a month ago, they didn’t consider the Streisand effect. Before the story, the joke among terrorism experts was about 99 percent of the account's followers were journalists and law enforcement. Afterwards, not only was the government’s contention about their “legal authority” mercilessly mocked, but their comments also helped attract attention to the account they so desperately want to silence: @HSMPress has gained more than 3,000 followers since the piece was published.

In fact, the content of the tweets poses no real or immediate threat to the U.S. The accounts speak in propaganda cliché—at least when they are not correcting the spelling of a Kenyan general or hinting at a Starbucks addiction.

We hope the U.S. government has better things to do than to upend Constitutional law and proceed with unprecedented censorship over a Twitter account that gets into Internet flame wars and professes a love for caramel macchiatos.

Ultimately, Justice Holmes was right: “that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.”

On those grounds the so-called “terrorist” Twitter accounts will lose on their own accord.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/0...en-free-speech





McAfee Releases 2012 Cyber Threat Predictions

The cyberthreats organizations and individuals are likely to face in 2012 will resemble those they faces in 2011, only more so; among the increased threats: attacks on critical infrastructure, mobile devices and consumer electronics, and politically motivated attacks

McAfee has released its list of the major cybersecurity threats organizations and individuals are likely to face in 2012. The company says that for the most part, 2012 looks like it will contain an elevation of many of the threats recently seen to be gaining momentum. Here are the predictions:

1. Disrupted utilities like water and power: earlier in the year a Southern California water systems hired a hacker to find vulnerabilities in its computer networks. The hacker had no trouble seizing control of their equipment and adding chemicals to the drinking water, and do all this in day.

McAfee says that many industrial and national infrastructure networks were not designed for modern connectivity, making them vulnerable. “We expect attackers to take advantage of the situation in 2012, if only for blackmail or extortion, but in a worst-case scenario public utilities such as water and electrical services could be disrupted.”

2. Affecting political change through hacktivism: hactivism is the use of computers or computer networks to protest or promote political change. A great example of this is the “Anonymous” group which was active last year doing high profile activities such as briefly taking down New York Stock Exchange’s Web site in support of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

McAfee says it expects more organized digital disruptions to come in 2012.

3. More spam in consumers’ inboxes: the new trend in spamming is sending e-mails from advertising companies that obtain their e-mail lists through shady but legal means. They may buy the lists from companies that are going out of business or partner with other advertising entities or mail-list providers without taking into account privacy policies.

McAfee notes that spammers can do this because under the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act advertisers are not required to receive consent before sending advertising. Since this method is cheaper and less risky than bombarding consumers with spam from networks of compromised computers, this activity is likely to continue to grow through 2012, possibly resulting in more spam in inboxes.

4. Malware aimed at mobile phones: Cybercriminals are now testing their creativity with mobile malware in the form of malicious applications. Once downloaded, they can deliver a variety of ads or even send expensive text messages from your phone. They are using botnets — a collection of compromised computers that have traditionally been used to do things like send spam — to target mobile platforms.

McAfee says that mobile malware is not common now, but that it expects these attacks to increase through next year.

5. Compromised cars, GPS trackers, and other devices: cybercriminals are now targeting embedded operating systems or even hardware to gain control of everything from cars to GPS trackers and medical equipment. They can do this two ways — either through infiltrating the device when it is being manufactured or through the easier route of tricking users into downloading malware that can penetrate the “root” of the system.

McAffee expects hackers to become more effective in 2012 and beyond, potentially affecting systems such as consumer electronics.

6. Cyberwar: there has recently been an increase in high-tech spying and other cyber techniques to gain intelligence, even if on a small scale. Many countries are now realizing the crippling potential of cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, and realize how hard they are to defend. This dangerous possibility is out there.
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....at-predictions





Wireless Passwords Vulnerable to Hackers, US-CERT Warns

The U.S. government is warning wireless users that their home and business networks are highly vulnerable to hackers.

Stefan Viehbock, a freelance cybersecurity researcher, recently discovered a major security flaw in wireless Internet routers that leaves them susceptible to brute force attacks.

In a brute force attack, hackers try every single password possibility until the right one is found. With an eight digit password, there are 100,000,000 possible combinations which could take years for a brute force attack to succeed.

But, according to Viehbock, hackers can exploit a design flaw in most common Wi-Fi Protected Setups (WPS) to crack an eight-digit pin in a matter of minutes.

With WPS, devices can present the first four digits of a pass and the router will determine if it is the correct combination. In addition, the last digit of the PIN is just a checksum, which means hackers only have to guess the remaining three digits to determine the correct PIN number.

Armed with this tactic, hackers no longer have to try 100,000,000 combinations but only 11,000 in a brute force attack, Viehbock found.

On his blog, Viehbock wrote that this flaw “affects millions of devices worldwide,” as most common wireless routers have WPS enabled by default.

The majority of routers that Viehbock tested including those made by Belkin, Buffalo, D-Link, Linksys, Netgear, Technicolor, and TP-Link did not have any defenses set up to prevent an individual from repeatedly entering the wrong password.

After Viehbock’s discovery of the flaw, U.S.–CERT issued a security bulletin detailing the weaknesses of WPS.

“A design flaw that exists in the WPS specification for the PIN authentication significantly reduces the time required to brute force the entire PIN because it allows an attacker to know when the first half of the eight digit PIN is correct,” the agency wrote in its warning.

“The lack of a proper lock out policy after a certain number of failed attempts to guess the PIN on some wireless routers makes this brute force attack that much more feasible,” the warning continued.

According to U.S.– CERT once an attacker obtains a WPS PIN they can cause a denial of service or intercept email and steal credit card numbers and passwords.

The agency is “currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem” and recommends users disable WPS on their routers and instead use WPA2 encryption with a strong password to secure their networks.
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....s-uscert-warns





Printer Malware: Print a Malicious Document, Expose Your Whole LAN
Cory Doctorow

One of the most mind-blowing presentations at this year's Chaos Communications Congress (28C3) was Ang Cui's Print Me If You Dare, in which he explained how he reverse-engineered the firmware-update process for HPs hundreds of millions of printers. Cui discovered that he could load arbitrary software into any printer by embedding it in a malicious document or by connecting to the printer online. As part of his presentation, he performed two demonstrations: in the first, he sent a document to a printer that contained a malicious version of the OS that caused it to copy the documents it printed and post them to an IP address on the Internet; in the second, he took over a remote printer with a malicious document, caused that printer to scan the LAN for vulnerable PCs, compromise a PC, and turn it into a proxy that gave him access through the firewall (I got shivers).

Cui gave HP a month to issue patches for the vulnerabilities he discovered, and HP now has new firmware available that fixes this (his initial disclosure was misreported in the press as making printers vulnerable to being overheated and turning into "flaming death bombs" -- he showed a lightly singed sheet of paper that represented the closest he could come to this claim). He urges anyone with an HP printer to apply the latest patch, because malware could be crafted to take over your printer and then falsely report that it has accepted the patch while discarding it.

Cui's tale of reverse-engineering is a fantastic look at the craft and practice of exploring security vulnerabilities. The cases he imagined for getting malware into printers were very good: send a resume to HR, wait for them to print it, take over the network and pwn the company.

Cui believes that these vulnerabilities are likely present on non-HP printers (a related talk on PostScript hacking lent support to his belief) and his main area of research is a generalized anti-malware solution for all embedded systems, including printers and routers.

Just in case this has scared the hell out of you (as it did me), be assured that there are many lulz to be had, especially when Cui described his interactions with HP, who actually had a firmware flag called "super-secret bypass of crypto-key enabled."
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/30/pri...t-a-malic.html





Hackers Target Emails of UK's Gordon Brown: Report

British police have found evidence that private investigators working for newspapers hacked into the email account of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown while he was finance minister, The Independent newspaper reported on Monday.

Hundreds of other people may have also had their emails intercepted, perhaps as many as were caught up in the phone hacking scandal at News International's now defunct News of the World tabloid, the paper said.

Detectives were looking at evidence from about 20 computers seized from private investigators, the newspaper reported.

The team at London's Scotland Yard police headquarters were looking into the possibility that several newspaper titles commissioned private detectives to access computers, The Independent said, citing an unnamed source.

The Brown emails under scrutiny dated from the time he was Britain's finance minister before he became prime minister in 2007. Former Labour advisor and lobbyist Derek Draper was also targeted, The Independent said.

The Metropolitan police would not comment on the report.

"We are not prepared to give a running commentary on this investigation," a spokesman said.

News International, the British newspaper arm of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, also declined to comment.

The group closed the News of the World in July 2011 after evidence emerged that investigators working for the title hacked into the mobile phone voicemails of celebrities, politicians and even murder victims.

It is the only newspaper that has admitted phone hacking, although some journalists and celebrities have said the practice was widespread in the tabloid press.

News International's titles were not singled out in the Independent's report on email hacking.

(Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80109N20120102





President Obama Signs Indefinite Detention Bill Into Law
ACLU

President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law today. The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision. While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations. The White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA, but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill.

“President Obama's action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.”

Under the Bush administration, similar claims of worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again. The ACLU believes that any military detention of American citizens or others within the United States is unconstitutional and illegal, including under the NDAA. In addition, the breadth of the NDAA’s detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war.

“We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court,” said Romero. “Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today. Thankfully, we have three branches of government, and the final word belongs to the Supreme Court, which has yet to rule on the scope of detention authority. But Congress and the president also have a role to play in cleaning up the mess they have created because no American citizen or anyone else should live in fear of this or any future president misusing the NDAA’s detention authority.”

The bill also contains provisions making it difficult to transfer suspects out of military detention, which prompted FBI Director Robert Mueller to testify that it could jeopardize criminal investigations. It also restricts the transfers of cleared detainees from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to foreign countries for resettlement or repatriation, making it more difficult to close Guantanamo, as President Obama pledged to do in one of his first acts in office.
http://www.aclu.org/national-securit...ntion-bill-law





Richard Stallman Was Right All Along
Thom Holwerda

Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia - but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality.

Up until relatively recently, it's been easy to dismiss Richard Stallman as a paranoid fanatic, someone who lost touch with reality long ago. A sort of perpetual computer hippie, the perfect personification of the archetype of the unworldly basement-dwelling computer nerd. His beard, his hair, his outfits - in our visual world, it's simply too easy to dismiss him.

His views have always been extreme. His only computer is a Lemote Yeelong netbook, because it's the only computer which uses only Free software - no firmware blobs, no proprietary BIOS; it's all Free. He also refuses to own a mobile phone, because they're too easy to track; until there's a mobile phone equivalent of the Yeelong, Stallman doesn't want one. Generally, all software should be Free. Or, as the Free Software Foundation puts it:

As our society grows more dependent on computers, the software we run is of critical importance to securing the future of a free society. Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us.

I, too, disregarded Stallman as way too extreme. Free software to combat controlling and spying governments? Evil corporations out to take over the world? Software as a tool to monitor private communication channels? Right. Surely, Free and open source software is important, and I choose it whenever functional equivalence with proprietary solutions is reached, but that Stallman/FSF nonsense is way out there.

But here we are, at the start of 2012. Obama signed the NDAA for 2012, making it possible for American citizens to be detained indefinitely without any form of trial or due process, only because they are terrorist suspects. At the same time, we have SOPA, which, if passed, would enact a system in which websites can be taken off the web, again without any form of trial or due process, while also enabling the monitoring of internet traffic. Combine this with how the authorities labelled the Occupy movements - namely, as terrorists - and you can see where this is going.

