Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 20th, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Great Britain has turned itself into an Orwellian 1984 during the last decade, yet all those cameras and anti-terror laws could not prevent this recent chaos." – Julian Assange


"In terms of all those big acts you name, the recording industry has made a gazillion dollars on those masters, more than the artists have. So there’s an issue of parity here, of fairness. This is a bone of contention, and it’s going to get more contentious in the next couple of years." – Don Henley


































Early Edition



August 20th, 2011


















Righthaven Defendant Wins Second Attorney’s Fee Award
Steve Green

In yet another stunning reversal for Las Vegas copyright lawsuit filer Righthaven LLC, the company won’t be collecting any damages from a man it once branded as a copyright infringer.

Instead, it’s Righthaven that must pay the man's legal fees of $34,045.

U.S. District Judge Philip Pro awarded the fees Monday in the case of Kentucky message board poster Wayne Hoehn.

Pro on June 20 dismissed Righthaven’s lawsuit against Hoehn, finding Righthaven didn’t have standing to sue him and even if it did, Hoehn was protected by the fair use doctrine in posting an entire Las Vegas Review-Journal column on a sports betting website message board. Righthaven's lack of standing was due to the R-J maintaining control of the column despite Righthaven's claims of ownership.

Righthaven is appealing the dismissal. But Pro, in the meantime, on Monday ordered Righthaven by Sept. 14 to pay Hoehn’s fees and costs for his representation by Randazza Legal Group of Las Vegas.

Pro, in a short order, rejected arguments by Righthaven that since he dismissed the case he didn’t have jurisdiction in the lawsuit to award fees to anyone.

Hoehn’s attorneys called that argument "bizarre’’ since Pro’s ruling covered the merits of Righthaven’s lawsuit, not jurisdictional issues.

Pro on Monday noted both the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the federal Copyright Act permit the recovery of attorney’s fees and costs for a prevailing party.

"In this case, the court finds that defendant Hoehn is the prevailing party and the attorney’s fees and costs sought on his behalf are reasonable and supported by defendant’s Memorandum of Law,’’ Pro wrote in his order.

This is the second attorney’s fee award against Righthaven. Earlier, Randazza Legal Group was awarded $3,815 for representing defendant Michael Leon.

But these are likely just the tip of the iceberg, with several cases dismissed based on Righthaven’s lack of standing and more dismissals likely.

Prevailing defendant Thomas DiBiase is asking for $199,250 while the Democratic Underground will likely seek a fee award of many hundreds of thousands of dollars after Righthaven was dismissed from that suit for lack of standing.

The bottom line for Righthaven is, as of Monday, it has not won a single lawsuit – of 275 lawsuits filed since 2010 – on the merits.

Instead, four judges have dismissed Righthaven suits over R-J material for lack of standing.

A fifth judge may do the same with suits in Denver over Denver Post material.

But it gets worse.

Three cases have been dismissed on fair use grounds, two cases have now resulted in attorney’s fee awards against Righthaven and Righthaven has been fined $5,000 by one of the judges for misleading the court about key information in its R-J cases.
http://www.vegasinc.com/news/2011/au...rneys-fee-awa/





Opinion: What's Wrong with Copyright
Allan Freeth, CEO TelstraClear

Very soon, many Kiwis will have a new niggling worry when they think about their Internet when the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011 comes into effect.

TelstraClear respects copyright and supports the ability of rights owners to realise value from their intellectual property. But a business model that has to be propped up by specific legislation in this way is flawed and needs to change.

In 2009 we led the charge in opposing plans that could have seen customer internet accounts disconnected without proof of copyright abuse. The new law addresses that particular issue (at least for now).

What it will not do is provide copyright owners with the redress they are seeking. It may encourage parents to take more notice of what their kids are doing online, and that's a good thing. But it won't stop those who really want content from getting it.

The problem is that much of what Kiwis want simply isn't available to buy here.

We know, because in 2009 we ran an online survey of more than 1000 Kiwis to find out why they download copyrighted content. They told us they're tired of paying too much, and waiting too long.

They view the packaging and distribution of physical copies of music, movies and games as unnecessary and costly, and claim the business model is outdated and out-of-touch.

These are the opinions of the 'now' generation, and the growing population that has never experienced the world without a TV the internet, and the freedom this offers.

New Zealand's distance from the source of much content has been conquered by online access, but simply making it available online while retaining old price structures and wait times doesn't work.

Three main themes emerged from our survey on how to reconcile the financial needs of artists with Kiwis' expectations for affordable, new and rare content.

