Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 4th, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around." – Neil Young


"Freetards mourn Ex.ua with the usual DDOS attacks." – Richard Chirgwin


"Last year, you know, I was rehabbing my foot, you know, in Costa Rica, watching the game on an illegal Super Bowl website, and now I'm actually playing in the game. So it's pretty cool." – Tom Brady


"ICE must have a lot of spare time if they can waste it on these domain seizures. They should invest time in the real important stuff , instead of chasing people who have no other option than to watch a sports game for free." – Firstrowsports.eu



































February 4th, 2012




Hollywood Edition
Aaron Klein

Hollywood is really mad at the technology industry for killing SOPA, their bill to equip the US government with China and Iran-like powers to take down web sites suspected of “assisting” piracy, without any due process.

From their rhetoric, it’s clear that Hollywood still hasn’t learned anything from this. And then it struck me…why don’t we teach them?

Since they’re so persnickety about licensing agreements, let’s amend all of our terms of use to require all movie moguls to use a special “Hollywood Edition” of our products.

Here are some of the special new features we’ll be giving them…

• Before you can do a Google search, you have to sit through five minutes of ads for Google Chrome, Chromebooks by Samsung, Android Phones by Motorola, and that amazing straight-to-video blockbuster, Google+. And oh yeah, don’t even think about trying to skip the ads. A cute little red “X” appears in the corner of your screen if you try to do that.
• Microsoft Word will no longer allow you to read or edit movie scripts that are obvious takeoffs from other movies. We get the message: remixing content to make something new is wrong. Bonus for us: this would have stopped you from absolutely ruining “Arthur” in the remake.
• If you fly off to your vacation home in the south of France, your Mac won’t boot up at all. Remember, it’s your fault for traveling – just buy another one with the right “region code.”
• Twitter still works fine in the Hollywood Edition. But all tweets are delayed for about three hours, unless you want to pay $10 a day to see them immediately. Bonus for you: every other tweet will offer you some really overpriced popcorn.

So enjoy “Hollywood Edition,” you movie moguls. Remember, we’re doing this for YOU because you’re the customer, and we want to make sure you’re well entertained.

Based on what we’ve learned from you, the best way to do that is annoying you to no end.
http://www.aaronklein.com/2012/01/hollywood-edition/





The SOPA War: Why the GOP Turned on Piracy (Opinion)
Stewart Baker

For Republicans, opposition to intellectual property laws is starting to look like a political winner, and that should terrify Hollywood as it misreads where the pop-culture power base now lies.

The entertainment industry has lost the fight over SOPA, its legislative proposal for stopping Internet piracy. Now some want to try again with a revamped bill and a bigger push. But the same approach could stunt Hollywood's clout in Washington.

That's because the industry still doesn't understand its adversary. From the start, studios saw the fight over SOPA as a struggle with a bunch of other companies -- Google and Internet service providers among them -- that were hoping to profit from the Internet travails of the entertainment industry.

That turned out to be wrong. In fact, the industry is fighting what amounts to a new popular culture.

Unlike the old pop culture Hollywood dominated, this one is largely independent of the music, movie and broadcast industries. In fact, people who spend hours online instead of watching TV or going to movies will probably encounter the entertainment industry only when YouTube videos of their kids dancing to Prince or spoofing Star Wars are pulled down by Hollywood's bots, or when the RIAA threatens to sue them for their college savings, or when digital rights software makes it hard to move their stuff to a new tablet or phone.

To the entertainment industry, these episodes might seem like collateral damage in the fight to stop piracy. To the new pop culture, though, collateral damage and misuse of enforcement tools are everywhere, and they threaten everyone. The content industry has made itself into the villain. Increasingly, it looks like an occupying power, obeyed at gunpoint, despised for its ham-handed excesses and resisted from every dark corner. Unfortunately for Hollywood, as its customers migrate to the Internet, it is losing not just their money but their hearts and minds as well.

The industry's miscalculation about the source of resistance to SOPA might have led to an even bigger mistake. As long as the campaign for better IP enforcement was an inside-the-beltway, company-versus-company struggle, it could be fought within the Congressional judiciary committees, where Republican and Democratic politicians were wooed and won as individuals. As a result, strengthening intellectual property enforcement has been a bipartisan issue for the past 25 years. But when the fight went from the committees to the floor and Wikipedia went down, every member of Congress was expected to take a stand.

The two parties reacted very differently. Despite widespread opposition to SOPA from bloggers on the left, Democrats in Congress (and the administration) were reluctant to oppose the bill outright. The MPAA was not shy about reminding them that Hollywood has been a reliable source of funding for Democratic candidates, and that it would not tolerate defections.

But that very public message also reached another audience: Tea Party conservatives. Most of them had never given a second thought to intellectual property enforcement, but many had drawn support from conservative bloggers. They began to ask why they should risk the ire of their Internet supporters to rescue an industry that was happily advertising how much it hated them. Pretty soon, far more Republicans than Democrats had bailed on SOPA, and the Republican presidential candidates had all come out for what they called "Internet freedom."

That's what really ought to worry the entertainment industry. For Republicans, opposition to new intellectual property enforcement is starting to look like a political winner. It pleases conservative bloggers, appeals to young swing voters, stokes the culture wars and drives a wedge between two Democratic constituencies, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

We've seen this movie before. Immigration reform, the DREAM Act, free-trade agreements and the USA Patriot Act all commanded impressive bipartisan support -- for a while. Now, not so much. Bills on these topics still come to the floor, and they sometimes even pass, but only after endless partisan point-scoring and amendments driven by talk radio and mass e-mail. The same soon could be true of intellectual property enforcement.

SOPA has pushed a generation of Republicans into choosing sides between Hollywood and the Internet.

They might never look back.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...-piracy-286648





Slovenia's Ambassador Apologizes to Her Children and Her Nation for Signing ACTA, Calls for Mass Demonstrations in Ljubljana Tomorrow
Cory Doctorow

After Helena Drnovsek Zorko, Slovenia's ambassador to Japan, signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, she was deluged with emails from Slovenians criticizing her for signing onto the agreement, which encourages widespread network censorship and creates criminal penalties for copyright infringement. The ambassador read the agreement more closely and decided she agreed with the critics, and wrote an open letter of apology to her country for signing them up to the treaty.

The ambassador calls on Slovenians to converge on Ljubljana tomorrow, Saturday, Feb 4, to protest ACTA.

I signed ACTA out of civic carelessness, because I did not pay enough attention. Quite simply, I did not clearly connect the agreement I had been instructed to sign with the agreement that, according to my own civic conviction, limits and withholds the freedom of engagement on the largest and most significant network in human history, and thus limits particularly the future of our children. I allowed myself a period of civic complacency, for a short time I unplugged myself from media reports from Slovenia, I took a break from Avaaz and its inflation of petitions, quite simply I allowed myself a rest. In my defence, I want to add that I very much needed this rest and that I am still having trouble gaining enough energy for the upcoming dragon year. At the same time, I am tackling a workload that increased, not lessened, with the advent of the current year. All in line with a motto that has become familiar to us all, likely not only diplomats: less for more. Less money and fewer people for more work. And then you overlook the significance of what you are signing. And you wake up the following morning with the weight of the unbearable lightness of some signature.

First I apologised to my children. Then I tried to reply to those acquaintances and strangers who expressed their surprise and horror. Because there are more and more of them, I am responding to them publicly. I want to apologise because I carried out my official duty, but not my civic duty. I don’t know how many options I had with regard to not signing, but I could have tried. I did not. I missed an opportunity to fight for the right of conscientious objection on the part of us bureaucrats.
http://boingboing.net/2012/02/03/slo...r-apologi.html





ACTA's EU Future in Doubt After Polish Pause
David Meyer

Acta, EU, Copyright, Poland, Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, European Union, File-sharing, Intellectual property, Activists, Enforcement, Law
NEWS

The chances of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement becoming law in Europe dwindled suddenly on Friday, after Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said he was suspending ACTA's ratification in his country.

According to reports, Tusk said on Friday that his government had made insufficient consultations before signing the agreement in late January, and it was necessary to ensure it was entirely safe for Polish citizens.

Although it is technically a trade agreement, ACTA is effectively an international treaty aimed at criminalising copyright infringement and associated activities.

Tusk's backtracking could spell the end of ACTA for the entire European Union. If Poland or any other EU member state, or the European Parliament itself, fails to ratify the document, it becomes null and void across the union. As it stands, there are already five member countries that have not even signed ACTA.

"I share the opinions of those who from the beginning said that consultations were not complete," Tusk said, according to a report in Wirtualna Polska. The 54-year-old prime minister added that a Polish rejection of ACTA is now on the table, and admitted that he had previously approached the agreement from a "20th century" perspective, due to his age.

All this represents a major about-turn, as Tusk strongly defended the agreement just three days ago.

Poland has seen the biggest protests against ACTA, with thousands demonstrating on the streets last week. Hackers believed to be associated with Anonymous attacked Tusk's website, as well as the European Parliament site, after the signing.

Critics of ACTA say it has insufficient safeguards for online liberties, particularly in signing countries that do not already have strong principles of freedom of speech and expression. In addition, the agreement negotiations, which took place without the contributions of civic groups or elected representatives, have been widely described as undemocratic.

Mixed agreement

Because ACTA deals in part with criminal law, the application of which is entirely up to national governments, it qualifies in the EU as a 'mixed agreement'. This is why it was signed in January by a European Commission representative as well as by ambassadors from EU member states, including Poland and the UK.

The rules around mixed agreements say the legislatures of every EU member state, as well as the European Parliament, all have to provide ratification. The European Commission confirmed to ZDNet UK that if just one member state does not ratify ACTA, the deal will not enter into force anywhere within the EU.

As yet, none of ACTA's 31 signatories has ratified it, and seven countries, including EU member states Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands and Slovakia, have so far declined to sign the document at all.

However, in a letter sent this week to the European Parliament trade committee, trade commissioner Karel De Gucht insisted those five EU member states will sign "in the coming weeks".

"They were not in a position to do so last week either because of the minimum time required for completing their internal procedures, or because they did not currently have an ambassador in Tokyo and will therefore need to send an envoy," De Gucht said.

One of the EU member states that did sign ACTA last week was Slovenia. On Tuesday, the Slovenian ambassador who signed the document in Tokyo on her country's behalf apologised for doing so, saying she had made a mistake.

"I signed ACTA out of civic carelessness, because I did not pay enough attention," Helena Drnovšek Zorko wrote. "Quite simply, I did not clearly connect the agreement I had been instructed to sign with the agreement that, according to my own civic conviction, limits and withholds the freedom of engagement on the largest and most significant network in human history, and thus limits particularly the future of our children."

If the EU steers clear of ACTA, it is still possible for the agreement to enter into force elsewhere. However, for this to happen, at least six of the negotiating parties will have to ratify the deal.

Non-EU signatories include Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and the US. Non-EU countries that have so far refrained from signing include Mexico and Switzerland.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/intellec...ause-40094978/





Act on Acta Now If You Care About Democracy and Free Speech

The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement could criminalise internet users globally. But it hasn't been ratified yet …
David Meyer

Acta is the latest copyright enforcement scheme to cause alarm among digital activists. Given its reach, this is understandable.

The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement is, despite its name, effectively an international treaty that forces signatories to criminalise "commercial-scale" copyright and trademark infringement. Some of it covers knock-off merchandise, but most applies to the digital world as well. Many of Acta's provisions already exist in countries such the US and the UK – for example, it makes sure courts can block or take down infringing websites – and the idea is ostensibly to bring the rest of the world in line.

However, some elements would go further than existing laws in most of the countries that sign up. Acta criminalises activities such as breaking the digital locks on rights-protected files, or even distributing tools to help people do so. Stripping the artist information from a music file becomes a crime, as does decrypting content that has been scrambled for copyright protection. Acta also codifies the flawed idea, in calculating damages from so-called piracy, that every unlawful download represents a lost sale.

One reason for the heightened attention being paid to Acta is the recent derailing of the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Protect IP Act (Pipa) in the US. These bills were, in many ways, more dangerous than Acta – Sopa wanted to alter the DNS, the core of the internet – but the spirit is the same. After winning a round against the US bills, citizens and activists are raring to take on a new challenge.

Acta was the brainchild of the US and Japan. Its formulation began in 2007, outside the frameworks of the World Trade Organisation and without the involvement of China, India and other countries that are major sources of pirated goods. Because it was technically a trade agreement, negotiations took place behind closed doors, with the only look-in afforded to citizens' groups or even elected representatives coming via a series of leaks.

Through conduits such as WikiLeaks, it became clear that the US in particular was pushing for signatories to create "three-strikes" laws that could be used to kick repeat file-sharers off the internet. The EU pushed back and this provision was removed, along with a requirement that ISPs and other online service providers snoop on their customers. The criminalisation of camcorder use in cinemas is also no longer mandated in Acta.

But what remains is troubling on several counts. Acta ostensibly targets big players, but, when it comes to its application on the internet, its definition of "commercial-scale" infringement is loose enough to also cause trouble for individuals. According to Acta, criminal and civil enforcement procedures "shall apply to infringement of copyright or related rights over digital networks, which may include the unlawful use of means of widespread distribution for infringing purposes".

Given that "widespread distribution" is the essence of the internet, this could be interpreted as a go-ahead for cracking down on small-scale infringers, or even people who post a copyrighted image or parody of it on their blogs. Sites and blogs that carry Google Ads could arguably also be seen as "commercial activities for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage", another way in which Acta defines commercial scale.

Those defending Acta maintain that it would not bypass free speech and privacy safeguards in places such as the US and EU. The document itself regularly refers to a need for "freedom of expression, fair process, and privacy" in the way enforcement is carried out, but only in accordance with the laws of the signatory country. Some of those countries, such as Morocco, are not noted for providing a strong right to free expression. Even if Acta's apologists are to be taken at their word, the implications could be unpleasant for free-thinking citizens in many parts of the world.

It is no longer possible to change the contents of Acta, as it has been finalised. However, Acta is now, for the first time, in its democratic phase. Although 30 countries, including the US and UK, have signed Acta, no one has yet ratified it. The treaty may have been negotiated by governments and bureaucrats, but most of the signatories now have to get Acta through their legislatures. The process varies from country to country, but the document is finally in the hands of elected representatives.

Those who want to see Acta defeated need to go to their MPs, MEPs and congresspeople and ask them, facts in hand, to vote against its ratification. Even though elements of Acta may be needed to combat large-scale copyright and trademark infringement, it can be argued that the risks associated with the whole are too great. Elected representatives may be receptive – they themselves were shut out of the Acta negotiations and, after the Sopa protests, they are well aware that voters dislike heavy-handed copyright enforcement.

Agreements such as Acta are entirely driven by one side: the rights-holders. These players have a genuine grievance, in that the internet poses an overwhelming threat to their old business model. The copyright-versus-technology debate is worth having, and soon. But resolution has to come through genuine discussion between the content industry, lawmakers and the public.

The structures to allow this open debate will hopefully come, but not before the debate is reset. Right now, citizens have a rare and possibly brief opportunity to call for that to happen.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...cy-free-speech





We Have Every Right to Be Furious About ACTA
EFF

If there’s one thing that encapsulates what’s wrong with the way government functions today, ACTA is it. You wouldn’t know it from the name, but the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a plurilateral agreement designed to broaden and extend existing intellectual property (IP) enforcement laws to the Internet. While it was only negotiated between a few countries,1 it has global consequences. First because it will create new rules for the Internet, and second, because its standards will be applied to other countries through the U.S.’s annual Special 301 process. Negotiated in secret, ACTA bypassed checks and balances of existing international IP norm-setting bodies, without any meaningful input from national parliaments, policymakers, or their citizens. Worse still, the agreement creates a new global institution, an "ACTA Committee" to oversee its implementation and interpretation that will be made up of unelected members with no legal obligation to be transparent in their proceedings. Both in substance and in process, ACTA embodies an outdated top-down, arbitrary approach to government that is out of step with modern notions of participatory democracy.

The EU and 22 of its 27 member states signed ACTA yesterday in Tokyo. This news is neither momentous nor surprising. This is but the latest step in more than three years of non-transparent negotiations. In December, the Council of the European Union—one of the European Union’s two legislative bodies, composed of executives from the 27 EU member states—adopted ACTA during a completely unrelated meeting on agriculture and fisheries. Of course, this is not the end of the story in the EU. For ACTA to be adopted as EU law, the European Parliament has to vote on whether to accept or reject it.

In the U.S., there are growing concerns about the constitutionality of negotiating ACTA as a “sole executive agreement”. This is not just a semantic argument. If ACTA were categorized as a treaty, it would have to be ratified by the Senate. But the USTR and the Administration have consistently maintained that ACTA is a sole executive agreement negotiated under the President’s power. On that theory, it does not need Congressional approval and thus ACTA already became binding on the US government when Ambassador Ron Kirk signed it last October.

But leading US Constitutional Scholars disagree. Professors Jack Goldsmith and Larry Lessig, questioned the Constitutionality of the executive agreement classification in 2010:

The president has no independent constitutional authority over intellectual property or communications policy, and there is no long historical practice of making sole executive agreements in this area. To the contrary, the Constitution gives primary authority over these matters to Congress, which is charged with making laws that regulate foreign commerce and intellectual property.2

(And by the way, we agree [pdf].)

Senator Ron Wyden has been asking these questions for years, first demanding an explanation from USTR ambassador Ron Kirk, President Obama, and now the administration’s top international law expert Harold Koh. The distinction between executive agreement and treaty should not be lost on this administration: as a Senator, Vice President Joe Biden used the same argument to require the Bush administration to seek Senate approval for an arms reduction agreement.

Public interest groups and informed politicians have long lamented these problems with ACTA. But the impact of dubious backroom law-drafting is getting fresh attention in light of the powerful global opposition movement that has emerged out of last week’s Internet blackout protests. Activists and netizens all around the world have woken up to the dangers of overbroad enforcement law proposals drafted by monopoly industry lobbyists, and rushed into law through strategic lobbying by the same corporate interests that backed SOPA and PIPA. Tens of thousands are protesting in the streets in Poland as their ambassador signed the agreement in Tokyo. The EU Parliament’s website and others have come under attack for their involvement in these laws. The Member of the European Parliament who was appointed to be the rapporteur for ACTA in the European Parliament, Kader Arif, quit yesterday in protest. In a statement he said:

I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament's demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly…

…This agreement might have major consequences on citizens' lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. ACTA may have been signed by public officials, but it’s crystal clear that they are not representing the public interest.

It is now up to the collective will of the public to decide what to do next, and for individuals to ask themselves what they want their government to look like. Do you believe in democracy? Do you believe that laws should be made to reflect our collective best interests, formulated through an open transparent process? One that allows everyone, from experts to civil society members, to analyze, question and probe an agreement that will lead to laws that will impact potentially billions of lives? If we don’t do anything now, this agreement is going to crawl itself into power. With the future at stake like this, it’s never too late to fight.

~

If you live in Europe, follow these links to learn how you can take immediate action and stay informed on the latest updates:

La Quadrature du Net (@laquadrature): How to Act Against ACTA

European Digital Rights (@EDRi_org): Stop ACTA!

Open Rights Group (@OpenRightsGroup): ACTA: signed, not yet sealed - now it's up to us

Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (@FFII): ACTA Blog

For those in the U.S., you can demonstrate your opposition to the dubious decision to negotiate ACTA as a sole executive agreement to bypass proper congressional review by signing this petition on the whitehouse.gov website, demanding the Administration submit ACTA to the Senate for approval.

EFF will continue to monitor ACTA's global implementation and watch for efforts to use ACTA to broaden US enforcement powers.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/0...ous-about-acta





Beyond ACTA: Next Secret Copyright Agreement Negotiated This Week—in Hollywood
Nate Anderson

One of the worst parts of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was its ridiculous secrecy, under which it was easy for negotiators and industry reps to see draft text, but impossible for the public to do so except through leaks. Thankfully, those leaks showed just how bad ACTA was going to be for the Internet, and public pressure helped remove the worst provisions.

But the basic approach to doing deals didn't die, and it's back again this week as negotiators meet in Hollywood to discuss a new, totally secret intellectual property chapter for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a regional trade agreement.

Civil society and digital rights groups would dearly love to be part of the process; barring that, they'd like to know simply what the process is so that they can at least mount press conferences of their own. But even that is difficult.

According to Sean Flynn, an American University professor who has worked on these issues for several years, the cloud of secrecy is again in force. "Although there has been no official announcement about the planned meeting, public interest advocacy organizations have determined that intellectual property negotiations will be held January 31-Feb 4th at a hotel in West Hollywood," he wrote last night in an e-mail.

Flynn helped to organize a "public interest briefing" that would take place at the hotel and be open to any TPP negotiators interested in hearing a different perspective. It was not to be:

The public interest briefing was booked last week and advertised to all delegations, including the host USTR [US Trade Representative]. An hour after the invitation was sent, we received a cancellation of our venue by the hotel. The cancelation by by Sophie Jones, Event Sales Manager, Sofitel Los Angeles stated:

“I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news but unfortunately we will not be able to move forward with your luncheon for Tuesday January 31st. It was brought to my attention that we have a confidential group in house and we will not be allowing any other groups in the meeting space that day. Again, my apologies for the late notice. Hopefully we can work together in the near future.”

After receiving the cancellation, members of an advocacy organization called the hotel and were able to book a room for a claimed private event not related to the TPP. Apparently only TPP-related events were banned from the hotel at the request of an unidentified party. USTR is serving as the host of this meeting.

The meeting did take place... at a restaurant across the street from the hotel. A later, two-hour conference was held at the USC Law School and is available for streaming. The whole episode sounds both petty and farcical on USTR's part, but the issues are deadly serious.

Last year, versions of the TPP's US-written IP chapter leaked; its provisions went well beyond even ACTA, which was already the new high-water mark for IP enforcement. Where do things stand now? Are the other TPP countries on board with the US approach? Who knows! It's all secret.

While ACTA at least claimed not to exceed US law, Flynn and other professors allege that the leaked TPP IP chapter does go beyond what's in US law, doing things like extending copyright protection even to temporary "buffer" copies so crucial to digital devices.

As for USTR, it claims to be conducting "an unprecedented fifty-state domestic outreach strategy for TPP," and it's even hosting a largely worthless TPP blog. People can send comments to USTR through a special Web form, and negotiators do take in presentations from civil society groups on some occasions.

But negotiators still insist of shielding their work from the public, even on matters of increasing public concern, such as digital copyrights. And each agreement they negotiate mysteriously ends up just a bit tougher than the one before it. The time for "trust us" is over, and unlike ACTA, people want meaningful access to TPP documents before the draft text has been so worked over that no substantive change is possible. But without significant public pressure, that's not going to happen. Again.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-hollywood.ars





Shoe on the Other Foot: RIAA Wants to Scrap Anti-Piracy OPEN Act
Timothy B. Lee

The Recording Industry Association of America found itself in an unusual position this week: opposing an anti-piracy bill that's gaining momentum in Congress.

"The OPEN Act does nothing" to stop online infringement and "may even make the problem worse," the industry group says in a statement it is circulating on Capitol Hill this week. "It does not establish a workable framework, standards, or remedies. It is not supported by those it purports to protect."

The basic approach of OPEN, which is sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), is to shift enforcement against rogue sites to the International Trade Commission, which has become a popular venue for international patent disputes. The ITC would investigate claims that a foreign site is dedicated to infringement. If the ITC found a site was dedicated to infringement, the site would be cut off from American advertising and payment networks.

But the RIAA argues the bill won't be effective at shutting down rogue sites. The trade group warns of "indefinite delays" as claims of infringement are investigated. And it complains that the process envisioned by OPEN would allow for "endless submissions by parties such as Google," further gumming up the process. All the while, the alleged rogue site would be able to continue operating.

The RIAA also warns that the need to hire an attorney to navigate the ITC's arcane legal process will "put justice out of reach for small business American victims of IP theft."

The trade group complains that sites aren't held responsible for the infringing activities of their users, a rule the trade group says "excuses willful blindness and outright complicity in illegal activity." RIAA also says it's "virtually impossible" to prove that a site infringed willfully, as OPEN requires.

OPEN "needs to be scrapped," the statement says. "Stakeholders and Congress need to start over with a fresh look at solving this problem."

Of course, Congress just did "start over" after the RIAA and its allies tried to ram the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act through Congress. That effort sparked an unprecedented Internet backlash. While some of the RIAA's objections may have merit, we suspect the group's real problem with OPEN is precisely that the drafting situation was reversed this time: technology companies and the Internet community actually had a seat at the table when the bill was formulated. As a consequence, its provisions reflect a very different approach to the issue.