In case all this reminds you of China and similarly totalitarian regimes, you're not alone. Even the Motion Picture Association of America, the MPAA, proudly proclaims that what works for China, Syria, Iran, and others, should work for the US. China's Great Firewall and similar filtering systems are glorified as workable solutions in what is supposed to be the free world.

The crux of the matter here is that unlike the days of yore, where repressive regimes needed elaborate networks of secret police and informants to monitor communication, all they need now is control over the software and hardware we use. Our desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and all manner of devices play a role in virtually all of our communication. Think you're in the clear when communicating face-to-face? Think again. How did you arrange the meet-up? Over the phone? The web? And what do you have in your pocket or bag, always connected to the network?

This is what Stallman has been warning us about all these years - and most of us, including myself, never really took him seriously. However, as the world changes, the importance of the ability to check what the code in your devices is doing - by someone else in case you lack the skills - becomes increasingly apparent. If we lose the ability to check what our own computers are doing, we're boned.

That's the very core of the Free Software Foundation's and Stallman's beliefs: that proprietary software takes control away from the user, which can lead to disastrous consequences, especially now that we rely on computers for virtually everything we do. The fact that Stallman foresaw this almost three decades ago is remarkable, and vindicates his activism. It justifies 30 years of Free Software Foundation.

And, in 2012, we're probably going to need Free and open source software more than ever before. At the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin late last year, Cory Doctorow held a presentation titled "The Coming War on General Purpose Computation". In it, Doctorow warns that the general purpose computer, and more specifically, user control over general purpose computers, is perceived as a threat to the establishment. The copyright wars? Nothing but a prelude to the real war.

"As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it won't be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body," Doctorow explains, "So when I get into a car - a computer I put my body into - with my hearing aid - a computer I put inside my body - I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests."

And this is really the gist of it all. With computers taking care of things like hearing, driving, and more, we really can't afford to be locked out of them. We need to be able to peek inside of them and see what they're doing, to ensure we're not being monitored, filtered, or whatever. Only a short while ago I would've declared this as pure paranoia - but with all that's been going on recently, it's no longer paranoia. It's reality.

"Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks," Doctorow warns, "And we haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won't be able to fight on without them."

This is why you should support Android (not Google, but Android), even if you prefer the iPhone. This is why you should support Linux, even if you use Windows. This is why you should support Apache, even if you run IIS. There's going to be a point where being Free/open is no longer a fun perk, but a necessity.

And that point is approaching fast.
http://www.osnews.com/story/25469/Ri...ight_All_Along





The Un-Internet
Dave Winer

The tech world is in an infinite loop.

I've written about it so many times, but that's how it goes with loops. You don't have to write original stuff more than once. Each time around the loop, at some point, everything comes back into style.

No need to list all the loops, other than to say Here We Go Again! :-)

At issue is this: Control.

For whatever reason, the people who run the tech companies want it. But eventually the users take it.

I wrote in 1994, my first time as a chronicler of the loops: "The users outfoxed us again. It happens every fifteen years or so in this business, We lost our grounding, the users rebelled, and a new incarnation of the software business has been created."

In the same 1994 piece: "Once the users take control, they never give it back."

You can see it playing out in the Twitter community, and now the Tumblr community.

It isn't a reflection on the moral quality of the leaders of the companies, to want to control their users. But it's a short-term proposition at best. Either the companies learn how to take the lead from their users, or they will be sidelined. Unless the laws of technology are repealed, and I don't think laws like that can be repealed.

Lest you think I was smart enough to see this coming in my own early experience as a tech entrepreneur, I wasn't. We were scared of software piracy, didn't understand how we could continue to be in business with software that could be easily copied. So we established controls that made it difficult for non-technical users to copy the software. That created a market of other software that would copy our software. So it was reduced down to whether or not the users would knowingly do something we disapproved of. Many of our users were honorable, they did what I would have done in their place. They stopped using our products. I would regularly receive letters from customers, people who had paid over $200 for the disks our software came on, with the disks cut in half with a scissor. These letters made their point loud and clear. One day everyone took off their copy protection, and the users got what they wanted. I came to believe then that this is always so.

This time around, Apple has been the leader in the push to control users. They say they're protecting users, and to some extent that is true. I can download software onto my iPad feeling fairly sure that it's not going to harm the computer. I wouldn't mind what Apple was doing if that's all they did, keep the nasty bits off my computer. But of course, that's not all they do. Nor could it be all they do. Once they took the power to decide what software could be distributed on their platform, it was inevitable that speech would be restricted too. I think of the iPad platform as Disneyfied. You wouldn't see anything there that you wouldn't see in a Disney theme park or in a Pixar movie.

The sad thing is that Apple is providing a bad example for younger, smaller companies like Twitter and Tumblr, who apparently want to control the "user experience" of their platforms in much the same way as Apple does. They feel they have a better sense of quality than the randomness of a free market. So they've installed similar controls. Your content cannot be displayed by Twitter unless you're one of their partners. How you get to be a partner is left to your imagination. We have no visibility into it.

Tumblr has decided that a browser add-on is unwelcome. Presumably it's only an issue because a fair number of their users want to use it. So they are taking issue not only with the developer, but with the users. They have admitted that the problem is that they must "educate" their users better. Oy! Does this sound familiar. In the end, it will be the other way around. It has to be. It's the lesson of the Internet.

My first experience with the Internet came as a grad student in the late 70s, but it wasn't called the Internet then. I loved it because of its simplicity and the lack of controls. There was no one to say you could or couldn't ship something. No gatekeeper. In the world it was growing up alongside, the mainframe world, the barriers were huge. An individual person couldn't own a computer. To get access you had to go to work for a corporation, or study at a university.

Every time around the loop, since then, the Internet has served as the antidote to the controls that the tech industry would place on users. Every time, the tech industry has a rationale, with some validity, that wide-open access would be a nightmare. But eventually we overcome their barriers, and another layer comes on. And the upstarts become the installed-base, and they make the same mistakes all over again.

It's the Internet vs the Un-Internet. And the Internet, it seems, always prevails.
http://scripting.com/stories/2011/12...ninternet.html





Asus Faces Customer Backlash Over Transformer Prime’s Locked Bootloader
Matt Brian

Taiwanese electronics giant Asus has been the subject of intense criticism over the release of its new Transformer Prime tablet after it emerged that the company had locked the bootloader on its device, reducing the ability for owner to modify their devices to run customized software.

The Transformer Prime, successor to the popular Transformer, began shipping in Asia shortly before Christmas and is gradually rolling out across North America.

Members of mobile development forum XDA Developers have identified that the Prime ships with a bootloader secured 128bit AES encryption, mirroring an approach that HTC took with its Android smartphones — only to reverse its decision months later following a customer backlash.

Without the option to unlock the bootloader, users are not afforded direct control over the software that runs on the Transformer Prime, reducing the ability to flash custom ROMs with modified kernels and perform additional customisations.

Whilst a large percentage of Transformer Prime owners will be unaffected by Asus’ bootloader restrictions, it has already attracted the ire of many Android developers and enthusiasts, who have begun to organise a campaign to get the tablet maker to withdraw its restrictions.

XDA Developer members have mobilised and started to share their frustrations on Asus’ North American Facebook page, hoping that if the issue becomes large enough for the company, it will take action and provide an unlocked bootloader for the device:
http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/01...ed-bootloader/





For Consumers, Android Is More “Clopen” Than Open
Danny Sullivan

Imagine if when Windows 7 came out, it was only offered on only one particular Dell computer. It was also uncertain when or if other computers, including those made by Dell, would ever be able to upgrade to it. Welcome to the “clopen” world of Android.

Android “Open” For Whom?

Google has made much of Android being “open” for use by anyone and thus potentially better than the “closed” system of the Apple iOS world. But “clopen” would be a better way to describe Android, as some have, because it’s both closed and open at the same time.

There’s no doubt that Android is open for anyone to use. Amazon has used Android as the basis for its Kindle Fire, but a version of Android altered so much that you can’t run apps from Google’s own official Android Market. Instead, you have to use Amazon’s own Android App Store.

But Android is largely closed for the typical consumers who use it, because they have little choice about which version of Android will run on their device. They’re left at the mercy of the device makers or mobile carriers.

Waiting For Android 4

The release of Android 4 — “Ice Cream Sandwich” — last month is underscoring this issue once again. It’s available only on one-and-a-half models of phones right now. Both are from Google: the new Galaxy Nexus and its predecessor, the Nexus S.

One-and-a-half? The Nexus S is the half-model, because only those with the GSM version of the Nexus S (used by T-Mobile and AT&T in the US) get updates. Those using the Sprint version of the Nexus S have to wait.

It really doesn’t get more absurd than being unable to know when or if you’ll get the latest version of Google’s own Android operating system on Google’s own Nexus S branded phone. It’s as if you owned a Mac but were given no clue from Apple about whether it could run a new version of Mac OS X.

Apple & Microsoft Make Updates Easy

Actually, it’s not like that, because Apple would never allow such uncertainty. Apple would ensure that you knew which devices you owned were able to be upgraded to a new version of its mobile or desktop operating systems, say like this for iOS:

Even Microsoft, having to deal with people who want to run Windows 7 on thousands of different computer models that Microsoft itself didn’t build, still provides consumers with ways to know how to upgrade, like the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.

Android Update Limbo

But Android? Consumers are left guessing. If Android 4 was a real ice cream sandwich, it might melt long before it was delivered to customers.

A big reason behind this mess is that Google doesn’t actually sell the Android operating system to consumers. If it did, it would probably care more about ensuring customers (because that’s what they would be) were covered from start to finish.

The Android 4 page from Google touts all the advantages that the new operating system offers. The page is written for consumers. But nothing on it explains how consumers can actually get the operating system.

Heck, the Android site itself doesn’t even provide any guidance about upgrading devices to the latest version of Android 2 (and around half the Android devices out there don’t seem to run the latest version of Android 2).

Instead, to discover if you will get an upgrade, you have to hope that your handset maker or mobile phone carrier lets you know. In my case, Verizon has told me nothing directly about whether my Droid Charge will get updated. Neither has Samsung, which makes the phone. Support pages from Verizon and Samsung are no help. As a consumer, I’m left in limbo.

If you watch the tech headlines through a site like Techmeme, you can piece together some of the developing picture, such as:

• Google: Nexus S GSM devices were getting updates, but that’s paused while bugs are being worked out. No official info on updates for the Nexus S from Sprint have been given. The Nexus One is deemed too old for Android 4, not that Google has notified owners of these phones in any way that I can tell.
• HTC: The HTC Vivid, the HTC Sensation (including XL & XE), the Rezound, the EVO 3D and Design 4G and the Amaze 4G all will get updates in early 2012, the company has said.
• LG: The company will release updates in the second and third quarter of this year for various devices. Third quarter, just in time probably for Android 5 to be released.
• Motorola: On its awesome upgrade page listing all sorts of devices, the Droid RAZR, Xoom and Bionic will all receive Android 4, though the timing isn’t given.
• Samsung: Various “Galaxy” devices will get updates in the first quarter of this year.
• Sony: From late March through early May, 2011 Xperia smartphones will get updated.

PC Magazine also did a nice round-up in mid-December, including information from some of the carriers. But couldn’t Google do more to centralize this type of news?

Google has maintained a Google Phone Gallery since September 2010. Why not centralize Android update news through that? Why not, at least, add a filter that allows you to search for devices by the current Android OS they use, information already stored within the gallery.

If Computerworld can maintain this incredible list of devices and where they stand in terms of getting Android 4, Google should be able to do it.

