Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 24th, '07

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Internet users will create 161 exabytes of new data this year, and this exaflood is a positive development for Internet users and businesses, IIA says. An exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes or about 1.1 billion gigabytes. One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video." – Grant Gross


































November 24th, 2007




France Plans to Cut Off Internet Pirates
Ben Hall

Internet users in France who download music and films without paying for them could find their web access shut down by a government body, under a ground-breaking industry agreement backed by President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The plan, which Mr Sarkozy is to endorse in a speech on Friday, will put France at the forefront of the battle against internet piracy with a three-strikes-and-you-are-out policy against repeat offenders.

The proposed enforcement body would use information collected by internet service providers on their highvolume users to detect illegal file-sharing. Persistent offenders would be cautioned but could see their internet accounts suspended or terminated if they ignored as few as two warnings.

The proposals have been drawn up by an independent review headed by Denis Olivennes, the chairman of Fnac, a French entertainment retailer.

The music and film industries, internet service providers and the government are all likely to sign up to the plan.

In exchange for the clampdown on illegal downloading, the music industry has agreed to make individual downloads of archive French material available on all types of players by dropping digital rights management protection.

The French film industry has agreed to release DVDs more quickly after a film’s first cinema screening, reducing the delay from 7½ months to 6 months.

However, consumer groups and even some of Mr Sarkozy’s own members of parliament on Thursday attacked the proposal for a new internet policeman as a threat to civil liberties.

UFC-Que Choisir, a consumer association, said the plans were “very harsh, potentially repressive, anti-economic and against the grain of the digital age”. It pointed out that illegal downloading was already punishable by a prison term of up to three years.

Marc Le Fur and Alain Suguenot, both deputies from Mr Sarkozy’s UMP party, said in a statement that they deplored the proposal to confer judicial powers on an enforcement agency, saying the move “creates a truly exceptional jurisdiction for downloaders contravening the principle of equality before the law”.

Mr Sarkozy has taken a strong stand against internet piracy, raising the issue during his election campaign and appointing Mr Olivennes to lead the review soon after becoming president.

The president will use his speech on Friday to “underline his attachment to culture but also his wish to see artists live from their work and have their rights respected on new platforms”, his spokesman said.

The music industry has campaigned for ISPs to take action against the illegal file-sharers who operate through their services.

The IFPI, a trade body for the global recording industry, said more than 50 per cent of all internet traffic was so-called peer-to-peer file-sharing, much of it illegal.

The problem appears particularly acute in France because of the relatively high download speeds of its internet services.

Mr Olivennes this year highlighted the problem of illegal downloading in a book entitled Free is Theft, in which he argued that piracy stole funds from French culture by reducing the money raised by levies on cinema takings and pay-television.

The book accused ISPs of exploiting an abundance of pirated material on the web to recruit new subscribers. “It is a little like . . . big store chains putting out free stocks of stolen CDs and DVDs to attract new customers into their shops,” he wrote.

Mr Olivennes appears now to have persuaded internet service providers to help the authorities police their own users more effectively.

To put in place the new enforcement body, the government would have to introduce legislation amending copyright, data protection, telecommunications and consumer protection laws, with a vote in parliament as soon as spring 2008.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/562f2a02-9...nclick_check=1





MPAA University 'Toolkit' Raises Privacy Concerns
Brian Krebs

The Motion Picture of Association of America is urging some of the nation's largest universities to deploy custom software designed to pinpoint students who may be using the schools' networks to illegally download pirated movies. A closer look at the MPAA's software, however, raises some serious privacy and security concerns for both the entertainment industry and the schools that choose to deploy the technology.

On Oct. 24, MPAA sent a letter to the presidents of 25 universities that the association has identified as top locations for the downloading of pirated movies over online file-sharing networks. In the letter, the group said it "has developed the University Toolkit, an application which can produce a report that is strictly internal and therefore confidential to illustrate the level of file sharing on [your school's] network. In addition, we will send a hard copy in the near future to your university's Chief Information Officer."

Security Fix downloaded the University Toolkit and studied it, with the help of David Taylor, a senior information security specialist with the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. (Taylor's school was not among those that received the letter.)

What we found was that depending on how a university's network is set up, installing and using the MPAA tool in its default configuration could expose to the entire Internet all of the traffic flowing across the school's network.

First, an explanation of what the toolkit is and how it works. The University Toolkit is essentially an operating system (xubuntu) that you can boot up from a CD-ROM. The package bundles some powerful, open-source network monitoring tools, including "Snort," which captures detailed information about all traffic flowing across a network; as well as "ntop," a tool used to take data feeds from tools like Snort and display the data in more user-friendly graphics and charts.

The MPAA overview of the toolkit stresses that the software does not communicate any information about a university's network back to the association. But in its current configuration, the very first thing the toolkit does once it is fired up is phone home to the MPAA's servers and check for a new version of the software. So, right away, the MPAA knows the Internet address every computer that is running the software.

The MPAA also claims that using the tool on a university network presents "no privacy issues -- the content of traffic is never examined or displayed." That statement, however, is misleading.

Here's why: The toolkit sets up an Apache Web server on the user's machine. It also automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited.

Unless a school using the tool has firewalls on the borders of its network designed to block unsolicited Internet traffic -- and a great many universities do not -- that Web server is going to be visible and accessible by anyone with a Web browser. But wait, you say: Wouldn't someone need to know the domain name or Internet address of the Web server that's running the toolkit? Yes. However, anyone familiar enough with the file-naming convention used by the toolkit could use Google to search for the server.

But surely there are ways a network administrator might keep this information from being available to the entire Web, right? Yes. The toolkit allows an administrator to require a username and password for access to the Web server. The problem is that the person responsible for running the toolkit is never prompted create a username and password. What's more, while Apache includes a feature that can record when an outsider views the site, that logging is turned off by default in the MPAA's University Toolkit.

On the surface at least, it was beginning to seem like the MPAA was asking universities to install a black box tool that would allow anyone to wiretap their networks, all the while hiding the tracks of those listening in on the network. So I put a few questions to the MPAA about its toolkit.

Craig Winter, the MPAA's deputy director for Internet enforcement, said the toolkit was in the "beta" phase. Winter said the MPAA and the developer of the software -- Fairfax, Va.-based Mantech International Corp. -- plan to release another version of the software within "a few weeks."

When asked about the phone-home update feature of the toolkit, Winter said the MPAA ultimately decided to include the update mechanism so that it could ship a new version when developers had fixed what he said was a "bug" in the ntop software. According to Winter, once the portion of the ntop program that counts the ones and zeros representing how much bandwidth a given connection has used gets to four gigabytes, it resets, starting the counter back at zero again.

Winter emphasized several times that the toolkit was not designed to determine whether someone is infringing on copyrights. "It can tell you how much traffic is going back and forth on BitTorrent [a popular file-sharing service], but it can't see what's in those files or what the names of those files are, and it doesn't communicate anything back to the Internet. "

He added that the MPAA would consider making it mandatory for administrators of the toolkit to set a username and password for the Web server, and that future versions of the software may also ask the user if they want to check for updates rather than phoning home automatically each time the toolkit is booted up.

"It's certainly not a tool intended for us to come and inspect [university networks] without permission," Winter said. "We wanted to make this as easy to use as possible, to accommodate system administrators who might want to go back to their dorm and monitor it remotely."

Unfortunately, even with a firewall keeping non-university students from accessing the toolkit's Web server, any student on the network armed with the Internet address of the Web server could view all of the traffic on his or her segment of the network, said Penn's Dave Taylor.

The MPAA's letter campaign and the release of this software package comes as Congress is considering a higher-education funding bill that would place new anti-piracy obligations on universities that participate in federal financial aid programs. Included in that massive bill, which was approved by the House Education and Labor Committee last week, are provisions that would require the very same 25 universities that received the MPAA letter to develop technology-based approaches to keep students from downloading infringing content, or risk losing their federal funding.

It's not clear how many -- if any -- universities are currently using the MPAA's toolkit. The MPAA itself says it doesn't know how many have deployed it. Doug Pearson, a technical director of the Research and Education Networking - Information Sharing and Analysis Center (REN-ISAC), said he is not aware of any schools that have installed the toolkit, but that many were still poking and prodding it.

"There are a lot of people trying to figure out exactly what all the thing does and what risks it might present to a network that it's placed on," Pearson said.

Steve Worona, director of policy and networking programs at EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association that promotes the use of information technology in higher learning, said he'd like to think that "no university network administrator in their right mind would install this toolkit on their networks." But he said some campus IT personnel may fail to dig too deeply into what the device actually does before installing it.

Reached by cell phone on Thanksgiving eve, Worona said he hadn't had time to investigate the toolkit, but that if Taylor's report was accurate then the MPAA's toolkit conjures up memories of the Sony rootkit fiasco. In that saga, Sony got in trouble with privacy and security advocates after it shipped hidden anti-piracy software with a number of music CDs, software that not only destabilized PCs running it but also opened them up to a host of Internet security threats.

"The important thing about the Sony rootkit wasn't the details about what a rootkit was or why it ended up being put into those CDs, but rather what the intention was versus what the CDs really did," Worona said. "The MPAA appears to be asking university administrators to run something which could expose sensitive, private data and in the process leave the campus subject to privacy complaints by virtue of student data being exposed."

If you know of any universities that are using the MPAA toolkit, please post in the comments. We'll also watch to see if and when MPAA updates the software and whether the update addresses the privacy and security issues raised here.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/secur...t_opens_1.html





Anti-Piracy Lobby Urges Sweden To Take Down The Pirate Bay
Ernesto

Several anti-piracy lobbyist organizations have joined forces in urging the Swedish authorities to take “swift and decisive action” against The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay laughed away this attempt, and assures its users that they are not doing anything illegal according to Swedish law.

Unlike less democratic countries, Sweden is not too keen on lobbyists who try to manipulate the actions of their government, something the MPAA did last year. Directly influencing Swedish authorities to intervene in this specific case, is considered illegal in Sweden (the term is “minister rule”).

The letter is signed by several copyright protection organizations, and was sent to the Swedish minister of communications. Noticeably upset they write: “We believe that, given the Pirate Bay’s cult popularity, this is a key opportunity for one country to educate the global internet community about the need for respect of copyright and the importance of intellectual property.”

Brokep from The Pirate Bay responded to this letter on his blog writing:”They seem to think that TPB is actually illegal and are very concerned about this! But I can reassure you, the site is not illegal so there’s no reason to be alarmed. It’s recognized worldwide as legal and helpful for the normal people around the globe that have something to share with each other. And we all do want to share!”

One of the people who signed the letter to the Swedish government is John Kennedy, Chairman of the IFPI. The IFPI is also fighting with The Pirate Bay over the IFPI.com domain name which the IFPI forgot to renew - and there’s more. Last month we revealed a leaked email where the IFPI planned to request confidential information from the Swedish police on an ongoing investigation into The Pirate Bay.
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-...sweden-071120/





Poor Anti-Pirates: E-mail About Leaked IFPI Email Gets Leaked
Ernesto

The infamous anti-piracy organization IFPI sent an email to warn its members NOT to any send email to colleagues that use an xxx@ifpi.com email address because that domain is now owned by their rivals from the “International Federation of Pirate Interests”. Unfortunately the members did not listen, and even the email about the leak leaked.

Last month a leaked email from The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) - the anti-piracy organization that represents the recording industry worldwide - revealed that they had plans to request confidential information from an ongoing police investigation of The Pirate Bay.

Several people were wondering how this email leaked, and rumors about hacked mail servers started to circulate. It now now becomes clear how the email leaked - and there is not much hacking involved - it seems that some of their members were still sending emails to xxx@ifpi.com addresses - not that smart.

The IFPI of course warned their members not to use any .com addresses anymore, but ironically, this email was forwarded to a .com address a few hours later. Here’s a quote from the leaked email correspondence that was anonymously forwarded to TorrentFreak.

“… please be aware that the person operating the domain is also collecting emails that are sent in error to anything@ifpi.com. You may have seen press reports regarding an email leak from IFPI – this was a result of an email being sent in error to an ifpi.com email address and is not indicative of any more serious problem with email security.”

Can you be even more stupid than to forward this message to someone using an IFPI.com address? I’ve always doubted the rumors that most people who work at these anti-piracy organizations are too dumb to tie their own shoes, but I’m starting to believe it now.

Unfortunately there was not much news in the email, the huge list of anti-pirate email addresses may come in handy sometime though. In addition, there was some info about the domain dispute the IFPI filed to get their .com domain back, as they write: “… we filed a complaint at WIPO under the dispute resolution procedure designed for cyber-squatting cases like this one. We are hopeful of a result from the WIPO procedure soon, and we will keep you updated.”

… I guess that means that we’ll be updated too?
http://torrentfreak.com/email-about-...-leaks-071122/





Forced Exodus of BitTorrent Sites Is Imminent
Ernesto

The Dutch ISP LeaseWeb can’t take the pressure from BREIN anymore. As a preliminary measure they have now ordered dozens of BitTorrent sites - including some big-shots - to pack their stuff before December 1st, leave LeaseWeb and find a new home.

Last week we reported that LeaseWeb forced SumoTorrent to move to another ISP due to pressure from BREIN. In that article we published a list of other potential BRIEN targets hosted by LeaseWeb (we left out dozens of other sites) including mybittorrent.com, btmon.com, btjunkie.org, seedpeer.com, what.cd and waffles.fm.

Over the past few days several admins of the sites in this list confirmed to TorrentFreak that they indeed got a letter from LeaseWeb in which they were asked to move their websites before the end of the month. At this point it is not sure whether the dozens of other, mostly smaller private BitTorrent communities, received a similar letter. A questionable request since BitTorrent sites are not considered to be illegal according to Dutch law.

However, it seems that LeaseWeb has succumbed to BREIN’s pressure as it orders its clients to take all BitTorrent related material from their servers before December 1st. LeaseWeb takes this proactive measure to protect their clients they say, but it’s not needed since the court order that BREIN has applies ONLY to everlasting.nl and not to all other BitTorrent sites

One of the biggest mistakes they made in the process is to hand over the personal details of the SumoTorrent administrator. Somehow LeaseWeb was under the impression that they had to give this information to BREIN, thereby violating the privacy of one of their clients. This mistake also contradicts a statement LeaseWeb gave earlier this week to ISPam.nl, where they said that they are not allowed to give customer information to a third party without a funded request.

One of the big questions right now is where on earth all the BitTorrent sites will go now that LeaseWeb is a no-go. There are still some other options in The Netherlands and countries like Canada and Sweden, but they are slowly running out of alternatives.

LeaseWeb announced that it will appeal the decision in the everlasting.nl case, “LeaseWeb has filed an appeal and will keep fighting for its client’s privacy and right of freedom of expression up to the highest court.” We wish them well.
http://torrentfreak.com/forced-exodu...-sites-071122/





Finnish FBI Raids Warez Topsites Following MPA, IFPI and BSA Investigation
enigmax

A crack police unit dedicated to tackling organized crime in Finland has conducted a series of raids on so-called Warez-Scene Topsites, arresting three individuals and seizing equipment and an alleged 10 terabytes of files. Years in prison are threatened for those involved.

According to its website, the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation’s (NBI) main responsibility is “to fight the most serious, professional and organized crime.” Understandably, they’re currently involved in the investigation into the terrible recent shooting at a Finnish school but apparently simple piracy demands their resources too.

Following complaints from Finland’s Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) and a subsequent investigation by anti-piracy teams, Friday 16th November saw NBI police raids against Warez-Scene ‘Topsites‘ - servers where release groups first place pirate material. According to Antti Kotilainen, CIAPC Director, ‘Topsites’ are “the absolute top of internet piracy and their activity enables sharing of millions of illegal files.”

The multi-site raids in Oulu, Finland, saw the arrest of three people and the seizure of many computers and around 10 terabytes of data. An investigation in to the nature of the seized data is focused on finding copyright infringements which in this case are said to carry a penalty of up to two years in prison.

CIAPC Director Antti Kotilainen explains: “These top sites have been sharing movies, music and computer games as well as software. Each site was also specialized in sharing particular material, such as animation, Finnish movies or the newest videogames.”

Showing a united front, the many organizations involved in the raids were all quick to put their spokesperson forward for comments about how these topsites affected their particular industry. Jeremy Banks, the IFPI’s chief internet Anti-Piracy officer said: “These actions by the Finnish police send a powerful message to operators of infringing servers: contrary to what you may think, you are not anonymous - you can and you will be caught. These sites were run by highly sophisticated operators who were stealing music and damaging the legitimate music community on a very large scale.”

For the movie industry, Halli Kristinsson, Vice-President and Director of the MPA’s European, Middle East and African anti-piracy operations explained the importance of the various industry associations working together: “These raids prove that efficient co-operation between MPA, ISFE, IFPI and BSA has lead to the fact that the net around top sites and release groups is tightening all the time. These actions will not be the last of their kind.”

John Wolfe, Director of Internet Enforcement at the Business Software Alliance (BSA) applauded the “strong and visible action against internet Topsites” stressing that “Individuals like the ones operating the sites raided last Friday contribute to the staggering losses that Internet piracy causes the software industry.”

Following on from yesterday’s report about a Topsite Site-Op leaking information to the press in Finland’s neighbor, Norway, pressure seems to be building on Scene members in Scandinavia.

When countries consider piracy to be among the most serious crimes today - worthy of the precious time and resources of their most skilled investigators - it’s no wonder Scene members go to unprecedented lengths to hide their identities.
http://torrentfreak.com/finnish-fbi-...psites-071120/





Another EliteTorrents Uploader Facing 10 Years in Prison
enigmax

The fallout from the FBI raid on EliteTorrents in 2005 continues, with a seventh defendant associated with the uploading of Star Wars Episode III facing the prospect of 10 years in prison coupled with a $500,000 fine.

Every few months it seems the FBI manages to come up with yet more people to charge in connection with Operation D-Elite - the joint ICE and FBI raids against the US-based BitTorrent tracker, EliteTorrents, in 2005.

Everyone charged so far has been accused of being involved in the uploading of Star Wars Episode III which, at the time, was a pre-release movie, carrying criminal implications for the uploaders under the Family Entertainment Copyright Act.

According to an announcement by Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Patrick L. Meehan for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, a seventh defendant has pleaded guilty.

An Duc Do, aged 25, of Orlando, Florida, has pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Legrome D. Davis of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on a two-count felony. He’s charged with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and criminal copyright infringement.

Do is the latest in a line of people pleading guilty in this operation against EliteTorrents. Previous guilty pleas and convictions include those of Scott McCausland, Grant Stanley, Sam Kuonen and Scott D. Harvanek.

In this copyright case tried in the criminal (rather than civil) legal domain, potential punishments are harsh. Do is facing up to 10 years in prison coupled with a fine of $500,000.

He will be sentenced on February 27th, 2008.
http://torrentfreak.com/another-elit...prison-071117/





Pirate Bay Faces Prince Pressure, Private Investigators in Foreign Cars
Nate Anderson

In addition to facing the wrath of content owners around the world, The Pirate Bay's administrators have recently been facing a much more local threat: camera-toting investigators following them around in cars marked with Danish plates. Is Prince to blame?
Prince to "reclaim the Internet" by suing YouTube, eBay, Pirate Bay

Prince loves sticking it to the man—this is the guy who changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and performed with the word "slave" written on his face when he was unhappy about his recording contract. But when "the man" is Prince himself and the one doing the sticking is BitTorrent search site The Pirate Bay, Prince reaches for the lawyer stick. He has declared himself out to "reclaim the Internet," and The Pirate Bay is at the top of his list (fan sites appear to be on the list as well).