Respondents suggested building a stronger direct connection between the artist and end-user to reduce the old-world overheads and online purchase price.

A try-before you buy mechanism was proposed. For example, tier access with free low-res video and music and pay access for high quality versions. Content supported by advertising and user/fan supported content were also suggestions that came out of our survey.

Finally, they said, change the scope of the copyright laws and focus on those who seek to make a profit from the illegal copying and on-selling of content.

As stated, TelstraClear respects copyright, but we respect the ever-changing needs of our customers too. At present, they are being denied the freedom to choose by companies intent on propping-up old world business models.

Rather than investing in innovative ways to legally provide people with the content they want, whether music or movies, pictures or programmes, these companies choose to pressure governments into legislating.

Instead of bringing in a law that we believe will not and cannot work, our government should be breaking monopolies, allowing personal choice and letting New Zealanders experience information and entertainment when the rest of the world does.

Instead, it has chosen to introduce a law that could turn ordinary Kiwis into law-breakers.
http://www.voxy.co.nz/business/opini...freeth/5/98253





Stealing Isn't Saving, But Sharing Isn't Stealing
Mike Masnick

Last week we wrote about Janko Roettger's GigaOm post concerning the fact that file sharing continues to grow. We focused on how the MPAA and the RIAA might be declaring "victory" too soon. Amusingly, the MPAA's Alex Swartsel took offense to Janko's article and posted one of the organization's typically laughable responses, in which they attempt to scold Janko for his "intellectually dishonest" claim that file sharing is "socially acceptable." Let's just say that between the Swartsel and Janko, one of the two is in denial, and it's not Janko.

The part that the MPAA takes issue with is the following part from Janko's post:

The U.S. credit ratings downgrade, tumbling stocks and international instability have made not just financial analysts nervous this week. Consumers are also starting to wonder whether we’re about to enter another recession. Whenever that happens, people start to tighten their belts and cut unnecessary expenses -- like paying for movies and TV shows.... With memories of the housing slump still fresh, many people could simply return to BitTorrent and download movies for free instead of going to the movies or paying for VOD.

It's pretty clear that there is no statement of support or cheering on or anything here. Janko is simply reporting a simple fact. Some group of people will continue to find unauthorized means of accessing content a better deal than authorized offerings. I don't see how that's objectionable at all. It's a pretty easy prediction to make because who honestly doesn't think it's true?

But, to the MPAA, this is "intellectually dishonest" and the equivalent of Janko supporting "shoplifting clothing." Wow. You know what would be intellectually dishonest? Pretending that lots of people don't use file sharing would be intellectually dishonest. Pretending that a bad economy combined with dumb moves by movie studios might drive fewer people to unauthorized file sharing would be intellectually dishonest. Repeating blatant falsehoods from the MPAA would be intellectually dishonest. Comparing stealing of physical goods to someone making a copy of a digital file would be intellectually dishonest. Calling out a reporter for accurately making a point would be intellectually dishonest.

What's not intellectually dishonest is accurately reporting what's happening.

But the MPAA and Swartsel are so in denial that apparently they've decided to "shoot the messenger." This is all to typical of the MPAA. Rather than adapt and deal with reality, the folks there like to pretend the world is a very different place and will attack any messenger who shows otherwise. Honestly, Swartsel's post reads the same way an MPAA blog post would have read a decade ago if it had a blog back then. It's full of misleading or downright incorrect claims:

T-shirts and jeans aren’t made out of zeroes and ones, at least not yet. But just because movies and TV shows and songs can now be packaged and distributed as data, not just as film reels or vinyl records or DVDs, and can be acquired or distributed with a few clicks of a mouse, doesn’t mean that the labor and time and money that went into making them is any less meaningful.

No one -- especially not Janko -- has claimed that "the labor and time and money that went into making" movies is "less meaningful." Swartsel is simply changing the topic because she can't actually argue against what Janko has said -- because it's accurate. So she's pretending he said something entirely different. The fact that labor and time and money goes into something doesn't make a difference. I put "labor and time and money" into Techdirt, and then it's my job to figure out how to make a living out of it. It does me no good to sit around and say "but I worked hard -- now pay me."

No one cares how hard you worked or how much money you spent. People buy things based on the market. They buy things based on the intersection of supply and demand -- and this is an economics lesson that the MPAA and Swartsel apparently remain ignorant of.