To Upgrade Your Software, Buy A New Phone

To go back to my opening metaphor, the situation now is as if millions of people using computers running Windows Vista are hearing that Windows 7 has just been released but that they can’t upgrade to it right now.

The reasons are plentiful. There’s testing and certification that need to be done. There are also business reasons why updates might not be provided.

I hear the hardcore Android advocates already chanting with their common refrain: root the device. In other words, consumers can install the latest Android operating system directly on many devices, if they want.

That’s not what a typical consumer is going to do. They wouldn’t do it for a Mac or PC, not without a guided upgrade system. They certainly wouldn’t do it if it meant potentially voiding their warranty or that they might need to reroot the device on a regular basis.

Yes, we will see Android 2 phones get upgraded to Android 4 in the coming months. But I suspect it’s more likely that the upgrade process will happen for many current Android owners when they simply buy a new handset and effectively trash the old one.

Why Android Survives This Mess

That’s probably been the saving grace for Android. Unlike PCs, the hardware specs for smartphones seem to change so rapidly. We’re trained to think that phones should get tossed out after two years — and for those who want to pay more for the latest-and-greatest — to upgrade our hardware each year.

It’s also part of the saving grace for Android against the fragmentation and confusion in the marketplace that Steve Jobs lashed out against in October 2010:

Google loves to characterize Android as open, and iOS and iPhone as closed. We find this a bit disingenuous and clouding the real difference between our two approaches.

The first thing most of us think about when we hear the work open is Windows which is available on a variety of devices. Unlike Windows, however, where most PC’s have the same user interface and run the same app, Android is very fragmented. Many Android OEMs, including the two largest, HTC and Motorola install proprietary user interfaces to differentiate themselves from the commodity Android experience. The users will have to figure it all out.

Compare this with iPhone, where every handset works the same.

Twitter client, Twitter Deck, recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than 100 different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations present developers with a daunting challenge. Many Android apps work only on selected Android handsets running selected Android versions. And this is for handsets that have been shipped less than 12 months ago.

Compare this with iPhone, where there are two versions of the software, the current and the most recent predecessor to test against.

So what if the user interface on one Android phone is different from another? It’s not like most people are going between two different handsets at the same time. If they get a new one, and things are different, they learn — just like they have to learn when things change (and they do) between iOS updates.

So what if not all the same apps are available for all the platforms? If the most popular apps are, that’s good enough. Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare — I’ve never had a problem with using these on any Android phone, I have — and I’ve owned and tested plenty.

But Google Still Should Clean Things Up

These things don’t seem to matter in slowing Android’s growth. But they should matter, and Google should be embarrassed for not doing more to improve the situation.

When Google CEO Larry Page keynoted CES in 2006, he decried the lack of standards on electronic devices:

All the devices at CES, as I mentioned, have keypads and screens and things like that, if you look around. Now why is there no standard for those little screens and keypads?…

Another example [slide of a pile of adapters and cords]: these are the power adapters just lying around our office….Why not instead standardize the power and have a basic [adapter device]….

Despite this, Page’s company sits on top of the Android ecosystem doing seemingly little to really ensure that there is a standard for how and when handsets will get Android updates.

At Google I/O last May, major handset makers, mobile carriers and Google came together to announce what was purported to be a solution to this problem:

The Android ecosystem has been moving really fast over the last two and a half years and rapid iteration on new and highly-requested features has been a driving force behind Android’s success. But of course that innovation only matters if it reaches consumers.

So today we’re announcing that a founding team of industry leaders, including many from the Open Handset Alliance, are working together to adopt guidelines for how quickly devices are updated after a new platform release, and also for how long they will continue to be updated.

The founding partners are Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T, and we welcome others to join us.

To start, we’re jointly announcing that new devices from participating partners will receive the latest Android platform upgrades for 18 months after the device is first released, as long as the hardware allows…and that’s just the beginning.

Stay tuned for more details.

As has been observed, watching the uncertainty over the Android 4.0 rollout gives the impression that initiative isn’t working out so well, to put it mildly.

If the carrot hasn’t worked, maybe Google could try the stick now. Any device that wants to carry the Google name on it has to be certified by Google. Why not make a fast update part of the certification requirements?

Why not, as part of releasing Android, make it a requirement that consumers can easily strip the device of its customized Android OS and install the latest version if they want, directly from Google or any Android OS provider?

When I put this to Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt back in 2010, when he was CEO, Schmidt said such a requirement would violate the principle of Android being open source. But such a requirement might actually make it more open for the actual users of the software.

As for carrier objections, given the big wet kiss that Google gave them by not pushing for net neutrality on mobile networks, the carriers can give a little back.

Is This The Success Android Wants?

As I’ve said, the fragmentation and inconsistency of Android doesn’t seem to have stopped its success. Google could do nothing and simply bask in the glory of Android succeeding despite the fact that….

• The “Android” Nook won’t run the Kindle app, because Barnes & Noble doesn’t allow it.
• The “Android” Kindle Fire doesn’t offer Gmail or Twitter, along with other apps, because Amazon doesn’t allow it.
• Hulu Plus is available for Android, but not for Android-based Google TV, because Hulu doesn’t allow it to work there.
• The Nexus S for Sprint, which is perfectly capable of working on Sprint’s pay-by-the-month Boost Mobile sister-company, can’t work there because Sprint doesn’t allow it.
• My Droid Charge Verizon LTE phone can’t run Android 4 now, and perhaps never, because Samsung hasn’t said anything about it.

To really understand the absurdity here, let me rewrite that in PC terms:

• My Windows computer made by Barnes & Noble can’t run the Windows Kindle application, because Barnes & Noble blocks it.
• My Windows computer made by Amazon can’t run the Windows Gmail application, because Amazon blocks it.
• My Windows computer made by Google can’t run the Windows Hulu application, because Hulu blocks it.
• My Windows computer made by Google can’t work with the ISP that I want, because the ISP I originally bought it from says no.
• My Windows computer made by Samsung can’t be upgraded to the latest operating system, because there’s no way for me to easily install it, and Samsung and Verizon aren’t helping.

Believe me, there are issues with iOS, as well. It’s not like any of the iPhones I’ve fully paid for from AT&T were magically unlocked at the end of my contract. It’s not like if I want a removable battery for my iPhone, that I have that option. It’s not like, if I want a smaller or bigger format for my iPhone, that I get any choice in that.

Think that’s a minor issue, phone size? I saw a stranger using an Android phone I’d not seen before two days ago, while I was in a line to buy lunch. I asked about it. The woman told me a bit, including that she liked because it was smaller than the iPhone. Usability, operating system, apps — for her, choice of size was a primary feature.

Android’s openness allows for this type of choice. But from a consumer perspective, there’s still a huge amount of closed about the platform. It feels like Google could do a lot more to open things up and still allow hardware manufacturers and carriers to believe there’s value in staying with the platform.
http://marketingland.com/for-consume...than-open-2388





Galaxy Nexus Power Analysis

Why chargers can't keep up with navigation. (Plus, black screens draw less power than white... sometimes!)
iansmith6

After personally experiencing having my phone end up LESS charged than I started out with on a 1 hour trip with navigation on while plugged in, I decided to run some tests.

The first was to see how much power the Galaxy Nexus could draw from the USB connection. This turns out to be about 4.5W. (0.9A at 5V)

(Edit: Yes I tied the data lines together so the GN knew it was hooked to a charger and not a PC)

I ran all kinds of applications, benchmarks, turned on all the networking, GPS. Just sitting there idle or in sleep mode it only drew 3.5W but I could push it up to 4.5W which is fairly close to the max most USB adapters can supply. My PS can deliver 8W so it had plenty of power to offer. So no matter how powerful your charger is, the GN simply won't draw more than 4.5W. Forget about those 3A chargers.

The next test was a bit trickier. I wanted to measure how much power the GN was drawing from the battery. Tiny contacts and an expensive phone made me a little cautious but I figured out a fairly safe way of doing this, and here are the results.

In sleep mode it only drew 0.04W with occasional spikes of 1W.

• Powered on and idle it averaged 3W.
• Running a CPU benchmark it stayed at 4W.
• Downloading a large file over WiFi got a steady 4.2W.

Now the real test... Google Maps.

This varied a LOT. Minimum was 4W with some steady peaks of 5.1W!

That seems to be the problem. The GN can draw more power from the battery than the charging system can provide. In the real world the power draw is going to be worse because of all the switching of cell towers and map data downloading. I wasn't about to take my very delicate wiring job on the road, so will just have to guess at the final numbers, but just sitting still was enough to overpower the charger.

I doubt this can be a software fix where a hardware register can be changed to let the charging system draw 1.5A or something.

This also means that a 2A or 3A power supply is not going to help. As long as you have a 1A supply, that's all the GN will take. Do make sure it's wired right or it will only draw 0.5A, and be warned some USB jacks on stereos and computers might only give you 0.1A.

Now on to something else... the AMOLED screen! Does keeping it black really save power? The answer is... sort of!

I ran several tests with the device in airplane mode and just showing a solid color on the screen on the dimmest, and brightest screen settings.

• Dim black: 1.8W
• Dim white: 2.0W
• Bright black: 1.9W
• Bright white: 2.9W

For extra fun...

• Bright Red: 2.5W
• Bright Green: 2.6W
• Bright Blue: 2.8W

So if you run the screen at the dimmest setting, it really doesn't matter what the screen is showing. If you run it at the brightest... then white really does draw more power. A lot more. If you can set Google Maps to display the screen mostly black, that could save a significant amount of power during navigation.

I was unable to find a way of turning off the display without putting the phone to sleep, so no idea how much of that power shown above is due to the screen and how much to running the CPU and all the other functions.

Anyway, I still have my spare battery rigged up so if you have any other good ideas for tests I can try them out.

(Edited for formatting and added in color power consumption)
http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comm...chargers_cant/





Smartphones Power Samsung to Record Q4 Profit
Miyoung Kim

Samsung Electronics, the world's top maker of memory chips and smartphones, reported a record quarterly profit on Friday, aided by one-off gains and best-ever sales of high-end phones.

The South Korean firm, which surged past Apple as the world's top smartphone maker in the third quarter, is quickly building on its supremacy with sleek designs and a rich product line-up, while the latest models from the likes of HTC, Nokia and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion struggle to interest consumers.

Samsung is also weathering a squeeze on its bread-and-butter memory chip business with new revenue sources such as mobile processing chips and high-end OLED displays. Key rivals are increasingly turning to Samsung for components to power their tablets and smartphones.

The South Korean firm posted 5.2 trillion won ($4.5 billion) in quarterly operating profit, beating a consensus forecast of 4.7 trillion won by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. It said actual profit may rise or fall by 200 billion won from the preliminary figure when the firm provides detailed earnings later this month.

The result would top Samsung's previous record profit of 5.0 trillion won earned in the second quarter of 2010 and is up 22 percent from the preceding quarter.

One-off gains expected in the fourth quarter include around 500 billion won from the sale of its hard disk drive business to Seagate Technology, and reduced mobile provisions involving royalty payments, according to analysts.

"Samsung has traditionally seen its first-quarter profit drop from the fourth quarter, but profit will hold up well, reaching between 4.5 trillion won and 5.0 trillion won, with smartphone sales expected to rise further," said Song Jong-ho, an analyst at Daewoo Securities.

Samsung only entered the smartphone market in earnest in 2010, but its handset division is now its biggest earnings generator.

Sales have skyrocketed thanks to a slick production system that rapidly brings new products to market and has mitigated weakness in its component business of mainly memory chips and flat screens.