Peter Sunde, a Pirate bay admin, tells Ars that the Purple One's legal team has already started leaning on some advertisers to drop support for the site. "We're not even worried, since the Internet is too big for morally upset people to get it their way," Sunde said in an e-mail. "I'm just sad that Prince—whose music I really like—can't understand that he's the new Metallica versus Napster. And we all know who lost that..."

Comparing his site to the original Napster seems a bit strange, since Napster was eventually shuttered and then retooled after legal pressure. Sunde doesn't want to go the way of the original Napster, of course, but similar legal pressures on the site are ratcheting up. The newest wrinkle in the long saga of The Pirate Bay: investigators following Pirate Bay members around in cars with Danish plates. Sunde says that the investigators are taking pictures from inside the car "with a flash, so I'm not sure how smart they are." He notes that something similar happened last year before a police raid on Pirate Bay servers.

He is "quite sure" that this is related to Prince's own announced plan to sue the site (though a Swedish prosecutor has also announced plans to sue the administrators in the next couple of months). "What do they think they can find out by following us around?" Sunde asks. "Everything we do is digital."

It's just another strange day in the increasingly strange life of a Pirate Bay admin.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...eign-cars.html





Chili Peppers Sue US TV Network
BBC

Rock band the Red Hot Chili Peppers are suing a US network over the name of its TV show, Californication.

The band says the title is "immediately associated in the mind of the consumer" with its 1999 album and single release.

It has filed a lawsuit against Showtime Network - the makers of the TV show, which stars David Duchovny as a writer going through a mid-life crisis.

"For some TV show to come along and steal our identity is not right," said the band's singer, Anthony Kiedis.

He described Californication as "the signature CD, video and song of the band's career".

'Dani California'

The legal action seeks a permanent injunction barring Showtime from using the title of the show and "disgorgement of all profits derived by the defendants".

It says the programme also features the character, Dani California, which is also the title of a Red Hot Chili Peppers song which was released in 2006.

Tom Kapinos, the show's creator and executive producer, was unavailable for comment.

In July, he told reporters that he first heard the term "Californication" in the state of Oregon.

"Apparently in the 70s there were bumper stickers that said 'Don't Californicate Oregon', because Californians were coming up there, and I just thought it was a great, great title for this show," he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/7103400.stm





The Romantics Sue Over Guitar Hero

Detroit rock band The Romantics have filed a federal lawsuit against Guitar Hero publisher Activision, claiming that the game’s cover version of 1980 hit “What I Like About You” infringes on the group’s rights.

According to an Associated Press report the lawsuit was filed on Tuesday at the U.S. District Court in Detroit, seeking unspecified damages.

The lawsuit admits that Activision did obtain the proper permissions for using the song in the game - but claims that the cover version was too close to the original recording, thereby infringing on the group’s rights to its own likeness.

The song appears in standalone expansion pack Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the ‘80s, originally released in North America for PlayStation 2 in July 2007. The band’s attorneys have indicated that they are seeking an injunction that would force the game to be withdrawn from sale.

Although around half of the songs in the newly released Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock feature recordings by the original artists, in previous Guitar Hero games the majority of songs were cover versions.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=16342





RIAA Targets 16 More Students for File Sharing

Music org. sends 10th wave of letters, but GW lawsuit could hurt efforts to curb downloading
Albert Sun

Yet another round of pre-litigation letters from the Recording Industry Association of America hit Penn students last week.

The RIAA, which represents the country's major music labels, continued its legal onslaught against college students last week, sending pre-litigation letters to 16 Penn students and 401 other students across the country.

Over the last year, 64 Penn students have received letters, which threaten illegal downloaders with a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement unless the offenders choose to settle at a "discounted rate" - usually about $3,000.

Of those 64, 20 have settled or are nearing an agreement and 27 others are being sued, according to RIAA spokeswoman Liz Kennedy. The remaining students are in the preliminary stages of the process.

As the RIAA tries to curb illegal downloading, the organization has focused mainly on student offenders, sending almost 4,000 letters to college campuses since February.

The RIAA picks out IP addresses where file-sharing has occurred and asks colleges to forward the letters to students that match the IP addresses. If the student does not settle, the RIAA usually subpoenas the university to release the student's name so that a lawsuit can be filed.

But the RIAA suffered a setback in its campaign against file-sharing last week when a federal judge said the organization must explain its reasons for subpoenaing colleges.

In a case involving 19 students at George Washington University, the defendants argued that the legislation the RIAA uses to obtain file-sharers' names, called the Cable Communications Policy Act, only applies to cable companies.

Federal District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has since ordered the RIAA to show just cause for why the act also applies to universities, giving the organization until Nov. 29 to respond.

If Kollar-Kotelly doesn't find the RIAA's reasoning compelling, it would provide a blow to a key facet of the organization's recent legal tactics.

It could also have implications for the way the RIAA sues illegal downloaders. Critics allege that the organization often issues the subpoenas without giving the defendants a chance to respond, called an ex parte subpoena.

"This is a viable [legal] option for students everywhere," copyright lawyer Ray Beckerman said. "They should be pooling their resources and taking action to stop this ex parte nonsense."

And while some universities have said they will help students fight the subpoenas, Penn officials say the University will continue to forward letters they receive from the RIAA. Once the student has a letter, the University is no longer involved, said University information-security officer Dave Millar.

"If somebody has received an early settlement notice it's between them and the recording industry," he said.
http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian....-3113268.shtml





MPAA: Linking College Funding, Piracy is 'Perfectly Legitimate'
Anne Broache

What's wrong with Congress being a little stingy about doling out taxpayer dollars to universities if they let peer-to-peer file-sharing pirates run amok on campus networks?

Not a thing, says the Motion Picture Association of America's top lawyer in the nation's capital.

On the heels of a House of Representatives committee's passage of a higher-education funding bill that includes new antipiracy obligations for universities that participate in federal financial aid programs, MPAA Washington general counsel Fritz Attaway suggested it's reasonable to condition federal education funding on copyright enforcement efforts.

"When the government is subsidizing universities...and it discovers that those universities are spending a lot of taxpayers' money to build digital networks that are being used primarily to allow college students to traffic in infringing content, I think it's perfectly legitimate for Congress to say, wait a minute, if we're giving you money, we don't want it to be used to help college kids infringe copyright," Attaway said during a panel discussion here Monday that was organized by the Federal Communications Bar Association.

At the same time, Attaway attempted to diffuse alarms universities and fair-use advocates are sounding about the House's higher-education bill. Embedded in the more-than-700-page bill is a requirement that universities devise plans for providing their students alternatives to illegal downloading and developing technology-based filters to keep offending content out of students' hands in the first place.

The MPAA vice president emphasized that there's technically no requirement under the bill that universities actually sign up for such "alternatives," namely subscription-based music services like Ruckus.com and Napster, nor that they actually activate the filters they're planning to develop. Committee aides close to the bill-drafting process have denied that schools would see their funding yanked if they didn't come up with satisfactory plans, even if Attaway seemed to suggest that wouldn't be a bad idea.
University representatives who oppose the provision have acknowledged, too, that they're not sure what exactly the punishment would be for failing to craft such plans, although some have read the bill to say their schools would no longer be eligible for at least some student financial aid programs.

Attaway's defense of the bill drew a sharp rebuke, however, from Gigi Sohn, president of the digital-rights advocacy group Public Knowledge. "Why do you put things in bills that you don't want to enforce at some point?" she asked. "Even if I agree, and I don't, that it's toothless, I don't want that language in there for some other Congress to give it some teeth."

There's still a chance that the Hollywood-backed provision won't survive any final version of the legislation. That's what happened when a similar proposal came before the U.S. Senate this summer. The full House is expected to debate the broader higher-education funding bill soon after it returns from its Thanksgiving recess in early December.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-982...=2547-1_3-0-20





Thinly veiled

Copyright Coalition Polls Pols
Brooks Boliek

In an effort to get on the presidential radar screen a copyright industry coalition is sending the candidates of both parties a questionnaire designed to illuminate their positions on issues surrounding intellectual property.

The five-question missive by the Copyright Alliance which includes the major studios, labels, and a couple of the guilds and artists' rights organizations is considered more of an educational document than a way to get campaign promises, said Copyright Alliance executive director Patrick Ross.

An industry that contributes $1.3 trillion to the U.S. economy and 11 million jobs needs to be paid attention to, Ross said.

"We're telling the candidates this is a significant constituency that you need to be aware of," Ross said.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...2385657b66b52f





Few Admit to Being File Sharers in Japan
Ken Y-N

It’s been a while since I last looked at P2P (Peer-to-Peer) software; although it is still a big issue in Europe and the USA with many organised piracy rings and individuals getting their collars felt for illegal file-sharing, what is the current situation in Japan, where government workers seem to have perfected the fine art of losing secret information through ill-configured file-sharing software? To find out some of the answers, japan.internet.com presented the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into the use of Winny and other P2P filesharing software.

Demographics

On the 13th of November 2007 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research Inc’s online monitor pool employed in the private or public sector successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 7.9% of the sample were in their twenties, 40.0% in their thirties, 34.8% in their forties, 12.7% in their fifties, and 4.5% in their sixties. The split of the sexes is not reported, but recent surveys by JR Tokai Express Research with samples taken from employed people have had around 82% male and 18% female respondents.

In Q1SQ3, I don’t know if the worry about infringing copyright is from the point of view of not wanting to deprive artists, or if it is due to a fear of being caught doing it, although the wording suggests its the stealing aspect that was considered when answering, not the subsequent chance of being arrested for possession.

In addition, only 3.4% complained about their connection speed, because as another recent survey shows, the vast majority of Japanese have fat pipes.

Research results

Q1: Have you ever used P2P file sharing software? (Sample size=330)
Yes, currently using (to SQ1, SQ2) 3.6%
Used to use, but stopped (to SQ1, SQ2) 16.7%
No, never used (to SQ3) 52.7%
Don’t know what it is 27.0%

Q1SQ1: What file sharing software have you used? (Sample size=67, multiple answer)
App Votes Percentage
Win MX 32 47.8%
Winny 25 37.3%
Napster 11 16.4%
BitTorrent 6 9.0%
Cabos 3 4.5%
Don’t know 3 4.5%
Other 4 6.0%

Q1SQ2: What kinds of files do/did you tend to download? (Sample size=67, multiple answer)
Files Votes Percentage
Music 43 64.2%
Movies 35 52.2%
Still images 20 29.9%
User-generated contents 7 10.4%
Other 2 3.0%

Q1SQ3: Why have you never used file sharing software? (Sample size=174, multiple answer)
Reason Votes Percentage
Feel there’s a danger of leakage of personal information 138 79.3%
Feel there’s a danger of viruses 120 69.0%
Don’t feel it’s needed 85 48.9%
Worried about infringing copyright 41 23.6%
Have slow connection 6 3.4%
Other 4 2.3%

http://whatjapanthinks.com/2007/11/2...rers-in-japan/





Blank Media Levy Breaches Should be Criminal, Say Authors

Report tries to stop EU scrapping levy
OUT-LAW.COM

Breaches of the European copyright levy system on blank media should be criminalised, a report by an authors' group says. The report is an attempt to convince the European Commission not to scrap the levy.

The levy is a small additional charge on blank CDs, MP3 players and other media which is used to compensate artists for the presumed use of the media to copy their material without payment. It is strongly opposed by consumer electronics companies.

The European Union's Copyright Directive says EU nations can allow a limited private right to copy material such as music but only if they fairly compensate artists for the presumed loss of income. They can, like the UK, avoid the levy by not having a private right to copy.

The UK, though, is introducing a private right to copy and it is not thought that the Government plans to introduce a levy. It has not yet explained how it intends to make this compatible with EU rules.

GESAC is the European umbrella body for the societies which collect royalties and distribute them to authors and artists. It has published the report which seeks to debunk the arguments of the opponents of the levy.

"The existence of different private copying remuneration schemes (PCRS) (or none at all) in the different EU Member States has been presented as an obstacle to the free movement of goods," said the GESAC proposals. "GESAC is not aware of any commission decision or ECJ judgment in that sense."

The body calls for the treatment of non-payment of levies as a criminal offence rather than a civil wrong. It also calls on countries to make sure that sellers of media pay the levy and not consumers, recognising that distance selling such as online retailing makes the situation more complicated.

"A significant number of the operators that are liable for the payment of private copying remuneration seek ways to circumvent this payment," said the GESAC document. "It is also necessary to address the case of distance sales in order to avoid that liability for the payment of the private copying remuneration be extended to consumers."

EU Internal Markets Commissioner Charlie McCreevy recently attempted to reform the levy system, but faced insurmountable political opposition, particularly from France. It is thought that he could make another attempt at making the system more transparent.

"We don't want any more emotional debate. We want a concrete discussion and concrete proposals," said GESAC secretary general Veronique Desbrosses, according to Reuters news agency. "We know the commission is still willing to address the issue."

The report said the long term benefits of the levy system were that consumers were able to make freer use of material, and artists were given greater incentives to create.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11...a_levy_report/





MediaDefender Leaks Cost The Company $825,000
Ernesto

The anti-piracy organization MediaDefender lost $825,000 as a result of the leaked emails according to a recent filing submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It is beginning to look like they have to walk the plank to bankruptcy after all.

This September we were the first to report that nearly 700mb of MediaDefender’s emails leaked on BitTorrent. The leaked emails gave the world a unique insight into the workings and the effectiveness of their BitTorrent decoy operations and revealed much more sensitive information.

The leaked emails were published by a group that goes by the name “MediaDefender-Defenders” and they were soon followed by other leaks such as a tracking database, a phone call and several anti-piracy tools.

From a recent SEC filing by MediaDefender’s parent company ArtistDirect we now learn that these leaks have cost the anti-piracy company some serious cash, $825,000 to be exact. Most of the money, $600,000, was spent to compensate their customers and the rest of the money was used to cover legal expenses.

In the SEC filing we read: “MediaDefender recorded approximately $600,000 for service credits to customers, which were recorded as a reduction to revenues during the three months ended September 30, 2007. This amount was determined based on various factors, including discussions with customers, and is subject to adjustment in future periods based on additional information. MediaDefender also recorded approximately $225,000 of legal, consulting and other direct costs related to the breach during the three months ended September 30, 2007.”

Surprisingly, the company does not think that the leaks have hurt the goodwill of MediaDefender on the long run, well, I hope for them that future clients don’t use Google then.
http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefende...825000-071120/





Canadian Report Finds P2P Might Sell More CDs, CRIA Sponsors Objection
Nate Anderson

The Canadian debate over the effects of peer-to-peer file sharing has morphed into a verse from "It's a Small World After All" as researchers from Australia, Canada, the US, and the UK battle over the proper interpretation of the data. And not all of this battling is disinterested: the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) is actually funding the Australians to debunk the report written by the Brits about the condition of the Canadians. Weird? Not when there's this much at stake.

It all began with Industry Canada (part of the Canadian government). The group last year commissioned a report into the effects of unauthorized file-swapping and handed the project to two researchers from the University of London, Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz. That report was released earlier this year.

Such government reports are a dime a dozen, but they attract more interest than usual when they conclude that a strong correlation exists between downloading songs from P2P networks and buying more CDs (no such correlation exists between downloading and purchasing music online). Andersen, one of the researchers, insists that "when we entered this research project, we had no preconceived views on what effect downloading a free music may have on music pay-markets."

The report generated immediate interest and criticism, most notably from Dr. Stan Liebowitz in the US and a pair of Australians from Australian National University. The critiques can get technical, and weighing the data and methods is best left to the specialists. What stands out, though, is that CRIA took an active role in rebutting the Industry Canada report, and crossed whole oceans to do so.

Dr. George Barker and Dr. Richard Tooth, the Australian professors, published a curious critique of the report. For one thing, CRIA supported their work with a grant. For another, the authors go beyond attacking deficiencies that they see in the report to attacking press coverage of the report. This is hardly the usual domain of economists, and it seems more than a little odd to include other people's coverage of a report in your critique of the report itself unless your goal is to mount a press offensive and not just an academic critique.

Canadian law professor Michael Geist has a nice rundown of the current situation, which shows the lengths to which trade groups will go to discredit reports that they feel are inaccurate or bad for business. Government reports, especially, are important targets for attack, since they can be most easily used to craft government policy positions. Anything, accurate or otherwise, that might lower the volume on the "P2P is evil" drumbeat is bad news for CRIA, and they'll go halfway around the world to sponsor objections.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ot-so-bad.html





P2P File-Sharing Author Defends Study
p2pnet news

File-sharing doesn’t lead to a drop in CD sales. In fact, P2P file-sharing tends to “increase rather than decrease” music purchasing.

So said The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada, an Industry Canada study by Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz.

It was released in a climate of anger and distrust between Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US) and their customers, the latter said by the Big 4 to be just waiting for an excuse to “steal” online music files.\

Predictably, the labels lost no time in trying to shoot down the paper and coincidentally, well-known economist Stan Liebowitz also immediately leapt to the attack, later backing off a little but still stating:

My initial criticism was too harsh regarding the simultaneity bias because the authors (A/F) attempt to control it but they do so only partially so that some bias is likely to remain. Nor do the authors acknowledge that the results of the survey are likely to be biased in a particular direction. The single biggest problem with the report is that the authors present two sets of results, one for the entire sample and one just for downloaders. It makes little or no sense to look only at downloaders and when they do so the authors find a result that is not only implausible but is actually is impossible to be true, given their data. When the appropriate full sample is used the results are still likely to be biased upward because the authors do not fully account for the impact of music interest, which impacts both downloading and purchasing. There are other less important issues, such as the regression specification and the construction of some variables …

Now Andersen has gone online to defend the study.

Here’s what she says in full >>>

1. We are intrigued by the debate our study has stimulated in various blog-postings on the internet.

Before responding to the debate, we would like to emphasise that, when we entered this research project, we had no preconceived views on what effect downloading of free music may have on music pay-markets.

However, Professor Stan Liebowitz who perhaps is the most prolific advocator against our results (his web-page on IP/File-sharing lists his views), writes in a critique in relation to another paper by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf (2007):

“O/S are aware that their conclusion-that file-sharing causes no reduction in record sales-contradicts conventional wisdom. […] Nevertheless, their results leave an extremely large elephant in the room-if not for file-sharing, why have record sales declined so precipitously?” (Liebowitz, 2007:1)

But, what if we wrongly blame downloaders of free music for declining sales? Then management and policy aimed solely at addressing file-sharing can only fail.

We are in the midst of a technological revolution. New ways in which music is created, delivered and consumed, affect both market and industry structures. There are many different stakeholders affected by this change, including music publishers (the big 4 and the independent), artists and consumers. One should not assume that existing industry structures are also the most optimal in the new technological paradigm. The growth of the online music industry is creating new business opportunities. For example, the responses indicate that free downloads are motivated, among other things, by consumers looking for music that is not available in stores, and that they are not necessarily interested in purchasing the album version but prefer a single file or a digital file. This illustrates a possible opportunity for new artists to enter music pay markets and a change in the way music users prefer music to be delivered and consumed.