In addition, SOPA and PIPA were not mentioned at all in the RIAA's statement. Apparently, those bills have become so politically toxic that even their leading supporters prefer "starting over" to reviving them... at least under their existing names.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...e-scrapped.ars





MPAA Wins the Oscar Screener Battle, But Loses the War
Andy Baio

Every year, the MPAA tries desperately to stop Oscar screeners — the review copies sent to Academy voters — from leaking online. And every year, teenage boys battling for street cred always seem to defeat whatever obstacles Hollywood throws at them.

For the last 10 years, I’ve tracked the online distribution of Oscar-nominated films, going back to 2003. Using a number of sources (see below for methodology), I’ve compiled a massive spreadsheet, now updated to include 310 films.

This year, for the first time, I’m calling it: The MPAA is winning the battle to stop screener leaks.

A record 37 films were nominated this year, and the studios sent out screeners for all but four of them. But, so far, only eight of those 33 screeners have leaked online, a record low that continues the downward trend from last year.

(Disclaimer: Any of this could change before the Oscar ceremony, and I’ll keep the data updated until then.)

They may be winning the battle, but they’ve lost the war.

While screeners declined in popularity, 34 of the nominated films (92 percent) were leaked online by nomination day, with 25 of them available as high-quality DVD or Blu-ray rips. Only three films — Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, My Week with Marilyn and W.E. — haven’t leaked online in any form (yet!).

If the goal of blocking leaks is to keep the films off the internet, then the MPAA still has a long way to go.

The decline in screener leaks could be attributed to tighter controls — personalized watermarks, the aggressive prosecution of leakers, and greater awareness of the risks for Academy voters.

But the continuously shrinking window between theatrical and retail releases may be to blame. After all, once the retail Blu-ray or DVD is released, there’s no reason for pirate groups to release a lower-quality watermarked screener.

The chart below tracks the window between U.S. release and its first DVD/Blu-ray leak online, which shows how the window between theatrical and retail release dates is slowly closing since 2003.

Whatever the reason, online movie releasing groups are taking longer to pirate movies than ever. When I first started tracking releases in the early- to mid-2000s, the median time between theatrical release to its first leak online was 1 to 2 days. Now, that number’s crept up to over three weeks.

The rise in leak time correlates with a dip in popularity for lower-quality sources, like camcorder-sourced footage. This year, only eight of the 37 nominees (21 percent) were sourced from camcorder footage. (This is likely because there are fewer blockbuster nominees than in the mid-2000s.)

As the industry slowly transitions from physical media to streaming video, it’ll be interesting to see if the downward trend continues, or if the ease of capturing streaming video spawns a new renaissance for screeners. Last year, Fox Searchlight distributed screeners with iTunes, and all were quickly and easily pirated.

The Data Dump

Skeptical of my results? Want to dig into it yourself? Good! Here’s the complete dataset, available on Google Spreadsheets or downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet or comma-separated text file.

Methodology

I include the full-length feature films in every category except documentary and foreign films (even music, makeup, and costume design).

I use Yahoo! Movies for the release dates, always using the first available U.S. date, even if it was a limited release, falling back to the first available U.S. date in IMDB.

All the cam, telesync, and screener leak dates are taken from VCD Quality, supplemented by dates in ORLYDB. I always use the first leak date, excluding unviewable or incomplete nuked releases.

The official screener release dates are from Academy member Ken Rudolph, who kindly lists the dates he receives each screener on his personal homepage. Thanks again, Ken!
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/...reener-battle/





Hollywood Isn't Ruining DVD Rentals On Its Own: Netflix is Happy to Help
Dan Frommer

It's easy to slam Hollywood for not understanding how technology works, or for putting its legacy business models ahead of user experience. Especially when big media companies do things like restrict digital access to movies and then cry about piracy.

But Hollywood isn't always acting alone. Sometimes, the savviest Web companies around - Netflix, for instance - are playing along, with their own agendas.

The latest example: Not only must Netflix customers wait 56 days before renting Warner Bros. new release discs, but they can't even add them to their rental queues until 28 days after they've been released. Sounds a little nuts, no?

Hollywood's goal with this wacky idea is to get you to buy those movies on DVD instead of renting them. Studios stand to make a lot more money by selling a DVD to each household instead of selling one copy to Netflix for a bunch of rentals. So now they're in the business of messing with movie rentals using things like release delays and this new no-new-movies-in-your-queue policy.

Whether this plan sells more DVDs or not, it's hard to escape the fact that Netflix's user experience is suffering a bit because of it, and that seems like something Netflix should fight. But Netflix is actually on board!

Instead of telling Hollywood to get lost with silly ideas like this, Netflix is cooperating. It doesn't have to buy DVDs directly from studios and play along with 28- or 56-day windows: Netflix can legally go out and buy DVDs anywhere - Walmart, Amazon, you name it - and rent them out as much as it wants. But it isn't doing that. It's playing along.

Why? A couple of reasons. To some extent, because it's easier and more reliable for Netflix to buy discs directly from Warner Bros. instead of relying on third-party vendors. Netflix admits as much. But more importantly, because Netflix actually has the same goal that the studios do: To try to discourage you from renting DVDs.

The future of Netflix is 100% based on its ability to grow into the best streaming video entertainment service. Renting discs is very profitable for Netflix, but it's the past. That's why it went as far as to try separating its DVD business last year as "Qwikster," and that's why it's letting studios make DVD rentals less attractive with windows and queue restrictions.

The sooner you get disgusted and cancel your DVD rental subscription, the stronger Netflix's case to the studios becomes that they need streaming, or else.

So far, that isn't really happening. An analysis by Tristan Louis shows that all of the top 100 movies from 2010 are available on DVD, but the vast majority aren't available as streaming rentals. Netflix actually had the best streaming rental selection vs. iTunes, Amazon, or Vudu, according to Louis's analysis, but it's still only a small fraction of the top movies. Not yet good enough.

Netflix has been successful in its efforts to reduce its number of DVD subscribers, however, albeit with significant damage to its reputation.

At the end of 2011, Netflix had just 11 million DVD subscribers, down significantly from last year and well below its 22 million streaming subscribers. "We expect DVD subscribers to decline steadily every quarter forever," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said on the company's Q4 earnings call last week.

Assuming this trend continues, Netflix will be in a position to say to the studios: Look, the vast majority of our subscribers won't be able to watch this movie unless you stream it. So stream it.

That might not work, anyway. There's plenty of competition on the way for Netflix, ranging from Amazon, Apple and Google to the cable companies. And it will need to keep its edge using other techniques, too, such as obtaining exclusive and/or original programming. But this is the future Netflix is choosing, so it needs to try.

The takeaway: If you're renting discs from Netflix now, expect more weirdness ahead.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...s_own_netf.php





Kaleidescape vs. DVD CCA: Judge Rules Against Movie Servers

Tentative ruling in landmark DVD-copying case suggests Kaleidescape knew its movie servers might be in violation of DVD CCA licensing agreement. Case has broad implication for media-server market.
Julie Jacobson,

Kaleidescape, a prominent manufacturer of high-end movies servers, has lost a major battle in its eight-year war against the DVD Copy Control Association, the organization that licenses the Content Scramble System (CSS) for DVD players.

The DVD CCA sued Kaleidescape in 2004, arguing that its products violate a licensing agreement that expressly prohibits the copying (ripping, archiving) of DVDs.

Judge William J. Monahan of the Santa Clara County Superior Court in California issued a tentative judgment favoring the DVD CCA on Jan. 9, 2012. Discovered by CE Pro after an anonymous tip, the unpublished ruling is subject to revision pending input from the two parties. If it stands as written, the DVD CCA can permanently prohibit Kaleidescape from selling its DVD movie servers, unless the manufacturer adds some kind of authentication mechanism, such a carousel that stores the physical discs. The DVD CCA also can collect court costs.

This landmark case could set a precedent that would make virtually all current DVD movie servers illegal – that is, all servers whose makers have a license with the DVD CCA.

“We are very disappointed by the tentative decision,” Kaleidescape CEO Michael Malcolm tells CE Pro. "The DVD CCA is controlled by the six large movie studios in concert with some of Kaleidescape’s competitors. They object to the innovations of the Kaleidescape System, and want new Kaleidescape Systems to require the presence of the DVD in a disc vault, as with Blu-ray Discs today. Despite the evidence presented at trial, Judge Monahan has tentatively adopted a statement of decision that was drafted by the DVD CCA, which goes far beyond anything in the license."

Malcolm adds that Kaleidescape has filed objections to the order "and if those objections are not successful, we plan to appeal."

Background of DVD CCA v Kaleidescape

CE Pro has been following this lawsuit and related cases since 2004, and a history of DVD-ripping legality can be found here.

Briefly, the DVD CCA licenses the CSS digital rights management (DRM) technology required for all (legal) DVD players to play copy-protected content.

Kaleidescape, a DVD CCA licensee, makes high-end movie servers that are populated with movies copied to the device. The DVD CCA has claimed that its CSS licensing agreement bars such copying.

Kaleidescape has maintained that the contract says no such thing; in any case, archiving DVDs is legal under the “fair use” doctrine and Kaleidescape servers make bit-for-bit copies so that the DRM provisions of CSS are preserved.

After several appeals and counterclaims, Judge Monahan ruled that the CSS licensing agreement does in fact require a disc to be present in a DVD player for playback. Kaleidescape servers – and countless similar products from other manufacturers – skirt this requirement, which is the “law of the case and thus is binding on this Court,” Monahan asserts.

At the heart of the matter is Section 1.5 of the General Specifications that states CSS is “intended to prevent casual users from unauthorized copying of copyrighted materials recorded in [DVDs].”

The DVD CCA, as well as content owners represented by the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA), have argued that even bit-for-bit DVD transfers don’t prevent users from renting a movie and copying it for their permanent use, the so-called rent-rip-return practice.

To thwart this practice, the CSS agreement requires disc authentication including bus encryption and bus decryption, which does not occur in the case of Kaleidescape servers “because the DVD disc is eliminated from the playback process….” Monahan notes. “Instead, they [discs] are intercepted and diverted to the Kaleidescape System’s server.

From the ruling (citations omitted):

Kaleidescape contends that the Kaleidescape System can detect that an imported DVD is rented when the DVD has been marked as a rental DVD and that some rental DVDs are so marked. The Kaleidescape System cannot detect if an imported DVD is a DVD that the user has borrowed. After the Kaleidescape System copies the DVD content to the server, it displays a message that states that it is illegal for a user to import a DVD that the user does not own and that the user must delete the copy if the DVD is not owned. The message further states that the user must click “Agree” to signify that the user either owns the imported DVD or that the user will delete it. The Kaleidescape System does not, however, provide any mechanism for confirming that a user actually owns an imported DVD. Furthermore the Kaleidescape System itself cannot delete the imported DVD – the user has to delete it using a personal computer.”

Kaleidescape had considered some options for extra protections when it began product development in 2001, according to court documents. The company contemplated a carousel that would hold the discs and a “DVD-destruction” scheme that would kill the DVD once it was copied. Both ideas were rejected (although the carousel method is employed in Kaleidescape’s latest Blu-ray servers).

Monahan says Kaleidescape was aware before entering into the licensing agreement that a physical disc might be required for DVD playback, noting that “Kaleidescape rejected proposed alternative products that would have played back DVDs from the physical DVD disc, not because it concluded that the License Agreement would allow the play back of DVDs from permanent copies stored on a server, but rather, because of marketing considerations.”

In numerous interviews with CE Pro and in court, Kaleidescape has said that the CSS requirement is too vague with regards to DVD copying, but an earlier court ruled that it is “not so vague that the court cannot tell what it requires – it requires that playback of DVD content by a Drive plus Decryption device be performed utilizing the physical DVD.”

It was up to Monahan to determine whether the Kaleidescape system is a Drive plus Decryption Module. He judged that it is such a device.

Parallels with DVD CCA vs. Real Networks

The Kaleidescape case is not unlike a similar lawsuit filed by the DVD CCA against Real Networks for its $30 RealDVD copying software.

Real lost in that breach-of-contract case; however, appeals were not exhausted because Real capitulated to the MPAA on another lawsuit – infringement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (Kaleidescape has not been sued by the MPAA or any other parties for DMCA violations.)

In his Kaleidescape ruling Monahan noted the parallels with the Real case and agreed with that court, which ruled the CSS licensing agreement unambiguously “prevent[s] unauthorized interception and the creation of a copy of the [CSS] keys and DVD video content on a storage device for future playback without the DVD, such as a computer hard drive.”

Dispute about Damage

An interesting point of contention concerns whether or not the DVD CCA could enjoin Kaleidescape from selling its existing DVD servers. Kaleidescape has said no injunction is warranted because the DVD CCA cannot prove that any harm has been done to that entity or to movie studios or content providers due to Kaleidescape products.

But as Monahan and earlier courts have maintained, content holders, including the MPAA, are not parties in this case, “and so any harm to them is irrelevant.”

He adds, “Rather, the harm is to DVD CCA itself from the undermining of those industries’ trust and confidence in the License Agreement, and thus in DVD CCA, if a breach by a licensee were to go unaddressed.”

In regards to a permanent injunction, Kaleidescape claims it will be greatly burdened by such an action, but Monahan concludes that is not the case, saying “Kaleidescape will survive no matter the outcome of the lawsuit because of its substantial business that is ‘unrelated’ to the suit.”

Furthermore, Kaleidescape's Malcolm has testified that his company likely can come into compliance with an injunction within four to 12 months.

Malcolm and other Kaleidescape officials have told CE Pro that same thing. When Kaleidescape introduced its M700 Blu-ray server with an attached carousel that authenticates the presence of discs, senior marketing director Tom Barnett told CE Pro that the same concept could be applied to Kaleidescape’s DVD-only products, but “we don’t want to take away any freedoms from consumers than we’re required to do.”

And, of course, Kaleidescape believes it is not required by the licensing agreement to have a DVD disc present for playback.

Monahan says Kaleidescape has been on notice that the DVD CCA objected to its products since the manufacturer was notified in 2003, about four months after it began selling product.

He points to an email exchange that suggests “Kaleidescape took a calculated risk, knowing it might be sued, to release their product without any carousel, and Mr. Malcolm noted that ‘[t]hings move very, very slowly in the litigation world.’”

As the judge noticed, Malcolm was right about the slow-moving legal process. Kaleidescape had sold about 300 systems when the DVD CCA filed its lawsuit in 2004. Today, Kaleidescape claims to have about 10,000 systems in the field.

’Fair Use’ Does not Apply

Kaleidescape argues that consumers have a “fair use” right to back up their copy-protected DVDs, but that argument did not hold muster in Monahan’s court (citations omitted):

Kaleidescape’s affirmative defense that the CSS License Agreement is “unenforceable” because it violates a supposed “fair use” right of consumers to copy DVDs has no business in this case. As Kaleidescape has conceded, fair use is a defense to copyright violations, not breaches of contractual rules. This is a breach of contract case, not a copyright case, and so fair use is simply not application here. Furthermore, this fair use was discussed and rejected in the RealNetworks case.
http://www.cepro.com/article/kaleide...movie_servers/





Is Netflix Kids' Streaming Part of Nickelodeon's Ratings Drop?

Netflix users streamed 2 billion hours in the fourth quarter
Jeanine Poggi

Netflix is adamant that its streaming service will not cannibalize the cable industry, but Nickelodeon's recent ratings decline may provide the first suggestion that at least one subset of viewers is at risk of abandoning live TV.

While Nick parent Viacom has blamed Nielsen for at least some of Nickelodeon's apparent ratings drop, the decline also coincides with new high-water marks for Netflix streaming. Netflix subscribers watched more than 2 billion hours of movies and TV shows through its streaming service in the fourth quarter of 2011, more than in any previous quarter, the company said early last month.

This statistic suggests that Netflix subscribers are averaging an hour of streaming content daily, according to Janney Capital Market analyst Tony Wible.

"While this can't be proven yet, it seems more than coincidental that this 2 billion stat comes during the same quarter as Viacom's disastrous Nickelodeon ratings," Mr. Wible said. "This could mean Viacom sold too much of its content to Netflix or isn't charging enough."

Netflix and Nickelodeon don't think there's a connection. Netflix notes that it has worked with many cable networks without pressuring ratings. "By way of example, Netflix has had the Starz catalog since 2008 and Starz subscribers grew during that time," a Netflix spokesperson said.

Nickelodeon remains positive on its partnership with Netflix. Netflix subscribers streamed no more Nickelodeon content during the fourth quarter than in the summer, when the network's ratings were stable, according to one person at Nickelodeon.

Netflix has been showing increased interest in viewers under 12 years old, however, introducing a "Just for Kids" channel to its website in August and extending it to the Nintendo Wii in October and Apple TV in December. The section features family-friendly content organized based on favorite characters, viewer age and other easy-to-navigate subgroups.

Neflix declined to say how much of the fourth quarter's 2 billion hours of streaming came from children's programming. When "Just for Kids" was released, Netflix said that nearly half of its users in the United States and Canada had streamed two or more movies or shows intended for children during the previous 90 days.

Nickelodeon isn't alone in its ratings concerns, with some pressure being felt at other children's cable networks, including the Cartoon Network and Disney XD. But other networks' declines aren't as pronounced.

Their content offerings on Netflix, and other streaming services like Hulu, also aren't as robust, according to Mr. Wible.

In May, Viacom increased the amount of its content available on Netflix, giving subscribers access to Nickelodeon favorites such as "Yo Gabba Gabba" and more episodes of "Spongebob SquarePants," "iCarly," "True Jackson, VP" and "Dora the Explorer."

Nickelodeon also attracts a slightly younger demographic than the Disney Channel, its biggest competitor, whose ratings have remained steady. Nielsen puts Nickelodeon's target audience at 2- through 11-year-olds, compared to Disney's 6- through 14-year-olds.

Young children often demand to watch the same show -- or even the same episode -- over and over, as Netflix pointed out when it introduced "Just for Kids." That may be making it easier for parents to satisfy young children's demands with on-demand services.

If kids are indeed seeing more streaming video and less live TV, that could be worrisome for the traditional model. What happens as those kids grow up?

Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings has been vocal about being a "complementary" service to cable, saying on a conference call last week that the company has no plans to bid on the rights for current seasons of TV shows. Instead Mr. Hastings said it is positioning itself as better suited for "catch-up television." "We would rather be additive to cable, not competitive," he said.

Cable networks, however, aren't entirely at ease. Starz subscribers may have increased during the time that Netflix has offered the channel's content, but Netflix is also now losing Starz content -- reportedly because it refused the network's demand to put Starz content on a premium tier costing subscribers extra.

Ultimately, Netflix's two billion-streaming-hours milestone could have content providers scratching their heads.

"We think that Netflix has underestimated the resolve of content owners to seek a fair price for their content, and by advertising the 93 hours per subscriber of streaming consumption during the quarter, we believe Netflix has sealed its fate," Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter wrote in a research note last week.

It remains hard to say with certainty whether or how much Nickelodeon ratings are being affected by Netflix. Some observers dispute any connection.

"We do not believe Nick content availability of Netflix is the culprit," Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang wrote in a research note in December, pointing out that Netflix increased the relevant offerings most dramatically in February 2011, long before the Nickelodeon ratings drop. "Rather, it appears that declines in overall viewership in the people 2-11 demo and ratings share shift to Disney Channel are the main reasons," he wrote.

Children are seeing more digital video, but they're still watching just as much TV as before, said Jack MacKenzie, president at Magid Generational Strategies, a research-based consulting firm. "Kids know mom's phone or Dad's tablet is a potential TV show," he said. But Mr. Mackenzie believes these streaming outlets aren't replacements, but augment the TV viewing experience. "Kids are just watching more," he said.

But Needham analyst Laura Martin said it's important for content providers to continue to evaluate conditions. It's possible that Netflix can't pay enough to make up for the risk to live viewers and associated ad revenue, she said.

Even if Netflix users aren't streaming any more Nickelodeon content now than they did before the network's ratings fell, Mr. Wible added, perhaps some viewers' turn away from TV is lagging their adoption of streaming.

"We may see the same level of streaming, but could be seeing it finally displace TV demand were it was not in the past -- people are more comfortable without the TV element now," Mr. Wible said. "Lastly, the streaming of Nick needs to be looked at with all the other kids fare on the Netflix service that could be gaining share of time on the site at the expense of TV. It's too early to know the real story, but it is hard to explain why the Nick ratings are down otherwise."
http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/...s-drop/232475/





Dutch to Go After ISPs that Allow File Sharing
Tjibbe Hoekstra

The Netherlands plans to crack down on Internet service providers that allow access to file-sharing sites such as Pirate Bay, though it will not make it an offence for individuals to download from these sites.

Wiebe Alkema, a spokesman for the Ministry of Justice, told Reuters the law would be amended to reflect a recent court ruling, but would not criminalize the downloaders, as is the case in most European countries.

A Dutch court earlier this month ordered ISPs Ziggo and XS4ALL to block access to Pirate Bay by February 1 because it allows copyright infringement of music and film content.

"We aim to strike a just balance between protecting against infringements of copyright and the importance of a free and open Internet," he said, adding that the proposal, to be submitted to parliament before summer, will state that websites that facilitate copyright infringements are acting against the law.

Both Ziggo, owned by private equity groups Cinven and Warburg Pincus, and XS4ALL, owned by telecoms firm KPN, risk a penalty of 10,000 euros a day, up to a maximum of 250,000 euros, if they do not obey the court order.

The penalty is payable to Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, which represents major entertainment companies and which brought the case against XS4ALL and Ziggo. BREIN has asked other providers including UPC, KPN and T-Mobile to block access to Pirate Bay, and they could eventually face court action too.

Ziggo, UPC, KPN, XS4ALL and T-Mobile together have more than 85 percent of the market, Dutch research firm Telecompaper said. UPC is owned by Liberty Global Inc., while Deutsche Telekom AG operates under the T-Mobile brand.

Ziggo said it would block the Pirate Bay website by Tuesday, but will appeal against the decision.

"Ziggo thinks that an access provider should not be forced into the role of police cop. Besides this, the verdict opens the door to further undesirable developments threatening internet freedom," the company said on its website.

Other jurisdictions are also clamping down. The United States is seeking the extradition of Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload.com, from New Zealand, saying that he was the ringleader of a group that netted $175 million since 2005 by copying and distributing music, movies and other copyrighted content without authorization.

Dutch consultancy Considerati said in a report that about 40 percent of Dutch internet users regularly download unlicensed content, compared with a European average of 27 percent, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

Considerati estimates downloading of unlicensed content costs the Dutch music industry up to 100 million euros a year.

BREIN expects the use of file-sharing websites, which also include 4shared, Rapidshare and Dutch website Spot-net, to fall quickly following the court decision.

In France the number of file-sharers using sites like Pirate Bay fell by more than a quarter after downloading by consumers was criminalized in 2009, according to the IFPI.

"Because consumers now will be denied access to illegal file-sharing platforms, they will have to find their way to legal providers to download music and films," BREIN spokesman Tim Kuik said.

But Kuik said a new law was still necessary, as attempts to close down file-sharing sites hosted from unknown locations abroad, like Pirate Bay, have been unsuccessful so far.

"Currently only sites where people can upload content can be banned, while sites which only facilitate downloading are legal. Besides this, access providers which have been asked to block the sites refuse to cooperate," Kuik added.

Ot van Daalen of Dutch online rights group Bits of Freedom said blocking such sites would set a dangerous precedent because "by making legislation enabling the banning of websites, as the Dutch government is planning to do now, we would be using the same technologies as countries like Iran and China."

European Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier has said he plans to propose revised legislation on the enforcement of intellectual property rights, in view of recent developments in the field of online piracy, by the end of the year.

(Reporting by Tjibbe Hoekstra; Editing by Will Waterman)
http://news.yahoo.com/dutch-isps-all...115106212.html





Dutch ISPs Refuse To Block The Pirate Bay
Ernesto

Two large ISPs in the Netherlands have said they will not be blocking subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, as demanded by the Hollywood supported anti-piracy outfit BREIN. T-Mobile and KPN argue that blocking websites is a threat to the open Internet, and suggest that the entertainment industry focuses on new business models instead. BREIN is now expected to take the ISPs to court.

Two weeks ago, the Court of The Hague ruled that Ziggo, the largest ISP in the Netherlands, and competitor XS4ALL have to block access to The Pirate Bay.