Taiwan's HTC, which shocked the market with revenue warnings in recent months, reported on Friday a worse-than-expected quarterly profit drop, its first retreat in two years, as models from the world's No.4 smartphone maker scrambled to compete with Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy range.

Smartphone Gains

Samsung shares closed down 1.4 percent, after charging to a record 1.11 million won earlier this week in anticipation of an upbeat forecast. The company is Asia's most valuable technology firm with a market value of around $150 billion.

Smartphone shipments are forecast at a record 35 million in the fourth quarter, up one quarter from the preceding three months, when it first surged past Apple as the world's top smartphone vendor.

In 2012 it is expected to sell as many as 170 million smartphones, according to BNP Paribas and Korea Investment & Securities, the most bullish street view, from an estimated 95 million last year, powered by a diverse product portfolio that spans high-end Galaxy models to cheap phones using Samsung's own "bada" software.

Its latest Galaxy Note model, which runs on fast fourth-generation (4G) networks, is touted by some followers as a "phablet" as its 5.3-inch display and powerful dual-core processor makes it work as both a tablet computer and smartphone. Its successful debut in some European and Asian markets during the year-end holiday season has raised hopes for a solid U.S. launch in coming months.

"As expectations for Apple to continue its innovation trail is receding a bit, this will be the year when Samsung solidifies its commanding lead in the smartphone market," said Kim Yun-sang, a fund manager at IBK Asset Management, which owns Samsung stock.

Samsung, the world's biggest technology firm by revenue, estimated fourth-quarter sales at 47 trillion won.

Major headwinds for Samsung in 2012 include slowing growth in global PC sales, which will dent sales of its core computer memory chips.

Weak computer memory chip prices will continue to squeeze earnings at least until the first half of this year. Prices of PC DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips dropped about 30 percent in the fourth quarter alone, near to production costs.

Samsung remains the sole profitable DRAM chipmaker and is likely to fare better than rivals, helped by heavy investments to cut production costs with finer processing technology.

Its foray into the booming tablet market has been also hit by a global patent battle with Apple, which is seeking to ban sales of Samsung's tablets in major markets.

(Additional reporting by Hyunjoo Jin and Iktae Park; Editing by Jonathan Hopfner and Alex Richardson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80429020120106





Barnes & Noble May Split Off Nook, Cuts Forecast
Phil Wahba

Barnes & Noble Inc cut its Nook sales forecast and shocked investors by saying it may spin off its fast-growing digital business, sending its shares plunging 17 percent.

The No. 1 U.S. bookstore chain has relied on readers, tablets and electronic books to offset shriveling sales at its brick-and-mortar stores, so news of weaker-than-expected Nook sales stoked fears the company is struggling to keep up with Amazon.com Inc's market-leading Kindle.

On Thursday, Barnes & Noble also projected a steeper net loss for the fiscal year than Wall Street had been expecting as it keeps shelling out on the Nook.

The retailer has poured tens of millions of dollars into the e-reader device. The first version hit the market in 2009, two years after the Kindle.

Barnes & Noble said in a statement it wanted to "unlock" the value of the Nook business and bring it to foreign markets. The company has opened discussions with potential partners such as publishers, retailers and technology companies outside the United States, it added.

One retail banker who declined to be identified said the Nook business was a faster-growing technology asset trapped within a slower retail stock, and theorized that Barnes & Noble simply wanted to spin off the Nook business to give it a chance to trade at a higher valuation.

The bookseller said it sold 70 percent more Nook devices this holiday season, while e-book sales doubled. Chief Executive William Lynch told Reuters that investors have not given the company enough credit for that growth.

"Our (market) share remains very strong," Lynch said. "We certainly think this is not being properly valued.

The chief executive of Liberty Media Corp, one of Barnes & Noble's largest investors, hinted at a conference earlier in the week that Nook would have an easier time attracting investment as a stand alone business.

Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei, who joined Barnes & Noble's board last year, said on Wednesday that extracting value from Nook and Barnes & Noble could come by finding "partners to help fund that game," referring to Barnes & Noble's digital business.

But investors were frightened of the prospect of a Barnes & Noble stock that would reflect only its traditional retail business.

"They would be separating their one growth driver," said Morningstar analyst Peter Wahlstrom. Barnes & Noble without Nook would be too similar to its former rival Borders, which went out of business in 2011.

But a source familiar with the company's thinking said the retailer would remain intimately involved in developing and promoting the Nook, tapping its links with publishers and fleet of 700 stores, and essentially continue to run the business.

So even if Barnes & Noble does split off its Nook business, everyday customers will scarcely notice.

Barnes & Noble put itself up for sale in 2010 but attracted only one firm offer - a bid for $17 per share, or $1 billion, last May from Liberty Media, which was drawn by Nook's growth.

Liberty ultimately decided to invest $204 million rather than buy the company outright, with much of that money earmarked for the Nook.

Liberty has preferred shares it can convert into a 16.6 percent stake in Barnes & Noble at a strike price of $17.

Barnes & Noble shares closed the day down 17 percent at $11.24, after falling as low as 31 percent. The chain now has a market value of about $676 million, or less than 1 percent of Amazon's.

Price War

Barnes & Noble lowered the sales forecast for the fiscal year ending in July 2012 for the Nook business, which accounts for nearly one-quarter of sales, to $1.5 billion from $1.8 billion, in part because of disappointing numbers for its $99 Nook Simple Touch e-reader.

"Demand for Nook products appears to be decelerating faster than original expectations," Barclays Capital analyst Alan Rifkin said in a research note.

The war with Amazon is ferocious. Amazon last week said it sold 1 million Kindle devices per week in December, including the Fire tablet and a touchscreen device.

Other Nook devices fared better than the Simple Touch, including its Nook Tablet. Forrester Research estimates that Amazon sold about 5 million Kindle Fire tablets during the holidays, compared with sales of some 1.5 million Nooks.

The company is second only to Amazon in the e-books market and claims to have as much as 27 percent of that market.

But when Barnes & Noble introduced the Nook tablet in November, it also cut the prices on other versions of the device, including the Simple Touch, in response to aggressive pricing by Amazon, which is known for uncutting rivals on price.

Unlike Amazon, Barnes & Noble's other businesses do not generate enough money to subsidize its e-reader segment. Last month, Barnes & Noble posted an unexpected quarterly loss and last year, it suspended its dividend to finance the Nook.

Despite the liquidation in September of its one-time archrival, Borders Group, and rising Nook sales, Barnes & Noble now expects sales of $7 billion to $7.2 billion this fiscal year, down from its initial forecast of $7.4 billion, suggesting an accelerating decline in book sales.

Still, Barnes & Noble expects Borders' disappearance to boost sales $210 million to $250 million.

Indeed, sales at Barnes & Noble stores open at least 15 months, excluding Nook and e-books, rose 4.5 percent during the holidays, an improvement over recent quarters.

Barnes & Noble now expects earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of $150 million to $180 million for the fiscal year ending in July, down from its forecast last month of $210 million to $250 million.

The retailer forecast a loss of $1.40 to $1.10 per share in the fiscal year, much worse than the average Wall Street forecast of a loss of 63 cents.

In addition to its bookstores, Barnes & Noble operates a chain of textbook stores on college campuses.

(Reporting by Phil Wahba in New York and Brad Dorfman in Chicago; Additional reporting by Jessica Hall; Editing by John Wallace, Maureen Bavdek and Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8040XA20120105





Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth, and Gap Is Growing
Kevin J. O’Brien

The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth.

Arieso, a company in Newbury, England, that advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, documented the statistical gap when it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour period in November.

The gap between extreme users and the rest of the population is widening, according to Arieso. In 2009, the top 3 percent of heavy users generated 40 percent of network traffic. Now, Arieso said, these users pump out 70 percent of the traffic.

Michael Flanagan, the chief technology officer at Arieso, said the study did not produce a more precise profile of extreme users. But the group, he said, was probably diverse, with a mix of business users gaining access to the Internet over a 3G network while traveling, and individuals with generous or unlimited mobile data packages watching videos, the main cause of the excess traffic.

“Some people may draw the parallel to Occupy Wall Street, and I’ve already heard comments about ‘Occupy the Downlink,’ ” Mr. Flanagan said. “But the situations are very different, and the mobile situation doesn’t break down along socioeconomic lines.”

The Arieso survey found that 64 percent of extreme users were using a laptop, a third were using a smartphone and 3 percent had an iPad.

The imbalance in mobile phone consumption is another example of a relatively small group of individuals dominating the consumption of a particular resource. The United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes about 23 percent of the world’s daily oil production, according to American government figures. Japan, Germany and Italy, whose populations together make up less than 4 percent of the world’s total, accounted for 31 percent of global natural gas imports in 2010, according to the International Energy Agency.

Pal Zarandy, an analyst at Rewheel, a research firm in Helsinki, Finland, that advises operators on data packages and pricing strategies, said the disparity in bandwidth use was not surprising because most mobile phone users globally used a 2G telephone for calls and texts only.

Just 13.2 percent of the world’s 6.1 billion cellphones are smartphones, according to Ericsson, the leading maker of mobile network equipment, but the rate exceeds 30 percent in larger markets like the United States, Germany and Britain.

The more powerful phones are rapidly replacing the simpler, less voracious devices in many countries, raising traffic levels and pressure on operators to keep pace. In countries like Sweden and Finland, smartphones now account for more than half of all mobile phones, Mr. Zarandy said. About 35 percent of Finns also use mobile laptop modems and dongles, or modems in a USB stick; one operator, Elisa, offers unlimited data plans for as little as 5 euros, or $6.40, a month.

As a result, Finns consume on average 1 gigabyte of wireless data a month over an operator’s network, almost 10 times the European average. As more consumers buy smartphones, the level of mobile data consumption and congestion will rise in other countries.

“This of course is bad news for operators because it means that more traffic is coming and they need to invest to stay ahead of the curve,” Mr. Zarandy said.

Mr. Flanagan at Arieso said one European operator, which he declined to identify, last year installed 250 miniature base stations, called microcells, to handle the traffic of extreme users. The operator, he said, did not wish to publicize the work because it did not want to draw attention to the strains that its network was experiencing.

Patrik Cerwall, the head of strategic marketing and intelligence at Ericsson, which is based in Stockholm, Sweden, said most operators were beginning to look for ways to make their networks more efficient, whether by dumping data quickly into a fixed-line network, imposing volume limits on customers or installing miniature base stations at congestion points.

Ericsson expects the volume of global mobile data to rise tenfold from 2011 to 2016.

The rate is likely to accelerate as more consumers integrate the mobile Web into their daily lives. Last year, for example, 40 percent of smartphone owners in an Ericsson survey used their devices to gain access to mobile broadband connections even before getting out of bed.

The heaviest users of mobile data, according to Ericsson, watched videos 40 percent of the time, surfed the Web an additional 20 percent, and used up the rest of their online time in e-mails, social networking, file sharing and software downloads.

Advances in smartphones and applications technology are also driving up use.

Arieso researchers, in their latest survey, found that users of Apple’s iPhone 4S downloaded 276 percent more data from an operator’s network than did people with the Apple 3G, which has been on the market since June 2008.

Part of the reason for the increase in download volumes may be Apple’s Siri voice feature on the iPhone 4S, Mr. Flanagan said. Siri allows consumers to dictate to the phone and enter more text and data into the network in an easier way. The growth of cloud computing-based applications like iTunes and other cloud services, which use the mobile network to connect consumers with remote computers, may also be a factor, he said.

In uploaded data volumes and the total number of calls to the network, two Google Android handsets made by HTC, the Taiwanese manufacturer, topped the list.