2. We believe that everyone can agree that the better and more diverse data we examine, the closer we come to uncover true relationships. Different data and methods have their unique strengths and weaknesses. If we want to understand the performance of industries and product markets, then we need to understand the strategies of firms who make up these industries and the behaviour of the people who are the consumers. Micro-data is best suited to bring us closer towards that understanding.

Macro data can describe a situation or some relationships at the aggregate level, but such data are limited when it comes to shedding light on explanations of the situation. For this we need micro-data, as we need to understand how the micro behaviour underpin the creation of the situation at the aggregate level. For example, an overall high level of unemployment may seem like an economy in crises at the macro level. However, at the micro level we might find that some declining sectors have huge unemployment and some growing sectors are in need of workers, and this could be due to a very vibrant and dynamic economy with fast changing industry structures.

This type of argument related to conclusions being drawn from macro data, is also the long standing fundamental argument led by evolutionary economists when debating the use and misuse of data and statistics, and it was frequently raised in the methodology debate regarding the proper use of patent statistics.

Therefore, we believe that Liebowitz’s analysis, which is based on macro-data, has a weak empirical underpinning, and as a result, the following is probably wrong.

“I have written a recent paper (forthcoming in Management Science) that examines record sales and Internet uses in 99 US cities to measure the impact of file-sharing. While I am partial to my own work, I believe this paper provides the strongest analysis to date of these issues. The methodology avoids many empirical difficulties found in other papers. It concludes that file-sharing is responsible for the entire decline in record sales that has occurred, and that except for file-sharing there would have been an increase in sales since 1999 instead of the strong decline.” (Liebowitz, 2007)

His core argument is based on city-level data: record sales measured for an entire city and Internet penetration in a city (used as a proxy for file sharing). Liebowitz writes that, unfortunately, there is no direct measure of P2P music file-sharing. He recognises the weaknesses of his proxy, but these are still the data which underpin his strong conclusion:

“… file-sharing [or internet penetration in his case] appears to have caused the entire decline in record sales and appears to have vitiated what otherwise would have been growth in the industry”. (Liebowitz, 2007)

Our own study relies on micro-data obtained by asking individuals to what extent they are engaged in downloading and/or purchasing of music, and about their incentives behind such behaviours. While this may not be without its problems, it clearly has its merits as discussed above if we want to understand the behaviour of people on whom music markets depend on.

The survey provides information on a wide range of variables including:

Downloading from free music markets:
» Downloading free music from P2P file-sharing networks, like Kazaa, LimeWire, eDonkey, BearShare or Gnutella
» Ripping CDs and copying them onto computers
» Downloading free music from promotional website
» Downloading music from peoples’ private Internet websites
» Copying MP3 from friends

Buying music
» Number of CDs purchased by respondents
» Number of MP3s purchased (i.e. buying music tracks from online pay-sites like iTunes or Archambault)

Incentives
» Percentage of P2P downloads to ‘hear before buying’
» Percentage of P2P downloads due to wishing to not to buy ‘whole album’
» Percentage of P2P downloads due to ‘album too expensive’
» Percentage of P2P downloads due to music ‘not elsewhere available’

There are many other aspects to the survey, such as several demographic factors, MP3 ownership, supplementary entertainment goods and more.

3. Liebowitz’s key criticism is that we examine a sub-sample of file-sharers; i.e. only people who declared that they engaged in P2P file-sharing. He states:

“The single biggest problem with the report, however, is that the authors present two sets of results, one for the entire sample and one just for downloaders, and it is only the former results that should be considered. It makes little or no sense to look only at downloaders.” (Liebowitz, 2007)

He continues with an example to illustrate his point:

“When we compare the efficacy of a drug, we compare those who take the drug with those that do not.” (Liebowitz, 2007)

However, there is a key difference between data based on drug trial experiments and this data. In drug trials people are randomly allocated to those who receive the drug and those who receive a placebo. This is not the case in our dataset. Here, belonging to the group of file-sharers and belonging to the group of non-file-sharers is not a random event. It is a deliberate choice made by each individual to either engage in P2P file-sharing or not to engage in P2P file-sharing. Being a file-sharer is an endogenous decision, just like taking illegal drugs. We expect illegal drug takers and file-sharers to behave different from the rest of the population, and we therefore model the differences in their behaviour.

We now move onto a point Liebowitz made in his first posting, and which he revised in his second posting several days later. In his first posting Liebowitz claimed that we do not control for ‘music interest’ in our study. This is still reflected in Internet blogs when contributors state that our finding (a positive association between the number of P2P downloads and CD album purchases for the sub-sample of downloaders) is trivial and can be explained away by the fact that people with a high interest in music, do both: purchase CD albums and download P2P files.

In Liebowitz’s second version of his critique he now reconizes that we are controlling for music interest (albeit imperfectly in his view, which means something very different). Nonetheless, the numerical example given by Liebowitz, and still included in his website, is based on the assumption that no controls for music interest are made and therefore is hugely misleading.

4. Given the 0.44 estimate has been a subject of debate, there is something we believe needs clarification. On page 27 the paper suggests that for an increase in the average number of P2P downloads of 1, the number of CD purchases per year will increase by 1.212/2.718282 or 0.44. This is a point estimate. We compute marginal effects at the means of the regressors, and, thus, the point estimate refers to those people who claim to download approximately 13 P2P files in an average month and not to downloaders who claim more or less downloads in an average months. This is because the assumed relationship is non-linear (negative binomial distribution plus log transformation of the number of P2P downloads). Many arguments against the paper (including the one of Liebowitz) seem to be based upon the assumption that we work from a linear relationship.

5. Some blogs (resembling Liebowiz’s first critique) discuss if our paper, which suggests a positive association between P2P downloading and CD sales for the sample of P2P downloaders, is not valid because we have seen a decline in CD sales. Hence, they find it a weakness that we cannot identify why CD sales have dropped. We can of course speculate why CD sales have declined (and as most other writing in the blogs we have some personal views on this), but this is not the aim of this study.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/14059





Top Pirate Reveals Warez Scene Secrets, Attracts MPAA Lawyer’s Attention
enigmax

Last week, a senior member of the warez scene took part in a rare interview. In it, he reveals some interesting things about this shadowy world but the question is: Did he reveal too much? MPAA pirate-chasing lawyer Espen Tøndel now says that The Scene will be “brought to justice”.

We’ve carried articles in the past about the Scene. So legend goes, these people are ultra-secretive but of course there’s always a few who like to talk, despite being targeted by law enforcement in cases such as Operation Fastlink and Operation Buccaneer.

Last week, an administrator of a Topsite (an important guy, near to the top of the so-called ‘Piracy Pyramid‘) linked to some very famous release groups, broke cover in a very rare interview with Trond Bie of itavisen.no, seemingly giving away quite a few secrets such as the security techniques used by the Scene and the locations of some of their servers. He also explains why the Scene dislikes torrents and sites like The Pirate Bay, and reveals how some torrent sites manage to get Scene releases so quickly.

In the interview, the Site-Op mocks the efforts of Norwegian police in trying to shutdown the Norwegian Scene, joking that Norwegian law prevents them from being caught in the traditional ways. This attitude could’ve been the thing that attracted the eye of Espen Tøndel, the aggressive MPAA/IFPI lawyer who also talked about action against torrent sites recently. RayJoha, a reader of TorrentFreak who did a lot of work on this article, contacted Tøndel and asked him a few questions which you can read at the bottom of this article.

The Interview (translation from Norwegian, courtesy RayJoha)

The guy we talked to is one of the few administrators of a Topsite in Norway. He’s in his mid twenties, is a student of programming and has been a part of the Scene for many years. He first became a Topsite Site-Op in 2003 and has since been responsible for adding users, banning ruleset violators and programming automating IRC-scripts.

In addition to being a Site-Op he also has his own home-based server where he downloads movies, games and TV-shows to and from the Topsites. He has a very fast Internet connection which make it possible to download a DVD movie in minutes.

Everybody keeps everybody informed

In addition to categories such as games, software, music and movies we have a news category on the Topsites warning against raids. Lamers are also posted in this news category. It’s also possible to find out who leaks warez to trackers and the P2P community. Those who leak will be banned from the Scene. It is very easy for the police to find those people who are spreading torrents.

One of the reasons it is quite difficult to break the Scene is due to a very sophisticated security system. The system we use on Topsites and IRC is SSL. This comes on top of Blowfish-aggregation on IRC. You have to log in to one of the Topsites to get the Blowkey password. Without Blowkey everything will be encrypted. The Topsites encrypt everything with SSL.

It’s not unusual to have 30 TerraBytes of warez on a Topsite. Last summer German police raided a Topsite which had 40 members. The following was posted on Topsites news sections to warn the entire Scene, (from German):

New police action in Germany. This morning 40 members got a visit from the BKA, (Bundes Kriminal Amt). All user accounts etc…. Everybody that has visited the site is in great danger!

I miss you

Laws must change?

Changing the laws will have no effect. The MP3 legislation… the only thing they do is make it difficult for ordinary downloaders/torrent users - those who download from a website, torrentsite, Limewire or with any other P2P software. It would be easier for the government if the police could create their own ‘entrapment servers’, but they could only hurt the Scene, not destroy it.

What’s the probability of getting caught?

HaHa, there’s almost no chance of getting caught in Norway. The Norwegian police cannot do anything illegal to get somebody. By law, they cannot set up servers to entice users to join. All the users in the network know each other. Members of the Scene have joined only through someone vouching for them. I do it because it’s a learning experience and fun. I learn a lot about running servers, programming, (C, C ++, Java and scripting). I started with this before I realized I could have a career in programming. When you learn a few programming languages it’s quite easy to pick up new ones.

His interest in file sharing has been there for years, but it took some time before he became a Topsite Site-Op. He reveals that there are lot of Norwegian ISPs, especially those that deliver fiber connections, that have Topsite servers as customers.

The first time I became a Site-Op it was 2003. I started setting up servers on my own, but at that time we had no affiliation with the Scene. There are lots of sites on Lyse, Hafslund and Sandefjord and I also know that servers are found around university campuses.

The Site-Op tells us that he has no plans of quitting piracy, even when he gets a real job in the software business.

It’s real hard to catch pirates, i’ve learned. I get to understand how it works, making it possible to protect myself against it. Anything that comes to market is cracked even before we post it. There’s no point for the industry in spending millions on copy protection.

The social side of the Scene

Is there a social environment in the Scene or is it just IRC chatting all the time?

Nobody sees anybody. The IRC OPs knows who the others are, but normally we don’t know who they are in real life. We only use nick names.

The Site-Op feels it’s easy to replace persons that are arrested in raids with some exceptions. Game crackers [people who remove copy protection] can’t easily be replaced. There’s just a few people with their skills around.

It’s correct that you can’t easily replace a cracker, it’s a real genius game. Sometimes we might lose everyone, but they’re real hard to catch. Let’s say they manage to cripple the Game-Scene, but they still have to deal with movies and music, and thats something Mr. anybody can do. [Rip movies and music]

The FBI are allowed to set up fake servers, but they are not successful in their endeavors. If the Norwegian police are going to catch anyone they have to adopt the same strategy. You can’t take down Topsites without resorting to illegality: they’d have to distribute copyrighted material. Actually doing something illegal. note: strictly prohibited in Norway

Site-Op’s responsibilities

I don’t know any informants, but there is a strong possibility there are some. If the Scene discovers this the individual will be banned with the help of Topsite news and barred from access to any resource within the Scene.

As a Site-Op he has a series of tasks perform in order for the site to work properly.

A Site-Op adds users and makes sure the ruleset are obeyed. He’s programming and scripting. Linux servers are almost always running glftpd.

Pre-Information

The Site-Op is one of a selected few who has pre-information. Pre-information is information about a specific warez that haven’t been shared with anyone yet. The different groups, (Razor1911, Fairlight etc), have their own folders on the Topsites with not yet released content. The competition is fierce when it comes to being the first to release a movie or a game.

When a “ware” is pre-released a so-called Race starts. A Race means that every Topsite tries to be the first to distribute. In this way the Scene is almost like an economy in itself. First to market doesn’t mean monetary survival but rather the gain of Respect.

There are unbelievably few people that has pre-information. Only Admins can browse all Pre-folders. One shouldn`t sneak a peak on a pre. It’s a rule not to browse on somebody else’s folder.

The Site-Op’s connections with the ‘Big’ people in the Scene

A Site-Op communicates with the real ‘big-wigs’ in the Scene - the ones that really puzzle the game and movie industries. The largest groups use their own IRC servers to communicate, while the Topsites often use Linknet with SSL.

We are in direct contact with Fairlight and the others. We talk to them on IRC. A great proportion of them are Linknet. The largest Topsites have their own servers giving them increased security.

Additionally, the Site-Op reveals that many Sceners post internal information on Wikipedia.

The scene harbours ill feelings towards the torrent community. According to the Scene they are stealing their warez and posting it on trackers. The Scene is of the opinion that it’s real easy to bust people that posts warez on torrent sites like The Pirate Bay.

What happens is that people leak from the Scene to torrent sites just before a release. That indicates that these lamers have access to early sites. And if you are the one of those that does this you are categorized as an Insecure user and therefore banned from the Scene. So, to be clear, this is the only connection we have to the torrent scene.

Dislike of The Pirate Bay

We, as Site-ops, have no fondness for The Pirate Bay. We do not want to talk to the press because it pressures the police to focus on us. As a software programmer I dislike file sharing, because of the small companies that suffers from it. Members of the Scene learn a lot and find it to be a fun experience. The top Sceners buy the music and the movies on DVD anyway.

As an example I have purchased, ( With money ), FlashFXP to support the developers. This is software I use a lot. If you follow this thinking the best thing to do is to get rid of all the file sharers, mainly because it`s so insecure. The police are able to just walk in and identify the sharers. END

Q+A: Espen Tøndel, MPAA/IFPI lawyer

Q: Is there anything in this interview that gives you tips on how to get these guys?

Let me put it this way - we have a considerable amount of information about these sites. We know how they work.

Q :Do you think this article [the original interview] will make it easier to bring the Norwegian Scene to justice, considering that he reveals what kind of software and which ISPs they’re using?

From my point of view the Norwegian Scene will be brought to justice, we possess a lot of information.

Q: Norway has always been at the forefront of technology development. Do you think Hollywood should target Norway first?

Norway is obviously a good place for tech development and we have necessary legislation hence Norway is a good place for pursuing these kind of activities. We have the full backing of the Motion Picture Association in doing that.

Did this guy give away too many secrets or is Tøndel simply bluffing? Time will tell.

Update: Some people are naturally questioning the authenticity of the guy claiming to be a Site-Op. The author of the original article, Trond Bie from Norway’s ITavisen has just confirmed that he conducted this interview at his home and all the time he was watching the Site-Op doing ‘administrative stuff’ on the topsite which he says, couldn’t be mistaken for anything else.
http://torrentfreak.com/top-pirate-r...ecrets-071119/





The Gnu and the RIAA’s Worst Nightmare
p2pnet

The Gnu is helping to take on the RIAA and in the process, the RIAA’s worst nightmare is about to come true.

The one major element missing in virtually all the RIAA cases has been the lack of examination of RIAA so-called expert witnesses, the notable exception being Ray Beckerman’s grilling of Dr Doug Jacobson, whose expert testimony he reduced to rubble, with more to come.

Beckerman was, to an extent, able to do this with help from the online P2P communities, with Slashdot and Groklaw to the fore.

Now the Free Software Foundation has stepped in to help establish an Expert Witness Defense Fund for RIAA cases.

The killer is:

Contributions to the fund are entirely tax deductible.

Donors, says the FSF, will also get a listing on our ‘Thank GNUs’ web page for donations of $500 or more (if desired), the satisfaction of supporting the defense of the RIAA lawsuits and, definitely more importantly, the deep and heartfelt thanks of not only the P2P community, but also RIAA victims who before this innovation were forced to watch the likes of Jacobson attempt to snow technically ignorant judges with junk science.

Says Beckerman on Recording Industry vs The People:

1. The sole use of the funds will be to pay fees and/or expenses of technical expert witnesses, forensic examiners, and other technical consultants assisting individuals named as defendants in non-commercial, peer-to-peer file sharing cases brought by the RIAA, EMI, SONY BMG, Vivendi Universal, and Warner Bros. Records, and their affiliated companies, such as Interscope, Arista, UMG, Fonovisa, Motown, Atlantic, Priority, and others.

2. The Fund will be advised by Ray Beckerman, the author of Recording Industry vs. The People, along with a group of selected attorneys acting as advisors. These attorneys will submit payment requests to the Fund, based upon their views as to which cases are most deserving of assistance, and in what at amounts, and at what time.

3. Among the criteria to be considered in making recommendations to the Fund will be the following:

A. The importance of the case to critical legal issues.

B. The demonstrated commitment of the defendant, and/or of the defendant’s attorney if the defendant has an attorney, to seeing his or her case through to conclusion, and to fighting for important legal issues.

C. The facts and circumstances of the particular case.

D. The level of investment made by the defendant, and/or by the defendant’s attorney if the defendant has an attorney, in time, money, and labor, in defending the case.

E. The legal posture of the case.

F. The need for assistance.

G. The need for technical expertise in the case.

H. The quality and commitment of technical expertise which may have been contributed to the case.

I. The competing needs of other cases.

J. And other similar factors.

4. Defendants, or attorneys representing defendants, who request funding for experts or technical consultants, should send requests by email to Ray Beckerman, the subject field reading “Technical Expert Funding Request”.

So don’t just stay tuned —- DONATE!

Here again is the link: https://www.fsf.org/associate/riaa

http://p2pnet.net/story/14045





Broken DRM Scheme: $45 Million; Trampling Fair Use: Priceless
Eric Bangeman

Macrovision, the DRM firm perhaps best known recently for creating security holes in Windows with its SafeDisc DRM, has purchased the intellectual property surrounding the BD+ DRM scheme used by Blu-ray to thwart attempts at copying. For $45 million, Macrovision will get ownership of the Self-Protecting Digital Content (SPDC) technology that forms the basis for BD+ as well as associated patents owned by Cryptography Research.

Both Blu-ray and HD DVD use AACS to thwart copying, but that was cracked last spring. Blu-ray is alone in using an additional layer of security, BD+, to keep users from copying Blu-ray discs. BD+ works via a small virtual machine that is launched each time a disc is inserted. The VM does some code transformation to correct deliberately-corrupted video streams, and checks to see if the disc is playing on a Blu-ray player known to have been hacked. If the player has been compromised in the past, playback can be disabled. When the disc is ejected, the VM disappears from memory, which, in theory, makes it more difficult to hack or reverse engineer.

One small problem: BD+ was hacked earlier this month by SlySoft, makers of AnyDVD. The crack made good the company's boast that a crack would be available by year end and called into serious question the claims made by Blu-ray's backers that BD+ was uncrackable.

With the crack, users of AnyDVD make copies of the movies for fair use purposes. Mandatory Managed Copy is part of the Blu-ray spec, but has yet to be implemented, meaning that there's no way for Blu-ray disc owners to legally copy the discs.