The ruling was the first to bring broad censorship to the Netherlands and in a response XS4ALL said they were “bitterly disappointed”, noting that fundamental rights had been traded for “commercial interests.”

For BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy group that started the court case, the verdict wasn’t quite enough. The Hollywood-backed group wasted no time issuing requests for other ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay as well. Or else.

After internal discussions two large ISPs – KPN and T-Mobile – are now on record stating they will not honor BREIN’s request. This means that millions of Internet users in the Netherlands will still be able to access The Pirate Bay without having to go through proxies.

Speaking out against censorship, both Internet providers state they will only block The Pirate Bay following a court order and that innovation is a better way to deal with the problem of piracy.

“KPN sees the blocking of websites as a drastic measure for which a court order is required,” KPN said in a statement, adding that innovation is needed to curb piracy.

“KPN doesn’t believe a blockade is the right solution. What is needed are robust, attractive business models that are easy to use and offer a fair deal to both producers and consumers of content.”

T-Mobile also said that it will only respond to court orders, while it emphasized the value of an open Internet.

“T-Mobile strongly supports an open Internet and is fundamentally against shutting off access to websites. Dutch law is very clear when it comes to blocking access to the Internet. T-Mobile will only respond to a court ruling, not to demands from a private party such as BREIN.”

If BREIN follows up on threats that were made earlier, both ISPs can expect to be sued by the anti-piracy outfit in the near future. Ziggo and XS4ALL, meanwhile, are expected to enforce the blockade this coming Wednesday, February 1st.

Whether the blockade will have much of an effect is yet to be seen. Judging from what happened in other countries when the site was blocked, users will quickly find ways to route around the blockade to regain access to the world’s largest torrent site.
https://torrentfreak.com/dutch-isps-...te-bay-120129/





Year of the Storm

2012 is the year of the storm.

The Pirate Bay will reach an age of 9 years. Experiencing raids, espionage and death threats, we're still here. We've been through hell and back and it has made us tougher than ever.

The people running the site has changed during the years. No sane human being would put up with this kind of pressure for 8 years in a row. An insane hobby that takes time from our families, our work (sorry boss) and our studies.

What binds us all together is a strong belief that what we do is good. That it is something we one day can tell our grandchildren about with pride. People from all over the world confirm this. We read testimonials from people in Syria longing for freedom, thanking us for what we provide. We receive more than 100 visits daily from North Korea and we sure know that they need it. If there's something that will bring peace to this world it is the understanding and appreciation of your fellow man. What better way to do that than with this vast library of culture?

With this said, we hear news from our old admins that they have received a verdict in Sweden. Our 3 friends and blood brothers have been sentenced to prison. This might sound worse than it is. Since no one of them no longer lives in Sweden, they won't go to jail. They are as free today as they were yesterday.

But what enrages us to our inner core is that the system, the empire, the governments, are still allowed to try to boss you and us around with one law crazier than the other. Do you think they will stop with SOPA/ACTA/PIPA? They will not. Because you won't stop sharing those files. Because we will not stay down. Because no one can turn back time. Together, we are the iron that hardens with each strike.

In this year of the storm, the winners will build windmills and the losers will raise shelters. So flex your muscles, fellow pirates, and give power to us all! Build more sites! More nets! More protocols! Scream louder than ever and take it to the next level!
http://thepiratebay.se/blog/204





Ukraine File-Sharing Site Disappears

Freetards mourn Ex.ua with the usual DDOS attacks
Richard Chirgwin

Microsoft Ukraine has disclaimed responsibility for the shut-down of Ukranian file-sharing site Ex.ua, which that country’s government has shuttered for copyright infringement.

The shut-down has triggered the usual round of attacks on government Websites in that country.

According to the Kyiv Post, Ukrania’s interior ministry had warned the site that it was in danger of a shutdown. Criminal charges against the site’s administrators have been in train since last July.

While there have been many reports naming Microsoft as one of the complainants against the site, the company has reportedly denied any involvement, in spite of the company being named by interior ministry deputy head Ruslan Pakhomov along with Adobe, Graphisoft and Channel 1+1.

The ministry claims that 200 servers holding 6,000 TB of files have been seized. Employees of the company have been questioned but not detained.

Reuters reports that both the presidential Website and that of the interior ministry have been shut down by attacks.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02...ing_site_down/





U.S. Shuts 16 Sports Piracy Websites Pre-Super Bowl
Jonathan Stempel

Three days before Super Bowl XLVI, U.S. prosecutors said they seized 16 websites that illegally streamed live sports and pay-per-view events over the Internet, and charged a Michigan man with running nine of those websites.

According to the government, the 16 websites provided links to give viewers easy access to other sites that hosted pirated telecasts from the National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, World Wrestling Entertainment Inc ("WWE") and TNA Impact Wrestling. The latter is also broadcast on Viacom Inc's Spike TV.

Prosecutors said such piracy costs leagues and broadcasters millions of dollars a year, and some of this cost is passed on to ticket buyers and sports network subscribers.

"These websites and their operators deprive sports leagues and networks of legitimate revenue" in what amounts to "virtual thievery," said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan, who announced the website seizures.

The websites are firstrow.tv, firstrowsports.com, firstrowsports.net, firstrowsports.tv, hq-streams.tv, robplay.tv, soccertvlive.net, sports95.com, sports95.net, sports95.org, sportswwe.net, sportswwe.tv, sportswwe.com, xonesports.tv, youwwe.com and youwwe.net.

As prosecutors announced the seizure on Thursday, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, expected to start in Sunday's Super Bowl against the New York Giants, admitted to reporters his own use of an illegal website.

"Last year, you know, I was rehabbing my foot, you know, in Costa Rica, watching the game on an illegal Super Bowl website," he said in a video posted Thursday on the NFL website. "And now I'm actually playing in the game. So it's pretty cool."

"Make a Deal"

The defendant charged in the case is Yonjo Quiroa, 28, who faces one count of criminal infringement of a copyright.

Prosecutors said Quiroa, also known as Ronaldo Solano, operated his websites from his home in Comstock Park, Michigan, prior to his Wednesday arrest, receiving at least $13,000 from online merchants who advertised with him.

Lawrence Phelan, a lawyer for the defendant, said Quiroa was in federal custody and expected to be transferred to New York, after having appeared on Wednesday in a Grand Rapids, Michigan federal court. Phelan declined to comment on the case.

The complaint against Quiroa outlines his alleged piracy efforts from February 2010 to January 2012.

It concludes by saying a U.S. Department of Homeland Security enforcement agent posing as a WWE representative last week offered to buy various domain names associated with the defendant, and received a response offering to "make a deal."

Prosecutors will seek the forfeiture of the domain names for the 16 seized websites.

The government had announced the seizure of 10 other websites said to pirate sports events exactly one year ago, shortly before Super Bowl XLV. [ID:nN02241115]

The case is U.S. v. Quiroa, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 12-mag-00241.

(Reporting By Jonathan Stempel; Additional reporting by Grant McCool; editing by John Wallace)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8111UD20120202





Seized Sports Streaming Site Makes a Blazing Comeback
Ernesto

Firstrow, one of the sites that had several of its domain names seized by the Feds yesterday, is furious at the US Government. Convinced that the service they are providing does not violate the law, the site continues to operate under a new domain name. One of the owners told TorrentFreak that they don’t intend to stop until a court shuts them down.

Yesterday, several sports streaming sites had their domain names seized by the Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE unit.

Leading up to the Super Bowl this weekend, a total of 307 domain names were seized, 16 of which provided access to online streams of popular sporting events.

Commenting on the actions, ICE Director John Morton was quick to declare victory, but perhaps this came a little too soon. Firstrow, one of the largest sites which had several of its domains taken over by the US government, is not planning to give up the ‘battle’ anytime soon.

Quickly after its firstrow.tv, firstrowsports.tv, firstrowsports.net and firstrowsports.com domains were seized, the service was operating as normal under a new domain – Firstrowsports.eu. Talking to TorrentFreak, one of the owners said that the US has stepped out of line by simply taking away their property.

“The US has prided itself on their ‘innocent before proven guilty’ mantra, yet is clearly hypocritical when it comes to this,” the Firstrow co-owner told us. “Numerous times the US has seized domains, before the defendants have been proven guilty in a court of law.”

“What is the point of trying to approve SOPA and PIPA if they do the same without these laws,” he questioned, referring to the pending US bills that would make it even easier to seize allegedly infringing domains.

The response of Firstrow stands in sharp contrast with that of ICE Director John Morton yesterday.

“In sports, players must abide by rules of the game, and in life, individuals must follow the laws of the land. Our message is simple: abiding by intellectual property rights laws is not optional; it’s the law,” Morton said.

This comment forms the base of the dispute. What is the law of the land? The people who operate Firstrow don’t live in the US, and neither are their servers located there. In fact, Firstrow says that their site is perfectly legal where they are based, so they will continue business as usual.

“Since we don’t live in a third-world country here, the courts decide if something is illegal not the entertainment industry lobbies. We will continue until a court decides that the site is illegal, but for now we’ve seen three court decisions on this matter that say it is not.”

Firstrow’s co-owner is referring to the court cases in Spain, where sites that merely link to copyrighted works have been declared legal. Rojadirecta, a site very similar to Firstrow, won in Spanish courts twice.

In the US, however, things work differently. Two operators of streaming sites have already been arrested and await criminal trials. And if the domains are linked to foreigners, the US believes it has the authority to take them over if they are deemed to infringe copyrights.

This stance has raised eyebrows among foreign governments. A few months ago the European Parliament adopted a resolution which criticized US domain name seizures. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger “the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication.”

Yesterday’s actions show that the US authorities are not impressed by the international critique, just as Firstrow refuses to change course after yet another domain seizure. Firstrow says ICE is wasting its time and continues to provide access to sports fans all across the world, who are otherwise unable to see their beloved games.

“ICE must have a lot of spare time if they can waste it on these domain seizures,” Firstrow’s co-owner says. “They should invest time in the real important stuff , instead of chasing people who have no other option than to watch a sports game for free.”
https://torrentfreak.com/seized-spor...meback-120203/





Hong Kong Steps Up File-Sharing Scrutiny
Enid Tsui

The Hong Kong government is stepping up its scrutiny of local internet businesses after US authorities led a high-profile crackdown on Megaupload, the file-sharing website accused of copyright theft, which was set up in the Chinese territory in 2005.

Hong Kong Customs, which has been working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the Megaupload case for more than a year, said that it would set up an electronic crime investigation centre later this year.

Media companies have called on the territory, which is also home to Filesonic - another “cyberlocker” site that allow users to upload their digital files to be saved in the internet cloud - to increase its focus on potential copyright infringers following the Megaupload case.

Megaupload was allowed to grow its controversial business for six years but the company blocked its site to users in Hong Kong. This could have helped ward off attention from local regulators, said Benjamin Bai, head of Allen & Overy’s intellectual property practice in China.

“Hong Kong authorities had no vested interest in doing any enforcement,” Mr Bai said.

However, he pointed out that there was case law in Hong Kong demonstrating that the courts could take action against local companies accused of infringing copyright elsewhere.

“I am surprised there has been no co-ordinated effort taken against [Megaupload] in Hong Kong before,” he added.

Hong Kong’s Commerce and Economic Development Bureau denied that local officials had been reluctant to investigate Megaupload. The fact that the services were unavailable in the territory would not be a barrier to an investigation by the law enforcement agency, it said.

Hong Kong customs officials have identified and frozen about HK$330m ($42.5m) of Megaupload’s funds which are sitting in Hong Kong either as bank savings or investment in securities, as well as seizing assets including servers which were found in the company’s hotel suite at the Grand Hyatt.

Kim Dotcom, Megaupload’s founder, described Hong Kong as “an awesome place to do business” and said “people there leave you alone and they are happy for your success” in a December interview with Torrentfreak.com, a website for file sharers.

Mr Dotcom holds a Hong Kong residency permit, but was living in New Zealand when he was arrested last month.

Cable and Satellite Broadcasters Association of Asia, which represents companies such as News Corp and Warner Brothers, hopes regulators have learnt from the Megaupload case.

Hong Kong is deemed an attractive place to establish a business because of its efficiency, low taxes and lack of restrictions on capital flows.

“Hong Kong is a good business destination and it is the kind of place that would attract increasingly sophisticated and ruthless operations which are costing our industry billions of dollars a year,” said Simon Twiston Davies, head of Casbaa. “Regulators of all stripes should be aware of that.”

Filesonic, which immediately suspended its file-sharing service upon the arrest of Mr Dotcom, said it has a zero tolerance approach to pirated content. It has not been accused of wrongdoing.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/f0aac...44feabdc0.html





Estonia Next In Line To Receive US 'Encouragement' To Adopt Harsher Anti-Piracy Laws
Glyn Moody

Numerous Wikileaks cables have highlighted the pressure that the US has brought to bear on several foreign governments behind closed doors in an attempt to get the latter to pass maximalist copyright laws. But it's worth noting that plenty of arm twisting takes place openly. Here, for example, is a letter (pdf) from the American Chamber of Commerce in Estonia addressed to the Minister of Justice, and the Minister of Economic Affairs and Communications of that country:

We find that the level of intellectual property protection in Estonia needs to be improved, both on the legislative and practical fronts. Estonian government should also focus more on investigating the commercial IPR infringements committed through the Internet, and not only breaches of law in relation with cyber terrorism. In addition, the government must follow the EU and national level debates that might have an impact on IPR legislative framework.

In other words, Estonia really ought fall into line like the other countries. Because if it doesn't:

Insufficient IPR protection has a negative effect on the entire economic situation in Estonia. As long as the IPR holders cannot be sure that their rights are protected, the international groups are hesitant in having their R&D units in Estonia and it is likely that R&D projects are run in countries with more comprehensive IPR protection. Insufficient IPR protection can also be an obstacle for starting new production units in Estonia as the IPR holders feel that the risk of IPR infringement is too high in Estonia and therefore it is better to produce their products in countries where the IPR-s are better protected.

Although the letter touches on trademarks and other areas, its central concern is copyright infringement, especially on the Internet. Its list of demands -- sorry, suggestions -- is depressingly familiar: stronger protection; more criminal prosecutions; intermediary liability for ISPs and website owners; and an "effective mechanism of damage compensation, without having to go through lengthy, complicated or costly procedures for achieving redress through the courts."

However, as an excellent post on the Estonian Public Broadcasting site explains, the letter's underlying assumptions about lack of enforcement are simply wrong:

They claim, for instance, that there is poor intellectual property rights (IPR) enforcement in Estonia. However, Estonia’s IPR laws and enforcement, at least in the commercial space, are quite adequate. Operations, including websites, that exist for commercial exploitation of unlicensed rights, are already illegal and get shut down. The operators can be imprisoned for up to three years.

The article goes on to point out one of the likely casualties of any harsher approach to copyright enforcement in Estonia:

if suing for non-commercial infringement is allowed, sooner or later, the pubs, restaurants and hotels offering free WiFi will be receiving legal threats and fines because someone downloaded something via their connection. It will be simpler for businesses to close their free internet access points, rather than face the legal harassment and risk of huge crippling fines that could result from one of their clients downloading something illegally.

When that happens, the Open Internet, an item of national pride in Estonia, will effectively be dead.

That's an important point: copyright legislation does not exist in isolation, but can have serious knock-on effects on the digital life of a country -- in this case, jeopardizing Estonia's place in the vanguard of open wireless Internet coverage. Let's hope the Estonian ministers bear that in mind when their visitors from the US Embassy come calling.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...acy-laws.shtml





The Moral Battle Between Pirates and Copyright Lobbyists
Ryan Smith

In a recent interview, Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler raises some serious concerns surrounding the MegaUpload bust.

One question raised by the professor, which may not have been entertained by many prior to the wide public opposition to SOPA, is of whether the lobbyist companies currently reaping the benefits of increasingly harsher copyright enforcement confer a strong moral cause for government interference of free market innovation. When a Harvard Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies raises these concerns, perhaps it is time we stop and consider this.

I have to say that, given the limited time he had to work with, I am very impressed with Prof. Benkler’s ability to address many important issues surrounding the MegaUpload case in such a succinct manner. Lack of due process. The legal targeting of an entire industry and the effect that has on the free market. While these topics are deserving of in depth scrutiny on their own, it was the moral issue raised at the end that caught my attention.

Now, I don’t generally like to argue morals because they tend to get a bit sticky with each party holding fast to whichever beliefs they identified themselves as before any debate even begins. How do you decide whose morals are right and whose are wrong?

Do you go by the majority rule? As Benkler stated:

“The moral authority of the networked public is on a different plane than the moral authority of lobbyist companies and that’s an enormous power to be reckoned with.”

This is clearly reflected by the 71% of recently polled Americans who feel that censorship is a far worse threat to society than piracy. The millions of people who contacted their government officials in protest of SOPA censorship was so overwhelming, I nearly took for granted that it needs mention.

Something else struck me about this moral when he gave his closing statement.

“It’s critically important that this new political force be focused on what will build a network that supports the industry in its legitimate needs, not in it’s overstated fears of piracy, for which there is no real data.”

This is something that had occurred to me only recently. If all practical reasons or perceived “bogey man” type threats surrounding the word “piracy” are discounted, then there is not much left to look at other than the moral cause for such extreme legal action. Is there even a moral basis to be found here? Is there a moral excuse for an open legal attack on a rather young industry which had found a popular niche in the marketplace?

Unfortunately, this is not something I can argue for because no matter how hard I try to play devil’s advocate for the legal authorities involved, I can not see a moral motive behind their willingness to take such extreme action on behalf of copyright lobbyists. It is really difficult for one to see anything beyond greed or ignorance as the underlying motive here. Please, I challenge you to raise some moral support for the general attack on innovation by these lobbyists. Just give me one moral argument that has not already been completely refuted. Those of us who have paid close attention to these issues just can’t spend any more time explaining why file-sharing does not equal theft.

There is no strong practical or moral argument to justify the tremendous money and resources that go into preventing innovative companies from settling their own business conflicts with the established industry in a civil (not criminal) court of law. That said, Prof. Benkler is right. It is time to focus on what is best for society as a whole. Granted, that includes even the lobbyists who insist that we drag them kicking and screaming toward progress.

It’s not that we hate you, lobbyists. It’s just that, you know, things have been kind of rough for the rest of us lately and we could really use new industries, jobs and the many benefits that the internet actually offers us in spite of you. It is a great time to take a look at the solutions and benefits that lie in wait for us all. This type of progress is inevitable and the rest of the world has a moral duty to see it meet our common needs instead of waiting around for the industry to keep up.
https://torrentfreak.com/the-moral-b...byists-120128/





Feds: We Obtained MegaUpload Conversations with Search Warrant
Greg Sandoval and Declan McCullagh

One of the most curious aspects of the U.S. government's case against MegaUpload is the large number of the company's internal communications acquired by the FBI.

In one exchange, MegaUpload managers fretted via Skype IM chat in 2007 that founder Kim Dotcom wasn't "safe with his money" and "the current situation is a bit risky," according to documents U.S. authorities filed with a New Zealand court this month as part of their criminal pursuit of the embattled cyberlocker service.

While it's still not clear how federal investigators gained access to the conversations of founder Kim DotCom and other top managers, there are hints that the FBI managed to place government-issued spyware on the defendants' computers.

The FBI cites alleged conversations between DotCom and his top lieutenants, including e-mail and Skype instant-messaging logs. Some of the records go back nearly five years, to MegaUpload's earliest days as a cyberlocker service--even though Skype says "IM history messages will be stored for a maximum of 30 days" and the criminal investigation didn't begin until a few months ago.

Sources told CNET yesterday that Skype, the Internet phone service now owned by Microsoft, was not asked by the feds to turn over information and was not served with legal process.

The U.S. Department of Justice told CNET that it obtained a judge's approval before securing the correspondence, which wouldn't have been necessary in the case of an informant. "Electronic evidence was obtained though search warrants, which are reviewed and approved by a U.S. court," a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia said.

In 2007, the FBI obtained court approval to implant spyware called CIPAV on a suspect's computer, which transmitted to government computers an ongoing log of the user's outbound connections. Documents obtained by CNET through the Freedom of Information Act in 2009 show that CIPAV has been used in investigations designed to nab extortionists, database-deleting hackers, child molesters, and hitmen.

Skype saves chat records with contacts in a directory on the local hard drive, which could be accessed by FBI-planted spyware.

It's not only the FBI that uses spyware to intercept communications. Last fall, the Chaos Computer Club discovered that German police were using spyware that could activate the suspect's microphone and webcam.

The MegaUpload indictment is unusually long and detailed, weighing in at over 70 pages, and was drafted last year. U.S. officials filed additional documents with the New Zealand court during DotCom's bail hearing. DotCom (aka Kim Schmitz) wasn't arrested in New Zealand until January 19. Yesterday MegaUpload users learned that their data would not be deleted for at least two weeks.

The feds allege that DotCom and six other MegaUpload employees enabled millions of people to use the company's cyberlockers to store pirated TV shows and films and then share them with each other without compensating creators. The government accuses MegaUpload's administrators of pocketing millions and has charged them with money laundering, racketeering, and piracy.

Ira Rothken, MegaUpload's attorney, declined to comment yesterday about how his client's internal documents were obtained by the government, but said the government's "allegations are flimsy under the law."

On January 19, New Zealand police raided the home of DotCom in a rural area outside of Auckland. The U.S. government is seeking to extradite DotCom; a local judge denied bail and an extradition hearing is scheduled for February 22.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57...earch-warrant/





F.B.I. Admits Hacker Group’s Eavesdropping
Scott Shane

The international hackers group known as Anonymous turned the tables on the F.B.I. by listening in on a conference call last month between the bureau, Scotland Yard and other foreign police agencies about their joint investigation of the group and its allies.

Anonymous posted a 16-minute recording of the conference call on the Web on Friday and crowed about the episode in via Twitter: “The FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”

Hours later, the group took responsibility for hacking the Web site of a law firm that had represented Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who was accused of leading a group of Marines reponsible for killing 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha, Iraq in 2005. The group said it would soon make public “mails, faxes, transcriptions” and other material related to the case, taken from the site of Puckett & Faraj, the Washington-area law firm.

An F.B.I. official said Anonymous had not in fact hacked into the conference call or any other bureau facilities. Instead, the official said, the group had obtained an e-mail giving the time, telephone number and access code for the call. The e-mail had been sent on Jan. 13 to more than three dozen people at the bureau, Scotland Yard, and agencies in France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden. One of the recipients, a foreign police official, evidently forwarded the notification to a private account, he said, and it was then intercepted by Anonymous.

“It’s not really that sophisticated,” said the official, who would discuss the episode only on condition of anonymity. He said no Federal Bureau of Investigation system was compromised but noted that communications security was more challenging when agencies in multiple countries were involved.

“We’re always looking at ways to make our communications more secure, and obviously we’ll be taking a look at what happened here,” he said.

The bureau issued a brief statement confirming the intrusion, which was first reported by The Associated Press: “The information was intended for law enforcement officers only and was illegally obtained. A criminal investigation is under way to identify and hold accountable those responsible.”

The breach, clearly an embarrassment for investigators, is the latest chapter in a continuing war of words and contest of technology between hacking groups and their perceived opponents in law enforcement and the corporate world.

The F.B.I. e-mail titled “Anon-Lulz International Coordination Call” — a reference to Anonymous and to an allied group of hackers, Lulz Security — announced a conference call for investigators “to discuss the on-going investigations related to Anonymous, Lulzsec, Antisec, and other associated splinter groups.”

The recording posted on YouTube and elsewhere on the Web included American and British voices discussing suspects in the case. The call begins with banter between an American named Bruce and British officials named Stewart or Stuart and Matt, who are joined by another official from F.B.I. headquarters, Timothy F. Lauster Jr., who sent the e-mail announcing the conference call.

A British official refers to Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis, two British teenagers who have been arrested and are wanted in the United States on suspicion of having ties to Anonymous. The British official describes a 325-page report analyzing Ryan Cleary’s hard drive, and an F.B.I. agent in Los Angeles discusses various suspects and their nicknames.

The investigators also refer to several suspects who had not yet been arrested, including one described by the British official as “a 15-year-old kid who’s basically just doing this all for attention and is a bit of an idiot.”

The conversation was part of an international criminal investigation that began in 2010 after Anonymous championed WikiLeaks by mounting electronic attacks on MasterCard and PayPal and other sites that had stopped collecting donations for the antisecrecy organization.