People using the HTC Desire S uploaded 323 percent more data than those with the iPhone 3G, and those with an HTC Google Nexus One phone made 221 percent more calls to the network. Calls to the network include the voice and data calls started by the user, as well as the automatic communication between the device and the network to update its applications or transmit its location.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/t...bandwidth.html





Hospital Splashes Cash On 'Electro-Allergy' Room

Falköping hospital in southern Sweden recently spent just under a million kronor ($146,130) to have a room adapted to suit the needs of the "electro-oversensitive", despite the fact that the allergy hasn't been scientifically proven to exist.

Since the remodeling was completed about eight months ago, only one patient has used the room, sparking criticism that the money has been wasted.

"It feels like the money could've been used in a better way," paediatrician Mats Reimer told Sveriges Radio (SR), suggesting that it would've been more appropriate to help these people to overcome their belief that their symptoms have anything to do with electricity.

Three percent of Swedes claimed to suffer from electro-oversensitivity when a national survey was conducted in 2007.

Local politician Jonas Andersson is sceptical that the condition really exists, he still felt it's reasonable to satisfy the needs of this "vulnerable group of people" since they clearly suffer, he told SR.

And he's not the only one who thinks that way, according to SR. A number of hospitals around the country have also taken steps to provide havens for those who claim to be sensitive to electricity.

The Local reported in November on a man in the Dalarna region whose alleged allergy almost caused the local authority create a mobile phone "dead zone" in the area near his home, despite experts saying that there are no scientific studies showing that there is such a thing as electro-oversenstivitiy.

Now, eight months after having put in the expensive insulation in the room, critics are saying that the initiative was a waste of the taxpayers' money, but also that it can be considered a disservice to those it's suppose to help.

Reimer claims that giving in to these imagined needs will only exacerbate peoples' irrational fear of electricity.

"This kind of evasive behaviour may give them temporary relief but i the end you are only helping to fan the irrational fear and in the end they will end up in a trailer in the woods with candles and a lantern," he told SR.
http://www.thelocal.se/38354/20120105/





Analysis: Molly, Crackers and Consumer Power Gone Viral
Chris Taylor

Corporate America's worst nightmare lives in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, loves browsing in flea markets and has a lop-eared brown and white pet rabbit named Crackers.

Meet Molly Katchpole. The 22-year-old Washington, D.C. resident has recently tangled with a couple of billion-dollar corporations, and cowed them into submission without breaking a sweat.

Take Verizon Wireless, which had planned a $2 "convenience" charge for the privilege of paying a bill by phone or online. Katchpole, a Verizon user for eight years, was offended by the very idea that loyal customers could be penalized for paying what they owed. So she went on the website Change.org - organized a petition - and watched as it quickly racked up more than 165,000 signatures. As consumer outrage went viral, Verizon backpedaled within hours.

And how about Bank of America's infamous $5 monthly usage fee for debit cards? It too was kiboshed, partly thanks to another Katchpole petition and 300,000 of her outraged brethren, at a time when the Occupy Wall Street movement had been pressuring banks.
"I'm not exactly sure what these companies are thinking," says Katchpole, who only graduated last spring from Roger Williams University in Rhode Island and now works as a fellow at the nonprofit Rebuild the Dream, an organization that lobbies against income inequality (her petitions are personal ventures, unrelated to her job). "It's so out of touch with reality and what their customers are going through. My Verizon petition was only up for about eight hours before they backed down."

Also forced into a recent and embarrassing climbdown was video-streaming company Netflix, which had planned to spin off DVD rentals into a stand-alone service called Qwikster. User objections became so deafening that the notion was killed before launch.

"The Internet is the great equalizer, and that's a beautiful thing - even if it's not positive for us," said Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey. "We made mistakes that hurt our brand, consumers let us know about it, and now we're rebuilding step by step."

Such is the growing power of social media, which can make consumer complaints go viral and cause serious brand damage within days or even hours. While one person can't topple a company, if that person is able to assemble an army of hundreds of thousands behind them, they become a force to be reckoned with.

Thanks to the increasingly savvy use of tools like Facebook and Twitter, the power balance between company and customer has been tilting in the latter's favor.

"Consumers have always had a voice, but now it's louder and it spreads so quickly because of social media," says Laura Ries, president of branding firm Ries & Ries in Atlanta. "Companies used to have a lot of time to think about strategy, to have meetings and studies, and to take time to respond. They don't have that time anymore. Now it's all about rapid response."

Consider the introduction of New Coke, one of the great marketing disasters of all time, which took almost three months to get reversed back in 1985. The Bank of America debit-card charge plan withstood a month of public fury before it was killed.

"Our customers' voices are most important to us," Bank of America co-COO David Darnell said in a written statement (the firm declined comment for this article). "As a result, we are not currently charging the fee and will not be moving forward with any additional plans to do so."

This time around, with Verizon Wireless, reaction was even faster. CEO Dan Mead scrambled to issue this statement: "At Verizon, we take great care to listen to our customers. Based on their input, we believe the best path forward is to encourage customers to take advantage of the best and most efficient options, eliminating the need to institute the fee at this time." Translation: Verizon executives (who also declined comment for this article) witnessed the venomous public reaction, and backtracked within a day.

"Someone at Verizon thought this was a reasonable way to add millions to the bottom line, and they were wrong," says Seth Godin, author of marketing classics like "Purple Cow" and "Unleashing the Ideavirus." "Consumers are speaking up more loudly and with more vehemence than ever before, and they're doing it in public."

Make no mistake, corporations are taking note of this sea change - and are often capitalizing on their rivals' foibles. The credit union Mission Federal, for instance, responded to the bank fee controversy by offering to reward customers up to $5 a month for using its debit cards, said the credit union's CEO Debra Schwartz.

"Companies are now saying, 'Wow, we have to be careful about how we do this,' " says Jean-Manuel Izaret, a partner and pricing expert with management consultants Boston Consulting Group. "Clearly Netflix, Bank of America and Verizon didn't apply best practices, and had their pricing moves rejected by the market. It used to be just the press putting pressure on corporations, but now we're way beyond that."

So now that consumers are realizing the power of the social-media megaphone, how are they going to wield it - and how are embattled companies going to respond? Here are a few predictions from the experts:

* Companies need to act at warp speed. Mistakes are made in the business world. But companies can limit any lasting damage to their brands by recognizing potentially devastating memes, and acting quickly to contain them, with their own equivalent of political 'War Rooms'. "If you don't respond to a fire on the Internet, it only tends to get bigger," says Ries. "But even though word can spread rapidly these days, if you stay on top of it, it can be forgotten just as rapidly."

* Rollouts will become more thoughtful. To avoid such out-of-control wildfires, companies should act preemptively and consider consumer reaction to boardroom decisions before the public does it for them. If charges are new and not shared by a firm's competitors, for instance, a backlash is entirely predictable. Focus groups and regional test rollouts could help companies gauge reaction before a casual decision morphs into a full-fledged disaster.

* Consumers should pick their fights. Activists like Katchpole have certainly notched some high-profile victories, but if everybody starts complaining about every little thing, then collective outrage could lose some of its power. As a result, make sure to focus on the meaningful instead of the petty.

* Get ready for more. Consumers still make up something of an archipelago, each pushing his or her own issue with an online petition here, a Twitter hashtag there. While some issues like the Bank of America debit-card charge catch fire in the public imagination, many don't. But if consumers do manage to get truly organized, watch out.

"What would happen if all pricing was shared by all consumers, or if everyone stood up for the person who was being thrown out of their house, or if at the very moment you're choosing a wireless carrier, you could see an updated chart of customer-service wait times?" asks Godin. "If the volume of consumer outcry gets even louder, and the coordination gets even better, it will forever change what we do as marketers."

At least, that's what Molly Katchpole hopes. She's not sure which corporate decision she'll be targeting next, in between her trips to the laundry and the grocery store, but no doubt another one will be coming along soon. "You used to have to make phone calls and write letters," she says. "But companies can't hide this stuff anymore; just take a look at their Facebook walls and all the angry comments. I really hope they take these lessons to heart."

(Reporting by Chris Taylor; Editing by Martin Howell)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80424T20120105





Why Do All Movie Tickets Cost the Same?
Derek Thompson

The new "Mission: Impossible" film has made ten times more money than smaller films like "Young Adult." If greater demand is supposed to move prices, why does a ticket to each movie cost the same?

At the AMC Loews in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., every evening ticket is $12, plus taxes, whether you want to see Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the holiday-season juggernaut starring Tom Cruise bouncing off Dubai's 2,700-foot Burj Khalifa tower, or Young Adult, a small, dark comedy starring Charlize Theron.

Like tens of millions of Americans, I have paid money to see Mission: Impossible, which made $130 million in the last two weeks, and I have not paid any money to see Young Adult, which has made less than $10 million over the same span. Nobody is surprised or impressed by the discrepancy. The real question is: If demand is supposed to move prices, why isn't seeing Young Adult much cheaper than seeing Mission: Impossible?

Senior rates and matinee discounts exist, but movie theaters don't offer different prices for different films showing at the same time. "Since the early 1970s, at any given movie theater, one price has been charged for all movies, seven days a week, 365 days a year," Barak Y. Orbach and Liran Einav begin in their research paper that looks at pricing strategies for movie theaters. This practice -- known, wonkily, as uniform pricing -- isn't specific to movies. It's true for sports, where I pay the same price for a football ticket whether the Redskins are playing the New England Patriots or the St. Louis Rams. It's also true for music. The fact that Katy Perry is likely to outsell Gilbert & Sullivan this year doesn't make "Last Friday Night" any cheaper than "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General."

But it's something of a mystery to Orbach and Einav that studios and theaters, so notoriously canny about finding profits, never experiment with higher prices to capture more money from inevitable blockbusters -- or with lower prices to fill up empty seats.

To make successful movies more expensive, you have to know what movies are going to be successful. That's not as hard as it sounds.

The Hollywood cliche is that "nobody knows anything" when it comes to how a movie will perform at the box office. But there are some basic rules of thumb. More expensive movies have bigger audiences. There is a high "correlation coefficient" between production costs and gross revenues. Sequels outperform non-sequels. The seven best-performing movies of 2011 were second, fifth or eight in a franchise. Christmastime outsells Eastertime ... and every other time, as the graph of weekly attendance below shows. Furthermore, it's practically a rule of law that big opening weekends predict overall success and that movie revenues fall after the first week.

One-price-tickets is a kind of return to the earliest days of (barely) moving pictures, when everybody would put a penny in a peep show machine. But the first instances of what film archeologists would actually call "movies" around 1910 featured different prices for different films. Movies were priced according to their length, stars, and popularity. For three decades until the 1940s, one theater would have the rights to each movie within a certain zone, and movies received grades (A, B, or C) that corresponded with ticket prices at those theaters. If the rules of the 1920s ruled today, Mission Impossible might be $15 and Young Adult might be $7. What changed?

Everything. For starters, the famous Paramount anti-trust case broke up monopolies between producers and distributors. Multiplexes replaced single-serving theaters. A recession after World War II coincided with the popularity of television to gut studio revenue, forcing them to rely on fewer, more expensive movies.
Screen Shot 2012-01-02 at 10.26.25 PM.pngOver time, the system moved toward one price for all films. As Steven Pearlstein explains:

“If you have any doubt that the studios have the power to dictate uniform retail prices, consider what happened with the introduction of "The Godfather" in 1972. Up to that point, the tradition was that theaters could charge a premium for tickets to the handful of "event" movies that came out every year -- in the modern context, the "Harry Potter" and "Spider-Man" movies. But when "The Godfather" was released in 1972, suddenly every movie theater in the country eliminated its event-movie pricing. That's the kind of "coincidence" Don Vito Corleone would have been proud of. “

Forty years later, uniform pricing is uniform practice for movie theaters. And with the onslaught from online streaming, legal downloads, and DVDs, studios and theaters are nervous as heck about pissing off what die-hards they have left by moving prices based on demand. (Although, you could argue that charging more for a 3-D movie is an interesting exception.)