Despite the recent cracks, Macrovision is excited about owning BD+. "The integration of SPDC into our product portfolio will enable us to continue to provide innovative technology to our customers as they expand their distribution vehicles," said Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso in a statement. "Not only is BD+ critical for content security, but it also supports value-added features that enhance the consumer playback experience, such as potentially unlocking bonus content."

Even if BD+ has been dented and its long-term viability is uncertain, it's still an important acquisition for Macrovision. The DRM company will now rake in the dough for BD+ licenses paid by the studios backing Blu-ray and will turn its expertise towards fighting hackers intent on defeating BD+.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...priceless.html





Universal Goes DRM Free
James Jolly

Universal, via its UK wing Universal Classics and Jazz (UCJ), has made recordings available without DRM (digital right management). This means that its recordings are now compatible with most portable devices (including iPods). EMI was the first company to release DRM-free music right across its catalogue in a deal with iTunes, but the UCJ offering is restricted to its classical and jazz catalogues and is made available through the company’s own digital store, classicsandjazz.co.uk

UCJ stress that this is a trial venture, resulting from consumer demand for DRM-free “open” MP3 files (an option that is already widely used in the independent sector on such as emusic.com and theclassicalshop.net). Dickon Stainer, managing director of UCJ, says that “by making our entire catalogue available in an open MP3 format we will have the opportunity to assess the level of demand, the effect on the wider music download market and of course whether we will have a problem with piracy.”

Visitors to the UCJ site are directed to a “Dress Circle” area where, after free registration, they can accumulate points in a loyalty rewards scheme that can be used against future purchases. (50 points are offered for each open MP3 album – 500 can be redeemed for a £5 discount off a future purchase.)

The lack of iPod-compatibility was seen as a major hurdle for UCJ when it launched its website, but this step could line it up as a serious challenger to the market dominance of iTunes in the classical arena.
http://www.gramophone.co.uk/newsMain...ewssectionID=1





UK

Anti-Piracy Moves 'Hurt Sales'
Andrew Edgecliiffe-Johnson

Retailers are urging the music industry to drop piracy protection for online downloads after new figures showed the average Briton has bought fewer than three digital tracks in the past three years.

Incompatible proprietary technologies, aimed at defeating rampant piracy in the digital music era, are instead "stifling growth and working against the consumer interest", said Kim Bayley, director-general of the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA).
Her warning comes as high street retailers and digital music specialists watch pre-Christmas sales trends nervously. The music industry makes at least 40 per cent of its revenues in the fourth quarter, but the traditional sales build-up has started later than usual.

Although Leona Lewis - the X Factor winner backed by Simon Cowell's Syco label - this month notched up the highest first-week album sales for a debut artist, album volumes are down 11 per cent, or 12m units, for the year to date, according to the Official UK Charts Company and Music Week.

Recorded music companies had been "quick to complain" that the slide in CD sales had not been offset by growth in digital music, Ms Bayley said, but their embrace of digital rights management (DRM) systems "might have added to the slow take-up of legal digital services".

Just 150m tracks have been downloaded legally in the UK over the past three years, she added. "Sadly, that amounts to an average of less than one 79p per download per head of population per year."

The ERA's appeal comes as more companies experiment with the DRM-free MP3 format, following a pre-emptive challenge in February by Apple's Steve Jobs. Most recently, Universal Music this month began offering its classical and jazz catalogue in MP3 format.
In April, EMI "unlocked" its catalogue, charging consumers a premium for DRM-free versions of its music on Apple's iTunes store, and has since signed deals with other digital retailers for MP3 files encoded at more than twice the quality of standard audio files.

"There are certainly experiments, but there's still a certain element of resistance within the music industry," Ms Bayley said. "At the moment, [DRM] just puts consumers off," she said, adding that confusion about formats was driving people toward illegal downloads.

She cited research this month that found consumers were almost four times as likely to choose an MP3 file as a DRM-protected track when the two were offered alongside each other.

The ERA, which represents high street retailers and online sites, said it was making the appeal now in the hope that music companies would drop DRM protections before the Christmas season and the January sales rise, when consumers load up the iPods they receive at Christmas.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6ed6dd08-9...0779fd2ac.html





PickyPirate: Metacritic Meets BitTorrent
Ernesto

It’s not hard to determine what’s hot on BitTorrent, just go to your favorite BitTorrent site and order the results by most seeds or peers. However, finding out what’s popular by people “in the know” usually requires some more steps.

This is exactly the gap PickyPirate is trying to fill. PickyPirate fetches the most popular movies, games and music albums from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, two well known review aggregators, and lists them on the frontpage.

For those not familiar with meta-review sites, these websites make a ranking of the movies, games and music albums that received the best reviews from critics. The links to these entries on Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes are of course included and there you can read the full reviews.

Ehud, the developer of PickyPirate told TorrentFreak that a friend asked him why nobody created a mashup of BitTorrent and Metacritic, “I immediately thought ‘Hey, that’s a really good idea!’” he said. “Basically I never know what to download from all the stuff that’s available.”

The site currently lists most popular items from the last 30 days for all categories (Music, Movies, PC Games, Xbox 360 and Wii). The lists are updated every 15 minutes, so if the scores change on Metacritic, they will be quickly updated on PickyPirate too.

If you click on one of the items on the frontpage it automatically lists all the “relevant torrents” available on The Pirate Bay and Mininova for that title, but more sites might be added later.

BitTorrent users have a huge amount of material at their fingertips and as such, they can afford to be very picky indeed. However, not everyone has the time to be picky but with the help of sites like this, allowing others to do it on your behalf can come a good second.
http://torrentfreak.com/pickypirate-...orrent-071121/





Very nice

MuViBee: Music Video Aggregation Tool
multi



http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=24323





Cox Pulls a Comcast with eDonkey
Cade Metz

Comcast isn't the only American ISP throttling peer-to-peer file sharing traffic. Cox Communications is pulling exactly the same trick.

According to Robb Topolski - the networking guru who first revealed that Comcast was busting BitTorrents (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10...busting_again/) back in May - Cox is using some sort of network hardware tool to sever connections on another P2P service, eDonkey. "I'm seeing the same thing with Cox and eDonkey that I saw with Comcast," Topolski told us.

In essence, Cox is preventing P2P users from seeding files. When one machine attempts to trade a file with another, the ISP is sending a duped "reset flag" to break this peer-to-peer connection.

"At the point where the remote peer asks for a particular section of a shared a file, Cox is sending a forged reset," Topolski said. "This reset is intended to take two peers that are out of sync and get them back in sync. But in this case, the reset is being forged even though there's nothing wrong with the connection."

Previous Topolski tests showed that Comcast is pulling this trick with eDonkey and Gnutella as well as BitTorrent - though it was the BitTorrent bagging that got all the press. Now, he reports that exactly the same interface that plagues eDonkey users on Comcast is hitting users on Cox.

When we asked Cox if this was indeed the case, it tossed us the same canned statement it sent to DSLReports.com (http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/C...Traffic-89481), where Topolski's tests were first revealed. Cox reserves the right to "manage" high-bandwidth traffic:

To ensure the best possible online experience for our customers, Cox actively manages network traffic through a variety of methods including traffic prioritization and protocol filtering. Cox does not prohibit the use of file-sharing services for uploads or downloads, or discriminate against any specific services in any way. To help our customers make the most out of their Internet experience, we take proactive measures to ensure that bandwidth intensive applications do not negatively impact their service.
This is a bit easier to stomach than Comcast's initial response to the news that it was bagging BitTorrents. When the story first went web-wide in August, Comcast flatly denied it. The big-name ISP didn't adopt this sort of we're-just-managing defense until last month, when the The Associated Press ran a piece confirming Topolski's tests.

With Comcast, Topolski was able to verify that a network management tool called Sandvine was firing off fake resets, but with Cox, he's yet to zero-in on the specific piece of offending hardware. "I'm not ready to confirm, but I'm 90 per cent sure they're using Sandvine too."

His tests are ongoing, and he also hopes to determine whether Cox is bagging BitTorrents as well as eDonkey swaps. But don't start hounding the guy for answers. He just had a massive tumor removed.

When The Associated Press ran its Comcast story, we phoned Topolski for a comment, but he was in the middle of a nine-day hospital stay. "When the AP story broke, I was out of it," he said. "I don't remember too much."

But now he's cancer-free. And he's back to busting ISPs.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11...edonkey_swaps/





SaveTheInterneters to Save the Internet from Comcast
Cade Metz

Members of the SaveTheInternet.com Coalition hope to save the internet from Comcast.

Joining forces with a few internet-savvy legal scholars, several of the coalition's spunky public advocates have formally asked the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to prevent America's second largest ISP from secretly throttling peer-to-peer traffic.

They think Comcast is undermining net neutrality.

Earlier this month, nationwide tests by The Associated Press proved that Comcast was actively interfering with attempts to swap files over P2P networks like BitTorrent, eDonkey, and Gnutella. And similar accusations date all the way back to last spring (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10...usting_again/).

Comcast claims that it's merely "managing" traffic in an effort to provide users with really awesome internet service. But this doesn't sit too well with several members of SaveTheInternet, including Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the Media Access Project. These net rescuers have long urged the US government to adopt laws that would prevent ISPs from discriminating against certain kinds of net traffic.

"Comcast’s defense is bogus," said Free Press policy director Ben Scott. "The FCC needs to take immediate action to put an end to this harmful practice. Comcast’s blatant and deceptive BitTorrent blocking is exactly the type of problem advocates warned would occur without Net Neutrality laws. Our message to both the FCC and Congress is simple: We told you so, now do something about it."

Management schmanagement

In filing a "Petition for Declaratory Ruling" with the FCC, these SaveTheInterneters have asked the feds to acknowledge that BitTorrent bagging violates their "Internet Policy Statement" - a 2005 effort to protect the rights of users online.

"In 2005, when the FCC adopted an order reclassifying wireline broadband as an information service, it sought to ensure that network providers of Internet service, like phone and cable companies, would not violate network neutrality," the petition reads.

"Consumers are entitled to access all applications, services, and content of the consumer’s choice, and entitled to competition among providers of networks, applications, services, and content."

The FCC's policy statement includes a footnote that says ISPs have the right to practice "reasonable network management," but the public advocates insist this doesn't apply when a provider "intentionally degrades" net applications.

Footnote fetish

Of course, Comcast is doing its best to find shelter under this footnote. "We engage in reasonable network management to provide all of our customers with a good Internet experience, and we do so consistently with FCC policy," reads a canned statement from David L. Cohen, Comcast executive vice president.

"As the FCC noted in its policy statement in 2005, all of the principles to encourage broadband deployment and preserve the nature of the Internet are 'subject to reasonable network management.' The Commission clearly recognized that network management is necessary by ISPs for the good of all customers.”

But this hasn't deterred the SaveTheInterneters. With a separate FCC complaint, they urge the commission to crack down on Comcast specifically. "Comcast, the nation’s number two provider of high-speed Internet access, is blatantly violating the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement by degrading a range of peer-to-peer applications," the complaint reads.

"It falsely denied degrading peer-to-peer applications and now continues to degrade applications without informing users and while advertising access to the 'internet.' The FCC should immediately enjoin this discrimination and impose forfeitures on Comcast."

The complaint also asks the FCC to adopt umbrella fines for ISPs that exhibit Comcast-like behavior. As an organization spokeswoman told us, the SaveTheInterneters don't want this to happen again.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11...ent_bag ging/





Mark Cuban: 'P2P Users Should Pay a Premium'
Terrence Russell

Comcast is undoubtedly in a heap of trouble over allegations of throttling P2P traffic. However, the embattled broadband provider does have an unlikely ally in dot com entrepreneur and billionaire, Mark Cuban. In a post to his personal blog, Cuban lays out his myopic reasons for supporting Comcast's P2P traffic jams:

As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders. Thats right, P2P content distributors are nothing more than freeloaders. The only person/organization that benefits from P2P usage are those that are trying to distribute content and want to distribute it on someone else's bandwidth dime.

Cuban's ideal solution? Well, let's say it's not exactly in sync with the FCC's Net Neutrality policies:

Comcast, Time Warner, etc should charge a premium to those users who want to act as a seed and relay for P2P traffic. After all, that is why P2P is used, right? For content distributors to avoid significant bandwidth and hosting charges. That makes it commercial traffic far more often than not. So make them pay commercial rates.

Cuban may have an interesting take on the issue, but his solution hardly seems fitting for legit users of the protocol. Comcast's throttling has allegedly affected Lotus Notes users and anyone patching a copy of World of Warcraft. So, it's unlikely that charging these users extra would effectively address the issue at hand -- namely, the legality of Comcast's current sleight of hand.

UPDATE: Cuban has put up another post that backpedals a little and attempts to further explain his unique take on the issue. Here's what it boils down to in 22 words: "I think there are valid applications for P2P on private networks, but nothing on the Internet that I think is worth surviving."
http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/...cuban-p2p.html





Whose Web is it, Anyway?

The equation bittorrent = pirate doesn't hold water. And, major ISPs in Canada and the U.S. know this. They're just trying to scare and co-opt naive North Americans who think peer-to-peer is the Devil's handiwork.

Until about three weeks ago, net neutrality was a difficult issue to explain at a dinner party. It was even more of a struggle to get anybody worked up about it. Now, thanks to the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) Comcast and Bell-Sympatico, the stakes are crystal clear and the acrid scent of a smoking gun hangs in the room.

Last month the Associated Press ran a series of tests that demonstrated that U.S. broadband provider Comcast was interfering with its customers' ability to download files stored on what are called peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.

In Canada, a forum supervisor for Bell-Sympatico has admitted the Canadian carrier does likewise.

So what? Peer-to-peer? Customer interference? Read on.

Peer-to-peer networks allow Internet-connected computers to distribute the burden of storing and transferring honking big digital files. Those files are often, but not always, music and videos. You might have also heard of it as sharing files via bittorrent.

You might also have heard that bittorrent is only used by scofflaws, pedophiles, university students and pirates illegally swapping Hollywood movies, pictures of naked children and Dan Hill tunes. So, at first glance, you might say, "Hey, what the carriers did makes sense. I mean, why should bandwidth-sucking evildoers who like sappy folk ballads get to download a metric buttload of pornography and bad music, all the while slowing things down for the rest of us?"

That's exactly what the carriers want you to think. But, that's just so wrong on so many levels. Let me explain.

While pirating music and movies is illegal, using bittorrent or peer-to-peer sharing isn't. For example, I use bittorrent to download Creative Commons-licensed videos from miro.com, as do thousands of other law-abiding, non-pirating individuals.

Content from National Geographic, Lionsgate Films, MTV, Dow Jones and the Discovery Channel is available online via bittorrent, legally. And, lots of large but legal downloads of medical x-rays, unmixed music tracks etc., raw footage for documentaries etc., take place everyday via peer-to-peer, and nobody is breaking the law.

So the equation bittorrent = pirate doesn't hold water. And, major ISPs in Canada and the U.S. know this. They're just trying to scare and co-opt naive North Americans who think peer-to-peer is the Devil's handiwork. Sort of the way George Bush used the threat of terrorism to invade Iraq.

Second, peer-to-peer blocking isn't an exact science. In fact, Comcast in the U.S. stepped in it big time when their peer-to-peer blocking schemes stopped businesses from exchanging Lotus Notes data. Big mistake.

So, not only is it true that many P2P users are engaged in perfectly legal acts, folks who aren't even using P2P are getting caught in the arc of a blunt instrument.

Third, it's not just peer-to-peer sharers and Lotus Notes users who are getting bludgeoned. Other carriers in Canada have been accused of degrading Internet phone calls. Internet telephony, also called Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) lets you make long distance calls dirt cheap. VOIP services like Skype and the Gizmo Project allow international computer-to-computer calls for free.

Why would carriers throttle VOIP traffic on their networks? They claim it sucks bandwidth but, again, that's a clever smokescreen.

Canadian carriers like Rogers and Shaw offer their own VOIP services. Those VOIP services also take bandwidth, but don't get throttled.

And last year VOIP provider Vonage complained that broadband (and VOIP) provider Shaw was charging customers a $10 per month "quality of service enhancement" fee for the privilege of using non-Shaw VOIP providers. In other words, a non-Shaw VOIP tax.

Is it in the carriers' best interest to allow upstart cheap phone companies like Skype or Vonage to suck up bandwidth with its inexpensive and excellent service? Nope, but in a free market and a neutral Internet, upstarts happen. The traditional players just don't like it much and want the nonsense to stop.

That takes us back to peer-to-peer. Why? Because the truth is, Rogers, Shaw and Bell-Sympatico want to start offering you video over the Internet - also called IPTV (Internet Protocol Television). NBC is already starting this with hulu, which distributes primetime shows online (to U.S. residents only - that's so cable). But soon Canadian networks will want to send you their content, on their terms, over their networks. And what's a great way for them to distribute that content? Peer-to-peer and bittorrent.
So, when you and I use bittorrent we're bandwidth-hogging criminals. When the carriers use it, it's just good business. When Shaw and Rogers offer VOIP, it's smooth and clear. When competitors do, it degrades badly or you get up-charged so it won't devolve to stuttering static. When we use lots of bandwidth, the carriers complain we're degrading the service for everyone. Yet, somehow, when they want to, the bandwidth will be there. Odd how it works.

But the problem runs deeper still.

In the past few years, broadband carriers in North America have:

• Prevented the abortion rights group Naral Pro-Choice America from getting a "short code" that would allow them to send text messages to supporters. (Verizon, 2007)

• Cut off the webcast of a Pearl Jam concert just when lead singer Eddie Veder was critical of U.S. President George Bush. (AT&T, 2007)

• Blocked emails critical of a pay-to-send email plan. (Time Warner/AOL, 2006)

• Blocked customers from accessing a website sympathetic to the Telecommunications Works Union during a strike. (Telus, 2005)

These incidents and others have raised the concern of net neutrality advocates. Why? Because they suggest that as well as blocking access to peer-to-peer sharing, throttling bandwidth and degrading competing VOIP services, carriers are also keen on controlling the content that's flowing through the Web. They'd like it to be their content.

"The carriers have a myriad of conflicts of interest," says Steve Anderson, the Coordinator of the Campaign for Democratic Media. "They have popular websites or they own television stations, so it's in their interest to get traffic to them. If they allow P2P sharing and people are watching shows that way, it's likely they're not watching shows from Rogers."

How could that affect you?

Here's an example. Right now the Canadian online news service The Real News (which I've done work with) provides daily video news that asks tough and uncomfortable questions about business and politics worldwide. Being video-based it consumes bandwidth, and lots of it.

It is within the power of Canadian carriers to say, "We'd rather folks watch the news our partners provide, so we'll just throttle back the speed of access for The Real News". They could choke off or degrade your access to an alternative viewpoint.

Or, let's move closer to home. Right now, rabble.ca is developing rabble tv, an Internet video version of rabble.ca. Canadian carriers could make rabble tv stutter and jump like a filmstrip caught in a projector.

Or, they could offer The Real News and rabble tv a chance to get out from underneath that throttling, if we were willing to pay more to get back on the fast lane of access - just like mobsters shaking down shopkeepers for protection money.