Last month, Anonymous attacked the Web sites of the Justice Department and major entertainment companies in retaliation for criminal charges against the founders of Megaupload, a popular Internet service used to transfer music and movies anonymously.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/u...sdropping.html





Megaupload: A Lot Less Guilty Than You Think
Jennifer Granick

The recent Department of Justice decision to indict Megaupload for copyright infringement and related offenses raises some very thorny questions from a criminal law perspective. A few preliminaries: I’m responsible for the musings below, but I thank Robert Weisberg of Stanford Law School for taking the time to talk through the issues and giving me pointers to some relevant cases. Also, an indictment contains unproven allegations, and the facts may well turn out to be different, or to imply different things in full context.

DMCA SAFE HARBOR: BELIEVE IT AND IT WILL BECOME REAL: As a matter of criminal law, the discussion of whether Megaupload did what it needed to do to qualify for the DMCA Safe Harbor misses the point. Did they register an agent? Did they have a repeat infringer policy? These are all interesting CIVIL questions. But from a criminal law perspective, the important question is did Defendants BELIEVE they were covered by the Safe Harbor? This is because criminal infringement requires a showing of willfulness. The view of the majority of Federal Courts is that “willfulness” means a desire to violate a known legal duty, not merely the will to make copies.

In other words, for criminal liability, it doesn’t really matter whether the service qualifies, so long as Defendants believed it qualified. If so, they were not intentionally violating a known legal duty, and so their conduct would not satisfy the willfulness element of the offense. For criminal liability after the DMCA safe harbor, as in horseshoes, close may be good enough.

SECONDARY COPYRIGHT LIABILITY AND CRIMINAL LAW:

The heart of this case is whether and when an enterprise can be held criminally liable for the conduct of its users. (For example, both copyright infringement claims (Counts 4 and 5) identify aiding and abetting as a basis for the charge.)

Aiding and abetting is something like the civil liability inducement theory the U.S. Supreme Court created in the 2005 Grokster case. Experts opine that the indictment makes out a pretty good inducement case against Megaupload. But the first question from a defense perspective has to be “Can the Grokster theory of CIVIL liability even be the basis for CRIMINAL copyright claims?” This has never been decided by any Court.

However, the pending Second Circuit case of Puerto 80 Projects v. USA (“Rojadirecta“), raises the issue squarely. There, the plaintiff is challenging the ICE seizure of its Rojadirecta domain names based on an allegation of criminal copyright infringement. For background on the case, and on the ICE domain seizures, check out Techdirt’s coverage.

Rojadirecta’s lawyers at Durie Tangri have challenged the U.S. Government’s assertion that criminal liability arises from linking to infringing content. The lawyers argue that judge-made secondary infringement liability theories, including Grokster style inducement, cannot be the basis for a criminal copyright violation because the criminal copyright statute doesn’t mention secondary liability. Congress considered and rejected statutes that would have created such liability, in COICA and PROTECT IP. In sum, due process doesn’t allow incarceration under a civil legal theory that the Supreme Court dreamed up in 2005. The issues yet to be decided in Rojadirecta apply to the Megaupload case as well.

AGREEMENT + CIVIL VIOLATION = PRISON?: Count 2 is a conspiracy to commit copyright infringement claim, and references unknown parties as members of the conspiracy. Conspiracy entails an agreement to commit an offense and an overt act in furtherance of that agreement. The act in furtherance need not itself be illegal, but there must be an agreement to do an illegal act. The list of overt acts show that the object of the conspiracy was infringement by Mega users. If Defendants agreed with each other to induce others to infringe, and Rojadirecta’s lawyers are correct that inducement is not a crime, there’s a conspiracy only to violate a CIVIL law. If the idea is that Mega conspired with its users to infringe, those users may or may not have been criminally infringing copyright. They were located all over the world, and may or may not have acted willfully, i.e. intended to violate U.S. law. Again, the government would basically have alleged an agreement to violate a U.S. CIVIL law, including by many people who are not subject to U.S. rules.

Is it a federal crime to conspire to induce others to violate a U.S. civil law?

The answer to that is an obvious “no”. The conspiracy statute itself makes clear that the object of the conspiracy must be an offense or fraud against the United States, in other words, a federal crime. 18 U.S.C. 371. It is true that Oliver North and John Poindexter were prosecuted for conspiracy to violate Boland Amendment, which prohibited Defense Department spending on the Nicaraguan Contras, but was not itself a crime. And there is a 1979 case (U.S. v. Ruffin, 613 F.2d 408 (2nd cir. 1979), where the defendant was convicted of conspiracy when he convinced an unwitting person to divert federal funds to the defendant’s personal benefit. But both cases constituted fraud involving U.S.taxpayer dollars, which is also a basis for conspiracy liability. Civil violations simply are not.

For these reasons, prosecuting this case against Mega, especially if Defendants get good criminal lawyers who also understand copyright law, is going to be an uphill battle for the government.

A few other points. Some direct infringement convictions look easy, but COUNT 4 IS WEIRDLY INCOMPLETE: I agree with the copyright law experts interviewed by Ars Technica that the most damning allegations in the indictment are the claims of direct infringement, particularly for the prerelease movies. Interestingly, the indictment identifies four films that the defendants supposedly distributed before release: The Green Hornet, Thor, Bad Teacher, Twilight–Breaking Dawn Part 1. But Count 4 only charges one such act of prerelease infringement, the movie Taken. What about the other films? Why were those not also charged?

Finally, this case is extremely interesting from a JURISDICTIONAL standpoint. One of the very first issue to be litigated will be extradition to the United States. Does the United States have jurisdiction over anyone who uses a hosting provider in the Eastern District of Virginia? What about over any company that uses PayPal? That’s a very broad claim of power, and I expect it will be vigorously contested.
http://www.granick.com/blog/?p=739





Megaupload Founder Refused Bail in New Zealand

A New Zealand court refused an appeal by the founder of online file-sharing site Megaupload.com to be freed on bail, Friday, agreeing with prosecutors there was a risk he would attempt to flee before an extradition hearing.

Kim Dotcom, a German national also known as Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, was returned to custody until February 22 ahead of a hearing on an extradition application by the United States.

The High Court in Auckland said the lower court judge was right to rule there was a significant risk Dotcom, who had passports and bank accounts in three names, might try to flee the country.

There was nothing to tie Dotcom to New Zealand except his motivation to fight the charges and get his funds, Justice Raynor Asher said.

"The judge correctly concluded that the risk of flight cannot be mitigated by the imposition of conditions, including electronic monitoring," said prosecutor Anne Toohey.

Strenuously Denies Charges

Prosecutors say Dotcom was the ringleader of a group that netted $175 million since 2005 by copying and distributing music, movies and other copyrighted content without authorization.

Dotcom's lawyers say the company simply offered online storage and that he strenuously denies the charges and will fight extradition.

Dotcom, 38, and three others, were arrested on January 20 after armed New Zealand police raided his country estate at the request of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

He told the court that with his assets frozen and business shut down he had no intention of trying to flee to his native Germany, where he would be safe from extradition.

"I will not run away. I want to fight these allegations on a level playing field. I have three little children. My wife is pregnant with twins. I just want to be with them," he said in court.

Extreme Flight Risk, Funny Visits

The prosecution again painted Dotcom as an extreme flight risk because of he had multiple passports, sources of funds, access to various means of travel, and previous history of fleeing to avoid criminal charges.

Officers cut Dotcom out of a safe room he had barricaded himself in within the sprawling mansion, reputedly New Zealand's most expensive home.

Dotcom said he said he had received "funny visits" and contacts while in jail, including one from a man claiming to be a prosecutor asking for money in return for a favorable bail hearing. He denied knowing anyone with a background in providing forged documents, whom the prosecution said had tried to visit him.

He said police had been unnecessarily aggressive when they raided his property.

"I was punched in the face, I was kicked down on the floor, one guy was standing on my hands ... it was bleeding."

Legal experts have said extradition hearings are likely to be drawn out with appeals likely all the way to the country's highest court.

The lower court judge said the accused appeared to have "an arguable defense at least in respect of the breach of copyright charges."

(Writing by Gyles Beckford; Editing by Ed Lane)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...81208J20120203





Feds: Megaupload User Data Could Be Gone Thursday
AP

Federal prosecutors say data from users of Megaupload could be deleted as soon as Thursday.

U.S. prosecutors blocked access to Megaupload and charged seven men, saying the site facilitated millions of illegal downloads of movies, music and other content.

The company says its millions of users stored their own data, including family photos and personal documents. They haven't been able to see their data since the government raids earlier this month, but there has been hope would be able to get it back.

Megaupload hires outside companies to store the data, for a fee. But Megaupload attorney Ira Rothken said Sunday that the government has frozen its money.

A letter filed in the case Friday by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said storage companies Carpathia Hosting Inc. and Cogent Communications Group Inc. may begin deleting data Thursday. Spokespersons for the two companies and for the U.S. Attorney's Office did not respond to messages Sunday night.

The letter said the government copied some data from the servers but did not physically take them. It said that now that it has executed its search warrants, it has no right to access the data. The servers are controlled by Carpathia and Cogent and issues about the future of the data must be resolved with them, prosecutors said.

Rothken said the company is working with prosecutors to try to keep the data from being erased. He said at least 50 million Megaupload users have data in danger of being erased.

Rothken said that, besides its customers, the data is important to Megaupload so it can defend itself in the legal case.

"We're cautiously optimistic at this point that because the United States, as well as Megaupload, should have a common desire to protect consumers, that this type of agreement will get done," he said.

Megaupload is based in Hong Kong. U.S. authorities said they had authority to act because some of its leased servers are in Virginia.

___

AP Business Writer Daniel Wagner contributed to this report.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/...ryId=146068504





EFF: One Way or Another, We're Getting That Megaupload Data Back
John Paul Titlow

In the aftermath of the Megaupload shutdown that unfolded nearly two weeks ago, the story has splintered into a few interesting directions. One of the more controversial issues is the fate of the personal data stored on the now-defunct service's servers.

Yesterday, news broke that the data could be at risk of deletion as early as this week, if Megaupload's former hosting service providers decide to do so. Well, not if the Electronic Frontier Foundation has anything to do with it.

The EFF has joined forces with one of the companies from which Megaupload rented server space to try and figure out the best way forward for users whose content was not infringing on anyone's copyright. MegaRetreival.com was launched today by the organization in conjunction with Carpathia Hosting and is now soliciting feedback from former Megaupload users who feel they were wronged.

For Megaupload Users, an Unclear Way Forward

Exactly how they will manage to resolve the issue is unclear at this early stage, as there are a number of technical and legal hurdles to overcome. A resolution could come in the form of a lawsuit against authorities, as has already been threatened by other groups. Alternatively, it could involve cooperation between the EFF, Megaupload, the hosting service providers and federal authorities, EFF Staff Attorney Julie Samuels told us.

"Right now the possibilities are almost endless," Samuels said. "We are open to anything." Whether legal or more diplomatic, the organization is seeking justice for the Megaupload users who were blocked from accessing their personal files despite not having broken any laws.

The Megaupload saga has put some users in a very weird position. Because the shutdown of the site happened without warning, they had no chance to retrieve any legitimate, non-infringing files they may have been storing there.

Uniquely Screwed

Of course, it also meant that people who were using the site for illegal purposes couldn't jump on and download the last season of "The Wire" real quick. Still, there's nothing stopping people from using MediaFire, RapidShare, the Pirate Bay or any number of other sources to grab copyrighted content. The users who kept personal files on Megaupload can't just tap into another service and get access to that content. They are uniquely screwed.

Normally, as Samuels explained, actions like this are taken using civil lawsuits rather than police helicopters and FBI agents. Thus, there's typically time for users to take the necessary precautions to back-up any files they couldn't afford to lose. Putting aside debates about the wisdom of keeping personal files exclusively in the cloud in the first place, the users of Megaupload never had an opportunity to salvage their stuff.

"That's what's really fundamentally troubling here," Samuels said. "People woke up, went to turn on their computer and found that they could not access their accounts."

Like the legal case of Kim Dotcom and his associates, it will be some time before this affair is resolved. For now, the EFF is hoping to open a dialogue with former users of the site and work with all of the parties involved in order to eventually come to a conclusion that works for everyone.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/archive..._retrieval.php





15 File-Sharing Sites Like Megaupload That the Feds May Target Next
Sean Ludwig

As more details come to light in the much-publicized Megaupload case, other file-sharing sites around the web are shutting their doors in fear that they could be targeted next by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Over the weekend, popular Megaupload alternatives FileSonic and FileServe completely turned off the ability to share files with other people. And another well-trafficked site, Uploaded.to, has blocked all U.S.-based IP addresses in fear of getting in serious trouble with the U.S. government.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and several other Megaupload employees were arrested after being named in a 72-page indictment issued Thursday by the DOJ. The indictment alleges Megaupload is connected to a vast criminal enterprise and has caused more than $500 million in harm to copyright owners. If convicted, the company’s executives could serve many years in prison.

Even with trouble brewing, many sites that emulate Megaupload’s basic capabilities still work just fine. The CEO of popular file-sharing site MediaFire told me Sunday the company isn’t too concerned about government scrutiny because it is a legitimate business and doesn’t incentivize piracy like Megaupload did. That said, just because a company is confident about its legitimacy and employees don’t absurdly flaunt their wealth, doesn’t guarantee the government won’t investigate it.

“At this point, it’s hard to tell how far you can extrapolate, but I don’t think anyone should rest easy,” said Felix Wu, assistant law professor at Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. “The Megaupload case will set precedent for these types of businesses and how liable they are.”

With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of 15 file-sharing sites still up and running that the government could potentially target next (in alphabetical order). Take a look:

1. BayFiles

Hong Kong-based BayFiles may be one of the file-sharing sites that attracts government scrutiny based on pedigree alone. The site was created by two of the founders of notorious torrent website The Pirate Bay, which said two weeks ago it would gradually stop serving torrent files because of sustained heat. BayFiles’ terms of service say content that “violates third-party copyrights” is not permitted to be uploaded, but the site still makes it effortless to share copyrighted material with others.

2. DepositFiles

Cyprus-based DepositFiles has a bare bones design, but the site has pretty incredible sharing capabilities available for free. You can upload and share files up to 300MB in size without registration, and if you do register, you can upload up to 2GB files for free. The site also offers a Gold membership that allows you download with multiple connections, no waiting time for downloads and no advertising. Having people pay for higher quality download connections to large files is one of the things that got Megaupload in trouble.

3. Divx Stage

Divx Stage is one of the shadiest looking sites on this list, without question. The site blatantly advertises it will pay $10 for each 1000 full-movie streams for movies uploaded on the site. The site lets you upload up to 1GB files and features tons of TV shows and movies to watch for free. As of Monday, some shows on the first page of the site include the Mark Wahlberg film “Contraband” and the latest episode of ABC’s “Once Upon a Time.”

4. HulkShare

HulkShare is a strange beast of a file-sharing service that walks the line between promoting artists and enabling those to spread copyrighted music illegally. The site makes it extremely easy to upload song files and let other people listen to those files using its embeddable HulkShare Player. The site’s terms of service states copyrighted material is “strictly prohibited,” but in line with DMCA, artists must let the site know if a file is there without authorization to get it taken down.

5. MediaFire

Texas-based MediaFire lets you upload and easily share up to 200MB files without registration. While I believe MediaFire makes a convincing case that it is a legitimate company targeting professionals, the site has a huge amount of users who use the service for spreading copyrighted files, especially music. If you do a Google search for a song name, an artist name, and “MediaFire,” for example, it will likely bring you to a copy of the file which can easily be downloaded from a MediaFire page. CEO Derek Labian told us the fault belongs to Google for indexing shared MediaFire pages, and that Google should look into the problem.

6. MegaShares

It probably won’t help MegaShares that the word “Mega” is in its name, but it might have other things to worry about. The site lets users upload up to 10GB files and it pays users for the amount of downloads they bring to the site. Every “unique premium download with a minimum 5MB file size” earns you a “1 cache point” and when you reach certain numbers of points, you get cash.

7. NovaMov

NovaMov is quite similar to the Divx Stage site, and it’s just as shady. It rewards people for uploading movies up to 2GB in size and keeps a searchable directory of streaming movies infringing on copyrights. Users who upload files are paid $10 for each 1000 full video streams.

8. OvFile

On the surface, OvFile is a lot less nefarious looking than Divx Stage and NovaMov. But because it allows you to easily upload up to 1GB movies and it’s plenty easy to find OvFile links through Google searches, it’s still just as capable of infringement as those other sites.

9. PutLocker

MediaFire CEO Labian told me PutLocker was one of the biggest sites on the web giving file-sharing sites a bad name. On the site, you can upload and share files up to 1GB for free and there’s no time limit on streaming shared videos. In a move likely inspired by Megaupload’s troubles, PutLocker will be ending its affiliate program, which gives users cash for streams, on Feb. 1. That’s at least a start, but the site will still almost certainly still be a place for sharing and watching copyrighted movies without authorization.

10. RapidShare

Switzerland-based RapidShare is one of the oldest file-sharing sites and currently has a global traffic rank of 211 on Alexa. The site has had numerous legal issues, but it still operates and serves millions of users daily who share files. RapidShare has no limits on upload or download sizes, but it does make you wait to download files if you are not a premium user. If you are premium user, you can download simultaneous large files with a waiting period.

11. SockShare

SockShare is one of many sites where you can share streaming videos links. There is a 1GB cap on what unpaid users can upload and a 5GB cap on what premium users can upload. It is troublingly easy to Google a video name and “SockShare” to find a watchable stream on the site. However, just like PutLocker, SockShare will be ending its affiliate program, which gives users cash for video streams, on Feb 1.

12. UploadHere

On UploadHere, you can upload files up to 2GB but you must be a premium member on the site to download files over 1GB in size. That sort of business model clearly leads to the site profiting on the downloads of large, mostly copyrighted files. The site charges $8 a month for premium memberships and slightly less per month if you pay for multiple months in bulk.

13. UploadKing

UploadKing offers people almost exactly the same service as UploadHere, except it costs a bit less for premium downloading status. Free users are encouraged to upgrade to premium because it limits free users to download files under 1GB in size and does not let you download several files simultaneously.

14. WUpload

Hong Kong-based WUpload will likely be one of the most-used file-sharing sites now that Megaupload has been taken down. The site allows users to upload and download files up to 2GB for free. It encourages users to sign up for premium accounts, which enable simulatenous large downloads, no delays on downloads, and downloads that do not time out.

15. ZShare

Hong Kong-based ZShare is another bare bones sharing site, but unlike many others it is completely free and ad-supported. It allows uploads and downloads up to 100MB. ZShare does not allow users to search directly on the site for files but it is easy to Google a file name and “ZShare” to find shared pages.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/23/15...gaupload-feds/





Apparently Veoh Isn't Dead Enough For Universal Music; Asks For Rehearing Of Its Bogus Copyright Lawsuit
Mike Masnick

One of the key examples of what happens when you have bad, overly draconian copyright laws that burden companies falsely accused of infringement is Veoh. We've talked about them a bunch in the past, but Dmitry Shapiro, who had been CEO of the company, has written up a great (though depressing) first-hand explanation of how bad copyright law kills good companies. He talks about having the vision for an online video service (which he came up with before YouTube existed, though both happened at about the same time), how he built up the product, raised a bunch of money (including from former Disney CEO Michael Eisner), and put together a really good product. On top of that, to help the big entertainment companies feel comfortable, they installed audio filtering technologies -- even though such things are not (yet) required by law. And yet, the company was still sued by Universal Music, who insisted that Veoh was a "pirate site."

Of course, as we've noted, Veoh has won every bit of their lawsuits. The latest ruling came in December, where an appeals court, once again, said that Veoh was perfectly legal. It complied with the DMCA and actually went above and beyond what the law required (such as by using those filters). Of course, Veoh is also dead. The costs of the lawsuit really were too much for a young company struggling to build a good product and compete in the marketplace.

As you can imagine the lawsuit dramatically impacted our ability to operate the company. The financial drain of millions of dollars going to litigation took away our power to compete, countless hours of executive's time was spent in dealing with various responsibilities of litigation, and employee morale was deeply impacted with a constant threat of shutdown. Trying to convince new employees to join the company in spite of this was extremely challenging. To make sure that our money supply was cut off, in an unprecedented move, UMG sued not only the company, but our investors (Michael Eisner, Art Bilger, and Spark Capital) personally. This move raised lot of eyebrows in the legal community, and at one point was thrown out by a judge, only to continue to be appealed and litigated by UMG. This completely choked off all of our financial oxygen, as trying to convince investors to invest with the threat of them personally being sued is insurmountable.

Even after winning the initial lawsuit, UMG just piled on the appeals, and it made it impossible for the company to survive:

With the appeal looming, financing continued to be choked off for us, and in April 2010 we had to sell the company in a fire sale to a small startup. The company that we had built, that was once valued at over $130 Million was gone. Along with it went the livelihoods of over 120 people and their families, $70 million of money entrusted to us by investors, and a big part of me. I had sacrificed so much to live the life of an entrepreneur. My marriage couldn't stand the strain of this lifestyle and ended in 2009, and while all of this was going on, my father was dying. Instead of spending time with him at his bedside, I was sitting in depositions with lawyers, and stressing over the lawsuit. He died July 13 2009, two months before we won the original judgement on the lawsuit. He would have been proud of me for following through with the fight. I felt so beaten down after this experience, that I couldn't imagine going back to being an entrepreneur. I was disenchanted, disgusted by the system that would allow these kinds of behaviors to go on, and it is not until recently that I have been able to come up to bat again.

Shapiro posted this to explain why he's against SOPA/PIPA, but the amazing thing is that the lawsuit is still going on. Even after that ruling in December that totally eviscerated UMG's arguments and made it abundantly clear that Veoh had been a perfectly legal operation destroyed by a bogus lawsuit, UMG is trying again. Embedded below is the petition that UMG recently filed in the appeals court, asking for an en banc rehearing (appeals courts usually hear cases with a three-judge panel, but parties can later ask for a rehearing with all of the judges in the court -- which is an en banc rehearing).

I'm not going to go through the filing in detail. It's more of the same from UMG. Basically, UMG wants to pretend that the DMCA requires certain actions that it clearly does not. Every judge so far has told UMG this, but it won't give up. And, more importantly, it won't give up even though Veoh is long since dead. Considering that UMG and the rest of the legacy recording business keep complaining that they're not making any money any more, the fact that they're choosing to keep suing a company they already killed years ago really says something, doesn't it?

The truth is that UMG is continuing the lawsuit for one reason: because it's hoping and praying that some court will magically believe UMG's made up interpretation of copyright law. If that happens, it will make it much easier for UMG to kill other legit sites that it doesn't like. It will also allow UMG to pretend that Veoh was a "rogue" site that needed to be killed, rather than a successful legitimate business that was killed via a bogus lawsuit.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-lawsuit.shtml





Google Asks Court Not To Enjoin ReDigi
NewYorkCountryLawyer

Google has sought leave to submit an amicus curiae brief against Capitol Records' preliminary injunction motion in Capitol Records v. ReDigi.

In their letter seeking pre-motion conference or permission to file Google argued that "[t]he continued vitality of the cloud computing industry—which constituted an estimated $41 billion dollar global market in 2010—depends in large part on a few key legal principles that the preliminary injunction motion implicates."

Among them, Google argued, is the fact that mp3 files either are not "material objects" and therefore not subject to the distribution right articulated in 17 USC 106(3) for "copies and phonorecords," or they are material objects and therefore subject to the "first sale" exception to the distribution right articulated in 17 USC 109, but they can't be — as Capitol Records contends — material objects under one and not the other.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/02/...-enjoin-redigi





Neil Young is Right — Piracy is the New Radio
Mathew Ingram

As an artist who probably makes a substantial income from licensing his music, you might think Neil Young would frown on piracy and file-sharing, but that appears not to be the case, according to an interview he gave at the Dive Into Media conference in Los Angeles. Instead of railing against file-sharers, Young called piracy “the new radio” because it’s “how music gets around.” The musician’s comment puts a lot of the hysteria about copyright infringement into perspective — as we’ve pointed out before, file-sharing and monetization aren’t mutually exclusive, and in many cases a certain amount of so-called “piracy” can actually be good for business, as authors, musicians and even game developers have come to realize.