But Orbach and Einav find some evidence that where dynamic pricing was used, both the theaters and the studios benefited. In Japan, tickets for Jurassic Park were profitably sold for a premium of 67%, while tickets for Austin Powers were profitably sold at 45% discount for young audiences. That's a huge boost for studios, who keep an outsized share of a movie's opening weekend revenue. Meanwhile, in 1970, some D.C. theaters cut weekday tickets by two-thirds and saw popcorn sales double. That's a huge boost for theaters, since half of theaters' income comes from amenities like popcorn.

So how come we're still stuck with $12 tickets for both blockbusters and indie flicks? A few theories:

1) Theaters do price discriminate already, kind of, but they do it with space. At the multiplex, not all theaters are alike. Bigger movies get more theaters with better technology. Smaller movies get older theaters with smaller screens.

2) You can't consistently cut prices after a successful opening weekend. If people knew that ticket prices would fall after a big opening, many more would wait until the second or third weekend to see it, which would, ironically, destroy the meaning of opening weekends.

3) Price can repel as easily as it attracts, because it's a signal of quality. If your a theater showing one movie for $6, one movie for $10, and another for $12, perhaps fewer people will see the $6 movie because they assume it's garbage.

4) Cheaper tickets lead to higher policing costs. I'm a cheapskate, so I might buy a ticket to see cheap, cheap Iron Lady and sneak into Sherlock Holmes. This would create a fascinating incentive for art-house studios to release smaller, cheaper films the same weekend as blockbusters, knowing that thousands of canny consumers might buy fake tickets to their show to sneak into the more expensive blockbuster.

5) Price discrimination offers more opportunities for other movie theaters to steal each others' audience. Once again, I'm very cheap, so I don't mind taking the metro way across town to see Sherlock Holmes for significantly less money if one multiplex starts to mark up its blockbusters.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...e-same/250762/





Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA
steveblank

This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue.

But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from?

From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads.

The Movie Industry and Technology Progress

The music and movie business has been consistently wrong in its claims that new platforms and channels would be the end of its businesses. In each case, the new technology produced a new market far larger than the impact it had on the existing market.

• 1920’s – the record business complained about radio. The argument was because radio is free, you can’t compete with free. No one was ever going to buy music again.

• 1940’s – movie studios had to divest their distribution channel – they owned over 50% of the movie theaters in the U.S. “It’s all over,” complained the studios. In fact, the number of screens went from 17,000 in 1948 to 38,000 today.

• 1950’s – broadcast television was free; the threat was cable television. Studios argued that their free TV content couldn’t compete with paid.

• 1970’s – Video Cassette Recorders (VCR’s) were going to be the end of the movie business. The movie businesses and its lobbying arm MPAA fought it with “end of the world” hyperbole. The reality? After the VCR was introduced, studio revenues took off like a rocket. With a new channel of distribution, home movie rentals surpassed movie theater tickets.

• 1998 – the MPAA got congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), making it illegal for you to make a digital copy of a DVD that you actually purchased.

• 2000 – Digital Video Recorders (DVR) like TiVo allowing consumer to skip commercials was going to be the end of the TV business. DVR’s reignite interest in TV.

• 2006 - broadcasters sued Cablevision (and lost) to prevent the launch of a cloud-based DVR to its customers.

• Today it’s the Internet that’s going to put the studios out of business. Sound familiar?

Why was the movie industry consistently wrong? And why do they continue to fight new technology?

Technology Innovation

The movie industry was born with a single technical standard – 35mm film, and for decades had a single way to distribute its content – movie theaters (which until 1948 the studios owned.) It was 75 years until studios had to deal with technology changing their platform and distribution channel. And when it happened (cable, VCR’s, DVD’s, DVR’s, the Internet,) it was a relentless onslaught. The studios responded by trying to shut down the new technology and/or distribution channels through legislation and the courts.

Regulation/Legislation

But why does the movie business think their solution is in Washington and legislation?

History and success.

In the 1920’s individual states were beginning to censor movies and the federal government was threatening to do so as well. The studios set up their own self censorship and rating system keeping most sex and politics off the screen for 40 years. Never again wanting to be at the losing side of a political battle they created the movie industry’s lobbying arm, MPAA.

By the 1960’s, the MPPA achieved regulatory capture (where an industry co-opts the very people who are regulating it,) when they hired Jack Valenti, who ran the studios’ lobbying efforts for the next 38-years. Ironically, it was Valenti’s skill in hobbling competitive innovation that negated any need for studios to develop agility, vision and technology leadership.

Management of Innovation

The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to existing markets, particularly to content/copyright owners whose sell through well-established distribution channels. The incumbents tend to have short-sighted goals and often fail to recognize that more money can be made on new platforms and new distribution channels.

In an industry facing constant technology shifts the exec staff and boards of the studios have lawyers, MBAs and financial managers, but no management skill in dealing with disruption. So they rely on lobbying ($110 million a year,) lawsuits, campaign contributions (wonder why the President won’t be vetoing SOPA?) and Public Relations.

Ironically, the six major movie studios have a great technology lab in Silicon Valley with projects in streaming rights, Video On Demand, Ultraviolet, etc. But lacking the support from the studio CEOs or boards, the lab languishes in the backwaters of the studios’ strategy. Instead of leading with new technology, the studios lead with litigation, legislation and lobbying. (Imagine if the $110 million/year spent on lobbying went to disruptive innovation.)

Piracy

One of the claims that studios make is that they need legislation to stop piracy. The fact is piracy is rampant in all forms of commerce. Video games and software have been targets since their inception. Grocery and retail stores euphemistically call it shrinkage. Credit card companies call it fraud. But none use regulation as often as the movie studios to solve a business problem. And none are so willing to do collateral damage to other innovative industries (VCRs, DVRs, cloud storage and now the Internet itself.)

The studios don’t even pretend that this legislation benefits consumers. It’s all about protecting short-term profit.

SOPA

When lawyers, MBAs and financial managers run your industry and your lobbyists are ex-Senators, understanding technology and innovation is not one of your core capabilities.

The SOPA bill (and DNS blocking) is what happens when someone with the title of anti-piracy or copyright lawyer has greater clout than your head of new technology. SOPA gives corporations unprecedented power to censor almost any site on the Internet. It’s as if someone shoplifts in your store, SOPA allows the government to shut down your store.

History has shown that time and market forces provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology is a video recorder, a personal computer, an MP3 player or now the Net. It’s prudent for courts and congress to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.

What the music and movie industry should be doing in Washington is promoting legislation to adapt copyright law to new technology — and then leading the transition to the new platforms.

The U.S. State Department has been championing the Internet Freedom initiative across the world. Secretary of State Clinton said, “…when ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled, and people constrained in their choices, the Internet is diminished for all of us.”

It’s too bad the head of the MPAA – an ex Senator - made a mockery of her words when he wondered “why our online censorship can’t be like China?”

We wonder, “Why can’t the film industry innovate like Silicon Valley?”

Lessons Learned

• Studios are run by financial managers who lack the skills to exploit disruptive innovation
• Studio anti-piracy/copyright lawyers trump their technologists
• Studios have no concern about collateral damage as long as it optimizes their revenue
• Studios $110M/year lobbying and political donations trump consumer objections
• Politicians votes will follow the money unless it will cost them an election

http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why...esult-is-sopa/





Film About the Hunt for Bin Laden Leads to a Pentagon Investigation
Michael Cieply

When the movies get real, moviemakers can count on real headaches.

Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow, the team behind a planned Hollywood film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, were caught up this week in the kind of dispute that more often ensnares journalists. It happened when Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, disclosed on Thursday that the Pentagon was investigating whether the filmmakers — who collaborated on the Oscar-winning project “The Hurt Locker” — had improper access to classified material for the still untitled Bin Laden movie.

Mr. King also said that the Central Intelligence Agency had informed him that it was reviewing its guidelines on interaction with the entertainment industry.

Mr. King has cited security concerns in pressing for an inquiry into the release of information about the May 1 Bin Laden raid in Pakistan. But for months he and others have also voiced suspicions that the film, an independent production to be released by Sony Pictures Entertainment, might exploit classified details of Bin Laden’s killing to boost President Obama’s political fortunes.

Originally scheduled to open shortly before the election, the film was moved to Dec. 19 after a hot public debate about its potential for partisan impact.

In addition, Michael Lynton, the Sony Pictures chief executive, has been a major backer of President Obama and last April attended and paid the donation fee for a high-priced political fund-raising dinner for the president on the Sony studio lot in Culver City, Calif., which was rented by the Democratic National Committee.

The investigation appears unlikely to affect the film’s production, expected to begin shortly, with Joel Edgerton and Jessica Chastain among its stars. A C.I.A. spokesman, Preston Golson, said the agency had worked in the past with writers and filmmakers with a goal of “an accurate portrayal of the men and women of the C.I.A., their vital mission and the commitment to public service that defines them.”

“And it is an absolute,” he continued, “that the protection of national security equities is an integral part of our mission.”

A White House spokesman on Friday declined comment beyond pointing to remarks last August, when Mr. King first raised the issue, in which White House Press Secretary Jay Carney called Mr. King’s assertions ridiculous.

But the investigation reveals the risks of an aggressively journalistic approach, once rare in the studio world. That approach has been pioneered lately by Mr. Boal — a writer and producer whose coming projects include one about Julian Assange of WikiLeaks — and by Sony Pictures, which last year surprised the movie world with “The Social Network,” a distinctly reportorial examination of Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

The studio made that film without acquiring life rights from Mr. Zuckerberg, relying instead on legal doctrines of fair use and the fair reporting of public court proceedings, though with a fictionalization that is inevitable in the movies. Facebook’s executives debated the wisdom of a lawsuit but eventually decided to ride out the wave of unwanted, and often unflattering, publicity.

Reached by telephone on Friday, Mr. Boal declined to discuss the Pentagon investigation or to say whether he had been asked to cooperate. In a journalistic career that has paralleled his work as a screenwriter, Mr. Boal has written extensively for publications like The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. His journalistic work while embedded with troops in Iraq in 2004 eventually led to his fictional script for “The Hurt Locker,” which was released in 2008.

Mr. Boal was researching a real-life account of the hunt for Bin Laden before Navy Seals killed him in Pakistan last year. With backing from Annapurna Pictures, an independent film company owned by Megan Ellison, the daughter of Oracle’s chief executive, Larry Ellison, he had already begun working with government agencies when Sony agreed to become the film’s distributor.

(With Mr. Boal, Ms. Ellison’s company has acquired life rights from Bill Keller, the former executive editor of The New York Times, in connection with their planned WikiLeaks film.)

While thousands of films have been based on real life, studios in the past only rarely dabbled in current news developments, because filmmaking is slow, and events move quickly. That can leave a company with a movie based on a changing set of facts, or, worse, with legal disputes that might block its ability to release a costly picture.

That almost happened five years ago, when prosecutors provided the filmmaker Nick Cassavetes with information for a movie, “Alpha Dog,” about the fugitive murder suspect Jesse James Hollywood. Mr. Hollywood was then captured, leading to an unsuccessful attempt by his lawyer to block the movie’s release by Universal Pictures, lest it taint the jury pool.