That's what's called the tiered Internet. And, that's what carriers would like to see. It's an Internet where the big players get the high road and everyone else gets the slow dirt path. That's the opposite of a neutral net where the carriers don't control or discriminate against the traffic they carry. But, it's exactly the way cable companies have always run their businesses. Why should today be different from yesterday?

Are they allowed to do this? Not really.

Section 27(2) of the Canadian Telecommunications Act says: "No Canadian carrier shall, in relation to the provision of a telecommunications service or the charging of a rate for it, unjustly discriminate or give an undue or unreasonable preference toward any person, including itself, or subject any person to an undue or unreasonable disadvantage."

That's stronger than U.S. legislation, at least in theory, but so far neither the CRTC nor the government in general has enforced it when it comes to net neutrality issues.

The carriers say they would never discriminate based on content. But, they are starting. And, more to the point, they have also consistently denied that they throttle bandwidth and target peer-to-peer sharing. We now know they do. We have the smoking gun. So, when it comes to net neutrality, they're not to be trusted. And, they've only just started.

Judging from what's happened to date, the government doesn't much care. If you do, here's what you can do right now. Head over to http://www.neutrality.ca and sign their petition. It's easy, and, best of all, it doesn't take much bandwidth.
http://www.rabble.ca/news_full_story.shtml?x=64622





FAQ: Comcast vs. BitTorrent
David Ramel

Cable TV giant and Internet service provider Comcast Corp. has been accused of blocking -- or at least throttling -- traffic from subscribers trying to share files through the popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer network.

What's BitTorrent?
BitTorrent is a networking protocol that lets users who download client software share (transmit and receive) files from other users. These shared files can be any type of file, but BitTorrent is well known for sharing MP3 music files, software applications, movies and other videos. Many of these files are copyrighted. BitTorrent is somewhat similar to the old Napster network that was used by millions of users to share MP3 files, but it doesn't use central servers. Instead, users download metadata files (torrents) related to the file they wish to get. Then the client software sends out a request to "trackers," which are computers that coordinate the transfer of the file -- typically in many different parts from among many peers.

So, if many of these files are being shared illegally, what's the big deal about blocking -- or throttling -- the traffic?
BitTorrent Inc., founded by the creator of the protocol, emphasizes that BitTorrent can be used for legally sharing files that aren't copyrighted and even offers the protocol/software as a legitimate service for businesses. Many others in the Internet community also use the technology for legitimate purposes. For example, Blizzard uses the BitTorrent protocol to distribute updates and patches to its popular World of Warcraft game.

Then why is Comcast (reportedly) hindering this traffic?
There are no exact numbers available, but some have claimed BitTorrent traffic comprises a significant portion of total Internet traffic. Comcast has limited bandwidth available for its millions of customers and has reportedly cut off service for some users who used more than their share of bandwidth. The company has admitted it restricts users who consume too much bandwidth (not specifically BitTorrent traffic) to ensure all of its customers receive adequate service, although it won't officially say what the limit is.

What is Comcast's reply?
The company says it doesn't block peer-to-peer traffic, but it does practice "reasonable network management" to ensure quality service for all it subscribers.

What does the other side say?
Claims of Comcast interference with BitTorrent traffic have been circulating for many months, at least, but the issue came to the forefront recently when the Associated Press published results of its own investigation into the issue. The AP concluded that Comcast was hindering BitTorrent traffic.

I don't use BitTorrent, so why should I care?
The dispute points to a larger issue called Net neutrality. This is a contentious dispute about the kinds of controls that Internet service providers can put on their networks. Those advocating for the principle of Net neutrality generally want to keep providers from regulating what kind of traffic or level of traffic is allowed. They also don't want providers to be able to charge different rates for different levels of service -- so consumers or companies would have to pay more to be guaranteed certain minimum levels of download/upload speed, for example. Those opposing Net neutrality generally maintain that some kind of control is necessary to promote improvements in equipment and services and guarantee minimum levels of performance. Others believe providers have the right to manage traffic on their network, but argue that -- especially in the Comcast case -- they should be more upfront about what they're doing.

What else is going on?
Besides BitTorrent traffic, Comcast has been accused of blocking or throttling Lotus Notes traffic. Also, complaints about Comcast interfering with BitTorrent traffic have been filed with the FCC by online video distributor Vuze and the group Public Knowledge and other members of the Open Internet Coalition.

Where are things going from here?
Comcast was recently sued by a California man for interfering in file sharing. At the time of this writing, Comcast hadn't officially commented on the suit. If the litigation proceeds, it could reveal details about exactly what Comcast is doing and eventually result in legislation or an FCC ruling to settle the legality of the practice.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...ittorrent.html





Exinda Networks Controls Broad Range of Recreational Internet Traffic Slipping Past Corporate Firewalls: Exinda's New Capability Detects and Controls Encrypted Peer-to-Peer Traffic That Cripples Corporate Applications
Press release

Exinda Networks today announced an enhancement to its WAN optimization appliances that helps control a broad range of recreational Internet traffic, such as instant messaging, gaming and downloading files for entertainment, that significantly slows business applications on corporate networks. Exinda’s new feature detects and blocks or slows recreational Internet traffic, called encrypted peer-to-peer traffic, that cleverly slips past corporate firewalls, ensuring that business applications are not negatively impacted. Exinda is the only WAN optimization vendor that can detect, classify and control more than 1,000 applications which includes encrypted peer-to-peer traffic.

The ability to detect and control this traffic also saves companies money and keeps employees more productive by not having to wait for business applications to respond. According to a survey conducted by America Online and Salary.com in June, 2005 employers spend $759 billion per year on salaries for which real work was expected, but not actually performed. Web surfing for recreational use was cited as the #1 time waster at work by 44.7 percent of more than 10,000 people polled.

Skype, BitTorrent, MySpace and Facebook are among the most common Web applications that send encrypted peer-to-peer network traffic over corporate networks. Skype, a free software that is used for both business and recreational purposes, offers instant messaging, file transfer and video capabilities and is well known for its ability to circumvent firewalls. BitTorrent is an application most commonly used for social purposes to download large files including movies, TV shows, games and MP3 audio files. MySpace and Facebook are social networking applications for sharing photos, personal profiles, videos and more. Recreational use of these applications are gaining in popularity, negatively impacting business applications. Exinda’s appliances can detect, classify and control 98 percent of BitTorrent traffic whereas other WAN optimization vendors allow this traffic to pass undetected or at best only detect and classify half of the rogue traffic.

According to a survey conducted by Ashton, Metzler & Associates in August, 2006, 63 percent of IT professionals see unauthorized use of company networks for instant messaging and 58 percent see unauthorized use for peer-to-peer file sharing. The statistics are likely much higher given that these two types of traffic go highly undetected by most firewalls.

“The recreational use of Skype and BitTorrent has become a serious problem for companies and service providers,” said Con Nikolouzakis, chief executive officer of Exinda Networks. “These recreational applications have a way of making business application run as if they were in slow motion. They have been known to crash the network in some instances. It’s disruptive to employees and adds unnecessary expense to operate the corporate network.”

Nikolouzakis added, “There are situations where encrypted peer-to-peer traffic is used for legitimate business purposes such as conference calls being hosted on Skype. In those instances, it is important to be able to detect and prioritize this traffic rather than restrict it. Until now, WAN optimization vendors have fallen short on properly handling encrypted peer-to-peer traffic.”

Skype and BitTorrent traffic were designed to use different network ports and file server IP addresses making it very difficult for firewalls to detect it. Exinda’s new feature classifies Skype and BitTorrent traffic using Layer 7 heuristics to detect traffic patterns and apply the proper network policy to control it.

Additionally, Exinda’s new heuristics-based classification speeds data at up to 100 times faster than before. Faster classification is helpful in large service provider and enterprise networks handling large amounts of data and numerous applications.

Availability and Pricing

Exinda’s new classification engine will be available on December 3, 2007 as part of a firmware update at no charge to Exinda customers who have a current software subscription. Visit www.exinda.com/support/ for more details.
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2.../emw570969.htm





Certification Testing for 100Mbps Cable Modems Begins, 2008 Rollout Eyed
Eric Bangeman

CableLabs has begun testing the first set of DOCSIS 3.0 gear, as five companies have submitted cable modems to the organization for official approval. We've seen precertification equipment tested, and some cable ISPs in Asia have rolled out pre-DOCSIS 3.0 equipment, but this is the first set of gear to be tested for compliance with the final DOCSIS 3.0 standard.

Cable ISPs currently use DOCSIS 1.1, which has been "good enough" in the past. Unfortunately, when compared to fiber, DOCSIS 1.1 lacks in the speed department. DOCSIS 3.0 has the potential to drastically change that, with download speeds of up to 160Mbps and uploads of up to 120Mbps possible. In addition, DOCSIS 3.0 also offers full support for IPv6, along with enhanced network management and security features. DOCSIS 3.0 also offers enough bandwidth for IPTV and other high-def video services.

Trials of pre-DOCSIS 3.0 gear have been promising. One of the deployments mentioned above has resulted in download speeds of 100Mbps for customers of a South Korean ISP that has a reach of 1.1 million subscribers. Another DOCSIS 3.0 trial in Singapore earlier this year saw speeds of up to 145Mbps.

The first round of DOCSIS 3.0 certification comes at an important time for the cable industry. Cable companies used to be the unquestioned kings of download speeds, but they're finding it impossible to compete with fiber-optic deployments such as Verizon's FiOS service. Last month, Verizon announced its new 20/20 symmetrical FiOS service, and earlier this week made the service available across its entire territory. The company also rolled out a new service tier with speeds of 50Mbps down and 30Mbps up.

Cable companies are definitely feeling the heat. "Cable's got to be ready with a [comparable] product that's not going to break the bank," Gartner analyst Patti Reali told Cable Digital News. With certification testing under way, cable companies should be able to begin deploying DOCSIS 3.0 gear at some point in 2008—likely in areas where they are facing competition from Verizon and AT&T's fiber networks.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...lout-eyed.html





Mininova Hits The Million Torrent Uploads Mark
Ernesto

The well-known BitTorrent site Mininova reached a new Milestone today. Just weeks after hitting the 3 billion torrent downloads mark, Mininova notched up its 1,000,000th uploaded torrent.

Torrent number 1,000,000 was uploaded yesterday by an anonymous user. Unfortunately, the memorable torrent has no seeds, which makes it likely that it wont be around much longer.

One million uploaded torrents is a great accomplishment, especially if you consider that Mininova only allows user uploads. Contrary to what most people assume, Mininova doesn’t scrape any torrents from other websites, all the torrents hosted on the website are uploaded by its users.

It took almost a year to get from the 500,000th torrent, which was uploaded November 2006, to the millionth torrent. So, the traffic and the torrent downloads grow faster than the torrent uploads, indicating that most new users are mostly interested in downloading and not in publishing content. At the moment, approximately 1350 torrents are uploaded to Mininova every day and the site hosts over 550,000 .torrent files in total.

Earlier this week we reported that Mininova entered the list of the top 50 most visited websites on the Internet. Some people might have noticed that Mininova spits out a few errors every now and then if you try to load a page, this is one of the downsides of the traffic increase. However, Mininova founder Niek assured us that they are working on it and that it should get better soon.
http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-hit...s-mark-071118/





DMCA Notices for Unlicensed Anime (Comcast)

Over the past few days some disturbing news has reached the AnimeSuki email box: it seems several Comcast (an US internet provider) users have received DMCA ("stop illegal downloading") notices for unlicensed anime. It seems there might be some fact to the news reported in the Japan Asks America to Stop Illegal Net Releases of Anime thread after all.

So far I've seen DMCA notices about the following anime (Japanese anime studios in parenthesis):

- Suteki Tantei Labyrinth (Studio Deen)
- Gundam 00 (Sunrise / Mainichi Broadcasting)
- Seto no Hanayome (AIC / avex / Gonzo)
- Nagasarete Airantou (feel / Starchild)

As you can see there is no real pattern, other than that the anime was unlicensed and the people who received the notices were Comcast users.

I wonder if this is a trend, so I'd like to ask if anyone else has received a DMCA ("stop illegal activity") notice from their ISP or third party recently for downloading anime in the US or Europe? (the issue with Odex in Singapore is another story...)

Forum member aldraek's thread about this issue was deleted because he misinterpreted the notice as a the series being licensed (which is possible, but seems terribly unlikely considering not all of the series seem like likely license candidates to me). Here is the contents of his post, which shows how the DMCA notices look like:

Originally Posted by aldraek
So I grabbed the first episode of Gundam 00 a few days ago just to check it out and see if it was worth watching... (unfortunately not something that grabbed my attention after watching it) and today, very surprisingly, I got an e-mail from Comcast about it. Anyone care to comment? I know that downloading anime is in the grey-area legally if it's not been licensed in your region, but I also know that Gundam 00 is not licensed in region 1. Can anyone care to tell me what's going on? Maybe some advice on how to handle this? This is the FIRST letter of any kind that I've received regarding this nature... Interesting fact was that I had uTorrent running with encryption on, guess it's not all that cracked up.

Anyway, here's a copy of the e-mail with sensitive information removed:

From: Comcast Network Abuse [mailto:abuse-noreply@comcast.net]
Sent: Friday, November 16, 2007 4:23 AM
To: Comcast Internet Subscriber
Subject: Notice of Claim of Copyright Infringement.

Notice of Action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Abuse Incident Number: NA000000-------
Report Date/Time: Wed, 14 Nov 2007


Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Subscriber:

Comcast has received a notification by a copyright owner, or its authorized
agent, reporting an alleged infringement of one or more copyrighted works
made on or over Comcast's High-Speed Internet service (the 'Service'). The
copyright owner has identified the Internet Protocol ('IP') address
associated with your Service account at the time as the source of the
infringing works. The works identified by the copyright owner in its
notification are listed below. Comcast reminds you that use of the Service
(or any part of the Service) in any manner that constitutes an infringement
of any copyrighted work is a violation of Comcast's Acceptable Use Policy
and may result in the suspension or termination of your Service account.

If you have any questions regarding this notice, you may direct them to
Comcast in writing by sending a letter or e-mail to:

Comcast Legal Response Center
Comcast Cable Communications, LLC
650 Centerton Road
Moorestown, NJ 08057 U.S.A.
Phone: (856) 317-7272
Fax: (856) 317-7319
E-mail: dmca@comcast.net

For more information regarding Comcast's copyright infringement policy,
procedures, and contact information, please read our Acceptable Use Policy
by clicking on the Terms of Service link at http://www.comcast.net.

Sincerely,
Comcast Legal Response Center

Copyright work(s) identified in the notification of claimed infringement:

Evidentiary Information:

Notice ID: ---
Asset: Gundam 00
Protocol: BitTorrent
IP Address: xx.xx.xx.xx
DNS: xx.xx.xx.comcast.net
File Name:
[Conclave-Mendoi]_Mobile_Suit_Gundam_00_-_01v2_[1280x720_H.264_AAC][871FCBC2
].mkv
File Size: 361374904
Timestamp: 12 Nov 2007 04:56:59 GMT
Last Seen Date: 12 Nov 2007 04:56:59 GMT
URL: http://tracker.radicand.org:5190/announce
Username (if available):

http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?t=58005





From April

File-Sharing to Bypass Censorship
Tracey Logan

By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, eliminating censorship of any kind.

This is the view of the man who helped kickstart the concept of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, Cambridge University's Professor Ross Anderson.

In his vision, people around the world would post stories via anonymous P2P services like those used to swap songs.

They would cover issues currently ignored by the major news services, said Prof Anderson.

"Currently, only news that's reckoned to be of interest to Americans and Western Europeans will be syndicated because that's where the money is," he told the BBC World Service programme, Go Digital.

"But if something happens in Peru that's of interest to viewers in China and Japan, it won't get anything like the priority for syndication.

"If you can break the grip of the news syndication services and allow the news collector to talk to the radio station or local newspaper then you can have much more efficient communications."

'Impossible to censor'

To enable this, Prof Anderson proposes a new and improved version of Usenet, the internet news service.

But what of fears that the infrastructure that allows such ad hoc news networks to grow might also be abused by criminals and terrorists?

Prof Anderson believes those fears are overstated. He argued that web watchdogs like the Internet Watch Foundation, which monitors internet-based child abuse, would provide the necessary policing functions.

This would require a high level of international agreement to be effective.

"The effect of peer-to-peer networks will be to make censorship difficult, if not impossible," said Prof Anderson.

"If there's material that everyone agrees is wicked, like child pornography, then it's possible to track it down and close it down. But if there's material that only one government says is wicked then, I'm sorry, but that's their tough luck".

Political obstacles

Commenting on Prof Anderson's ideas, technology analyst Bill Thompson welcomed the idea of new publishing tools that will weaken the grip on news of major news organisations.

Such P2P systems, he said, would give everybody a voice and allow personal testimonies to come out.

But the technology that makes those publishing tools accessible to everyone and sufficiently user-friendly will take longer to develop than Prof Anderson thinks, added Mr Thompson.

Prof Anderson's vision underestimates the political obstacles in the way of such developments, he said, and the question of censorship had not been clearly thought through.

"Once you build the technology to break censorship, you've broken censorship - even of the things you want censored," said Mr Thompson.

"Saying you can then control some parts of it, like images of child abuse, is being wilfully optimistic. And that's something that peer to peer advocates have to face."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/3611227.stm





Is Facebook Really Censoring Search When It Suits Them?
Michael Arrington

Earlier this month I wrote a blog post showing that a search for presidential candidate “Ron Paul” in Facebook Groups yields zero results. Facebook blamed the problem on a bug (unofficially, via comments by employees to that post), which was later corrected.

But a new issue may be harder to explain. On Tuesday, scores of mainstream press organizations (see WSJ, NYT, LATimes, CNET, AP, etc.). and bloggers reported on a privacy issue around part of Facebook’s new advertising platform.

MoveOn.org was leading the charge, and created a petition to demand Facebook not disclose personal information about a user without their explicit consent.

But now a side story is developing around the issue that relates to search censoring, again, at Facebook. Naturally all the press on the issue led people to go to Facebook to find the group MoveOn set up to organize their opposition to Facebook’s current privacy policy on this issue.

The group, which now has over 12,000 members, could not be located via search. Yesterday a search in Facebook Groups for “Privacy” began to return an error message saying “search is currently unavailable” (see image to right). But at the same time, searches for any other term yielded normal results.

Later search began working again, but the MoveOn Group was not included in the results even though it clearly had the term “privacy” in the title. A filtered search yielded seventeen results, but only sixteen could be viewed. The MoveOn group was likely the seventeenth, unseen result. See bottom image below.

MoveOn contacted Facebook to complain, and the search is now working. Facebook has not responded to a request for comment sent yesterday on why this may have happened, although we are in the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday.

MoveOn’s Adam Green, who alerted us of the issue, had this to say:

Facebook has the potential to revolutionize how we communicate with each other and organize around issues together in a 21st century democracy. But to succeed, they need the trust of their users. That trust will be undercut if they continue to put the wish lists of corporate advertisers ahead of the privacy interests of their users. It would also be undercut if it turned out our group was intentionally hidden from Facebook users — as opposed to it being an accident.