Comparing piracy to radio is a smart way of looking at the issue: in the early days of the music business, when live performances and record sales were the main revenue generator for artists and publishers, radio itself was seen as a form of piracy (as sheet music was before that). Musicians fulminated about radio stations playing their music for free, and some record labels made their acts sign waivers saying they would not appear on the radio. In the end, of course, radio became a huge revenue driver for music — although it did so in part because record labels and publishers pushed for licensing fees.
Radio was seen as piracy too, but became a publicity engine

But more than just being a source of fees, radio was also a huge publicity engine for music, and eventually this became so obvious that at one point record labels were giving radio stations and disc jockeys “payola” under the table to promote their music. And now we have come full circle with Neil Young’s comment:

“I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around.”

This idea of piracy as being “how content gets around” doesn’t just apply to music either. In a videotaped comment last year about piracy, British author Neil Gaiman — who I interviewed recently about his opposition to the proposed federal anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA — said that he used to be irate about people pirating his work, but eventually came to realize that he was actually selling more copies of his physical books in those countries where piracy was the highest. Brazilian author Paulo Coelho found the same thing, and actually started uploading his own work to files-sharing sites without telling his publisher.

Some game developers — the digital-era equivalent of songwriters and authors, in many ways — have also come to see piracy as being a necessary evil, and in many cases a positive force. Markus Persson, the Swedish developer of the massively popular game Minecraft, has said that he came to see piracy of his game as a form of marketing. And at a recent music-industry conference in Europe, the CEO of superstar game company Rovio (creator of Angry Birds) said that piracy “may not be a bad thing” because it increases demand for the official version of the company’s products.

If you make it easy to get and pay for, piracy isn’t an issue

Even Microsoft CEO Bill Gates has been known to see the virtues of a little piracy, especially in developing markets like China. The Microsoft founder reportedly said of that market: “As long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.” Gates clearly saw pirating as a kind of loss leader, creating eventual market demand.

We’ve described before how one of the reasons why users engage in copyright infringement is that distributors make it too cumbersome to get the official version of whatever the content is, as venture capitalist Fred Wilson complained in a recent post, admitting that he pirated a livestream of a basketball game. But the example of comedian Louis CK — who allowed anyone to download his comedy special for just $5 with no copyright protection, and made over $1 million in less than a week — shows that there is still room for creators to monetize their content, if they make it as easy as possible.

As Andrew Weissman of Union Square Ventures noted in a recent post, information wants to be free — not necessarily free meaning it costs nothing, but free in the sense of being friction-free to access. And if you don’t make it easy for your music or writing or other content to “get around,” as Neil Young puts it, then piracy will take care of that for you.
http://gigaom.com/2012/01/31/neil-yo...the-new-radio/





Why Piracy Is Indispensable For The Survival Of Our Culture
Glyn Moody

Last Year Techdirt wrote about the case of the huge collection of historic jazz recordings that had been acquired by the US National Jazz Museum. The central problem is that even if the recordings can be digitized before they deteriorate, very few people will hear them because of their complicated copyright status.

But as this eye-opening article from Benj Edwards explains, bad as that situation is, it's even worse for the entire category of software creations. For example, consider the earlier generation of floppy-based programs:

Floppy disks, which were once used as the medium du jour for personal computers, have a decidedly finite lifespan: estimates for the data retention abilities of a floppy range anywhere from one year to 30 years under optimal conditions.

A floppy stores data in the form of magnetic charges on a specially treated plastic disc. Over time, the charges representing data weaken to the point that floppy drives can’t read them anymore. At that point, the contents of the disk are effectively lost.

This becomes particularly troubling when we consider that publishers began releasing software on floppy disk over 30 years ago. Most of those disks are now unreadable, and the software stored on them has become garbled beyond repair. If you’ve been meaning to back up those old floppies in your attic, I have bad news: it’s probably too late.

Actually, the situation is even worse than that, because software publishers in the 1980s spent a huge amount of effort trying to make it impossible to copy their programs, through the use of things like hardware dongles that had to be plugged into the computer, or intentionally-corrupt sectors on the discs. That makes the creation of backups a non-trivial matter.

Fortunately, getting around such schemes is just the kind of challenge that hackers enjoy, and this has led to efforts by enthusiasts to preserve these fast-disappearing cultural artefacts by transferring them from the old media to more modern storage. As Edwards explains:

For the past decade, collectors and archivists have been compiling vast collections of out-of-print software for vintage machines (think Apple II, Commodore 64, and the like) and trading them through file sharing services and on "abandonware" websites. Through this process, they’ve created an underground software library that, despite its relative newness, feels like the lost archives of an ancient digital civilization.

That's great, apart from one slight problem: under today's copyright laws, all these wonderful backups that will probably ensure the programs' survival while civilization itself is still around, are illegal. The choice is stark: follow copyright law, and watch decades of computer culture literally fade away on their unreadable floppies, or save them for posterity - and break the law.

Nor is this is a problem that only concerns antediluvian forms of computing. Our cool, smartphone- and tablet-based approach is no better:

take a look at the iTunes App Store, a 500,000 app repository of digital culture. It’s controlled by a single company, and when it closes some day (or it stops supporting older apps, like Apple already did with the classic iPod), legal access to those apps will vanish. Purchased apps locked on iDevices will meet their doom when those gadgets stop working, as they are prone to do. Even before then, older apps will fade away as developers decline to pay the $100 a year required to keep their wares listed in the store.

This is a deep and fundamental problem with not just computing culture, but all artistic expression that is locked down with DRM. The only way that its glories will be preserved for future generations is if considerate "pirates" make illegal back-up copies, stripped of copy protection. For DRM is a guarantee of oblivion: the term of copyright is so disproportionately long, few will care about breaking ancient DRM to make backups of long-forgotten digital creations when it eventually becomes legally permissible to do so.

Edwards concludes with a call to action:

If you see strict DRM and copy protection that threatens the preservation of history, fight it: copy the work, keep it safe, and eventually share it so it never disappears.

Some people may think ill of your archival efforts now, but they’re on the wrong side of history: no one living 500 years from now will judge your infringing deeds harshly when they can load up an ancient program and see it for themselves.

This is a crucial point: whatever qualms people might have about piracy now, posterity will have no doubts whatsoever. It's not simply that the supposed harms of piracy to culture are exaggerated, as more and more evidence suggests: it's that in the long term, piracy is actually indispensable for its preservation.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-culture.shtml





You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You
Paul Tassi

Now that the SOPA and PIPA fights have died down, and Hollywood prepares their next salvo against internet freedom with ACTA and PCIP, it’s worth pausing to consider how the war on piracy could actually be won.

It can’t, is the short answer, and one these companies do not want to hear as they put their fingers in their ears and start yelling. As technology continues to evolve, the battle between pirates and copyright holders is going to escalate, and pirates are always, always going to be one step ahead.

But what’s clear is that legislation is not the answer. Piracy is already illegal in the US, and most places around the world, yet it persists underground, but more often in plain sight. Short of passing a law that allows the actual blacklisting of websites like China and Iran, there is no legislative solution. That’s what SOPA and PIPA were attempting to do, but it so obviously trampled on the First Amendment, it was laughed out of existence as the entire internet protested it. The only other thing you could get the internet to agree on was if they tried to institute a ban on cat pictures.

So, what to do? Go the other direction. Realize piracy is a service problem. Right now, from the browser window in which I’m writing this article, it is possible to download and start watching a movie for free in a few swift clicks.

(This is all purely theoretical of course)

1. Move mouse to click on Pirate Bay bookmark

2. Type in “The Hangover 2″ (awful movie, but a new release for the sake of the example)

3. Click on result with highest seeds

4. Click download torrent

5. Auto open uTorrent

6. Wait ten minutes to download

7. Play movie, own it forever

It’s not moral, it’s not right, but it’s there and it’s easy and there’s no one to stop you from doing it, and never will be. If after ten years and millions of dollars in legal fees they finally manage to kill the Pirate Bay, there are hundreds of other torrent sites that exist, and more will spring up. If they ban torrents altogether, the internet will invent something new.

Piracy is not raiding and plundering Best Buys and FYEs, smashing the windows and running out with the loot. It’s like being placed in a store full of every DVD in existence. There are no employees, no security guards, and when you take a copy of movie, another one materializes in its place, so you’re not actually taking anything. If you were in such a store, you’d only have your base moral convictions to keep you from cloning every movie in sight. And anyone who knows how to get to this store isn’t going to let their conscience stop them, especially when there is no tangible “loss” to even feel bad about.

It’s not a physical product that’s being taken. There’s nothing going missing, which is generally the hallmark of any good theft. The movie and music industries’ claim that each download is a lost sale is absurd. I might take every movie in that fictional store if I was able to, but would I have spent $3 million to legally buy every single DVD? No, I’d probably have picked my two favorite movies and gone home. So yes, there are losses, but they are miniscule compared to what the companies actually claim they’re losing.

The seven step, ten minute download process (which will be about ten seconds when US internet speeds catch up with the rest of the world) is the real enemy the studios should be trying to tackle. Right now, the industry is still stuck in the past, and is crawling oh-so-slowly into the future. They still believe people are going to want to buy DVDs or Blu-rays in five years, and that a movie ticket is well worth $15. Netflix is the closest thing they have to an advocate, but the studios are trying to drive them out of business as they see them as a threat, not a solution. It’s mind boggling.

The primary problem movie studios have to realize is that everything they charge for is massively overpriced. The fact that movie ticket prices keep going up is astonishing. How can they possibly think charging $10-15 per ticket for a new feature is going to increase the amount of people coming to theaters rather than renting the movie later or downloading it online for free? Rather than lower prices, they double down, saying that gimmicks like 3D and IMAX are worth adding another $5 to your ticket.

They have failed to realize that people want things to be easy. Physically going to the movies is hard enough without paying way too much for the privilege. Going to a store and buying a DVD instead of renting or downloading is generally an impractical thing to do unless you A) really love a particular movie or B) are an avid film buff or collector.

I saw an image on reddit the other day that had a concept for an online movie distribution tool that would be the movie industry’s greatest ally if they were to even consider it. Here it is:

More or less, it’s Steam (the online PC game distribution client) for movies. It allows you to rent or download your favorite films with ease, build a library and watch cross devices and share with your friends. The service would effectively allow you to beat the seven step piracy process easily.

1. Open “Movie Steam”

2. Search for The Hangover 2

3. Click button to rent for $2 for 24 hours

4. Play movie.

They win by three steps! And as an added bonus, you no longer have to feel guilty for doing something illegal.

To some degree, this is what Netflix streaming is, though you don’t have the ability to actually own the movies you want, and there’s a very limited selection. In terms of buying new films, studios are so far behind the times it’s laughable. Most often they want you to buy the $30 Blu-ray so you can get the “Ultraviolet” copy as well that plays on a few digital devices. Please, how about I’ll give you $10 for the new Harry Potter, and I’ll watch it whenever and wherever I want? This is a negotiation where at any time, your customer could just go download the damn movie for free, and they’re doing you a favor by even considering picking it up legally. And you have the nerve to think it’s on YOUR terms? That’s not how negotiation works. It may not be right, but it’s reality, and they have to face it.

Yet movie companies threaten to put Netflix out of business by charging them huge amounts of money to have access to their content. Netflix is in the forefront of the war on piracy, and the studios don’t even seem to understand it. It’s incredible.

“Movie Steam” would have its share of practical problems. It would be hard to get companies to agree to all use one service, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want “Sony Steam,” “Universal Steam,” and “Paramount Steam” all cluttering up my computer. It would also be hard for companies to agree to set prices this low, when they’re used to charging $15-30 for physical products. It would be almost impossible for them to not agree to some sort of ridiculous DRM, and god forbid if you ever wanted to share a movie with a friend.

It would also effectively kill off services like Netflix and Redbox (and of course finally put Blockbuster out of its misery) as well as hurt every retail store that sells DVDs. You could argue however, that DVDs will be gone completely within the decade, and retailers are going to have to brace themselves for that anyway. There’s always the crowd that circles around me when I bring this up to say “but people will always want physical media,” but there is just no possible way this is the case in 20, 10 or even maybe even five more years.

But with a distribution service like this, at least they’d be trying. At least they’d be going in the right direction. Trying to pass laws that stifle the freedom of the internet and piss off the entire population of a country is a terrible, terrible route to go. The millions of dollars they spent lobbying trying to get bills like SOPA and PIPA passed could have gone into R&D for new distribution arms like the one above.

And here’s something no one has stopped to consider: Maybe making movies is too damn expensive. Or rather, far more expensive than it needs to be.

After SOPA and PIPA, Hollywood now looks like a dinosaur, and as out of touch as someone trying to kill the radio or home video cassettes. Venture capital firms are actually now actively looking to fund companies with the aim of dismantling the industry, as the current model of movie making seems outdated. The internet is producing a talented crop of filmmakers working on shoestring budgets, hungry to get themselves noticed.

Perhaps A-list actors do not need multi-multi-million dollar salaries when there are thousands of hardworking amateurs trying to get noticed. Perhaps not every graphic novel and board game needs $100M or $200M thrown at it in order to become a feature film when there are hundreds of creative, original screenplays that get tossed in the trash. Perhaps you don’t need to spend an additional $100M marketing a movie when everyone is fast-forwarding through commercials and has AdBlock on their browsers.

The industry is crawling toward these sorts of realizations, and they’re suffering for it. Yes, it’s true that nothing will ever kill piracy. But it’s equally true that nothing will ever kill the movie, music or video game industries either. Projects with bloated budgets and massively overpaid talent might start to fade away, but that can only be a good thing creatively for all the industries. To threaten us with the idea that pop culture is going to disappear entirely because of piracy is just moronic.

I believe in paying money for products that earn it. I do not believe in a pricing and distribution model that still thinks it’s 1998. And I really don’t believe in censoring the internet so that studio and label executives can add a few more millions onto their already enormous money pile.

Treat your customers with respect , and they’ll do the same to you. And that is how you fight piracy.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertco...ever-kill-you/





Leaked Zynga Memo Justifies Copycat Strategy
Paul Tassi

Last week, and well, actually for years now, social games giant Zynga has taken a lot of heat for copying its competitors’ popular titles and releasing almost identical games under their own brand. What drew the most ire recently was the release of Zynga’s Dream Heights, a clone of Nimblebit’s Tiny Tower, which also happened to be last year’s iPhone Game of the Year. The company released a sarcastic congratulatory message, accompanied by side-by-side images showing just how similar the two games were.

I picked up the story, as did countless other news outlets, and though normally Zynga pays no mind to such accusations, as it’s almost their entire business model, CEO Mark Pincus wrote an internal memo that has now been leaked to the web. Pincus once famously said “I don’t f***ing want innovation. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.” This memo isn’t quite as brazen, but echoes a similar sentiment. Read the full text below:

“Everyone,

There’s press today about one of our mobile games, Dream Heights, that just launched in Canada and worldwide soon. As we become the Zynga of Mobile and more broadly, as Zynga grows by further innovating on best of breed social mechanics, we should expect the industry to sit up and take notice of our growing portfolio.

I’m proud of the mobile team’s hard work and the industry has taken notice.

For the first time, according to App Data, Words with Friends is the #1 game on Facebook. Scramble with Friends, within 2 weeks of launching, has topped the App Store rankings in multiply categories including top free, top paid and top grossing. Last week, Apple recognized the team’s work by featuring Zynga’s games on the front of the App Store.

The mobile team is gearing up to launch more play across more genres and platforms. I want to congratulate them for working hard to bring great experiences to players around the world.

Google didn’t create the first search engine. Apple didn’t create the first mp3 player or tablet. And, Facebook didn’t create the first social network. But these companies have evolved products and categories in revolutionary ways. They are all internet treasures because they all have specific and broad missions to change the world.

We don’t need to be first to market. We need to be the best in market. There are genres that we’re going to enter because we know our players are interested in them and because we want and need to be where players are. We evolve genres by making games free, social, accessible and highest quality.

With regard to Dream Heights and the tower genre, it’s important to note that this category has existed since 1994 with games like Sim Tower and was more recently popularized in China with Tower of Babel in 2009 which achieved 15 million DAUs. On iOS there has been Yoot Tower, Tower Up, Tower Town, Tower Blocks and Tiny Tower. Just as our games, mechanics and social innovations have inspired and accelerated the game industry, its 30 year body of work has inspired us too.

And, this has always been the case for our company and the rest of the industry. Zynga Poker, FarmVille, CityVille and Words with Friends, none of these games were the first to market in their category but we made them the most fun and social, and the most popular. Our teams continue to build and improve these games every week which has been an important part of our success model. We run our games as a live service and we continue to iterate, innovate and improve on them to give our players the best possible experience.

As I’ve said, our strategy since the beginning has been to develop the best game – most fun and most social – for every category of play. We are rarely first since most categories in games go back decades, but we aim to be the best.

A few of you have asked how our approach to genres relates to the situation we faced with Vostu. There are rules of engagement in our industry. Companies have to respect each other’s legal and IP ownership rights in the form of copyrights and trademarks. In the case of Vostu, you can see for yourself that Vostu crossed the line and chose to use our copyrighted IP and artwork. That’s different than competing to build the best product or out-innovate us in the City category.

Play in the form of social and mobile gaming has become a mainstream activity, but it has the potential to be so much more. It can be one of the primary ways we connect with other people. It can surpass TV as the most popular and engaging medium of the 21st century. In order to make this vision real, we need to work as a company and an industry to continue innovating, improving and hopefully revolutionizing every major genre of games for social play. Every successful game from developers big and small has pioneered some important new facet of this experience. We are proud of the mechanics we have pioneered that are now industry standards.

Part of what makes our industry cool and dynamic is the idea that small teams can build successful games. But at Zynga we will continue to innovate and expand our possibility space in order to delight our player base too.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who emailed me on this topic. Part of what makes our company special is the open transparent dialog we can all have, and it’s your passion that is shaping our future.

Thanks,

Mark”

That’s a much more eloquent statement of purpose than “I don’t want f***ing innovation,” I suppose, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was meant to be leaked showing “nice guy” Mark motivating behind the scenes. But I don’t buy it.

As I’ve said before to Zynga defenders who happen upon my articles (many of which turn out to be employees), this is not a case of “inspiration.” Yes, every product and IP on the market is generally a derivative of some other concept in almost all cases, but what Zynga’s doing is a step beyond.

The company scavenges through the most popular titles on the social market and harvests them for their own. To use an analogy I’ve drawn on before, the gap between Tiny Tower and Sim Tower might be the difference between James Cameron‘s sci-fi Avatar and the similarly themed Dances with Wolves. However, the space between Tiny Tower and Zynga’s Dream Heights would be the difference between Dances with Wolves and another film set in the 1800s about Native Americans with the exact same plot, lookalike actors and titled “Cavorting with Bears.”

You can repeat that analogy for countless Zynga titles, Farmville with Farmtown, Hidden Chronicles with Gardens of Time, Zynga Bingo with Bingo Blitz, Words with Friends with Scrabble. There’s no “inspiration” here, only thievery. Yes, they change the code and draw up new artwork to avoid any legal trouble (after getting in hot water for not doing that when they stole Farmville), but it’s the bare minimum to avoid legal retribution. And if someone did sue them? The powerful company (now with a billion dollar IPO) would crush them with a dogpile of lawyers.

Pincus would have us believe he’s just continuing in the great tradition of all tech pioneers, drawing on past products to make future ones, but there’s something different with Zynga. Something wrong. And to have a brand that is this creatively bankrupt does not bode well for its long term prospects.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertco...ycat-strategy/





Local TV Stations Rally to Oppose Media Transparency

What exactly are their “public interest obligations”?
Steven Waldman

Local television stations have now rallied against the key elements of the Federal Communications Commission’s media transparency proposal, which would require broadcasters to move their “public inspection files” out of their filing cabinets and onto the Internet.

I described these proposals in detail here and here, but the surprising hostility from TV stations—news organizations—to this transparency plan raises a broader question: Do broadcasters believe that they even have “public interest obligations” anymore? Judging from some of the unintentionally hilarious comments they submitted to the FCC docket (more on that shortly), they enthusiastically embrace the concept as long as it remains completely devoid of meaning.

But first, to understand how we got here and why it matters, let’s review the history. When the FCC gave broadcasters the rights to use the spectrum, starting in the 1930s, it offered a simple compact: taxpayers will allow you to use the public’s airwaves—for free—and in exchange you have to serve the community, beyond simply airing the most popular programming.

For a while, the FCC gave stations detailed guidance on how to fulfill these “public interest obligations”—for instance, by having a minimum number of hours of public affairs programming. If the stations didn’t meet the requirements, they would, in theory, lose their licenses. Broadcasters endorsed the compact. As the National Association of Broadcasters testified recently: “Broadcasters have and will continue to take seriously their responsibility as broadcast licensees to serve the public interest.”

Recently, I led an effort at the FCC that evaluated this system. Our report, called “Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landsape in a Broadband Age,” concluded:

Over time, court rulings, constitutional concerns, and FCC decisions have left a system that is unclear and ineffective. The current system of public interest obligations for broadcasters is broken: TV stations are required to maintain programming records and other such paperwork, which FCC staff and members of the public rarely read.

(Some provide detailed descriptions of substantive news programming; others list the sponsorship of an America’s Next Top Model tryout as fulfilling the obligation to provide issue-responsive programming.)

Licenses are routinely renewed, regardless of whether a station is investing huge sums in local reporting or doing no local programming at all. Over the FCC’s 75-year existence, it has renewed more than 100,000 licenses. It has denied only four renewal applications due to the licensee’s failure to meet its public interest programming obligation. No license renewals have been denied on those grounds in past 30 years.

The current system operates neither as a free market nor as an effectively regulated one; and it does not achieve the public interest goals set out by Congress or the FCC. [fcc.gov/infoneedsreport]

But if the system is broken, what should be done instead? As we considered what recommendations this report should make to the FCC, I saw four possible paths.

1) Require the stations to once again do a minimum amount of public affairs programming.
2) Charge the broadcasters a fee for use of the spectrum.
3) Adopt a pure free market system.
4) Emphasize disclosure.

The first option was favored by one of the commissioners, Michael Copps, and some public interest groups. I decided against recommending this because it would necessitate the FCC deciding which stations had done legitimate public affairs programming and which hadn’t. (Does Oprah count? What about weather? Judge Judy?). Broadcasters—appropriately, in my view—opposed this approach.

Alternatively, one could consider more free market solutions—such as imposing a “spectrum fee.” Instead of paying for the use of spectrum by providing “public affairs programming,” broadcasters could give taxpayers cold hard cash. The money might be used to create an endowment for public broadcasting (obviating the need for annual congressional appropriations once and for all)—an approach endorsed by President Reagan’s conservative FCC chairman Mark Fowler, and, more recently, by several prominent liberals. I like this approach in the abstract but concluded that, in the off-chance Congress approved such a fee, the funds would evaporate into the general Treasury rather than helping struggling local media or public broadcasting.

In any event, broadcasters oppose this free market approach, too.

A more radically pure free market system would be to allow the licenses to lapse at the end of their eight-year term and hold auctions for use of the reclaimed spectrum. Broadcasters could pay taxpayers for long-term use of the spectrum and then air whatever programming they wanted. But this would require them to pay substantial amounts of money to secure ongoing use of the spectrum, so they would strongly oppose that free market idea.

Which brings us to the idea of making transparency a cornerstone of media policy. The main remaining element of the public interest obligation is the requirement that broadcasters maintain—on paper, in a filing cabinet—a “public inspection file.” The FCC has proposed replacing the paper files with an online system. Not exactly a radical concept here in 2012. What’s more, technology has made what was once a fairly limp public policy tool—“disclosure”—into something potent. For instance, stations already keep records on how much political advertising is purchased on their channels. Putting that information online would allow the public and reporters to better understand the flow of money in political campaigns.

This approach could enable broadcasters to meaningfully fulfill their public interest responsibilities, but in a First Amendment-friendly way. Tellingly, the deans of the major journalism schools—as sensitive as anyone to press freedom—came out overwhelmingly in favor of the FCC rule.

Yet, amazingly, the local TV news industry—ever eager to demand transparency from others—is opposing the central elements of this initiative, too.

One gets the strong sense that broadcasters are happy to have a “public inspection file” as long as the public is not actually inspecting it. For instance, four TV licensees (in San Diego, Texas, New Mexico, and Illinois) objected to a proposal that the public be notified on air about the existence of the file. “Such announcements may arouse the public’s interest in examining a PIF, but the Licensees do not believe that the Commission should attempt to stimulate such examinations.” Right. We wouldn’t want the public so “aroused” that they would, in their words, play “Sherlock Holmes” rather than engaging station managers in “productive dialogue.”