Still, Sony lately has been experimenting with films that closely follow current events. With the help of rapid-fire digital filmmaking techniques, it released the Michael Jackson concert film “This Is It” only months after that singer’s death in 2009. Then, working with the writer Aaron Sorkin and the director David Fincher, it tackled Mr. Zuckerberg’s story using court records and other sources as a book on which the film was ostensibly based was being finished.

On Friday Ann Boyd, a spokeswoman for Sony, declined to discuss the Pentagon investigation. And Ms. Ellison did not respond to a query.

But Martin Garbus, a First Amendment lawyer who has represented journalists and occasionally filmmakers in disputes, counseled hanging tough.

Citing what he called a lack of public evidence to support any claim of wrongdoing, Mr. Garbus said, “I’ve never seen a situation like this.”

Helene Cooper reported from Washington.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/m...stigation.html





Deloitte: 9% Have Cut Cable, Another 11% Are Considering It
Ryan Lawler

Deloitte just released its sixth annual State of the Media Democracy survey, which (among other things) asks U.S. respondents how they get access to their content in a world full of new and exciting devices. While operators and networks say they’ve seen little evidence of cord cutting, Deloitte’s report paints a different picture: 9 percent of respondents have already canceled their cable subscriptions, with another 11 percent saying they were considering doing so.

Not surprisingly, the number of viewers that are considering canceling skews higher the younger the respondents are: 19 percent of “leading Millennials” — those aged 23-28 — said they were considering canceling cable, with 13 percent of Gen Xers saying they were thinking about doing so. Of baby boomers, only 7 percent said they would consider cutting the cord, and older respondents were even less likely to do so, at just 5 percent.

The findings come as a greater number of viewers are catching on to free and subscription-based video services available online and streaming to their TVs and other devices. 22 percent of respondents said they had watched their favorite TV show on a free online video source, and 21 percent said they had viewed that show on its own video site. The good news for networks is that those views are increasingly coming from legitimate sources: That compares to 15 percent who watched on a video sharing site or 4 percent that watched on a peer-to-peer network.

Viewers are also becoming more comfortable with watching TV shows on other devices: 9 percent watched shows on a gaming console, compared to 6 percent a year earlier. Smartphone viewing — up to 6 percent from 5 percent — and tablet viewing — 3 percent vs 2 percent — also increased.

With movies, viewers are even more connected, according to the survey. Deloitte reports that 42 percent of users had streamed a movie in 2011, which was up from 32 percent a year earlier. 25 percent did so as part of a paid subscription like Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant Videos. That’s significantly higher than those who streamed as part of a one-time purchase, which 9 percent of viewers did.

While Deloitte makes the point that greater accessibility ultimately means more people accessing more content, it also means more people are realizing there are more choices for content outside the traditional cable model. As that happens, we expect even more to consider cutting the cord and finding their content elsewhere.
http://gigaom.com/video/deloitte-cord-cutters/





HBO Ends DVD Discounts for Netflix
Brian Stelter

Netflix said a month ago that it sees HBO as its chief rival. And it appears that HBO agrees, as the company confirmed on Thursday that it had decided to stop selling DVDs to Netflix at a discount.

Netflix typically buys the film and TV show DVDs that it rents to customers through wholesale venues, thereby taking advantage of volume discounts. But from now on, Netflix will have to buy DVD sets of shows like “True Blood” and “Boardwalk Empire” at retail in order to rent them to customers.

It’s not a huge financial hit to Netflix, but it is a signal about what the competitive landscape looks like. Asked about the change, a Netflix spokesman said, “Netflix will continue to provide HBO titles on DVD and Blu-ray to our members.”

The change was believed to have taken effect on Jan. 1.

Netflix firmly believes that its future is in the streaming video business, not the DVD-by-mail business. But it still has millions of customers that want DVDs by mail, and it has pledged to keep serving them.

On the streaming video side, Netflix does not have the rights to stream HBO’s TV shows or the films that HBO televises. That content is available through HBO’s own streaming service, HBO GO.

Referring to streaming, the Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings said last month, “I think the two of us will compete for a very long time; hopefully we’ll make ourselves both better through that competition.”

Showing off the growth of streaming despite an unpopular price hike, Netflix said earlier this week that in the last three months of 2011, it served up “more than two billion hours” of TV and film streams.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...s-for-netflix/





Warner Brothers Will Make Netflix, Redbox, Blockbuster Wait Longer for New Movies

Want to watch a new movie just out on DVD from Warner Brothers? You’re going to have to buy it, or wait even longer to get it from Netflix or other disc renters.

A new deal between Time Warner’s movie studio and Netflix, Redbox and Blockbuster will double the “window” for new releases. That means the services will now have to wait 56 days after the discs first go on sale to offer them to their customers, instead of 28 days.

The move is part of Hollywood’s ongoing campaign to bolster flagging DVD sales, and sources tell me the new deal is supposed to be announced at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Warner Brothers executives have already talked publicly about extending the current window.

This is the second time that Warner has been able to get the rental services to wait before distributing its movies.

In 2010, it struck deals with Netflix, and later Coinstar’s Redbox, to wait 28 days before renting its new discs. Coinstar and Netflix later landed similar pacts with most of the other big studios. (Coinstar did up end up in legal battles with Universal Studios and 20th Century Fox, which like this Web site is owned by News Corp.)

Two years ago, Netflix was able to argue that by delaying access to DVDs, it was able to get its hands on more streaming content, and lower prices for the discs it did buy. This time around, though, Warner won’t be granting any additional digital rights to the studios. It will simply be offering them the ability to buy discs in bulk, at a significant discount to retail pricing, like they already do.

Earlier today, news broke that HBO, another Time Warner unit, would stop selling its DVDs to Netflix altogether, but sources tell me the two moves aren’t directly related. Next week’s planned announcement is supposed to be tied to Warner Brothers’ continuing push for Ultraviolet, an industry consortium that’s supposed to allow home video buyers to watch their purchases on multiple machines, in multiple formats.

Reps for Time Warner, Coinstar, Netflix and Blockbuster parent company Dish Network declined to comment.
http://allthingsd.com/20120105/warne...or-new-movies/





Netflix: Our 20 Million Members Streamed 2 Billion+ Hours Of Content In Q4 2011
Robin Wauters

Netflix experienced a very rough year, but ended 2011 on a high when it comes to its streaming business. The company this morning announced that, in the fourth quarter of 2011, its 20 million members (from across 45 countries) instantly watched more than two billion hours of TV shows and movies.

That breaks down to roughly 666 million hours of on-demand streaming on Netflix per month, or about 22 million hours per day, on average.

Very impressive, but let’s wait until we get to take a look at the company’s earnings report for the quarter before we break out the champagne.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/net...nt-in-q4-2011/





The Android-based HDTV: Higher Bandwidth, 6x Streaming, Built-in Sling Media
Scott M. Fulton, III

The segment of the media delivery industry that may yet take off for consumers consists of programming and services that are delivered to newer HDTVs "over-the-top" (OTT) - meaning, outside of the cable or satellite provider's pipeline. Naturally, the Internet is the delivery medium here. In prior years, analysts have wondered how (or whether) traditional programming from multi-service operators (MSOs) like Comcast would compete.

The answer we may get from CES 2012 is that it won't have to. Semiconductor maker Broadcom is set to demonstrate a new class of system-on-a-chip (SoC) components that could be integrated into set-top boxes (STBs). This new class, numbered BCM72xx, would deliver OTT services alongside cable channels, in a format that would enable MSOs to utilize Android as the operating system, and Sling Media as the streaming provider for wireless devices. It could be the formula behind the phrase, "Goodbye, TiVo."

The multitude of partnerships this new class of products entails is so hot that neither Broadcom nor its new partners could hold off until next week. Essentially, what we should expect to see demonstrated in Las Vegas by Broadcom is a type of STB that delivers all of the following:

1. DVR functionality from EchoStar that incorporates wireless "place-shifting" from Sling Media. Meaning, anything you record to your EchoStar DVR can be streamed wirelessly to your smartphone, tablet, or laptop. EchoStar had purchased Sling back in 2007, but its ability to exploit that technology had been tied up in a patent battle with TiVo that only ended last May, in a $500 million settlement in TiVo's favor.

2. An Android-based apps ecosystem enabled through a partnership with Myriad Group, the maker of the Alien Vue environment that Dan Rowinski introduced you to last month. Existing OTT program services such as Google TV and Roku are already being integrated into Alien Vue; and to that end, Roku today announced its own partnership with premium channel Showtime for a kind of "previewing app" for premium content.

3. A 3D environment for graphical, on-screen program guides using OpenGL ES 2.0 as the graphics standard.

4. Optional built-in videoconferencing, which could be a major plus for cable operators that still want to deliver "triple-play" or "quadruple-play" customer options, but find themselves uncompetitive with wireless providers like Verizon.

5. Interactive supplemental content similar to the BD-Live content on Blu-ray movie discs, by way of Adobe AIR for the Digital Home.

6. Expanded bandwidth for on-demand streaming of as many as six simultaneous channels, by way of support for the Multimedia over Coax Alliance MoCA 2.0 standard.

7. Accelerated channel changing and scanning ability by means of a Broadcom standard called FastRTV.

As RWW's Dan Rowinski told me today, one of the sticking points to seeing Android implemented on STBs already concerns something called the device recognition setting, which enables software to determine the size of its own display. Newer versions of Android, including "Ice Cream Sandwich" version 4.0, enable a variety of standard sizes; but at least for now, Rowinski says, "extra large" refers to tablets with 10.1-inch diagonal screens. Any demos we see of Alien Vue on Android-based widescreens, therefore, would probably have to be manual hacks, at least for now.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/enterpr...dtv-higher.php





Privacy Been Violated? Call the PRC

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse lets you file privacy complaints electronically and helps you resolve them. Warning to privacy scofflaws: There's a new sheriff in town.
Dan Tynan

Odds are your personal privacy gets violated at least once a day. Slimy spammers, rapacious robo-callers, amoral data miners, snoopy employers, cyber stalkers, or plain old Facebook and Google – all of them like to make your business their business, whether or not they have a right to do it. The worst part: Unless they’re breaking the law, there’s nobody you can complain to.

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse hopes to change all that. Today the 20-year-old consumer rights organization launched its Online Complaint Center, offering ticked-off consumers an easy way to blow the whistle on privacy violators.

“We want to become the digital Dear Abby for privacy,” says Amber Yoo, PRC’s director of communications.
http://www.itworld.com/it-management...lated-call-prc





Why 2012 is Starting to Look Like 1984
Geoff Duncan

Between SOPA, NDAA, telecommunications surveillance, and people's willingness to share endlessly via social networking, will 2012 mark the year consumers irreversibly surrender their privacy and freedoms?

A mantra of the Internet age, articulated in 1984 by WELL founder Stewart Brand, is that “information wants to be free.” Back then — the days of 360K floppies and 1200 baud modems — Brand was referring to digital technology making information ever easier to distribute, copy, and remix than their old-school analog counterparts. The oft-forgotten corollary Brand offered at the same time was “Information also wants to be expensive,” because particular items, while perhaps of no interest to one person, can be “immeasurably valuable” to someone else.

As we head into 2012, the conflict Brand articulated between information’s “want” to be both free and expensive is taking on new dimensions. So-called “digital content” like books, music, and television is increasingly falling into the expensive category, thanks to online stores, digital distribution, copyright, and DRM. Meanwhile, information about ourselves — like our location, habits, activities, possessions, transactions, preferences, and personal information — is increasingly becoming “free,” often accessible to advertisers, corporations, and governments without our explicit consent. Or, in many cases, proffered up willingly in exchange for things like coupons.