We’ll see if Facebook responds at all, and if they blame this on a bug as well.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/22...it-suits-them/





Sen. Feingold Speaks Out On Media Consolidation
FMQB

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) is the latest politician to speak out against FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's rush to alter the media ownership rules. Feingold has sent a letter to Martin voicing his concerns about the plan.

In a statement, Feingold says, "I have been fighting for years against the increasing consolidation of media ownership in this country. The 1996 Telecommunications Act, which I voted against, allowed for significant consolidation in radio ownership silencing many of the exceptional voices that are the strength of local radio. In the decade since the law’s passage, we have seen small and independent media outlets replaced by corporate monoliths. I have contacted FCC Chairman Kevin Martin with my concerns about the FCC’s failure to adequately address the harmful effects of media consolidation on local ownership, including minority-owned and women-owned broadcast stations. I also strongly support Senator Dorgan’s Media Ownership Act to improve transparency in media ownership rulemaking. I will push for adoption of Senator Dorgan’s bill and continue my efforts to ensure diverse and open media."

In his letter to Martin, Feingold wrote that he is "particularly concerned that the Commission has not sufficiently evaluated the impact of media consolidation on local programming, and may even be selectively collecting and releasing information to support its pre-conceived agenda," in reference to the delayed release of localism studies.

He concluded, "While the Commission has commissioned some reports and held some hearings on media ownership, there is no completed localism proceeding to inform the consideration of proposals in this area. In addition, the selective burying of reports raises questions about the objectivity of the FCC reports that were allowed to be published. Moreover, the limited hearings that have been held have confirmed that other issues of public importance, including the lack of women-owned and minority-owned broadcast stations, deserve more careful attention from the Commission. Keeping in mind the contentious media ownership proposal in 2003, I respectfully suggest the need for additional information gathering and opportunities for public comment before the Commission acts on this matter again."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=516246





51 More Lawmakers Oppose Performance Royalty For Radio
FMQB

Fifty-one more lawmakers have backed the bipartisan resolution to recognize the free airplay value of radio airplay. The resolution was introduced late last month to counter the proposed performance royalty rates for radio. According to the NAB, the resolution now has 104 co-sponsors, including its authors, Reps. Gene Green (D-TX) and Mike Conaway (R-TX).

"Congress should not impose any new performance fee, tax, royalty, or other charge relating to the public performance of sound recordings on a local radio station for broadcasting sound recordings over-the-air, or on any business for such public performance of sound recordings," reads House Concurrent Resolution 244.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=516946





Studio Chiefs Decry Interference

FCC's attempt to regulate cable is 'ill-considered'
Brooks Boliek

The heads of four major motion picture studios have told FCC chairman Kevin Martin that his attempts to regulate cable operators could damage the U.S. economy and harm the nation's competitiveness.

In a letter dated Tuesday, News Corp. president and COO Peter Chernin, Disney president and CEO Robert Iger, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman and NBC Universal president and CEO Jeff Zucker urged Martin to back off his attempts to restore cable regulation.

"Because of the vibrant competition in both programming and distribution, and because of the myriad of options and alternatives available to consumers, there is no conceivable justification for government intervention in this marketplace," the studio chiefs wrote. "Media content is one of the few industry sectors in which the U.S. is still pre-eminent on the world stage. Ill-considered and unjustified government interventions cannot be permitted to undermine this vibrant American industry."

Martin has been searching for ways to force the cable industry to offer its programming on a per-channel basis, and he might have found a way by invoking a provision in the 1984 Cable Act that says the government can regulate cable operators with 36 or more channels once they are available to 70% of the nation's households and at least 70% of those households subscribe to the service.

Martin contends that cable operators have passed the 70-70 threshold and has scheduled a vote on the FCC's "Video Competition Report" for Tuesday. If the findings of the competition report support Martin and are accepted by the commission, that could open the way for new regulation by the FCC. It was unclear exactly what was in the report; calls to the commissioners were not returned Tuesday.

There are questions about the report's veracity, however, and Republican commissioners Robert McDowell and Deborah Tate have both concluded that the data is faulty.

On Monday, McDowell said he would not support the report if it included the data that Martin is using to justify the new regulations.

Martin obtained his data from the Television and Cable Factbook, published annually by Warren Communications News. In the past, the agency's analysis included Warren, two other outside sources and its own annual cable price survey.

Warren chairman and publisher Paul Warren has said that his data is not conclusive because many cable operators refused to disclose the number of subscribers they have and the homes available.

McDowell contends that a change of that magnitude needs to be vetted in the rulemaking process with time for the public to comment.

If Martin cannot depend on the two GOP commissioners, then he would have to gain the support of Democratic commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein. Add the voices of the studio chiefs, and it makes it even more difficult to get a majority. To bolster their argument, the studio heads contend that the necessity for the 70-70 regulation has long passed.

"The reality is that consumers today enjoy a wider range of media choices than at any time in history," they wrote. "The range and diversity of media options available to consumers is almost overwhelming, and all of these options are increasing virtually every single day."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...a39f02476e9f3f





Study Linking Broadband, Job Creation Shows Need for Coherent US Policy
Jacqui Cheng

The adoption of broadband helps the economy by leading to more jobs and an overall increase in payroll, according to a new study. The research was conducted by the Sacramento Regional Research Institute on behalf of AT&T, and showed a strong correlation between broadband growth in California and the number of new jobs available, forecasting that even small increases in broadband use could substantially affect the state over the next 10 years. The findings suggest that a greater investment in broadband deployment would significantly benefit not only California, but the rest of the country.
"Not tonight, honey, I'm on the Internet"

The SRRI looked at California's overall broadband usage between 2001 and 2006, and found that adoption has more than tripled to 53.5 percent in 2006. During the same period of time, the use of dial-up to access the Internet decreased steadily (surprise!), and the two crossed in 2004. Historically, SRRI found that such an increase in broadband use was tied to an increase in jobs—more jobs were created than they would have during "business as usual." The institute estimates that for every one percentage point of the adult population using broadband, the employment growth rate rises by 0.075 percentage points—the payroll growth rate also grows by up to 0.088 percentage points.

Based on an estimate of "strong" broadband growth over the next several years (about 3.8 percent), SRRI says that California could see a cumulative 10-year gain of 1.8 million jobs and $132 billion in payroll. A "dramatic" increase in broadband adoption—7.6 percent growth per year—"could push the state to universal diffusion of broadband within the next 10 years," says the institute.

The findings underline a need for a coherent national broadband policy. President Bush's dream of universal broadband access by this year turned out to be just that—a dream—and the FCC has acknowledged the sad state of US broadband. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) recently outlined an ambitious goal to make universal 100Mbps broadband available throughout the US by 2015 and the House has finally passed a bill that would improve the Federal Communications Commission's broadband data collection, but more needs to be done to improve the state of US broadband.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...us-policy.html





The Future of Internet Immune Systems
Cory Doctorow

Bunhill Cemetery is just down the road from my flat in London. It’s a handsome old boneyard, a former plague pit (“Bone hill” -- as in, there are so many bones under there that the ground is actually kind of humped up into a hill). There are plenty of luminaries buried there -- John “Pilgrim’s Progress” Bunyan, William Blake, Daniel Defoe, and assorted Cromwells. But my favorite tomb is that of Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century statistician for whom Bayesian filtering is named.

Bayesian filtering is plenty useful. Here’s a simple example of how you might use a Bayesian filter. First, get a giant load of non-spam emails and feed them into a Bayesian program that counts how many times each word in their vocabulary appears, producing a statistical breakdown of the word-frequency in good emails.

Then, point the filter at a giant load of spam (if you’re having a hard time getting a hold of one, I have plenty to spare), and count the words in it. Now, for each new message that arrives in your inbox, have the filter count the relative word-frequencies and make a statistical prediction about whether the new message is spam or not (there are plenty of wrinkles in this formula, but this is the general idea).

The beauty of this approach is that you needn’t dream up “The Big Exhaustive List of Words and Phrases That Indicate a Message Is/Is Not Spam.” The filter naively calculates a statistical fingerprint for spam and not-spam, and checks the new messages against them.

This approach -- and similar ones -- are evolving into an immune system for the Internet, and like all immune systems, a little bit goes a long way, and too much makes you break out in hives.

ISPs are loading up their network centers with intrusion detection systems and tripwires that are supposed to stop attacks before they happen. For example, there’s the filter at the hotel I once stayed at in Jacksonville, Fla. Five minutes after I logged in, the network locked me out again. After an hour on the phone with tech support, it transpired that the network had noticed that the videogame I was playing systematically polled the other hosts on the network to check if they were running servers that I could join and play on. The network decided that this was a malicious port-scan and that it had better kick me off before I did anything naughty.

It only took five minutes for the software to lock me out, but it took well over an hour to find someone in tech support who understood what had happened and could reset the router so that I could get back online.

And right there is an example of the autoimmune disorder. Our network defenses are automated, instantaneous, and sweeping. But our fallback and oversight systems are slow, understaffed, and unresponsive. It takes a millionth of a second for the Transportation Security Administration’s body-cavity-search roulette wheel to decide that you’re a potential terrorist and stick you on a no-fly list, but getting un-Tuttle-Buttled is a nightmarish, months-long procedure that makes Orwell look like an optimist.

The tripwire that locks you out was fired-and-forgotten two years ago by an anonymous sysadmin with root access on the whole network. The outsourced help-desk schlub who unlocks your account can’t even spell "tripwire." The same goes for the algorithm that cut off your credit card because you got on an airplane to a different part of the world and then had the audacity to spend your money. (I’ve resigned myself to spending $50 on long-distance calls with Citibank every time I cross a border if I want to use my debit card while abroad.)

This problem exists in macro- and microcosm across the whole of our technologically mediated society. The “spamigation bots” run by the Business Software Alliance and the Music and Film Industry Association of America (MAFIAA) entertainment groups send out tens of thousands of automated copyright takedown notices to ISPs at a cost of pennies, with little or no human oversight. The people who get erroneously fingered as pirates (as a Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) spokesperson charmingly puts it, “When you go fishing with a dragnet, sometimes you catch a dolphin.”) spend days or weeks convincing their ISPs that they had the right to post their videos, music, and text-files.

We need an immune system. There are plenty of bad guys out there, and technology gives them force-multipliers (like the hackers who run 250,000-PC botnets). Still, there’s a terrible asymmetry in a world where defensive takedowns are automatic, but correcting mistaken takedowns is done by hand.
http://www.internetevolution.com/aut...doc_id=139358&





Expert Scares World with VoIP Hacking Proof
John E. Dunn

An expert has released a proof-of-concept program to show how easy it would be for criminals to eavesdrop on the VoIP-based phone calls of any company using the technology.

Called SIPtap, the software is able to monitor multiple Voice-over-IP (VoIP) call streams, listening in and recording them for remote inspection as .wav files. All that the criminal would need would be to infect a single PC inside the network with a Trojan incorporating these functions, although the hack would work at ISP level as well.

The program can index 'IP-tapped' calls by caller - using SIP identity information - and by recipient, and even by date. Running from August this year until the most recent tap on November 21st, SIPtap had no problems in extracting enough information on the test network to prove that call recording of any and every VoIP call at a hypothetical company was now a trivial exercise.

SIPtap demonstrates that the worst-case nightmares of VoIP vulnerability are now well within the capabilities of organised crime, which could use such a program to steal confidential data from companies, governments and even the police.

The demonstrator is the work of UK-based VoIP expert, Peter Cox, who co-founded and was CTO of firewall vendor BorderWare, before leaving the company last summer to start his own VoIP consultancy, due to be up and running by Spring 2008. He was inspired to write the software after conversations with encryption guru Phil Zimmermann, creator of Zfone, the latter designed to protect against SIPtap-like hacking by using VoIP call encryption.

"We are in the early days of VoIP, but there is a knowledge gap," said Cox, lamenting the naivety about VoIP's inherent security weaknesses among the mostly telecoms-oriented engineers building such systems. "Companies using VoIP internally think they are protected."

"The threat is that an attacker engineers a Trojan and has it sit there passively [on a network], recording calls from anywhere on the Internet," says Cox.

His advice was simple. "Apply the same vigour when building a VoIP network you would when building a website."

Cox is currently running a series of workshops on VoIP threats in conjunction with SIP Services Europe, and has published his own Video podcast on the topic.
http://www.techworld.com/security/ne...m?newsid=10736





Skype Encryption Stumps Police
Louis Charbonneau

German police are unable to decipher the encryption used in the internet telephone software Skype to monitor calls by suspected criminals and terrorists, Germany's top police officer said.

Skype allows users to make telephone calls over the internet from their computer to other Skype users free of charge.

Law enforcement agencies and intelligence services have used wiretaps since the telephone was invented, but implementing them is much more complex in the modern telecommunications market where the providers are often foreign companies.

"The encryption with Skype telephone software ... creates grave difficulties for us," Joerg Ziercke, president of Germany's Federal Police Office (BKA) told reporters at an annual gathering of security and law enforcement officials.

"We can't decipher it. That's why we're talking about source telecommunication surveillance - that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it's been decrypted."

Experts say Skype and other Voice over internet Protocol (VoIP) calling software are difficult to intercept because they work by breaking up voice data into small packets and switching them along thousands of router paths instead of a constant circuit between two parties, as with a traditional call.

Ziercke said they were not asking Skype to divulge its encryption keys or leave "back doors open" for German and other country's law enforcement authorities.

"There are no discussions with Skype. I don't think that would help," he said, adding that he did not want to harm the competitiveness of any company. "I don't think that any provider would go for that."

Ziercke said there was a vital need for German law enforcement agencies to have the ability to conduct on-line searches of computer hard drives of suspected terrorists using "Trojan horse" spyware.

These searches are especially important in cases where the suspects are aware that their internet traffic and phone calls may be monitored and choose to store sensitive information directly on their hard drives without emailing it.

Spyware computer searches are illegal in Germany, where people are sensitive about police surveillance due to the history of the Nazis' Gestapo secret police and the former East German Stasi.

Ziercke said worries were overblown and that on-line searches would need to be conducted only on rare occasions.

"We currently have 230 proceedings related to suspected Islamists," Ziercke said. "I can imagine that in two or three of those we would like to do this."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/st...ectid=10477899





Study: Internet Could Run Out of Capacity in Two Years
Grant Gross

Consumer and corporate use of the Internet could overload the current capacity and lead to brown-outs in two years unless backbone providers invest billions of dollars in new infrastructure, according to a study released Monday.

A flood of new video and other Web content could overwhelm the Internet by 2010 unless backbone providers invest up to US$137 billion in new capacity, more than double what service providers plan to invest, according to the study, by Nemertes Research Group, an independent analysis firm. In North America alone, backbone investments of $42 billion to $55 billion will be needed in the next three to five years to keep up with demand, Nemertes said.

The study is the first to “apply Moore’s Law (or something very like it) to the pace of application innovation on the ‘Net,” the study says. “Our findings indicate that although core fiber and switching/routing resources will scale nicely to support virtually any conceivable user demand, Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years.”

The study confirms long-time concerns of the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA), an advocacy group focused on upgrading U.S. broadband networks, said Bruce Mehlman, co-chairman of the group. The group, with members including AT&T, Level 3 Communications, Corning, Americans for Tax Reform and the American Council of the Blind, has been warning people of the coming “exaflood” of video and other Web content that could clog its pipes.

The study gives “good, hard, unique data” on the IIA concerns about network capacity, Mehlman said. The Nemertes study suggests demand for Web applications such as streaming and interactive video, peer-to-peer file transfers and music downloads will accelerate, creating a demand for more capacity. Close to three-quarters of U.S. Internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of video in May and viewed more than 8.3 billion video streams, according to research from comScore, an analysis group.

Internet users will create 161 exabytes of new data this year, and this exaflood is a positive development for Internet users and businesses, IIA says. An exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes or about 1.1 billion gigabytes. One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video.

Carriers and policy makers need to be aware of this demand, Mehlman added.

“Video has unleased an explosion of Internet content,” Mehlman said. “We think the exaflood is generally not well understood, and its investment implications not well defined.”

The responsibility for keeping up with this growing demand lies with backbone providers and national policy makers, added Mehlman, also executive director of the Technology CEO Council, a trade group, and a former assistant secretary of technology policy in the U.S. Department of Commerce.

“It takes a digital village,” he said. “Certainly, infrastructure providers have plenty to do. You’ve seen billions in investment, and you’re seeing ongoing billions more.”

U.S. lawmakers can also help in several ways, he said. For example, the U.S. Congress could require that home contractors who receive government assistance for building affordable housing include broadband connections in their houses, he said. Congress could also provide tax credits to help broadband providers add more capacity, he said.

Consumers also pay high taxes for telecommunication services, averaging about 13 percent on some telecom services, similar to the tax rate on tobacco and alcohol, Mehlman said. One tax on telecom service has remained in place since the 1898 Spanish-American War, when few U.S. residents had telephones, he noted.

“We think it’s a mistake to treat telecom like a luxury and tax it like a sin,” he said.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/11...city/index.php





Video, Interactivity Could Nab Web Users by '10
David Lieberman

Enjoy your speedy broadband Web access while you can.

The Web will start to seem pokey as early as 2010, as use of interactive and video-intensive services overwhelms local cable, phone and wireless Internet providers, a study by business technology analysts Nemertes Research has found.

"Users will experience a slow, subtle degradation, so it's back to the bad old days of dial-up," says Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson. "The cool stuff that you'll want to do will be such a pain in the rear that you won't do it."

Nemertes says that its study is the first to project traffic growth and compare it with plans to increase capacity.

The findings were embraced by the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA), a tech industry and public interest coalition that advocates tax and spending policies that favor investments in Web capacity.

"We're not trying to play Paul Revere and say that the Internet's going to fall," says IIA co-Chairman Larry Irving. "If we make the investments we need, then people will have the Internet experience that they want and deserve."

Nemertes says that the bottleneck will be where Internet traffic goes to the home from cable companies' coaxial cable lines and the copper wires that phone companies use for DSL.

Cable and phone companies provide broadband to 60.2 million homes, accounting for about 94% of the market, according to Leichtman Research Group.

To avoid a slowdown, these companies, and increasingly, wireless services providers in North America, must invest up to $55 billion, Nemertes says. That's almost 70% more than planned.

Much of that is needed for costly running of new high-capacity lines. Verizon is replacing copper lines with fiber optic for its FiOS service, which has 1.3 million Internet subscribers.

Johnson says that cable operators, with 32.6 million broadband customers, also must upgrade. Most of their Internet resources now are devoted to sending data to users - not users sending data. They'll need more capacity for the latter as more people transmit homemade music, photos and videos.

"Two years ago, nobody knew what YouTube was," Johnson says. "Now, it's generating 27 petabytes (27 million gigabytes) of data per month."

Schools, hospitals and businesses could add to the flood as they use the Web for long-distance education, health care services and videoconferencing.

Service providers might not appreciate how fast Web demand is growing, Johnson says: "Comcast doesn't know what's going on in AT&T's network, and vice versa. Researchers are increasingly shut out. So nobody's getting good, global knowledge about the Internet."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/200... 7S13GXIjtBAF





A Guerrilla Video Site Meets MTV
Robert Levine

Vice magazine has built a small media empire out of a raw, ironic sensibility, risqué photographs and a willingness to deal in taboo subjects.