A comment filed by the stations owned by the major TV networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and Univision) suggested that researchers should not expect their task to be made easier by the Internet. “Research by its nature requires the expenditure of effort,” they wrote. And for reporters, “a certain amount of leg work is eminently practical.” (One almost expects them to next blurt out, “in my day, we didn’t have no new-fangled Intertubes; we had to go to the damn library and they should too!”)

It’s almost as if these companies—did I mention that they’re news organizations?—believe their first obligation is to offer creative character-building obstacles to getting information, not to better inform the public.

Let me be honest: as I looked through the possible ways of fixing the broken public interest obligation system, I recommended the one that was least onerous to the broadcasters. Mind you, that wasn’t the reason I picked it; I do believe that in a digital age, transparency done well can be a powerful tool for accountability. But digitizing these disclosures should enable them to better serve their communities and possibly even ultimately reduce their burdens.

Many local news organizations really try to inform their residents, and want to improve. For them, we figured, let’s breathe life into the public interest obligation system in a way that can help them play an even more constructive role. We even recommended some ideas desired by broadcasters. We proposed eliminating the final vestiges of the Fairness Doctrine. We suggested that the federal government shift some of its national advertising budgets—which has been as much as $1 billion per year—toward local media, including TV stations, to help sustain local journalism. We proposed replacing the overly complex “enhanced disclosure” form—intended to log what local programming a station is doing—with a simpler online form. (That idea is on a separate regulatory track and has been endorsed in principle by some forward-thinking broadcasting companies. Perhaps some of the more journalism-minded stations will even offer an approach to the political file dispute that puts them on the side of transparency.)

Yet so far all we’ve seen is the local TV news industry united in opposition to a proposal to make the political and media system more transparent by taking the information they already collect and putting it online — leading us back to the question: What is the fate of the “public interest obligation”? To review: Broadcasters oppose old-fashioned regulatory approaches. They so far oppose modern disclosure efforts. And they oppose free market strategies. To preserve their special form of corporate welfare, they have effectively adopted the motto, “if it is broke, why fix it?” The answer to that question may have been provided by, of all people, Pope Benedict XVI. In a filing with the FCC, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops noted the Pope’s warning of the “distortion that occurs when the media industry becomes self-serving or solely profit driven, losing the sense of accountability to the common good.” Online disclosure requirements, the Bishops suggested, “move broadcasters closer to that sense of accountability.” Amen to that.
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/l...y_to_opp_1.php





Aggregation is Deep in Journalism’s DNA

The aggregators of today will be the original reporters of tomorrow — it’s how disruption happens.
David Skok

Below are a few quotes. Can you guess when each was written, and to what they refer?

Just what I want to read and just what I have time to read.

It enables one to keep abreast of the times without wasting a lot of time reading a whole column to obtain a single fact.

Sounds a bit like an online aggregator, doesn’t it, pulling a few salient points from much longer work? One more:

Your magazine is concise and to the point. It represents five good magazines in one.

These are, in fact, a series of subscriber comments sent to Time magazine in the weeks following its launch on March 3, 1923.

This past weekend, I was out with a friend who happens to be a former editor at Time. We were analyzing the current state of the news media in light of recent developments, including The Huffington Post’s plans to launch a 24-hour live web TV network and Buzzfeed’s aggressive push into politics. These organizations — often lambasted for aggregating other’s content while producing little of their own — are repositioning themselves with new strategies, with more room for distinctive, often original content.

My friend argued this was nothing new. Henry Luce’s Time started as a full-fledged aggregator almost 89 years ago.

A quick visit to the library confirmed his statements. Sure enough, all 29 pages of the black and white weekly — its signature red-border cover not yet developed — were packed with advertisements and aggregation. This wasn’t just rewrites of the week’s news; it was rip-and-read copy from the day’s major publications — The Atlantic Monthly, The Christian Science Monitor, and the New York World, to name a few.

Today, of course, Time, between print and online properties, reaches a global audience of 25 million; it employs celebrated journalists and editors, and it remains among America’s preeminent journalism institutions.

Using history as our guide, we shouldn’t be surprised in the recent developments at the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed — nor should we be surprised when, in the coming months and years, other sites disdained by some make similar moves. These are organizations beginning their march up the value chain — beyond LOLcats to politics, beyond aggregation to original content, beyond cheap to upmarket.

My friend is right: This is entirely predictable, and furthermore, precisely what disruption theory predicts.

Clay Christensen’s theory of disruption, first described in the seminal book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, argues that this pattern repeats itself from industry to industry. New entrants to a field start at the low end, establish a foothold, eat away at the customer base of incumbents — and then move up the value chain. It happened with Japanese automakers in the 1980s, who started with cheap subcompacts and moved up to making Lexuses. It happened in the steel industry, where mini-mills began as a cheap, lower-quality alternative to established integrated mills, then moved their way up, pushing aside the industry’s giants. In the news business, newcomers do this by delivering a product that is faster and more personalized than that provided by the bigger, more established news organizations. They also create new market demand by engaging new audiences. (A 17-year-old may not read The New York Times, but they may stumble upon Buzzfeed to see that viral cat video.)

Herein lies Christensen’s critical point, and one that media companies should not forget. Because new-market disruptions initially attract those that aren’t traditional consumers of The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, these incumbent organizations feel little pain or threat. So they stay the course on content, competing on “quality” against these new-market disruptors. Meanwhile, the disruptors, once they establish themselves at the market’s low end, move into the space previously held by the incumbents by producing cheaper, personalized content. It is not until the disruption is in its final stages that it erodes the position of the incumbents. This is the definition of the innovators’ dilemma.

There are two critical points to be made. First, the aggregators of today will be the original reporters of tomorrow. Those of us who care about good journalism shouldn’t dismiss the Buzzfeeds of the world because they aren’t creating high-quality reporting. Their search for new audiences will push them into original content production. Buzzfeed may be focused on cat videos and aggregation now, but disruption theory argues that content companies like it will move into the realm of the Huffington Post — which in turn, has already indicated its desire to compete more directly with The New York Times.

Second, and perhaps more important, is that despite the obituaries for quality journalism, we can take comfort in remembering that we’ve been here before. We need look no further than that same 1923 volume of Time magazine. Under a passage entitled “Machines Do It“:

“The public,” says Mr. Bliven in effect, “is always asking about Newspaper morals. But equally important with newspaper morals is newspaper intelligence. And both of them are changing drastically, dangerously, because of mechanical progress.”

Mr. Bliven is Bruce Bliven, at the time former managing editor of The New York Globe and soon to become editor of The New Republic. Bliven’s quote wasn’t given in an interview with a Time reporter. It was a rip-and-read from an article Bliven had written in that month’s Atlantic Monthly titled, “Our Changing Journalism.” Time’s report went on for several more paragraphs, summarizing and quoting.

We’ve been here before. The question is not, how aggregation is ruining journalism, but how traditional journalism will respond to the aggregation.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/01/dav...urnalisms-dna/





Why CNN’s Digital Strength May Cause Problems For Fox
Daniel Frankel

CNN has become a prime-time ratings afterthought in the cable news business it started three decades ago, as Fox (NSDQ: NWS) News continues to dominate a traditional television realm mostly supported by older viewers. But online and on mobile, the tables are turned.

Driven by a flurry of big breaking-news events in 2011 – everything from the Japanese tsunami to the Egyptian uprising – Time (NYSE: TWX) Warner-owned CNN Digital averaged 73 million unique viewers a month last year across its various platforms, according to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR). Fox News Channel, far and away the leading cable news outlet in prime time, averaged less than 30 million unique users across its channels, while No. 2 network MSNBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) averaged just over 50 million.

Given that other Time Warner sites including Time.com and People.com are folded into the CNN Networks metric, just comparing unique users overstates CNN’s advantage. But in the social networking universe, the 1 million fans on CNN’s Facebook page dwarf those for Fox News by a factor of eight. And with a combined total of 9.4 million followers, @CNN and the rest of the news brand’s Twitter handles have 1.8 million more followers than the closest news competitor, the New York Times.

CNN.com served up 135.9 million page views last March when the earthquake and tsunami ravaged the Japanese coastline, and it averaged 101.3 million video starts a month, a 19 percent uptick over 2010. Sections including Belief (up 64 percent to 7.8 million page views), World (up 23 percent) and This Just In (up 29 percent) also posted big gains.

CNN Digital also remained No. 1 in mobile news for a fourth straight year, averaging 19.4 million unique users, a 60 percent edge over Fox News Digital. (For its part, Fox News is quick to note that it has an engagement metric advantage – according to comScore, the average user spent 10.7 minutes on Fox News sites compared to just 2.2 minutes for CNN.)

These digital rankings, of course, are a complete reversal from what has been happening on cable news television over the last decade.

The Atlanta-based CNN ranked No. 3 in prime-time cable news ratings last year—despite its 16 percent uptick in average nightly prime-time viewers and Fox News Channel’s 9 percent decline. For the year, Fox averaged 2.2 million watchers in prime time, MSNBC came in second averaging 902,000, followed by CNN with 735,000. This, according to TV ratings tracker Nielsen.

Perhaps most key, CNN trailed Fox in the all-important adults 25-54 viewer demographic, averaging less than half of Fox’s 522,000 in the category in which advertising sales are based on. So what’s with the discrepancy between digital and cable performances?
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-w...blems-for-fox/





Police Investigating Allegations of Email Hacking at The Times

The Metropolitan Police are investigating allegations of email hacking at the Times Newspaper, sources have revealed.
Martin Evans

It is understood the investigation relates to claims that a former reporter at the Murdoch owned newspaper hacked into the emails of an anonymous police blogger.

The police investigation follows a complaint by Labour MP Tom Watson, who wrote to Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers urging Scotland Yard to look into allegations of hacking.

The Times editor James Harding and News International chief executive Tom Mockridge have both given evidence to the Leveson Inquiry acknowledging that a reporter at the newspaper had admitted hacking an email.

The reporter was later named as 28-year-old Patrick Foster, who accessed the email account of Richard Horton, a police officer who blogged under the name Nightjack.

Mr Foster was later dismissed from the newspaper for an unrelated matter.

Mr Horton was outed in 2009 after The Times fought an injunction in the High Court in order to reveal his identity.

Last week James Harding, editor of The Times wrote to the Leveson Inquiry admitting for the first time that the newspaper had failed to tell the High Court they new about the hacking before challenging the injunction.

When Mr Harding appeared before the inquiry earlier in January he only admitted that managers knew about an incident of email hacking but did not name Mr Foster or give details of the story.

Following his evidence The Times published an article admitting that Mr Foster had admitted hacking Mr Horton's email account.

Mr Watson’s letter to the Metropolitan Police, which was also sent to the Attorney General, said: “It is clear that a crime has been committed – illicit hacking of personal emails.

“A journalist and unnamed managers failed to report the crime to their proprietor or the police. I must ask that you investigate computer hacking at The Times. In so doing you will also be able to establish whether perjury or conspiracy to pervert the course of justice have also occurred.”

The Metropolitan Police has set up Operation Tuleta to examine allegations of email hacking by journalists.

The investigation is separate to Operation Weeting which is looking into allegations of phone hacking.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...The-Times.html





UK Police Arrest Murdoch Tabloid Staff, Raid Offices
Tim Castle and Georgina Prodhan

British police arrested four current and former staff of Rupert Murdoch's best-selling Sun tabloid plus a policeman on Saturday as part of an investigation into suspected payments by journalists to officers, police and the newspaper's publisher said.

Police also searched the paper's London offices at publisher News International, News Corp's British arm, in a corruption probe linked to a continuing investigation into phone hacking at its now closed News of the World weekly tabloid.

News Corp's Management and Standards Committee, set up in the wake of the phone hacking scandal, said Saturday's operation was the result of information it had passed to police.

"News Corporation made a commitment last summer that unacceptable news gathering practices by individuals in the past would not be repeated," the committee said in a statement confirming the arrests of four "current and former employees" of the Sun.

The committee is conducting a lawyer-led internal review of News International's remaining titles, which also include The Times and The Sunday Times newspapers, as part of a drive to mend the reputational damage done by the phone hacking scandal.

The committee's investigation into The Sun was "well advanced," News International chief executive Tom Mockridge said in an email sent to staff.

"News International is confronting past mistakes and is making fundamental changes about how we operate which are essential for our business.

"Despite this very difficult news, we are determined that News International will emerge a stronger and more trusted organization," he added.

News International was providing legal support for the four arrested "colleagues," Mockridge said.

The arrests included The Sun's crime editor Mike Sullivan, its head of news Chris Pharo, and former deputy editor Fergus Shanahan, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters.

Also arrested was the paper's former managing editor Graham Dudman, now a training director at News International, the source said.

Police said a 48-year-old man from north London and two other men from Essex, east of London, aged 48 and 56, were arrested at their homes. The fourth man, aged 42, was arrested after reporting to an east London police station.

A Sun reporter, who asked not to be named, said: "Everyone is a bit shocked, there is disbelief really. But there is a big difference between phone hacking and payments to the police."

A 29-year-old policeman serving with the Met Police's Territorial Policing Command, was arrested at the central London police station where he worked.

All five were being questioned on suspicion of corruption.

Operation Elveden

Police searched the arrested men's homes as well as The Sun's offices in Wapping, east London.

Thirteen people have now been arrested over allegations that journalists paid police in return for information.

Their detentions are part of Operation Elveden - one of three criminal investigations into news-gathering practices.

Last week, News International settled a string of legal claims after it admitted that people working for the tabloid had hacked in to the private phones of celebrities and others to find stories.

The phone hacking scandal drew attention to the level of political influence held by editors and executives at News International, and other newspapers in Britain.

It embarrassed British politicians for their close ties with newspaper executives and also the police, who repeatedly failed to investigate allegations of illegal phone hacking.

(Additional reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Ben Harding)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80R0BH20120128





Arrests Leave Sun Journalists Feeling Cast Off By Rupert
Roy Greenslade

Wapping journalists are in a state of shock. Many now believe that their ultimate boss, Rupert Murdoch, no longer cares for them. Staff at the Sun, The Times and the Sunday Times were taken aback when news broke at the weekend of four senior Sun journalists being arrested.

An angry and bewildered veteran of that newspaper explained that it wasn't so much the arrests themselves that alarmed him and his colleagues, it was the part played in the episode by the Management and Standards Committee - the unit created by Murdoch.

That arm of News Corporation has been given the task of cleaning things up at the UK division, News International, and it appears to be taking its job more seriously than many of the journalists expected.

It should not have been too great a surprise because it is simply sticking to its brief. But Sun journalists now fear the worst, viewing the committee's latest act as confirmation of their deepest fear - that Murdoch might be willing to let their newspaper go.

Until now, I have argued strongly against those who have aired such suggestions. Murdoch has been emotionally attached to the Sun since he bought it in 1969. It was the essential cash cow from which he was able to expand from Australian parvenu into global media magnate.

Though Murdoch is not overly sentimental, the Sun happens to represent his own political, cultural and social ethos. It is unapologetically anti-Establishment, unashamedly irreverent and unblinkingly forthright.

But the backwash of the phone-hacking scandal has had an extraordinary effect on both Murdoch and, more pertinently, on his company's executives and investors in America. Some believe there is no point in cleaning the Augean stables; better rather to quit the stables altogether.

I happen not to think of the paper in such terms, nor as a "swamp" as one source linked to the MSC inelegantly put it. The Sun, whatever its faults, whatever Scotland Yard and the prosecuting authorities eventually decide, is nothing like as mucky as the thankfully now-defunct News of the World.

The problem for the Sun, which continues to be profitable and remains Britain's largest-selling title, is that it is tainted by association with its deceased ugly sister. And the results of the MSC's inquiries into its internal correspondence are tending to damage its image still further.

Seen in this context, especially when viewed from the US, the Sun could be seen as expendable. Its fate is therefore in the balance.

That is only one part of the story, however.

Though the Sun arrests imply that the MSC is doing its job with the kind of rigour which suggests that it is an independent entity, its very existence is baffling.

It is a creature of News Corp. It was set up specifically to deal with the fallout from the hacking case, police payments and "all other connected issues". It is answerable to the company's board through an executive director - Joel Klein - and an independent director, Viet Dinh, who is a law professor.

That sounds fine enough. But what's the point? In reality, the MSC is a sort of "middle man" standing between the company and the police. It has privileged access to millions of emails and it appears to be trawling through them in order to discover allegedly illegal behaviour.

It gives the MSC the power to filter the information and then decide what messages and memos should, and should not, be passed to the police. Therefore, there is no transparency.

Even if we accept that the MSC is being scrupulously fair - and it is being led by the irreproachable Lord Grabiner QC, a respected deputy high court judge - it is a strange body.

Why not hand the whole email cache to Scotland Yard and let its officers do the job? Why must a corporate unit get in the way?

The Sun arrests, on "evidence" provided by the MSC, add to the bizarre nature of the exercise. In a message aimed at calming the paper's increasingly nervous staff, News International's chief executive, Tom Mockridge, informed them that the company had provided the arrested quartet with "legal support".

In other words, News Corp's MSC is playing prosecutor while its UK publisher, News International, is providing the defence.

It is little wonder that befuddled Sun journalists are wondering whether Murdoch has lost the plot.

How, they ask, did the world's largest news media tycoon get himself into such a fix?
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/market...f-by-rupert.do





Using Wikileaks To Figure Out What The Government 'Redacts'
Mike Masnick

We've talked in the past about the ridiculousness of the US government pretending that the State Department cables that were leaked via Wikileaks are still confidential. The reasoning, obviously, is that they're afraid that declaring anything that's become public is no longer confidential is that it creates incentives to leak more documents. But the actual situation is simply absurd. Documents that everyone can see easily and publicly... live in this world, a world where anyone in government has to pretend that they're still secret and confidential. There have even been cases where officials have gotten into trouble for using information from a "public" document, because they're supposed to create this fiction that it's not.

Still, there is one way in which this has actually turned out to be enlightening. A few months ago, the ACLU filed some Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the State Department on some issues, getting some of the very same documents that were leaked via Wikileaks. Except... the kind that came with the FOIA had redactions. The Wikileaks documents, for the most part, do not. That created an interesting opportunity for Ben Wizner at the ACLU. He could now compare and contrast the two version of the document, to see just what the government is redacting, and figure out if they're redacting it for legitimate reasons... or just to do things like avoid embarrassment.

The ACLU then set up a special page allowing people to compare multiple versions of documents with just a simple mouseover. This came out a few months ago, but I didn't get a chance to write it up until now. It's pretty enlightening to see just what makes the censor's cut, and (not surprisingly) raises significant questions about the government's temptation to simply excise stuff they don't like, rather than information that there are valid reasons to keep hidden.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-redacts.shtml





Website Accused of Defamation is Closed by Judge
Tim Healy

A JUDGE yesterday ordered a website to be shut down and said lawmakers should think about making it illegal to post "patently untrue" allegations about people on the internet.

Mr Justice Michael Peart was speaking after he granted Damien Tansey various orders, effectively ending the operation of the website www.rate-your-solicitor.com.

The Sligo-based solicitor brought defamation proceedings to the High Court arising out of comments on the website.

The action was against site operators John Gill, of Drumline, Newmarket-on-Fergus, Co Clare; and Ann Vogelaar, of Parklands, Westport, Co Mayo.

It is also against the US-based internet services provider, Dostster Inc, which hosts the site. Both Mr Gill and Ms Vogelaar denied the claims against them.

In his ruling, the judge said he was satisfied to grant injunctions against Mr Gill and Ms Vogelaar, pending the full hearing of the action, requiring them to end the operation of the website. They were also ordered to remove various material posted about Mr Tansey on the website and refrain from publishing further defamatory material about him.

They must also provide the names and address of all those involved in the posting of defamatory material. Mr Tansey also obtained similar orders against Dotster, which did not enter a defence.

Malcontents

The judge said he had no hesitation in making the orders as he was "entirely satisfied" that the material complained about "was seriously defamatory of Mr Tansey". He was also satisfied, from submissions made by Mr Gill, that any defence he wished to put forward at trial had no reasonable prospect of succeeding.

Calling for a change to the law, the judge said the internet has facilitated an easy, inexpensive and instant means of "allowing unscrupulous persons or ill-motivated malcontents to vent their anger and grievances against people, where their allegations are patently untrue and unreasonable". In some "extreme cases" such damage "can lead to suicide", he said.

The "mischief on the internet" was so serious that "in my view the Oireachtas should be asked to consider the creation of an appropriate offence under criminal law, with a penalty upon conviction to act as a real deterrent to the perpetrator".

"The civil remedies currently available have recently been demonstrated to be an inadequate means of prevention and redress," the judge added.

Mr Tansey, a partner in the firm Callan Tansey Solicitors, said that since July 2007 the website has published wrong ful material that damaged his character, reputation and business, resulting in him suffering embarrassment, loss and damage.
http://www.independent.ie/national-n...e-3005716.html





Satellite Phone Encryption Cracked

Security researchers have warned that the satellite phones relied on by businesses, charities and government agencies in trouble spots and emergencies worldwide Christopher Williams

German academics said they had cracked two encryption systems used to protect satellite phone signals and that anyone with cheap computer equipment and radio could eavesdrop on calls over an entire continent. Hundreds of thousands of satellite phone users are thought to be affected.

“We were able to completely reverse engineer the encryption algorithms employed,” said Benedikt Driessen and Ralf Hund of Ruhr University Bochum as they announced their report, "Don't Trust Satellite Phones".

The encryption algorithms are known as GMR-1 and GMR-2, and are standards used across satellite phone operators, including Thuraya, a leading providers. Their technology is widely used in the Middle East and Africa, including in some military applications.

Mr Driessen told The Telegraph that the equipment and software needed to intercept and decrypt satellite phone calls from hundreds of thousands of users would cost as little as $2,000. His demonstration system takes up to half an hour to decipher a call, but a more powerful computer would allow eavesdropping in real time, he said.

By publishing details of how to break the encryption, the researchers hope to prompt ETSI, the organization that sets the standards, to create stronger algorithms. A major problem with GMR-1 and GMR-2, Mr Driessen said, was that their details were kept secret so security experts cannot test them.

“This is actually already happening for mobile phones after their encryption was shown to be weak,” said Mr Driessen.

“They are now disclosing the encryption algorithms rather than keeping them secret, so they can be tested. This did not happen with satellite phones.”

As a result, sensitive organisations deploy extra layers of cipher software in their satellite phones. Experts have long suspected that government eavesdropping agencies and other clandestine attackers are able to monitor satellite phone networks on a large scale, so using additional encryption software is quite common, but not standard.

"Many government agencies, including the military, make many of their communications through their own technology," said Bjoern Rupp, chief executive of GSMK Crytophone, an encryption software firm.

"However, they often still rely on satellite phones to communicate with locals, back to HQ or people at home.

"With this announcement, it has been shown that the satellite handsets’ built-in encryption on these calls is no longer secure, which could pose a considerable threat to the armed forces and civilians alike."

The Telegraph understands that the problem does not effect Inmarsat satphones as they do not use the ETSI GMR-1 and GMR-2 encryption.

Thuraya could not be immediately reached for comment.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...n-cracked.html





Do You Like Online Privacy? You May Be a Terrorist
Public Intelligence

A flyer designed by the FBI and the Department of Justice to promote suspicious activity reporting in internet cafes lists basic tools used for online privacy as potential signs of terrorist activity. The document, part of a program called “Communities Against Terrorism”, lists the use of “anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address” as a sign that a person could be engaged in or supporting terrorist activity. The use of encryption is also listed as a suspicious activity along with steganography, the practice of using “software to hide encrypted data in digital photos” or other media. In fact, the flyer recommends that anyone “overly concerned about privacy” or attempting to “shield the screen from view of others” should be considered suspicious and potentially engaged in terrorist activities.

Logging into an account associated with a residential internet service provider (such as Comcast or AOL), an activity that could simply indicate that you are on a trip, is also considered a suspicious activity. Viewing any content related to “military tactics” including manuals or “revolutionary literature” is also considered a potential indicator of terrorist activity. This would mean that viewing a number of websites, including the one you are on right now, could be construed by a hapless employee as an highly suspicious activity potentially linking you to terrorism.

The “Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activities” contained in the flyer are not to be construed alone as a sign of terrorist activity and the document notes that “just because someone’s speech, actions, beliefs, appearance, or way of life is different; it does not mean that he or she is suspicious.” However, many of the activities described in the document are basic practices of any individual concerned with security or privacy online. The use of PGP, VPNs, Tor or any of the many other technologies for anonymity and privacy online are directly targeted by the flyer, which is distributed to businesses in an effort to promote the reporting of these activities.
http://publicintelligence.net/do-you...e-a-terrorist/





Iframe Shop Spins Hijacked Traffic
Darren Pauli

Cyber criminals have opened an online store offering website operators increased traffic by hijacking other websites.