As we enter 2012, the tension between “free” and “expensive” information is becoming more charged than ever. What could 2012 bring… and will it end up resembling Orwell’s 1984? Here are a few of the threats on the horizon.
SOPA-Internet-censorship-shutterstockStop Online Piracy Act

The Stop Online Piracy Act and its companion piece, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) are bills currently being crafted by U.S. Congress aiming to expand the capabilities of U.S. law enforcement agencies to combat copyright and intellectual property infringement — piracy. The proposed legislation is aimed at both the piracy of digital goods (books, movies, television shows, games, and things like live broadcasts), but also the use of the Internet and online marketplaces to traffic in physical counterfeit goods. That means pirated DVDs, Blu-rays, and CDs, but also fake drugs, fashion and accessories, electronics, antiques, collectibles, and many more items.

At a basic level, most people accept that piracy and counterfeiting are bad. It’s theft, and theft is rarely justifiable. So, on the surface, the notions behind SOPA don’t seem that onerous. The devil is, of course, in the details — or lack of details, given the very broad language in SOPA as it exists today. As originally proposed, SOPA would enable copyright holders to seek court orders against Web sites they believe are infringing on copyrights or either enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on one’s definitions, merely linking to a site that contained allegedly infringing content could be construed as “facilitating” infringement, so copyright holders could demand the site or account with that link be taken down.

In a worst-case scenario, Internet users who share a link to a cool video with their friends might find their social networking accounts suspended for “facilitating” alleged copyright infringement. Similarly, journalists writing about piracy could find their sites or publications suspended. And if a legitimate site or account were to get hijacked, transferred, or sold (because that never happens, right?) anyone who linked to or did business with once-legitimate content or sites might suddenly find themselves in violation of the law.

Under SOPA, a court could require ISPs to take down sites accused of infringement, order search engines to drop the sites from their listings, or bar online advertising and payment services (like AdSense or PayPal) from doing business with the site. The goal of those measures is ostensibly to shut down online marketplaces for pirated and counterfeit goods: Get them offline, and shut off access to their sources of online revenue. Although the bill provides for penalties against copyright holders who knowingly make false accusations of infringement (emphasis mine), the bill also grants immunity to ISPs who proactively take down accused sites. In other words, there’s no penalty to ISPs who take down sites because they’re accused of infringement, even if those claims are false. That’s a significant weakening of “safe harbor” provisions created by 1998′s still-controversial Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA). Similarly, the process of requesting or obtaining a court order over alleged infringement would largely take place outside the public eye, likely with the owners of the accused site unaware action was being taken against it. If the order were granted, one morning a site or service operator could wake up and find their site gone. Site owners can file a counter-claim if they’re barred from ad or payment services, but the counter-claim would have no force.

That’s not the full course of SOPA. It also has broad implications for cybersecurity and DNSSEC, a new security layer for DNS. However, provisions like the ones outlined above obviously have tremendous implications for search engines and services that host user-generated content — think Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the like, but also for personal sites, blogs, small businesses, and (really) any person, organization, or business with a website. Under SOPA, merely linking to other sites could become a dangerous proposition, lest the site at the other end of the link be accused of copyright infringement.

Opponents of SOPA argue these provisions would fundamentally break the Internet and stifle innovation, and could lead to many sites and services migrating their infrastructure out of the U.S. to escape potential liability. Further, it seems unlikely SOPA’s provisions would do much to combat online piracy and trafficking in counterfeit goods, since site operators are already adept at moving to new hosting services in the space of a few hours: Even SOPA’s proposed streamlining of takedowns would still move at glacial speeds compared to the Internet world.

Proponents of the legislation argue SOPA’s provisions would protect revenues of content creators that would otherwise be lost and, hence, preserve jobs — an important buzzword in today’s political and economic climate. Supporters also note SOPA is not intended to go after single instances of links on blogs, social networking feeds, or other sites; rather, the bill is meant to offer law enforcement and rights holders tools to go after bigger fish, like substantial piracy and counterfeiting operations. However, the language of the bill as it stands today contains no such limits, implicitly relying on barriers to entry (court costs, attorneys’ fees, documentation, etc.) to curb potential abuses.

SOPA (and PIPA) are not law. Both bills are proposed legislation that has yet to make it out of committee for votes before the House and Senate, let alone be signed by the president. Nonetheless, the proposed legislation has drawn a wealth of criticism, with domain registrar GoDaddy bearing the brunt of anti-SOPA sentiment by first endorsing the bill, then retracting its support. A handful of gaming companies have also apparently withdrawn their explicit support, although it’s not clear whether that’s a genuine reassessment of their stance or merely a PR move in the wake of the GoDaddy fracas. Many other top-line Internet companies—Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, eBay, Wikimedia Foundation — oppose SOPA, as do the EFF, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU.

The bottom line is that if legislation like SOPA and PIPA become law, the way the Internet works for most Americans could change substantially. Much of the information we understand to be “free” today, even to the level of tweets and status updates, could suddenly come with enormous consequences. The weight of those consequences will tend to suppress Internet users’ willingness to speak, communicate, link, and share — and that’s why opponents say SOPA will “break” the Internet.

National Defense Authorization Act

SOPA is not yet law, but the most recent National Defense Authorization Act is. The NDAA is an annual bill passed by the U.S. Congress authorizing the budget of the U.S. Defense Department. It’s always a bit of a political hot potato because few presidents can justify failing authorizing revenue for the Defense Department, particularly when tens of thousands of U.S. troops are overseas serving in extended conflicts. Since the President does not have a line-item veto, lawmakers try to attach all sorts of things to the NDAA, knowing the President will almost certainly have to sign them all through into law.

This year, the NDAA contains a doozy: It enables the U.S. military to conduct anti-terrorist operations on U.S. soil, and authorizes indefinite detention of terror suspects, including U.S. citizens, without trial. The law is not entirely clear whether the military can indefinitely detain U.S. citizens domestically, but it can certainly do so overseas, and foreigners can be detained whether overseas or within U.S. borders.

In signing this year’s NDAA, President Obama included a signing statement attempting to clarify his position on the law. “The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it. In particular, I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”

In essence, this year’s NDAA expands on provisions granted into the Patriot Act and extends the military’s role in domestic law enforcement. Now, the U.S. military can detain anyone, anywhere in the world, without trial or process, simply because they’re suspected of terrorist activities.

This may not seem to have anything to do with the Internet — until you think about groups like Anonymous and Wikileaks. Could Anonymous (or groups within Anonymous) attacking credit card operators, the threatening the NYSE, law enforcement organizations, or other organizations constitute terrorist activity? Similarly, would Wikileaks’ publication of classified U.S. diplomatic cables constitute terrorist activity? Suddenly, everyday Internet users speaking up in support of groups like Anonymous and Wikileaks might find themselves accused of aiding and facilitating terrorists. Similarly, if U.S. authorities decide these or similar groups’ activities constitute terrorism, members or alleged members might find themselves shipped to Guantanamo. No trial, no process, no appeal.

The Obama administration says it does not intend to exercise these powers. Even if that’s true, now that they’re law the only way they can be undone is with additional legislation that repeals the provisions, or through a court challenge, which would almost certainly ensure if the powers were ever utilized. But just because the Obama administration says it won’t use the powers doesn’t mean future administrations won’t. And let’s not forget that, at least in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Obama administration concluded it has the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without trail. (The American-born al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen by a targeted U.S. drone strike in September 2011.)

The bottom line here is that it doesn’t matter whether the U.S. government ever exercises the powers granted under this year’s NDAA: the very fact they exist suppresses American civil liberties by explicitly authorizing the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial, anywhere in the world. For folks who hold unpopular views, or merely know people who do, that’s a sobering thing to consider.

Telecom Immunity

Confused yet? Things get weirder. Late last month a U.S. Court of Appeals panel upheld the constitutionality of a law that makes telecommunications operators immune to lawsuits for assisting the federal government’s surveillance of American citizens. In other words, if your cell phone, telephone, or Internet provider turns over information about you, your activities, and use of their services over to the Federal government — even illegally — you’d have no grounds to sue. Communications companies face no sanctions for disclosing personal information to the federal government, including account information and even usage data like sites visited, account names, and location data.

When can the federal government require communications companies to hand over customer information? Essentially, anytime it likes: As part of anti-terrorist measures enacted by the Bush administration, the federal government has been engaging in warrantless wiretapping of individuals it has reason to believe may be connected to terrorist activities. Although originally revealed back in late 2005, the practice was sustained by the Bush administration and continues under the Obama administration. The activities include tapping phone calls, as well as intercepting Internet traffic (email, Web use, etc.) VoIP traffic, and text messages. The government is the sole arbiter of what individuals are surveilled, and is under no requirement to disclose its activities.
However, there is an upshot to the appeals court ruling. The court only finds the immunity granted to telecommunications operators to be legal; a case against the government challenging the legality of warrantless wiretapping practices can still proceed. That case, Jewel v. NSA, alleged that the National Security Agency set up secure facilities within AT&T facilities across the United States to engage in an “unprecedented suspicionless general search” of digital communications.

“The federal courts remain a forum to consider the constitutionality of the wiretapping scheme and other claims, including claims for injunctive relief,” wrote Judge Margaret McKeown of the 9th Circuit.

However, even if the Justice Department does not appeal the ruling that Jewel vs. NSA can proceed, it is likely to move the case be dismissed on state secrets grounds. Given the volume of information that has already been disclosed about the NSA’s domestic surveillance operations, the Justice Department may have a difficult time asserting a state secret privilege, but it does mean key proceedings of the case could take place outside public view.

The true value of privacy

Does any of this actually matter? Some might argue that talking about preserving privacy and civil liberties is pointless in an age when many everyday citizens regularly share intimate details of their daily lives with the entire world, including who they know, where they are, what they’re doing, what they like, what they’re looking for, and what they buy. Couple that with personal information about most people squirreled away in private and government databases (think health care providers, credit reporting agencies, banks, credit card companies, even grocery stores, not to mention the erstwhile efforts of online advertisers to track your every move across every site on the Internet) and it’s easy to see why former Sun head Scott McNealy said “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” And that was way back in 1999, before things like smartphones, Facebook, and Foursquare.

Fundamentally, the value of privacy comes down to whether individuals consider personal information to be free or expensive. It’s easy to consider information about other people “free,” after all, most of the time, it doesn’t matter to us. That leads to the comforting fallacy that individuals have nothing to worry about if they have nothing to hide. Perhaps, for a handful of people who have absolutely no qualms about living their entire lives in the public eye, that might be true.

However, there’s a distinct difference between having something to hide (like, say, terrorist connections), and not wanting every iota of personal information available to anyone, at any time. Few people would want their entire medical histories made public—which could lead to problems with insurance, health care, job prospects, and more. Similarly, few people would want their communications or financial records available to anyone, or consent to having their location monitored at all times. Is it acceptable to live our lives constantly wondering how our actions might be interpreted by the myriad of other people, organizations, and governments who might be watching?

Simply put, most people believe that information about themselves belongs to them, and ought to be under their control. We find information about ourselves to be “immeasurably valuable.” Sure, we’re free to share details if we like. But we should also be free not to share information, or to have information about ourselves collected and used with no right of recourse, appeal, deletion, or correction, because we recognize that information could be misused by others, to our detriment.

Unfortunately, in the world of 2012, it looks like Americans — and most other people — are finding themselves with less and less choice in the matter. And if you’re a marketer or a government, maybe that’s doubleplusgood.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computi...ook-like-1984/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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