On VBS.tv, the video Web site the company runs, viewers can find short videos about independent music, extreme sports and, of course, some nudity. But there are also a surprising number of ambitious news reports, like an interview with Hezbollah’s self-proclaimed “mayor of Beirut,” investigations of environmental abuse, and a story about a Colombian date-rape drug.

What’s even more surprising is the company that finances most of these projects: Viacom.

Late last year, the Viacom-owned MTV Networks Music and Logo Group made a deal to start VBS, with financing from MTV and content from Vice, which also sells ads.

“They gave me a pitch of ’60 Minutes’-meets-‘Jackass,’” said Jeff Yapp, the executive vice president for program enterprises for the MTV Networks music group.

In return for its investment — which is not mentioned on the VBS site — MTV gets a low-cost laboratory in which to experiment with Internet video programming as it struggles to adjust to a world where online content is chipping away at television’s dominance.

MTV virtually owned youth culture on television a decade ago but has not translated that success online. Viacom missed its chance to buy MySpace, a failure that many believe cost Tom Freston, the company’s former chief executive, his job.

“MTV’s online distribution strategy has been one of confusion,” said Michael Wolf, a research director at ABI Research. “I think they could use a content partner if it helps them bring in a fresh perspective.”

Major media companies like Viacom have been looking to smaller firms like Vice to lead them through the digital wilderness. But this deal will also give MTV Networks a source of new television programming, since it has the rights to show VBS content on any of its channels worldwide. MTV Latin America has already shown four half-hour programs assembled from VBS content, and the first United States VBS special will appear Saturday on MTV2. More could follow.

“We were at this place in time when all the great creative energy was around music videos,” said Van Toffler, president of the MTV Networks music group. “Now you see all that energy happening again.”

VBS is set up as a separate venture, although neither Vice nor MTV Networks would discuss the exact terms of the deal. The two companies also work together on several other projects.

Vice did some work on the marketing of the MTV Networks video game Rock Band and consulted on a virtual world project the company is working on. Vice also has a publishing deal with MTV Books, under which it has released two titles; a third, “The Vice Photo Book,” which collects images from the magazine’s history, is due out Dec. 1.

Vice was started in Montreal in 1994 by Shane Smith, Suroosh Alvi and Gavin McInnes when all three were on welfare, they have said. During the late ’90s, the company was bought by Richard Szalwinski, a Canadian software millionaire who made big plans for expansion and moved the operation to New York.

The magazine quickly became known for politically incorrect, sometimes racially charged, humor and photographs from Terry Richardson and Ryan McGinley. The company opened several retail stores that sold the kind of street fashion the magazine advertised.
As the dot-com boom ended, however, “everything fell by the wayside,” Mr. Smith said. In 2000, the three founders bought the company back, closed the stores and focused on the media business. The company now controls 13 foreign editions of the magazine, published with partners around the world, and runs an independent record label.

As Vice added international editions, the perspective of the founders began to change.

“The world is much bigger than the Lower East Side and the East Village,” Mr. Alvi said. So the magazine started to cover more serious issues, usually in its own inimitable style. One recent issue about Iraq, written mostly by people there, portrayed daily life in that country; in true Vice fashion it included an interview with an Iraqi prostitute in Syria.

The deal with MTV gives Vice the resources to apply its D.I.Y. approach in a new medium, and it has enlisted Spike Jonze, the film director, as VBS creative director. “I don’t care if it’s for Internet or TV or film or mobile phones, I want to create the best content,” Mr. Smith said.

Although VBS shoots in standard-definition video, so its footage can be used on television, its programming owes little to the medium’s conventions. It sends out correspondents in teams of three — a producer, a cameraman and a host who expresses his opinion freely. There are no lights or makeup.

“Our aesthetic is raw,” said Bernardo Loyola, an editor at VBS. “If it’s raggedy, if they’re hung over, it’s part of the shoot.”

At least one VBS series has already worked out better than MTV Networks might have hoped. Mr. Loyola and Monica Hampton, whom VBS hired from the film industry, edited footage Mr. Alvi and his friends shot in Iraq into “Heavy Metal in Baghdad,” a documentary about an Iraqi hard rock band that loses its practice space to an explosion and goes to Syria as refugees. In September, the movie received positive reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival, and Mr. Alvi said that a distribution deal would be announced shortly.

“We made a feature-length documentary by accident,” said Mr. Alvi, who appeared in the film. “These are the people who are getting affected by this war.”

VBS is also beginning to build an audience online. In August, the site had 184,000 unique viewers from the United States, according to the Internet traffic monitor ComScore; the company says the actual number is much higher.

That’s a smaller audience than some other online video sites; collegehumor.com had 1.3 million viewers in the same month. But MTV has yet to put its promotional muscle behind VBS. Although such numbers are small compared with television, the site’s perspective seems to intrigue advertisers, and it already has attracted record companies and fashion labels.

“This is a singular vision. It’s not cats playing with yarn,” said Todd Krieger, a senior vice president at Denuo, a division of the advertising giant Publicis Group. “What MTV is getting out of it is a relationship with people who have a following, and they have a certain style.”

That style may have mellowed with age. Mr. McInnes, who had become known for making racially charged remarks, perhaps as pranks, fell out of day-to-day involvement with the company. He still writes the withering fashion dos-and-don’ts section that has become a key part of the magazine.

Vice is still owned by the founders and several employees, and Mr. Smith said that it was profitable, although he acknowledged exaggerating the company’s success in the past. “After we bought the company I’d bang the drum and say how great we were doing,” he said. “But we’ve always had to make money. It’s not like we could go to the bank and get money — they’d look at us and run away.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/bu...ia/19vice.html





Hollywood Producer of Varied Interests, Many Hits, but Little Fame
Allison Hope Weiner

Brian Grazer, one of the most successful producers in Hollywood, would seem to be a memorable guest, with his energetic manner and elaborately spiked hair. But to make sure he is not forgotten, he will often leave behind a small photo of himself in an inexpensive heart-shaped frame after attending a dinner or party, hiding it among his host’s family photographs.

Over the years, he has left these photos at the homes of movie executives, socialites and even one in Fidel Castro’s military compound. “When I first started doing it, some people got really angry,” Mr. Grazer recalled. “That made me continue doing it. I get to see how long it takes for them to find it and whether they think it’s funny. It’s interesting to see what they’ll do with it.”

There is another level to the joke: despite Mr. Grazer’s enormous success in the movie business, his public profile remains relatively slight when compared with his Hollywood peers. Imagine Entertainment, founded 20 years ago by Mr. Grazer and the director Ron Howard, has produced a strong slate of films, including “Liar Liar,” “Eight Mile,” “Inside Man,” “A Beautiful Mind” and “The Da Vinci Code.” His latest, “American Gangster,” opened two weeks ago as the top film in the country, taking in more than $43 million at the box office its first weekend.

The diversity of his films makes Mr. Grazer an anomaly in Hollywood, where careers are typically built on well-defined brands. Everyone knows what a Steven Spielberg movie is, or a Jerry Bruckheimer film. But few people could describe a Brian Grazer project, except to say that it will probably make a lot of money.

Even for the most discerning moviegoer, there is no obvious common theme among his movies. Instead, he operates under the assumption that his own interests reflect those of the public. More often than not, he is right.

“He’s curious, smart and has a sixth sense in many ways for what the public wants and for what will appeal to talent,” said Ron Meyer, the president of Universal Studios, which finances Imagine’s films. He added, “If they end up being Oscar-contending films, that’s a wonderful bonus.”

In part, this eclecticism is a product of how Mr. Grazer works, turning his own passions into fodder for a film or a television show. For the last 20 years, Mr. Grazer has met each week with a person who is an expert in science, medicine, politics, fashion, religion — anything other than entertainment. He is so serious about the meetings that he has a staff member whose job it is to find interesting people.

The weekly get-togethers have led to some of Mr. Grazer’s most successful ideas. After meeting with five of the top trial lawyers in the country, Mr. Grazer came up with the idea for “Liar Liar.” “Eight Mile” came about because he had met Chuck D, the lead singer for Public Enemy, and Slick Rick, a rapper from the 1980s. A meeting with a former F.B.I. agent, Christopher Whitcomb, led to “The F.B.I.,” a new show for Fox.

“I like learning stuff. The more information you can get about a person or a subject, the more you can pour into a potential project,” Mr. Grazer said. “I made a decision to do different things. I want to do things that have a better chance of being thought of as original. I do everything I can to disrupt my comfort zone.”

Despite having won Oscars as well as most other film and television awards, Mr. Grazer remains largely unknown outside Hollywood. And while he acknowledges the success of his work, he still craves public recognition.

Mr. Grazer’s tendency to base shows on his own curiosities may hurt him in television, where brand names with identifiable styles like Mr. Bruckheimer or Dick Wolf tend to flourish. Imagine Entertainment has produced a wide variety of acclaimed series, including “Felicity,” “Sports Night,” “Arrested Development,” “Friday Night Lights” and “24,” but only the Fox drama “24” has achieved mainstream commercial success.

“I feel like our television company is most like our feature company. For better or for worse, I don’t think we have an easily defined brand,” said David Nevins, president of Imagine Television. “We try to avoid formula television. Although ‘24’ is a hit, we’ve not spent a lot of time trying to copy what makes ‘24’ a hit. We’re not going to do ‘24 Miami.’”

Mr. Grazer’s public profile has risen substantially over the last year — although not always for the reasons he wished. He weathered a public split from his wife of almost 10 years, the novelist Gigi Levangie Grazer, and was also caught up in an internal fight at The Los Angeles Times, which had asked him to edit a special section as a guest.

Days before the section was supposed to run, reports surfaced about a romantic relationship between a representative for Imagine and a Times editor. Eventually, The Times chose not to publish the section. Mr. Grazer was deeply upset by the episode and remains disappointed in the paper’s decision.

Despite his success and his status as a seasoned Hollywood player — he counts Sumner M. Redstone and other moguls among his closest friends — Mr. Grazer remains oddly insecure. He resists confrontation, often preferring to have other people in his company deliver bad news. He wears a conservative uniform to work each day — black pants, a white shirt and skinny black tie — because he fears looking like the typical Hollywood producer struggling to appear young.

Before he makes most decisions, he engages in an informal survey to garner the opinions of his friends. “I try things on people to test them out,” Mr. Grazer said. “Before I made ‘Eight Mile,’ I was nervous that I might be empowering someone who was not only misogynistic, but homophobic. So when I had dinner with Tom Hanks, I asked him if I was empowering the wrong person. He said no; the guy isn’t taken seriously. He talks through a character.”

The one area in which Mr. Grazer is secure is in his ability to spot talent. His first film, “Night Shift,” starred Michael Keaton — then unknown — and his second, “Splash,” made a movie star of Mr. Hanks. Both were directed by Mr. Howard, then still better known as Richie Cunningham from “Happy Days.”

Mr. Grazer almost passed up a partnership with Mr. Howard because he feared the director’s celebrity would overshadow his own role in the company. “He was just too famous for me,” Mr. Grazer said. “I felt that no matter how hard I could work, it would always be gigantically eclipsed by him.”

Mr. Howard said, “We’ve always been aware of the disadvantage of being a company that in fact wasn’t entirely driven by the identities of Brian and me. But to a degree, that’s kind of unavoidable. I never wanted a great director, young or old, to feel like I was going to sit as a principal in the company and sit there over their shoulder and try to co-direct the movie. Brian feels that to a degree as a producer as well.”

Mr. Grazer’s next projects seem conventional by comparison to his other works. “The F.B.I.,” which is scheduled for broadcast next year, will compete on networks already heavy with police procedurals. But Mr. Grazer insisted that his show won’t play it safe.

“I want to do the opposite of corny with the ‘F.B.I.’ series — something really edgy. When I was making ‘Eight Mile,’ I was desperate to avoid being corny. I’d been talking to Dr. Dre for a year to try and get as much guidance as possible. And one day he finally just said, ‘Hey, don’t clown out our world,’” Mr. Grazer said. “So, now, I try to apply that axiom. I don’t want to clown out the F.B.I. world.”

Another coming project, “Angels and Demons,” a follow-up to “The Da Vinci Code,” represents something new for Mr. Grazer — a sequel, the first his company has produced. Sequels are, of course, the ultimate safe bet in Hollywood, but he wants the approach this time to be less reverential than in “The Da Vinci Code.”

“I probably should have a brand,” Mr. Grazer said, “but I think you can’t get the best artists to work for you if you’re branded. I get the trade-off, and I really would like to be more famous for my work, get more credit for my achievements. We all want more of that. But on the other hand, if you get too big — like it says in ‘American Gangster’ — success is your enemy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/bu.../19grazer.html





Amway Adds Entertainment to Product Line
Brooks Barnes

Amway, the door-to-door peddler of vitamins and soap, wants to reinvent how Hollywood sells entertainment.

The owners of the multilevel marketing company are pouring millions of dollars into a new online store called Fanista (pronounced fa-NEE-sta). The Web site, set to make its public debut this week, will initially sell DVDs and CDs.

In the coming months it plans to add video games, digital downloads and books.

People can simply use Fanista as a place to shop. But the company hopes most consumers will join as members — signing up is free — and then recruit their friends.

The carrot: If your friend joins and buys something, identifying you as the reason for joining, you get 5 percent of the sale in cash or credit.

Think of it as part Amazon (online retail), part MySpace (social network) and part Amway (direct pitch from somebody you know).

“The distribution system for the entertainment business is broken,” said Daniel H. Adler, Fanista’s founder. “We’re pioneering a new model.”

A newfangled Internet business pops up every few weeks in Hollywood and promises to revolutionize something or other. But movie studios and music labels are taking the upstart seriously.

Money is a reason: Alticor, the owner of Amway and Fanista’s sole financial backer, says it generates about $6 billion in annual revenue.

“Those are awfully deep pockets,” said the writer and entrepreneur Norman Lear, who helped connect Mr. Adler with the direct-sales giant.

Through his various business partners and friends in Hollywood, Mr. Lear knew that Mr. Adler was tinkering with a new Web-based distribution system and that Alticor was looking for a new angle, perhaps in entertainment.

More important, Mr. Adler, 44, is an entertainment insider. He formerly worked at the Creative Artists Agency, where he led the new-media division, and Walt Disney, where he was a creative developer, or “imagineer.”

Mr. Adler helped introduce LidRock, which created a stir in 2004 by distributing music on miniature CDs tucked inside the lids of movie theater soda cups.

“His Rolodex of relationships is what makes this different,” said Sherry Lansing, the former chairwoman of Paramount.

Mr. Adler aims to exploit the increasingly cynical view of consumers, particularly young ones, about the way Hollywood pushes its wares.

“Regardless of what the big marketing campaign says is hot, regardless of what the big-name critic says is good, people make entertainment purchases based on the recommendations of people they encounter directly,” he said. “That is the only authentic voice.”

The company arrives as Hollywood experiments with the Web to build a more direct relationship with consumers.

The rock band Radiohead last month allowed fans to set their own price for digital downloads, while Blockbuster recently signed a deal with Facebook to promote movie rentals. When members of the social network rent films from Blockbuster.com, they will be encouraged to have their movie choice broadcast to all their Facebook contacts.

Some Internet analysts say Fanista faces an uphill battle, however. “It’s certainly interesting, but I’m not completely sold on what they’re trying to do,” said David Card, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research who focuses on online media. “Historically, with the exception of Amazon and Wal-Mart, the shopping mall approach hasn’t worked online.”

Amway also suffers from an image problem because of lingering memories of its past legal troubles. Most prominently, the company pleaded guilty in 1983 to defrauding the Canadian government and paid $25 million in fines.

In recent years, India, China and Britain have investigated the company’s business practices.

Conscious of the negative connotation of multilevel marketing, Fanista coined a happier term. The site describes the sales model to users as “common interest commerce.” The site is currently being tested and operates independently of Alticor.

On Fanista, members create and customize profiles where they list favorite DVDs and CDs — preferably to Fanista, ones in its inventory of about 500,000 titles.

Mr. Adler, for instance, added the movie “Fletch” to his home page. Members are then asked to write reviews for each item.

“If you love good comedy, this is a must,” wrote Mr. Adler of the 1985 film, which stars Chevy Chase as a wisecracking reporter.

The next step is to invite friends to join. If they become members and identify you as the reason, you will always earn a 5 percent commission on any purchases they make on the site. Fanista has additional hooks, too.

If, for instance, your friends’ purchases within a year total $100, you get a 5 percent discount on any Fanista purchases.

The idea is that once people are brought inside the site they will make impulse purchases by reading reviews from their circle of friends or people who are passionate enough about items to write personal reviews.

“We think people want a richer and more intuitive shopping experience, and that’s what we really are trying to deliver,” Mr. Adler said.

Fanista, developed in secrecy over the last two years, plans to make noise in multiple ways, Mr. Adler said. Celebrities, attracted partly though Mr. Adler’s contacts in Hollywood, will be members, while the company also hopes to get exclusive access to certain new releases from studios and record labels.

Statistics about online shopping comfort Mr. Adler as he introduces Fanista to the public. More consumers shop online for books, DVDs and music than any other product, according to iCrossing. According to Nielsen SoundScan, about 12 percent of physical album purchases are made over the Internet.

And 75 percent of online shoppers seek consumer reviews to make purchase decisions, according to Jupiter Research.

Fanista’s multilevel marketing, also called affiliate marketing, has a bad reputation because it can be confused with illegal pyramid, or Ponzi, schemes.

Multilevel marketing companies — Amway, founded in 1959, is perhaps the best known but there are others, including Avon — sell products through part-time sales representatives who typically work from home.

Amway, which now generates most of its income overseas, primarily sells health and beauty products.

Multilevel marketing is legal if money is earned on sales of products. The technique becomes illegal if participants are paid primarily for recruiting new members, or if they are required to buy more product than they can sell.

Alticor decided to finance Mr. Adler’s idea because it sees entertainment as an expansion opportunity, according to Bill Payne, the chief marketing officer. “That world is a mystery to us in many ways,” he said. “We saw Dan’s vision as a chance to learn about the attractiveness of the segment.”

The company has dabbled in entertainment before. In the 1980s, Amway owned a large string of radio stations. And the billionaire co-founder of Amway, Richard DeVos, has contributed to Gospel Communications, which distributes evangelical films and operates a popular Christian Web site.

Mr. Payne declined to say how much money Amway was sinking into Fanista, as did Mr. Adler.

Building Fanista may be more expensive than the company thinks, according to Mr. Card of Jupiter Research. “They will need to spend some money getting in people’s faces,” he said. “The Internet is a viral medium, but that is a very risky way to build a media company.”

Another worry involves people who try to game the system. An online store built on the concept of “authentic voice” will crumble quickly if marketers pop up as members, said Mr. Card.

Mr. Adler acknowledges he has never been a person to whom “no” means a lot. He decided to pursue a career in entertainment after seeing a Bruce Springsteen concert in 1978.

“I weaseled myself backstage and asked him to autograph a dollar bill,” he said.

His arrival in Hollywood was equally brazen. He wrote Michael D. Eisner, who was a rising entertainment executive at the time, a letter about how he had worked at a Vermont summer camp that Mr. Eisner’s children attended.

Mr. Eisner pulled strings and Mr. Adler was soon an assistant to one of the industry’s most powerful figures, Michael S. Ovitz.