The Russia-based web shop injects hidden iframes into pages of legitimate, unsuspecting websites to redirect visitors to a buyer's URL.

Integrated frames (iframes) split pages into parts that can be used to embed elements such as advertising or windows from a single website or redirect to other sites. When an iframe's height and width is set to zero, it becomes invisible to users.

Customers can purchase 1000 visitors throgh the new online store from any nominated country for an average of $US4 ($A3.75).

Regional traffic prices purchased under "countries packs" vary; 1000 Dutch visitors cost $US18 ($A16.90), while the same number of hijacked web users from Australia can be purchased for $US8 ($A7.50).

The shop also offers to purchase redirected traffic from others. Sellers can inject their own iframes into websites and funnel the traffic through the shop where it is purchased by customers.

Its operator boasted on an underground cybercrime forum that allowed customers to use the service for any purpose without being monitored.

In a translated post, they said "our servers do not record your IP … no one will ban your accounts and we do not care what you are promoting".

The shop can adjust prices automatically based on supply and demand, the operator said.

Though initally created for personal use, the operator said “after talking with colleagues who would also like to use this system, I decided, 'why not?'".

The website is listed under Indian domain registrar Directi.

Another search engine optimisation website offered to redirect its own visitors to customer sites as part of a premium package.

It also offered a lower price package to host customer sites on its page using iframes, which would not redirect customers.
http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/28...d-traffic.aspx





Google Now Scanning Android Apps for Malware
Elinor Mills

Google has added an automated scanning process that is designed to keep malicious apps out of the Android Market, the company announced today.

The new service, code-named "Bouncer," scans apps for known malware, spyware, and Trojans, and looks for suspicious behaviors and compares them against previously analyzed apps, Hiroshi Lockheimer, vice president of engineering on the Android team, said in an interview with CNET this morning.

Every app is then run on Google's cloud infrastructure to simulate how the software would operate on an Android device, he said. Existing apps are continuously analyzed, too.

"The system takes an app that's been uploaded and runs it in the cloud and monitors what the app is doing in a virtual environment, if you will," Lockheimer said.

If malicious code or behavior is detected, the app is flagged for manual confirmation that it is malware. The app could be blocked from being uploaded if it is blatantly malicious or will be removed quickly thereafter if it gets flagged by the scanning process. "It won't get uploaded at all if it is an instance of known malware," Lockheimer said.

Unlike Apple, which vets every iPhone app before it hits the iTunes Marketplace, Google does not require pre-approval for Android apps. Instead, it does the screening of the apps behind the scenes when the developers upload them to the Android Market.

Google also is analyzing new developer accounts to "prevent malicious and repeat-offending developers from coming back," the company says in a blog post today.

Google has been quietly testing Bouncer for a "number of months," long enough to see an impact, Lockheimer said. Between the first and second half of 2011 there was a 40 percent decline in the number of downloads of potentially malicious apps, the company said.

Lockheimer said he could not say how many malicious apps had been blocked or removed from the market as a result of the scanning.

Asked if Google created Bouncer in response to complaints about malicious apps on the Android Market, Lockheimer said no. "It's not like there is a rampant malware problem," he said. "Think of it as an insurance policy...to ensure that Android continues to be a safe place."

Mobile security firm Lookout found that there were about 1,000 malicious Android apps last year, but the vast majority were on unofficial, third-party sites where anything goes. But some malicious apps have made it to the Android Market, including about two dozen apps containing malware that Google yanked in May and nearly 60 malicious apps removed in March.

It's likely Bouncer will flag apps that may not technically be considered malware but are designed to perpetrate fraud against the consumer. This would include situations such as the nearly 30 fraud-related apps Google pulled from the market in December that were found to be charging premium SMS toll rates on European phones without the user's knowledge.

Asked to comment on this, a Google spokesman said "We look for many things, this may be one of them."

The news was met with praise by security experts, including some who wondered why Android apps weren't scanned from the beginning.

"I think it is great that Google is taking steps to address the inevitability of malicious apps in their app store. What were they thinking at first?" said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer at application security provider Veracode, who had called on Google to scan Android apps in March of last year.

. "Both Apple and Microsoft started their app stores with a validation process. Blocking known malware patterns is a no-brainer."

"I hope Google can keep up with published rootkit code and research on vulnerabilities and add these patterns to their scanners," he added. "The process should be proactive and not have a window of time when tens or hundreds of thousands of mobile users can be compromised before the malware is detected and removed."

Kevin Mahaffey, chief technology officer at Lookout, said Google's move was a "step in the right direction."

"We think it is great that Google is working with the Android community to provide an alternative to a manual curation process, allowing developers to innovate quickly while also increasing the baseline level of security for Android users," he said.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-57...s-for-malware/





Apple Hit by Boycott Call Over Worker Abuses in China

US writers attack conditions at Foxconn plant and call for consumers to act
Paul Harris

Apple, the computer giant whose sleek products have become a mainstay of modern life, is dealing with a public relations disaster and the threat of calls for a boycott of its iPhones and iPads.

The company's public image took a dive after revelations about working conditions in the factories of some of its network of Chinese suppliers. The allegations, reported at length in the New York Times, build on previous concerns about abuses at firms that Apple uses to make its bestselling computers and phones. Now the dreaded word "boycott" has started to appear in media coverage of its activities.

"Should consumers boycott Apple?" asked a column in the Los Angeles Times as it recounted details of the bad PR fallout.

The influential Daily Beast and Newsweek technology writer Dan Lyons wrote a scathing piece. "It's barbaric," he said, before saying to his readership: "Ultimately the blame lies not with Apple and other electronics companies – but with us, the consumers. And ultimately we are the ones who must demand change."

Forbes magazine columnist Peter Cohan also got in on the act. "If you add up all the workers who have died to build your iPhone or iPad, the number is shockingly high," he began an article that also toyed with the idea of a boycott in its headline.

The New York Times's revelations, which centred on the Foxconn plant in southern China that has repeatedly been the subject of accusations of worker mistreatment, have caused a major stir in the US. Although such allegations have been made before in numerous news outlets, and in a controversial one-man show by playwright Mike Daisey, this time they have struck a chord.

The newspaper detailed allegations that workers at Foxconn suffered in conditions that resembled a modern version of bonded labour, working obscenely long shifts in unhealthy conditions with few of the labour rights that workers in the west would take for granted. It also mentioned disturbing events elsewhere in China among supplier firms, such as explosions at iPad factories that killed a total of four people and another incident in which 137 workers were injured after cleaning iPhone screens with a poisonous chemical.

Apple has come out fighting, which is no surprise given the remarkable success that the company has seen in recent years.

Through the iPod, iPhone and now the iPad tablet computer, Apple has revolutionised lifestyles across the world and built up a cult of worshippers. It has also generated billions of dollars in profits, in part due to the cheapness of Chinese labour.

But much of the firm's success rests on its reputation for "cool" among hip urban professionals and a generally positive corporate image. Stories of worker abuse at Chinese firms are a direct threat to that winning combination.

In a lengthy email sent to Apple staff, chief executive Tim Cook met the allegations head-on. "We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern," Cook said. He went on to slam critics of the company. "Any suggestion that we don't care is patently false and offensive to us… accusations like these are contrary to our values."

Earlier this month Apple took the unusual step of releasing a list of all the firms in its worldwide supply chain as part of its 2011 audit of human rights conditions at factories where it has partnerships.

However, the company's own list made for grim reading. It revealed that a staggering 62% of the 229 facilities that it was involved with were not in compliance with Apple's 60-hour maximum working week policy. Almost a third had problem with hazardous waste.

Cook insisted in his email that Apple did not turn a blind eye to conditions in its supplier network. But he did warn that the firm was likely to discover more problems. "We will continue to dig deeper, and we will undoubtedly find more issues," he said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...-worker-abuses





Steve Jobs Told Google to Stop Poaching Workers
Dan Levine

Apple's Steve Jobs directly asked former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt to stop trying to recruit an Apple engineer, a transgression that threatened one junior Google employee's job, according to a court filing.

The 2007 email from Jobs to Schmidt was disclosed on Friday in the course of civil litigation against Apple Inc, Google Inc and five other technology companies. The proposed class action, brought by five software engineers, accuses the companies of conspiring to keep employee compensation low by eliminating competition for skilled labor.

In 2010, Google, Apple, Adobe Systems Inc, Intel Corp, Intuit Inc and Walt Disney Co's Pixar unit agreed to a settlement of a U.S. Justice Department probe that bars them from agreeing to refrain from poaching each other's employees.

According to an unredacted court filing made public in the civil litigation on Friday, the now-deceased Jobs emailed Schmidt in March 2007 about an attempt by a Google employee to recruit an Apple engineer. Schmidt was also an Apple board member at the time.

"I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this," Jobs wrote.

Schmidt forwarded Job's email onto other, undisclosed recipients.

"Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?" Schmidt wrote.

Google's staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer "will be terminated within the hour."

He added: "Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs."

Google spokeswoman Niki Fenwick said on Friday the company, "has always actively and aggressively recruited top talent."

Apple representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The tech defendants have asked a U.S. judge in San Jose, California to quickly dismiss the civil lawsuit, arguing that the companies engaged in bilateral anti-poaching deals to protect collaboration. The companies did not participate in an "overarching conspiracy," they argued in filings.

But at a court hearing this week, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh said the civil lawsuit will proceed, although it may be split up into multiple potential class actions.

Among the revelations stemming from the civil litigation is a 2007 note from Palm's chief executive to Apple's Steve Jobs, saying that an anti-poaching agreement would be "likely illegal.

The latest court filing also refers to a 2007 note from Intel chief executive Paul Otellini discussing that company's agreement with Google.

"Let me clarify. We have nothing signed," Otellini wrote. "We have a handshake 'no recruit' between eric and myself. I would not like this broadly known."

Intel representative Sumner Lemon said on Friday the company, "disagrees with the allegations contained in the private litigation related to recruiting practices and plans to conduct a vigorous defense."

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is In Re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, 11-cv-2509.

(Reporting By Dan Levine; editing by Tim Dobbyn and Andre Grenon)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80Q27420120127





Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software
Cade Metz

The meeting took place a week before Bill Gates retired from Microsoft, and the topic was open source software.

It was the summer of 2008, and for years, the open source community had viewed Microsoft as public enemy number one. Seven years earlier, CEO Steve Ballmer had referred to Linux as a “malignant cancer,” and as recently as the previous summer, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez had told Fortune Magazine that Linux violated 235 of its patents, implying that it would soon demand royalties from any big business using the open source OS.

But at the same time, Microsoft realized how powerful the free software movement could be, and the company was exploring ways it could make nice with the ever-growing community of developers who used open source. For two years, Sam Ramji had served as head of open source strategy at Microsoft, and every three months, he met with Bill Gates and other execs to show off various open source technologies put together by a small team of Microsoft engineers.

But that afternoon was different. At the invitation of the company’s chief legal minds — Smith and Gutierrez — Ramji sat down with Gates, chief software architect Ray Ozzie, and a few others to discuss whether Microsoft could actually start using open source software. Ramji and Ozzie were on one side of the argument, insisting that Microsoft embrace open source, and Gutierrez offered a legal framework that could make that possible. But other top executives strongly challenged the idea.

Then Bill Gates stood up.

He walked to the whiteboard and drew a diagram of how the system could work, from copyrights to code contribution to patents, and he said — in no uncertain terms — that the company had to make the move.

For Ramji — who would spend more than three and a half years as the company’s chief open source strategist — the moment Bill Gates stood up was the moment Microsoft turned the corner on its approach to free software. “He was given little to no credit by the open source community — or anyone in the tech industry — for really understanding open source and why it can be important, how it can be a competitive advantage, and why when your competitors start to use it, you have to too. He really got it, and in that moment, he taught us all.”

From the outside looking in, it appears that Microsoft has indeed turned the corner. The company recently added two open source platforms to Windows Azure — its new-age web service for building and hosting applications on the net — and it’s actually contributing open source code to these projects — as well as others. These aren’t minor open source projects. They’re big name projects with huge followings: Node.js and Hadoop. This would not have happened in the past.

Microsoft changed because of people like Sam Ramji and the man who hired him, Bill Hilf — not to mention Bill Gates. But the change also reflects a much larger movement across the tech industry. As more and more applications move from local data centers to “cloud” services such as Amazon Web Services and, yes, Microsoft Azure, the economics of software are shifting. In the past, businesses paid companies like Microsoft for software and loaded it on their own servers. Now, businesses pay to use online services instead. In offering open source software atop Azure, there’s a clear way for Microsoft to actually make money.

“With Azure, we make money from compute and storage and bandwidth,” says Hilf, who now oversees Azure. “We want to offer as many types of applications and as many types of systems as we can, so they can help that flywheel spin…. We don’t see [Node.js] on Azure as altruistic. We see it as a way to drive business.”

‘The First Astronaut on the Planet’

Bill Hilf was a Linux guy. As a senior architect at IBM in the early 2000s, he built big business infrastructure using Linux and other open source software, and he was eventually tapped to oversee open source strategy for all of Big Blue. IBM had bet big on Linux in the late ’90s as a way of battling the Microsofts of the world. Then, in 2004, Hilf got a call from his biggest rival.

“Microsoft called up and said: ‘We don’t understand this open source stuff. And we need people who do,’” Hilf remembers. “I was like the first astronaut on the planet.”

His main task, at least initially, was to teach. “I spent a lot of time just educating people on what the open source process was: How does open source work? How community software on the internet work? How do licenses work? Do these people really work for free?” But he also helped build an open source lab inside Microsoft where he and his cohorts would build Linux systems and test them in tandem machines running Windows software. For a company that had longed shunned the Samba project — an open source effort to ensure that Windows desktops could talk to Linux file servers and not just Windows servers — this was a significant undertaking.

At the same time, Hilf’s lab would explore new Microsoft projects that might grow out of existing open source efforts. And toward the end of his time on the job, he began to reach out to members of the open source community. “We wanted to understand the ways we could work cooperatively with open source — not just learning how it works and testing to see if we could inter-operate, but looking for areas where we could really pursue open source,” he says.

This sort of thinking, Hilf says, led to Microsoft’s involvement with Node.js and Hadoop. Last year, the company not only announced that it would port Node and Hadoop — both Linux technologies — to Windows. It said it would contribute the code back to the open source community.

“We have a dedicated team of people who are working on this. We’re doing real engineering work,” Hilf says. “Then we’re taking that work and putting it under an open source license and distributing it through something like Github. That would not have happened six years ago.”

This fall, Microsoft even contributed code to Samba. “A few years back, a patch submission from coders at Microsoft would have been amazing to the point of unthinkable, but the battles are mostly over and times have changed,” wrote Christopher Hertel and his fellow Samba contributors.

“Most people didn’t even notice the source of the contribution. That’s how far things have come in the past four-ish years… but some of us saw this as a milestone, and wanted to make a point of expressing our appreciation for the patch and the changes we have seen.”

A Company That’s At Its Best When Freaking Out

But the road was a long one. In 2006, when Hilf hired Sam Ramji to take over Microsoft’s open source efforts, the company’s relationship to free software was still uneasy. A year later, Brad Smith and Horacio Gutierrez would make those apparent threats to the Linux community in the pages of Fortune. And when Ramji was hired to run open source at Microsoft, as he acknowledged years later, he was a little skeptical of the role — and a little scared.

There were ups, and there were downs. But Ramji’s meeting with Gates meant that the big changes would eventually happen. Not long after the meeting, Microsoft purchased a company called Powerset, a semantic search startup that was among the first companies to run a web service atop Hadoop. After a short hiatus, Microsoft allowed Powerset’s engineers to continue contributing code to the open source project. And for a while, the service continued to run on Hadoop, a means of crunching data across a sea of servers. At some point, the project abandoned the technology and moved the service to Microsoft software, and at least one of the main open source contributors left the company. But Powerset was at least a step in the right direction.

The following year, Ramji and his team prototyped an Amazon-like cloud service using nothing but open source software such as Zend and OpenNebula and Eucalyptus and OpenScale and Hadoop. “We were like the beta squadron,” Ramji remembers. “We were the attack squadron that would come test everybody. We would say: ‘You think you’re ahead? Let us show you what can be done with open source and two weeks of time and some smart Linux guys.”

According to Ramji, the project caused “deep discomfort” among the Microsoft braintrust. The company was already building Azure — then code-named Red Dog — using proprietary technologies. But for Ramji, deep discomfort is a good thing. “Microsoft is at its best when it’s freaking out,” he says. “That’s just it’s mentality. It’s a crisis-oriented company.”

Microsoft Becomes Google

Ramji left Microsoft in 2009 and joined a startup called Apigee, tackling what he sees as today’s equivalent of the early open source movement: the effort to integrate the world’s web services through application programming interfaces, or APIs. But he left a mark in Redmond. Projects like that open source cloud stack had the desired effect.

“I think that the team that we built is the best team I’ve ever worked with,” Ramji says. “We really carried the belief that we have to let the outside in. We can’t continue, in this world, to only use proprietary approaches that are only going to let in the jingos — the flag-waving Microsoft fans.” The team spread across the company, taking this ideas with them.

Azure still runs on proprietary Microsoft software. But to the surprise of many, the service is offering developers a wide range of open source tools they can use to build their applications, including not only Node and Hadoop but open source languages such as Java and PHP. The company has even said it will eventually allow developers to run Linux atop the service.

Ramji acknowledges that Microsoft changed in part because the world changed. “There is no greater power in the world than an idea whose time has come,” Ramji says, paraphrasing Victor Hugo. But then he puts it in more prosaic terms: “Cloud is peanut butter for open source’s chocolate.”
“Personally, I think that the chapter on Microsoft on open source has yet to be written. We need to see a lot more contribution from them to say they are a friend of open source.”

But Microsoft’s history as the enemy of open source is a long one, and many still question whether the company has indeed changed its ways. “Personally, I think that the chapter on Microsoft on open source has yet to be written,” says Ron Schnell, a longtime open source user who also happened to run the Technical Committee that oversaw Microsoft’s consent decree with the U.S. government after the company lost its big antitrust case in 2001. “We need to see a lot more contribution from them to say they are a friend of open source.”

In the end, Schnell says, it all comes down to money. “Open source solutions don’t generally look good on the balance sheet. The question is — with the anticipated success of cloud computing, which would reduce the need for desktop operating systems like Windows, can Microsoft continue to see the sort of profits they’ve been seeing anyway?” That is the question. But the move to cloud computing certainly makes it easier to build an attractive balance sheet with open source software. And clearly, Microsoft realizes this.

For years, it’s been easy to praise Google for being a friend to open source, while vilifying Microsoft for keeping its distance from free software. But as a web service, Google was in a very different position from Microsoft, a company that reached its heights selling shrink-wrapped boxes of code. Now, Microsoft is also a web company. It’s becoming more like Google — in more ways than one.

Yes, Microsoft is demanding — and in many cases, receiving royalties — from companies selling devices that run Android, an operating system based on Linux. This shows that its place in the world remains complicated. Though it’s moving to the web, it is still very much a company that makes money selling software — and it still has an interest in protecting this business. But these battles aren’t always what they seem. Android isn’t as much an open source project as a Google project.

The world is not black and white. And neither is the world of software. Not everyone realizes this. But Bill Gates did. And Microsoft is the better for it.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise...ll-gates/all/1





Jailbreaking the Internet: For Freedom's Sake
Paul Venezia

Last week, I talked a bit about the history of the Internet and its original goal of enabling the free flow of information [1]. I also talked about the fact that moneyed interests the world over are scrambling to turn the Internet into something closer to cable TV than the open network we currently enjoy.

The past few weeks have shown that public outcry can still somehow influence legislation: SOPA and PIPA are down, if not quite out. Yet the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) [2] is coming on fast. Plus, who knows what the next year will bring in the form of odious legislation intended to collapse the free and open Internet while masquerading as some pious "save the children" nonsense? The battle may have been won for the moment, but this is going to be a never-ending war.

[ Read the prequel to this post, "Building the next Internet [3]." | Find out why Paul Venezia thinks politicians should never make laws about technology [4]. | Also see Paul's recent investigative project, "Fundamental Oracle flaw revealed [5]." ]

In my last post [1], I also talked about the next Internet. Not necessarily in terms of a separate, new network -- that's not possible at this point -- but a new Internet that would continue to promote the free exchange of ideas and information without the shackles of corporate control. It's a network that already exists and has for some time, but the vast majority of Internet users don't know about it and have never needed to know about it until now.

If the baboons [6] succeed in constraining speech and information flow on the broader Internet, the new Internet will emerge quickly. For an analogy, consider the iPhone and the efforts of a few smart hackers who have allowed anyone to jailbreak an iPhone with only a small downloaded app and a few minutes. Though these apps couldn't be simpler to use, their easy and colorful UIs mask a massive quantity of research and reverse-engineering by a group of determined software and hardware geeks. It's all wrapped up in a nice, accessible package, but the underlying concepts are well beyond what 99 percent of those who jailbreak their phones can truly understand.

So it will be with the jailbroken Internet. In a world where corporations can force just about anyone "off" the Internet by leveraging proposed laws like SOPA and causing ISPs to break DNS, there needs to be a way to maintain connectivity to those sites and that information. If Large Corporation A doesn't like what Average Guy B is saying about it in his blog, it could effectively muzzle that voice with a takedown notice that adheres to the letter of the law, yet crushes our concepts of free speech and the open Internet. While protecting copyright is clearly an important endeavor, these proposed methods are execrable. However, if a significant number of people aren't using those DNS servers, if they aren't using the standard Internet pathways, that voice will still be heard, those sites will still be available.

All that scenario would require would be a way to wrap up existing technologies into a nice, easily-installed package available through any number of methods. Picture the harrowing future described above, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor [7], tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.

This is precisely what technophobic and myopic legislators simply do not understand: You cannot censor the Internet. As John Gilmore famously said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." So it has been and so it will be.

This workaround solution will be technically deficient, but it will be functional. A technically valid solution already exists --the Internet in its current form -- but if that gets mangled, plan B may be one of the only ways through those troubled times.

Make no mistake, these tools and services are readily available now --and have been for quite some time. Tools like Vidalia for Mac OS X wrap up technologies like tor quite well, but tor itself isn't the whole solution. If the day comes when true censorship enfolds to the Internet, deep geeks who have been using these tools for years will start showing their friends how to use them. Then the aforementioned "jailbreaking" apps will appear, and sooner rather than later, those who don't use them will fall into the category we reserve for people who still use AOL today. The rest of us will still be able to access sites and services the world over through alternative means, at least until the baboons figure it out and pay for more legislation crafted to crack down on those methods. Then those methods will change again and the game will continue.

The fact that we may have to play this game is in itself a disgrace. No, this is a sad game, an amoral game, a farce and a crime. The Internet is an engineering marvel that has contributed more to the open exchange of information than anything in history. Seeing it crippled by greed and ignorance is like watching the burning of the Library of Alexandria. To paraphrase one of the most famous fictional computers in history, in the coming contest between those who would control the infrastructure and those who use it, the only way to win is not to play [8]. Unfortunately, those battle lines are being drawn whether we like it or not. So play we must. Play we will.

This story, "Jailbreaking the Internet: For freedom's sake [9]" was originally published at InfoWorld.com [10]. Read more of Paul Venezia's The Deep End blog [11] at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter [12].

Data Center
Networking
Internet
Federal Regulations

Source URL (retrieved on 2012-01-30 01:50PM): https://www.infoworld.com/d/data-cen...ms-sake-185143

Links:
[1] http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-cent...nternet-183082
[2] http://www.infoworld.com/t/intellect...ght-treaty-007
[3] http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-cent...82?source=fssr
[4] http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-cent...74?source=fssr
[5] http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/...-0?source=fssr
[6] http://boingboing.net/2012/01/28/mpa...mits-indu.html
[7] https://www.torproject.org/
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames
[9] http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-cent...ms-sake-185143
[10] http://www.infoworld.com?source=footer
[11] http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-cent...?source=footer
[12] http://twitter.com/infoworld

https://www.infoworld.com/d/data-cen...ms-sake-185143





Netherlands Makes Net Neutrality a Law
BBC

The Dutch may become the first in Europe to use Skype and other web-based services on smartphones for no extra charge.