On a recent afternoon at his offices in Beverly Hills, Mr. Adler leaped up several flights of stairs — past a suite where Sylvester Stallone is putting the finishing touches on a new installment of “Rambo” — to a floor where Fanista engineers were working out bugs.

The red and gray Web site was suffering from an overeager welcome video. “Share your passions ...buy entertainment,” the welcome screen flashed over and over again as a rock song blared.

“That needs to be fixed,” Mr. Adler said. “We want to be inviting, not hard sell.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/bu...a/20amway.html





The Munchkins Receive Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles


UPI Photo/Jim Ruymen

Honorary Mayor of Hollywood, Johnny Grant, center with black hat, honors The Munchkins from "The Wizard of Oz" as they receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles on November 20, 2007. The Munchkins from left: Mickey Carroll, the Town Crier; Clarence Swensen, a Munchkin soldier, Jerry Maren, part of the Lollipop Guild; Karl Slover, the Main Trumpeter; Ruth Duccini, a Munchkin villager; Margaret Pelligrini, the 'sleepyhead' Munchkin and Meinhardt Raabe, the coroner. Back row from left: Ted Bulthaup, star sponsor and owner of a Trip to the Movies Theatre in Chicago, Hollywood Chamber Chairman Jeff Briggs, Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti, Johnny Grant, Tom LaBonge, Los Angeles Councilman, and Leron Gubler, Chamber President & CEO.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Enterta...photo/gallery/





Hollywood and Strikers Watch Clock
Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes

Sun Tzu, the Chinese sage, warned of the danger in prolonged conflict. “Let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns,” he wrote in “The Art of War.”

In the next week, that advice will probably be on the mind of David Young, a leader of Hollywood’s striking writers, who has closely studied the famous treatise in his time as a hard-nosed union organizer. Now 16 days into a work stoppage, screenwriters and their employers are scheduled to talk on Monday for the first time since Nov. 4.

A rapid settlement would jump-start the entertainment industry. But anything less, and Mr. Young and the writers could be stuck on the wrong side of yet another of the master’s admonitions: “Not to besiege walled cities if it can possibly be avoided.”

A protracted war, much like the sides fought during a five-month strike in 1988, would pose a particular threat for writers. They have been operating under a strategy intended to shock their employers into an early settlement by shutting down as much television production as possible before alternative programs were in place or guild morale began to flag. A lengthy strike, however, could sap the staying power of the writers, who do not have the resources their media conglomerate opponents possess.

Screenwriters, represented by the Writers Guild of America East and the Writers Guild of America West, took to the streets of Hollywood with supporters from other unions on Tuesday afternoon in a demonstration that was meant to telegraph resolve. The show was complete with a performance by Alicia Keys and the presence of eight aging actors who played Munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz.”

“We’re here to show our teeth,” Patric M. Verrone, president of the West Coast guild, said in kicking off the rally attended by thousands. Later, the actress Sandra Oh stepped up the anticorporate tone, suggesting that the crowd boycott Disneyland.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates labor contracts for the studios and networks, maintained silence.

To make progress despite continued animosity, the sides would have to close a wide bargaining gap — and no public signals have shown that either is ready to make a substantial move.

For the sale of shows and movies via the Internet, producers have been seeking to impose a payment structure that mirrors the residuals paid over the years for home video showings. Writers, deriding that formula almost from the time they agreed to it two decades ago, have sought far more. Similarly, the sides are in sharp dispute over writer payments for free showings of programs on the Web.

Representatives for both sides declined to discuss the coming talks, in keeping with a mutual agreement not to discuss them publicly.

In e-mailed communications, union representatives told members that employers had been forced back to the table by heavy pressure from the writers. Numerous shows, including “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Two and a Half Men,” have ceased work on previously written scripts because the writer-producers who oversee these shows withheld their producing services. But the renewed discussions were also intended to lure these writer-producers, known as show runners, into resuming their nonwriting duties.

“We agreed at a meeting a couple of weeks ago that if the C.E.O.’s went back to the table then we would go back in our producer capacity,” said Neal Baer, the show runner for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

Mr. Baer said many of the show runners he knows have already returned — albeit quietly. At least some television executives have hopes that going back to the table would give cover for others to return to work, notably late-night comedians whose shows were instantly shut by the strike. NBC Universal notified the 100 or so employees of “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on Nov. 6 that they could be laid off as of Nov. 19. So far the company has not done that.

Television networks and movie studios are well positioned to withstand a prolonged walkout, Wall Street analysts say. Because of widespread consolidation in the industry, all of the big players are housed inside giant conglomerates. The lights do not even flicker at General Electric, which had $163.4 billion in annual revenue last year, if its $16 billion NBC Universal unit has a bad quarter or even year.

Even the CBS Corporation, viewed as the most vulnerable to a strike because television makes up the bulk of its business, is not in any immediate financial danger. Ratings for the late-night shows have not dipped drastically. And the company has enough original episodes of prime-time shows to stretch into January.

And some studios and investors are actually bullish about the media companies’ near-term fortunes — and largely because of the strike. “My guess is that during fiscal 2008, a strike is probably a positive for us,” as lower production costs would more than make up for any loses from advertising, said Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation, in a conference call with analysts on Nov. 7.

Mr. Young, who is executive director of the West Coast guild, is well acquainted with corporate strength, something he confronted during the mid-1990s as a leader in the unions that sought unsuccessfully to organize garment workers employed by Guess Inc.
Writing of that campaign in the fall/winter 2005 issue of The American Sociologist, Edna Bonacich, a sociologist who worked closely with Mr. Young both then and later at the writers guild, noted that “he studied Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’ with deep attention, trying to find its applicability to union struggles.” (The fascination has been shared by modern students of conflict as diverse as Douglas MacArthur, Lee Atwater and Michael S. Ovitz.)Should Mr. Young and his colleagues make only small gains next week, they could make a midcourse correction in their strike strategy and sidestep the dangers of a protracted fight against a strong opponent. They could return to work without a contract, with an eye toward joining the much larger Screen Actors Guild in a renewed strike next June.

Yet another threat to be confronted is the possibility that the Directors Guild of America, its own deal set to expire next June, will soon open its own negotiations and perhaps reach an accommodation with companies, undercutting the writers’ bargaining stance.

In an e-mail message last week, Peter Lefcourt, who is on the board of the West Coast writers guild, told writers who also belong to the directors guild that any near-term move by companies to talk with directors would be like “Hitler dangling a separate peace in front of Stalin.”

Gil Cates, who will lead the directors guild in its negotiations, told Mr. Lefcourt in an e-mailed response that his fellow members could do without the writers’ advice. “It will be the membership and the membership only who will make the decision” about accepting any deal, Mr. Cates wrote.

Progress on any front would be welcomed by many of the directors, production managers, actors, assistants and others who are being shut out of work.

In a grass-roots movement, hundreds of such workers are now trying to organize their own “Strike a Deal” demonstration in Hollywood on Dec. 2.

“It was born out of frustration by people who were working on films and television shows,” said Christopher L. Griffin, a producer of the “Nip/Tuck” series on the FX Network. “There’s a general sense of desperation and helplessness.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/bu.../21strike.html





Ontario School Board Bans Fantasy Book
AP

A Roman Catholic school board in Ontario ordered the popular fantasy book "The Golden Compass" taken off library shelves at dozens of schools Thursday after receiving a complaint about the author referring to himself as an atheist.

Similar concerns prompted a Catholic organization in the U.S. to urge parents to boycott a movie version of the book starring Nicole Kidman.

The board for Catholic schools in Ontario's Halton region said a complaint was lodged after British author Philip Pullman stated in an interview that he is an atheist.

"We have a policy and procedure whereby individual parents, staff, students or community members can apply to have material reviewed. That's what happened in this case," said Rick MacDonald, the board's superintendent of curriculum services.

The board, which oversees 43 Catholic elementary and secondary schools, has not released the identity of the complainant. It also removed two other books in Pullman's "Dark Materials" trilogy as a precaution.

While "The Golden Compass" was first published in 1995, attention was drawn to the book by the film, which opens next month, MacDonald said.

Pullman has made provocative statements in the past, telling the Washington Post in 2001 that he was "trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief."

In 2003, he said that compared to the Harry Potter series, his books had been "flying under the radar, saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are about killing God."

In the U.S., the Catholic League has criticized Pullman's trilogy for bashing Christianity and promoting atheism. The organization urged parents to boycott the movie. The league also boycotted the movie adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code," which went on to become one of biggest movies of 2006.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...&feed=rss.news





Movie Director Uses BitTorrent as Lawyers Chase Those Downloading His Movie
enigmax

The director of a successful Norwegian ‘Kill Bill’ parody movie who admits to downloading TV shows via BitTorrent himself, doesn’t support his distributor as they take legal action against his fans. Fourteen people accused of sharing the movie have been reported to the police by MPA copyright lawyer, Espen Tøndel.

Tommy Wirkola is the director of ‘Kill Bill’ parody, ‘Kill Buljo‘, which has been one of this years most discussed Norwegian movies.

Having started as a joke and despite its feeble $163,700 budget, its been a success, and has so far pulled in 90,000 domestic admissions and 62,000 DVD sales in 26 territories.

Inevitably, ‘Kill Buljo’ was available for download from file-sharing networks around 6 weeks before the DVD was due its commercial release.

However, in a interview with Thomas Talseth of VG Nett, director Wirkola reveals that he’s not concerned about people downloading the movie and feels that they probably wouldn’t have bought it anyway, which is quite an unusual stance for someone in the movie industry.

This article is in part, direct translation of the original Norwegian interview. Many thanks to Håvard and RayJoha.

Wirkola believes it is an honor to have people download your movie and reveals he is a BitTorrent user himself, downloading TV-shows such as ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘South Park’. He explains why:

“I download lots of TV-shows, I’ll admit that. But it’s also about them already having been aired on TV, and have kinda been accessible for free already. I also think it’s stupid to have to wait for six or seven months to get to watch a TV-show that’s already been aired in the USA.”

Despite the pro-sharing stance of Kill Buljo’s director, the distributor of the movie CCV and their lawyer (uh oh, here he is again) Espen Tøndel, are going on the offensive against BitTorrent users. This week they sent a letter to the Norwegian police wishing to press charges against 14 individuals it accuses of sharing ‘Kill Buljo’ on The Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker.

Director Tommy Wirkola doesn’t think that downloading causes any problems, on the contrary, he believes the opposite is true:

“I understand that CCV is pressing charges, and feel the need to protect their movie. But it’s flattering that people are making copies of the movie and releasing it on the internet. Besides, all movies today are released onto the web. It would have been worse if no one wanted to share the movie.”

“The artist in you feels some pride?” asks Thomas Talseth, the interviewer.

“Yes, you can say that” admits Wirkola. “I love watching movies in the cinema, in large theatres, and I don’t like the bad quality you often find on the versions floating around online. But I have no moral position on this.”

Lawyer Espen Tøndel, representing both CCV and Norwegian Videogramforening (they distribute all films in Norway), disapproves of Wirkola’s downloading habit:

“No, he shouldn’t be doing that” Tøndel tells VG adding that there’s no difference in downloading TV-shows or motion picture movies: “The laws on copyright have not introduced any way to make a difference between this kind of material, independently of what sequence the TV-show has been aired around the globe.”

Tøndel is making quite a noise around Norway at the moment. It’s a shame he doesn’t listen to people like Wirkola and Eric Wilkinson - he might learn something.
http://torrentfreak.com/movie-direct...orrent-071123/





Lawmakers Urge Google/DoubleClick Deal Scrutiny

Two U.S. senators on the antitrust subcommittee urged the Federal Trade Commission's chairman to submit Google Inc's (GOOG.O) purchase of advertising company DoubleClick to "serious scrutiny."

Sen. Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat, and Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, argued that Google had a dominant position in a form of Internet advertising called contextual ads while DoubleClick was a market leader in display advertising.

They said industry experts believed the deal could harm competition on the Web.

"While we have not reached any definitive conclusion regarding this issue, we urge that you only approve the merger if you determine that it will not cause any substantial lessening of competition with respect to Internet advertising," they wrote.

Kohl and Hatch also raised questions about privacy implications since both Google and DoubleClick collect information about Web usage.

"We believe that this deal raises fundamental consumer privacy concerns worthy of serious scrutiny," the letter said.

FTC spokeswoman Nancy Judy said Chairman Deborah Majoras had received the letter but that it would inappropriate for her to comment on it.

Google said in a statement it had already discussed the privacy and market share questions with the FTC.

"We remain confident that the FTC will conclude that this deal is good for consumers, advertisers and Web site publishers," Google said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...111900994.html





Wholesaling of D Block Spectrum Okayed by FCC
Darren Murph

Landing an agreement to create a worldwide mobile broadband standard with the freed up 700MHz band isn't the only good news going on in the spectrum world, as the FCC has also waived a previous regulation that would require winners of the D block segment to not wholesale more than 50-percent of its capacity. Now, the winner will be able to wholesale up to 100-percent of the capacity so long as it abides by the other guidelines surrounding D block, most notable of which is the provision that requires the victorious bidder to "build out a nationwide wireless network that is good enough to meet public safety specifications for coverage and redundancy." The move is seen as one that will widen the range of potential bidders and encourage small business participation, and for consumers, it could offer up more competition in the mobile services marketplace. Sounds like a surefire win-win, eh?
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/19/w...okayed-by-fcc/





After Global Agreement, Companies May Bid Higher at Wireless Auction in U.S.
Victoria Shannon

When and if Google, Apple, Yahoo and the other potential bidders participate in the auction for wireless licenses in the United States in January, the prices they offer could be the first measure of the impact of the monthlong global radio-frequency spectrum conference that ended in Geneva on Friday.

The companies’ willingness to bet large amounts of money on the licenses will demonstrate, in part, their confidence in the global commercial market for services in a particular part of the spectrum, the versatile 700-megahertz band of ultra-high frequencies.

Their confidence would probably be shakier — and their bids lower — if that band had not been blessed last week by the more than 150 countries represented at the World Radiocommunication Conference, which meets every four to five years to evaluate global rules on how best to manage the airwaves. Google has said it might bid for a United States wireless license, although applications are not due until Dec. 3.

Because the conference elicited a global consensus, that confidence should extend worldwide. The conference said that countries could use the 700-megahertz slice for wireless broadband services like cellphones, mobile TV and WiMax, although at each country’s time of choosing.

The conclusions of the conference, which operates under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, carry the weight of an international treaty.

“Most people in the industry believe this will be very important going forward in terms of supplying new services and new technologies to consumers around the world,” said Richard Russell, who led the 150-member United States delegation, which included government and industry representatives.

The auction of the frequencies was made possible because digital television broadcasts require less bandwidth than analog TV, which is now the main use of the 700-megahertz span. As countries move over the next decade to digital TV, that valuable UHF spectrum becomes available for other uses. The United States will go completely digital in 2009.

Although the W.R.C. — whose abbreviation participants pronounce as “work” — adjourned on Friday with a global sign-off on using that spectrum for mobile broadband, not everyone was singing its praises.

The European Broadcasting Union, in particular, was disappointed that the telecommunications agency decided to allow mobile services into the UHF bands before knowing the effects of interference with digital TV broadcast signals that would share the space. The union had urged the conference to study the consequences and wait until its next meeting, in 2011, to make a decision.

At the conference, a coalition of all the countries from the Americas pushed through the compromise of allocating the spectrum but then leaving the timing of its use up to national regulators. Many of the large countries in Asia — including China, India, South Korea and Japan — signed on to the American plan.

“Because of this conference, countries around the world have the flexibility now to open up spectrum to wireless broadband at the time of their choosing,” said Mr. Russell, the United States delegation leader.

More broadly, he said, the W.R.C. helped create a solid market for wireless broadband technologies and services. “There’s much more certainty today than there was before the conference started,” Mr. Russell said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/te...9wireless.html





Google Closer to Mobile Airwaves Bid, Sources Say
Peter Kaplan and Eric Auchard

Google Inc. is considering bidding alone on coveted airwaves to launch a U.S. wireless network, as a deadline nears to declare bidding plans, sources familiar with the situation said.

One source underscored that Google had made no decision as of Friday on whether it would bid with partners or on its own in the auction of 700-megahertz spectrum due to begin Jan. 24.

Bidding could pit Google against top wireless carriers AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless, owned jointly by Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group Plc.

Going it alone at the government auction of airwaves would not rule out later signing up partners if Google were to win the necessary spectrum to create a network, the source said.

Google executives discussed the auction last week with Federal Communications Commission officials, including FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, sources familiar with the meeting said.

At the talks, executives for the Web search leader gave the impression of “inching more towards” a bid, one source said.

Another said it is “within the realm of possibility” that partners could be brought on later if Google wins. Google has talked to a number of prospective partners, not just carriers.

Google is “making all the necessary preparations to become an applicant to bid in the auction” ahead of a Dec. 3 deadline for applying to participate, a spokesman said in a statement.

“From the company's perspective, the overriding factor is how to foster more openness in networks. That is certainly the driving factor in our thinking about bidding on the spectrum.”

The 700-MHz band airwaves, which are being returned by broadcasters as they move from analog to digital signals early in 2009, can go long distances and penetrate thick walls. The auction is seen as a last chance for a new wireless player.

Google is considering funding a bid not only from its growing cash pile but by working with Wall Street. Outside financing would reduce its need for partners, one source said.

Google has said it would be prepared to bid at least $4.6 billion for the biggest chunk of spectrum if regulators agreed to policies to promote open use of such networks.

Google won half of what it asked: The FCC imposed a condition on a large portion of the spectrum that would require the winning bidder to open up networks to allow consumers to use any device or applications that works on those frequencies.

But the FCC did not require open access to network capacity to be resold to independent mobile service providers on a wholesale basis, another Google request.

Under the auction terms, if no one meets the $4.6 billion minimum bid, the auction for the open-access portion of the spectrum would be rerun without the open-access conditions.

One strategy Google is considering is to bid on a chunk of airwaves known as “D Block” that would be shared with public safety providers, as well as the more flexible, open-access piece of “C Block” spectrum.

One source said Google has met with Cyren Call, a company charged with managing public safety agency use of spectrum.

Google unveiled this month plans to offer software for building Internet-ready cell phones in an alliance of network operators and device and software makers. The first phones to result from it are due out in mid-2008, partners say.

Stifel Nicolaus analyst Blair Levin said Google is likely to apply to participate in the FCC auction and pay a required deposit later in December. Such moves would not guarantee it will submit a bid, but Levin thinks the company will do so.

Even if Google does bid, Levin said, it may not be designed to actually win the auction, but rather to make sure the FCC's minimum is met and the open-access provision stays in place.

John Hodulik, telecoms analyst with brokerage UBS in New York, said Google's entry into the highly competitive market will hurt the four big incumbents: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint Nextel Corp and Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobile USA.

But it could also prove painful for Google. He estimated it would cost an $8 billion to $10 billion more to build another nationwide wireless network, not to mention heavy capital spending to keep up with constant evolutions in the market.

Hodulik said such cost considerations could hugely depress Google's highly valued stock, which trades about 33 times what analysts, on average, expect it to earn next year. Google shares closed on Friday up $3.98, or 0.6 per cent, at $633.63.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...wgtgoogair1119