On 22 June, the Dutch Parliament passed a law stopping mobile operators from blocking or charging extra for voice calling done via the net.

The bill must now pass through the Dutch senate, but its passage is expected to be a formality.

The move may prove crucial in Europe's on-going debate over net neutrality.

Net neutrality is controversial around the world, with heated discussions on the subject taking place in the United States, Europe and many other regions.

The idea it enshrines is that all internet traffic should be treated equally, regardless of its type - be it video, audio, e-mail, or the text of a web page.

However, ISPs said they need to discriminate because unchecked traffic from some applications, such as games or file-sharing programs, can slow down their entire network for all customers.

As a result many ISPs throttle, block or charge extra for many bandwidth hungry applications and content.

This has become an issue for content creators, who do not want to have a two-tier internet and would like users to enjoy whatever they produce in the best way possible.

Before now the issue has largely been confined to home net access rather than mobiles.

Extra fees

The European Union endorses net neutrality principles, which state that telecommunication companies may charge extra for some services, but need to tell customers what they are doing.

The European Commission has adopted a "wait and see" approach with Neelie Kroes, Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, stating in April that Brussels would spend 2011 "closely looking at current market practices".

Ms Kroes promised to present the findings and publicly name "operators engaging in doubtful practices" at the end of 2011.

Taking action

So far, the Netherlands is the second country to enshrine the net neutrality concept into national law, after Chile.

The Chilean bill was approved in July 2010 and finally implemented in May 2011

While advocates of net neutrality idea praised the Dutch government for the move, the country's telecommunications companies were disappointed.

All major mobile network providers, including Vodafone, T-Mobile and the former Dutch state telecom Royal KPN NV, had lobbied against the bill, warning that they may raise subscription prices if the law was passed.

Vodafone said the law would inevitably "lead to a large increase in prices for mobile internet for a large group of consumers" as it could no longer single out heavy users for higher charges.

In a statement, KPN said that it regretted "that parliament didn't take more time for this legislation".

It was KPN's initial actions that prompted Dutch politicians to react, after it announced plans to charge customers extra for using Skype and WhatsApp, a free text messaging service.

A public outcry followed with users saying they were unhappy with the pricing policy and many questioning how KPN knew they were using these applications in the first place.

After the country's consumer rights watchdog asked to investigate possible privacy violations, the issue got all the way to the parliament.

Labour MP Martijn van Dam, one of the bill's co-authors, said that KPN was similar to "a postal worker who delivers a letter, looks to see what's in it, and then claims he hasn't read it."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13886440





Canada's Internet Among Best, Report Says
Jameson Berkow

Canadians enjoy among the fastest, most widely available and least expensive broadband Internet in the developed world, says a report released Thursday.

The report, based on the results of 52 million speed tests of broadband users across the G7 countries and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) membership, was produced by Montreal-based consulting firm Lemay Yates Associates Inc. on behalf of Rogers Communications Inc., the country's largest broadband service provider.

It disputes the OECD's own report, published in July, that ranked Canada's high-speed Internet offerings significantly below those of other countries.

At 74%, Canada has the highest broadband penetration rate in the G7, the report said, significantly ahead of the United Kingdom (69.2%) and France (69%). Canadians also have the second-least expensive average monthly broadband subscription rates in the G7, with a typical monthly fee of US$30.79 in Canada being only slightly more than the US$29.80 per month Internet service providers (ISPs) charge in Italy.

Among all 32 OECD countries, Canada has the seventh-lowest average broad-band subscription fees, with Greece, at US$24.23 per month, the lowest.

That conclusion differs vastly from the OECD report, which ranks Canada as 26th, or seventh most-expensive among its membership. The disparity comes from different methodologies employed by the two reports.

Canadians also experienced an average decline in broadband speeds during peak usage hours of only 5.8%, the Lemay Yates report said, well below the 6.6% average of all OECD members.

The OECD takes an average of advertised speeds and rates, the Lemay Yates report said; Lemay Yates said it uses real data from real users and takes other factors such as ISP market share into account.

"Canada's performance, based on LYA's analyses, is always better - along every dimension analyzed - than what is reported by the most recent OECD Communications Outlook report," the Lemay Yates report says.

The report comes days after the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) revealed a sharp jump in the number of complaints it has received regarding Internet traffic-management practices or "throttling" in recent months.

Rogers in particular has been facing criticism over the controversial practice, with the CRTC ruling last month the Toronto-based company was deliberately slowing certain online traffic.
http://www.financialpost.com/todays-...446/story.html





The Ups and Downs of the "America-Proof" Cloud: CloudSigma
Scott M. Fulton

If it's a feature your customers are asking for, it's difficult not to want to provide it. Although one of the benefits of public cloud computing is the ability to provision computing and storage resources from anywhere in the world on-demand, enterprises in Europe are wary that if their cloud-based assets are migrated to servers residing in the U.S., then they could (even if they never have yet) be subject to inspection by U.S. law enforcement authorities, even though the assets themselves are not American.

It's still the most controversial provision of the U.S. Patriot Act, signed into law in October 2001. Because of this, European cloud customers specifically request that their service providers (CSPs) block any live migration to U.S. servers. And because it's such a frequent request, CSPs including Zurich-based CloudSigma are offering what they call "Patriot-proof" clouds as a feature.

"I think it's largely a theoretical risk. I don't believe the U.S. Government is rampantly going around, getting data off of U.S. subsidiary-operated clouds," admits Robert Jenkins, CloudSigma's chief technology officer, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. "But also, I think people do have a genuine concern, because the penalties are quite strict."

There's now raw data to verify the suspicion that European CSPs restricting all or some of their cloud services to geographies outside the U.S. - or even just to Europe - is costing Europe valuable investments and prestige. Last year, according to data from U.K.-based telecom analyst firm Informa, the Middle East/Africa region nearly pulled even with Western Europe in the number of operators offering viable cloud services. The rate of growth for European cloud services is among the lowest on the planet.

Prior to the Informa data's release, European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding asked her country's CSPs to refrain from making these offers, saying the free flow of data between nations is essential to healthy trade and a vibrant economy. But as CloudSigma's Jenkins tells us, some European CSPs actually don't have a choice. In Germany, for example, cloud customers may be subject to criminal sanctions if their cloud deployments expose personally identifiable data (PID) to any agency outside Germany.

"The reality is, there's a disconnect between the U.S. position and the European position at the moment," remarks Jenkins. "And the problem is that companies are in a position where essentially they comply with European law, but then they would break U.S. law if they work with a U.S. company, or vice versa. It's a big mess, and for sure, it needs clarifying."

Despite Comm. Reding's calls for CSPs to open up, Jenkins says the E.U. already has very clear laws mandating them to protect citizens' personal data - laws which are unlikely to ever be changed. Those laws state service providers must notify users and seek their permission before transferring their PID to any third party. This is the case, he says, not only for cloud service providers but conventional co-location providers as well.

Jenkins says CloudSigma has designed its IaaS servers to be separable by the customer when necessary. Although CloudSigma does have a U.S. subsidiary, there is not a free flow of data between its American and European servers. "We've done that deliberately to allow customers in Europe to say, 'I'm only using a European cloud, therefore I'm not exposing myself to U.S. jurisdiction.' Likewise, the U.S. company can [choose to] only use the U.S. cloud, and only expose themselves to U.S. jurisdiction because we're a U.S. company in the U.S... Our aim is to make it easy for the customer to understand what jurisdiction they are exposing themselves to."

For CSPs that provide PaaS and SaaS, the CloudSigma CTO points out, this level of compartmentalization is not so easy to achieve. Data replication is common in order to ensure resilience and service reliability, so it's conceivable that replicated data may cross jurisdictional boundaries. There will be no way, he predicts, for Google to be able to guarantee its Gmail or Google Apps customers that their data will never fall under some particular, questionable jurisdiction - say, China.

But how CloudSigma lets its IaaS customers approach the jurisdiction problem is during the account creation phase. This way, a customer who may need to operate services in Shanghai can easily be informed as to the possibilities of oversight by Chinese authorities. "It's not an anti-U.S. or pro-Europe question, 'Can I control who has access to my data?'" Jenkins says. "Our job is to try to make it as transparent and as controllable as possible, so a company can go open an account in a specific location, and that's their home jurisdiction. Then they can opt into other cloud locations as they see fit."

As an example, Jenkins offered the case of a Zurich-based customer who wants to add failover and geographic load-balancing in the U.S. That customer will see a warning saying that her customer records will be replicated in the U.S. as well, and explaining the implications of that data falling under U.S. jurisdiction. If both jurisdictions are linked together as one service, the explanation will also add that authorities in either location may have access to customer data from the other. A multi-national company which has offices across the globe, he adds, may actually not have the luxury of choosing an IaaS service that's centered in Zurich.

This opt-in approach, he believes, gives his company an advantage insofar as Europe is concerned. The flip side is that it may be a disadvantage for CloudSigma in the U.S.

"For us, it would be a very advantageous thing to have a consistent approach, as well as for the cloud in general. I think overall, we're a net winner because we're on the European side and we could potentially benefit. But [on the other hand], in Switzerland we don't because it puts people off of the cloud in general, and that's a bad thing. It's something that's in the interest of European cloud providers to resolve... I think finding some middle ground would be beneficial, maybe some sort of framework that goes between the U.S. and Europe. Maybe there's a way to provide some oversight in Europe that would make the E.U. people happy, and then the U.S. would feel like they have some level of access to prevent terrorism. There needs to be some sort of balance... [that] doesn't break either system fundamentally."
https://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2...-the-ameri.php





Google to Censor Blogger Blogs on a ‘Per Country Basis’
David Kravets

Google has quietly announced changes to its Blogger free-blogging platform that will enable the blocking of content only in countries where censorship is required.

Twitter announced technology last week addressing the same topic. It said it had acquired the ability to censor tweets in the countries only where it was ordered removed, instead of on an internet-wide basis.

Twitter’s announcement via its blog sparked a huge online backlash. The microblogging service was accused of becoming a censoring agent.

Yet Google’s announcement three weeks ago — buried in a Blogger help page — went unnoticed until it was highlighted by TechDows on Tuesday.

Google wrote Jan. 9 it would begin redirecting Blogger traffic to country-specific URLs, meaning whatever country you’re in, you’ll get that country’s domain for Blogger-hosted blogs.

TechDows reports that this is now happening in India, for example. So when you’re there and click on a Blogger blog, the URL will end .in.

Doing that, Google wrote, means content can be removed “on a per country basis.”

“Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law,” Google wrote.

Twitter did not announce how its new technology functions, but said Twitter has the ability to remove tweets only in countries where that content was barred.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...oring-blogger/





Innovations in Light
Tina Rosenberg

People often write to Fixes telling us of cool new devices made for the poor: the sOccket soccer ball that stores energy as children kick it; the neoprene LifeWrap that hospitals can use to save women hemorrhaging in childbirth; adjustable eyeglasses.

We love devices — but we don’t like to write about them. It’s cheating. The technology is the easy part of solving problems. There are zillions of cool ideas. Plenty of college students have come up with a great new technology for the poor.

The bigger challenge comes from the questions around any new device: How do you build a market for a technology focused on people with no money? How do you physically get it to where it needs to be? How do poor people acquire it? How can it be adopted on a wide scale? How do you make it last?

If you look at the market for solar lighting in Africa, you’ll be excused for thinking that you’re looking at the mobile phone market some 15 years ago. Both are leapfrog technologies — neither land lines nor the electrical grid is going to reach much of the continent, so let’s just skip that generation of technology and move to the next one. Like cellphones, solar lamps are getting cheaper, smaller, better. Both are life-changing, indispensable. And the market is enormous. Today, about 1.5 million people in Africa use solar lamps. That’s a huge number — but it’s less than 1 percent of the potential market. A fifth of the world’s population lives without electricity. Another large group of people do have access to electricity, but need an alternative because it is too expensive and power outages are daily events.

People without electric light usually rely on kerosene, a terrible alternative. It gives poor light — really, not enough to study by — produces noxious fumes, and is a major hazard for burns and fires. Indoor air pollution kills 2 million people each year and kerosene is a major source. Kerosene itself is also expensive; the very poor typically spend 10 percent of their income or more on kerosene. Its users pay 600 times more per unit of light than people who use electrical-powered incandescent lamps.

The unsolved problem for lighting Africa isn’t designing a great lamp. Great lamps are out there. It’s designing a great business model. Here are three different ways it can work.

~~~

The bottle bulb may be the coolest idea I’ve ever seen.

You take a one-liter plastic soda or water bottle, fill it with a mixture of water and bleach, cap it and seal it. Then cut a bottle-shaped hole in your tin roof and stick the bottle in it, cap up, with part of it above and part below the roof. Seal the hole so the roof doesn’t leak. The water inside the bottle refracts and disperses sunlight. You now have the equivalent of a 50- or 60-watt bulb that will never cost you a dime, burn your toddler or set your house on fire.

The bottle bulb was invented in 2002 by Alfredo Moser, a mechanic in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to light his workshop when his neighborhood was suffering through a long cut in electrical power. Soon, many houses in his neighborhood had the same bottles poking through their roofs as Moser did in his workshop. (Although many people credit M.I.T.’s design lab with inventing the bottle bulb, M.I.T. says it isn’t true.)

Though it was born in Brazil, the bottle bulb’s coming out party is being staged in the Philippines. A tiny Filipino organization, the My Shelter Foundation, has put the bottle bulb in tens of thousands of houses in the last year and is aiming for a million homes this year. The project, called Isang Litrong Liwanag — A Liter of Light — is the perfect grassroots campaign. It starts with community activities — on November 30, for example, 10,000 cyclists delivered bottle bulbs to 17 communities around Metro Manila. But after a few demonstration projects in each community, the only thing that needs to be delivered is the how-to information. This is a technology program where word of mouth and social media really can do most of the work.

This model — make it yourself, for no money, from garbage — solves a lot of problems at once. Affordable, even for the destitute? Easy to distribute, even to remote places? Scalable? Sustainable? All check. (And since it employs old plastic bottles, it’s doubly eco-friendly.) The only challenge is to spread information. That’s not a trivial challenge, but it’s a lot easier than all the others.

The bulb has no way to store energy, so it only works during the day. That’s fine for Moser’s workshop. And it’s more useful for houses than you might think. There are hundreds of millions of families in rural areas or crowded city slums who have no light in the daytime. People who build their own shacks put in tiny windows — really, a hole protected by a makeshift shutter — if they have them at all. So people conduct their lives outside.

But this is obviously far from a complete solution to providing off-the-grid light. Not everyone wants to have a bunch of plastic bottles stuck in their ceiling. And people do, after all, like to see after the sun goes down.

~~~

Higher up on the quality chain are experiments like SociaLite. In 2006, Toby Cumberbatch, a professor of electrical engineering at the Cooper Union in New York, challenged his first-semester students to create a lamp for use in the middle of nowhere, one that cost less than $10 and could go for two days between recharges.

What they came up with was a very simple lamp with a housing made largely of local materials — a hair relaxer tub, an orange drink container and three bicycle spokes. It can be dropped and banged around. It can go 40 hours between charges on the high setting, 400 hours at the low setting.

Most revolutionary, it has no charger — instead, the whole community would share a charger. This idea is a variation on a model in use in several countries, the best known being TERI’s Lighting a Billion Lives campaign in India. It has several advantages over simply selling lamp-and-charger sets: the lamp is cheaper. Instead of paying for a charger in intermittent use, people could essentially be paying for a share of a charger in constant use — more efficient. Someone in the community could buy the solar panel (perhaps using microfinance) and start a business charging the lamps and mobile phones — the phone charging might subsidize the lamps. Perhaps most important, customers would not have to pay the full cost up front. They could pay three or four dollars up front and pay the rest in monthly installments, in the form of charging fees.

“We designed it not so much as a product as a service,” said David Berger, one of a half-dozen students in Cumberbatch’s original class who has gone to Ghana every summer to work on turning the prototype into a business. “If something happens— you drop it or something breaks — the people at the base station will give you a spare lantern while yours is being fixed. You’re paying for light, as opposed to a lantern.”

Ghanaians who can afford it can buy solar lanterns in cities and towns. But lamp distributors don’t bother with villages. “The thing seems to be that you pay for it, and if you can’t pay, not my problem,” said Cumberbatch. Berger said that in four summers in rural Ghana, he saw only two lanterns in villages.

The Cooper Union students formed a partnership with Wa Polytechnic, a university in the north of Ghana, the poorest part. Wa students assemble the lanterns, take them out to remote communities, install the solar panel and train local people to run the system. They are then supposed to visit each village once a month.

So far the project is small, in use in only four villages — fewer than 400 lanterns. But the government of Ghana is planning to roll it out in 20 villages around the country.

The SociaLite is designed to fill a crucial niche: a high quality light for use at night by the poorest people in the world. The weak point in the plan might be the creation of a large-scale delivery system. Raj Gupta, deputy chief investment officer at the Acumen Fund (an investor in D. Light), points out that Africa doesn’t have a WalMart or Amazon that provides a standard way to get goods from various manufacturers to buyers. Each company has to invent its own delivery system. SociaLite may need distributors with a greater financial incentive to actually get out to remote villages. (Of course, that will add to the price.)

The project is new and small, and may never end up taking off as a business. But it has a chance — it is an ingeniously designed system for selling a necessary but relatively expensive product to people with no money.

~~~

While these projects are tiny start-ups, the existing solar light business in Africa is enormous. Many companies make solar lights — d.light and Barefoot Power are two of the best-known. These companies are growing exponentially; Barefoot Power reached 1.5 million people by the end of last year, and is on target to reach 5 million this year. Stewart Craine of Barefoot believes the market will serve half of all unelectrified households in the world by 2020.

These commercial solar lamps vary from $10 desk lamps to five-lamp systems that sell for more than $100. The manufacturers say the lamps pay for themselves through savings on kerosene in two to six months. But this is still far too much money for many people.

“We currently don’t target the poorest people in the community, as we sell products for cash, and $25 is still hard to find at one time for many villagers,” Craine wrote in an e-mail.

Barefoot and d.light do try to reach poorer customers, both physically and financially. Joyce DeMucci of Barefoot said that the company often sells in bulk to nongovernmental groups that run camps for internally displaced people. These groups give away the lamps or subsidize their sale. The solar companies also work with local women’s groups or microfinance groups that can provide distribution and financing.

Sam Goldman, the co-founder of d.light, said that the major challenge for selling to villagers was supply chain and logistics — “how do we sustainably deliver products and provide after-sales and warranty services?” The company sometimes distributes lamps through businesses already designed to reach the rural poor — sellers of dried frozen fish, for example, or a kind of low-cost roofing, and d.light is starting to work with a multinational company that distributes products in rural Africa. In Guatemala, d.light sells its lamps in mountain villages through the microconsignment system that I wrote about last year.

These programs are small, in part because the potential market for full-price sales is so big. But the price of solar lighting is likely to drop substantially. Gaurav Gupta, who heads the energy and environment practice at the consulting firm Dalberg, makes the point that the demand for portability and energy efficiency is being driven by rich consumers, who want smaller and smaller mobile phones and better solar lights. But those improvements will end up bringing down the cost of solar lighting for the poor. If it gets cheap enough, then there just may be a simple business model that can serve almost everyone — the market.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...ions-in-light/





Preparing For the End of the World As We Know It

In a growing trend, more and more Americans across the United States are preparing themselves for a catastrophic apocalypse; for reasons ranging from terrorists to natural disasters or an economic meltdown, these individuals have begun stockpiling food, taking survival courses, or constructing safe rooms

In a growing trend, more and more Americans across the United States are preparing themselves for a catastrophic apocalypse.

For reasons ranging from terrorists to natural disasters or an economic meltdown, these individuals have begun stockpiling food, taking survival courses, or constructing safe rooms.

For instance Patty Tegeler, a resident of southwestern Virginia, has turned her rural home into a “survival center,” stocked with a large generator, portable heaters, water tanks, and a two-year supply of freeze-dried food.

Tegler said in the event of a serious emergency, she could survive in her home indefinitely, and that the emergency could be coming soon.

“I think this economy is about to fall apart,” she said.

This subculture, dubbed “preppers,” has found a rich community online with vendors hawking survival gear, guns, and water tanks as well as advice.

James Wesley Rawles, the author of Survival Blog, which is considered canonical among preppers, writes on his blog, “Unfortunately, given the increasing complexity and fragility of our modern technological society, the chances of a societal collapse are increasing year after year.”

Rawles is a former Army intelligence officer who has written several fiction and non-fiction worlds on apocalyptic events including “How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It,” considered to be the preppers’ Bible.

“We could see a cascade of higher interest rates, margin calls, stock market collapses, bank runs, currency revaluations, mass street protests, and riots,” Rawles said. “The worst-case end result would be a Third World War, mass inflation, currency collapses, and long term power grid failures.”

The preppers are not the first subculture to begin preparing for the end of the world. In the 1830s and 40s, Millerites, fervent followers of the charismatic preacher Joseph Miller, scared by the speed of technological developments during the Industrial Revolution, sold all of their possessions and awaited for the second coming of Jesus Christ in 1844.

More recently, hippies in the 1960s established communes in remote areas far from society, and in the 1990s, survivalists, who feared an oppressive government, sought safety beyond the reaches of civilization.

Cathy Gutierrez, a professor of religion at Sweet Briar College and an expert on end-times beliefs, explained that behind most of these movement is a sense of “suffering and being afraid” and in times of economic uncertainty, like now, these feelings are natural.

“With our current dependence on things from the electric grid to the Internet, things that people have absolutely no control over, there is a feeling that a collapse scenario can easily emerge, with a belief that the end is coming, and it is all out of the individual’s control,” Gutierrez said.

In contrast, Michael T. Snider, the author of the Economic Collapse blog, said, “Modern preppers are much different from the survivalists of the old days”

“You could be living next door to a prepper and never even know it. Many suburbanites are turning spare rooms into food pantries and are going for survival training on the weekends,” he said.

Snider’s main fear is an economic collapse in the United States. As evidence he points to the tens of millions living on food stamps and the many children living in poverty.

“Most people have a gut feeling that something has gone terribly wrong, but that doesn’t mean that they understand what is happening,” Snider said. “A lot of Americans sense that a massive economic storm is coming and they want to be prepared for it.”
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....-as-we-know-it





Neil Young and the Sound of Music
John Paczkowski

You know what the biggest problem with music today is?

Sound quality.

That’s Neil Young’s take on the issue, anyway. For years, the musician has been obsessed with improving the way modern music sounds, sonically speaking.

In an interview with Walt Mossberg and Peter Kafka at our D: Dive Into Media conference, Young, the perennial music purist, said that while modern music formats like MP3 are convenient, they sound lousy.

“My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years,” Young said. “We live in the digital age and, unfortunately, it’s degrading our music, not improving it.”

While modern digital encoding schemes might sound clear on our iPods and smartphones, they only feature a small percentage of the musical data present in a master recording, and Young is on a crusade to correct that.

“It’s not that digital is bad or inferior, it’s that the way it’s being used isn’t doing justice to the art,” Young said. “The MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording. … The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn’t have to make that choice.”

Young proposed that fans stage a grassroots movement to demand higher-quality audio. “Occupy audio!” he urged.

So what’s the solution? New hardware capable of playing audio files that preserve more of the data present in original recordings, said Young.

Ah. But who’s going to produce that?

Said Young, “Some rich guy.”

And evidently there once was some rich guy working on just such a device.

The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

“Steve Jobs as a pioneer of digital music, and his legacy is tremendous,” Young said. “But when he went home, he listened to vinyl. And you’ve got to believe that if he’d lived long enough, he would have done what I’m trying to do.”

Also a topic of conversation during today’s interview: The recording industry, and whether the record label has outlived its usefulness. Young contended it hasn’t.

“What I like about record companies is that they present and nurture artists,” he said. “That doesn’t exist on iTunes, it doesn’t exist on Amazon. That’s what a record company does, and that’s why I like my record company. People look at record companies like they’re obsolete, but there’s a lot of soul in there — a lot of people who care about music, and that’s very important.”

Then why is it the case that some artists complain so much about the economics of the industry?

Said Young, “Those artists should go by themselves. They have a choice of what they can do. Artists who want to go it alone should just do that.”

Finally, Young discussed piracy, which he doesn’t view as the threat that some other musicians do.

“Piracy is the new radio,” said Young. “That’s how music gets around.”
http://allthingsd.com/20120131/neil-...ound-of-music/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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