We doubt many people will subscribe to the kind of intellectual dishonesty that suggests that it’s fine – or really, that it’s inevitable – to steal as a way of saving. But it’s troubling that by suggesting that stolen content available on rogue sites and elsewhere is just another substitute good, Roettgers is tacitly arguing that content theft is legitimate and socially acceptable.

He made no such argument, tacitly or not. I will, however, make the argument that for a very large segment of the population, it absolutely is socially acceptable. It is not socially acceptable to me. I don't engage in it myself and never have. But it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that many, many people don't find it socially acceptable. If the MPAA were really concerned about adapting to the changing market, the first step would be actually recognizing that. But that's not how the MPAA works. It works by denying reality, and then running to Congress to get them to change the laws because its member studios don't want to have to change. Tellingly, it appears that Swartsel's last job was... working for Congress.

It would be nice, just once, if the MPAA (and the RIAA) could actually be intellectually honest. If the folks there could admit some basic facts: the market has changed and many, many people find unauthorized file sharing socially acceptable. If you start at that point, and then say, "now what do we do about it?" you can come up with all sorts of productive answers. But that's not what they do at all. They just keep trying to demonize it, and don't seem to realize that every time they insist reality isn't real, people trust them even less.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...stealing.shtml





Record Industry Braces for Artists’ Battles Over Song Rights
Larry Rohter

Since their release in 1978, hit albums like Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Billy Joel’s “52nd Street,” the Doobie Brothers’ “Minute by Minute,” Kenny Rogers’s “Gambler” and Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” have generated tens of millions of dollars for record companies. But thanks to a little-noted provision in United States copyright law, those artists — and thousands more — now have the right to reclaim ownership of their recordings, potentially leaving the labels out in the cold.

When copyright law was revised in the mid-1970s, musicians, like creators of other works of art, were granted “termination rights,” which allow them to regain control of their work after 35 years, so long as they apply at least two years in advance. Recordings from 1978 are the first to fall under the purview of the law, but in a matter of months, hits from 1979, like “The Long Run” by the Eagles and “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer, will be in the same situation — and then, as the calendar advances, every other master recording once it reaches the 35-year mark.

The provision also permits songwriters to reclaim ownership of qualifying songs. Bob Dylan has already filed to regain some of his compositions, as have other rock, pop and country performers like Tom Petty, Bryan Adams, Loretta Lynn, Kris Kristofferson, Tom Waits and Charlie Daniels, according to records on file at the United States Copyright Office.

“In terms of all those big acts you name, the recording industry has made a gazillion dollars on those masters, more than the artists have,” said Don Henley, a founder both of the Eagles and the Recording Artists Coalition, which seeks to protect performers’ legal rights. “So there’s an issue of parity here, of fairness. This is a bone of contention, and it’s going to get more contentious in the next couple of years.”

With the recording industry already reeling from plummeting sales, termination rights claims could be another serious financial blow. Sales plunged to about $6.3 billion from $14.6 billion over the decade ending in 2009, in large part because of unauthorized downloading of music on the Internet, especially of new releases, which has left record labels disproportionately dependent on sales of older recordings in their catalogs.

“This is a life-threatening change for them, the legal equivalent of Internet technology,” said Kenneth J. Abdo, a lawyer who leads a termination rights working group for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and has filed claims for some of his clients, who include Kool and the Gang. As a result the four major record companies — Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner — have made it clear that they will not relinquish recordings they consider their property without a fight.

“We believe the termination right doesn’t apply to most sound recordings,” said Steven Marks, general counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America, a lobbying group in Washington that represents the interests of record labels. As the record companies see it, the master recordings belong to them in perpetuity, rather than to the artists who wrote and recorded the songs, because, the labels argue, the records are “works for hire,” compilations created not by independent performers but by musicians who are, in essence, their employees.

Independent copyright experts, however, find that argument unconvincing. Not only have recording artists traditionally paid for the making of their records themselves, with advances from the record companies that are then charged against royalties, they are also exempted from both the obligations and benefits an employee typically expects.

“This is a situation where you have to use your own common sense,” said June M. Besek, executive director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at the Columbia University School of Law. “Where do they work? Do you pay Social Security for them? Do you withdraw taxes from a paycheck? Under those kinds of definitions it seems pretty clear that your standard kind of recording artist from the ’70s or ’80s is not an employee but an independent contractor.”

Daryl Friedman, the Washington representative of the recording academy, which administers the Grammy Awards and is allied with the artists’ position, expressed hope that negotiations could lead to a “broad consensus in the artistic community, so there don’t have to be 100 lawsuits.” But with no such talks under way, lawyers predict that the termination rights dispute will have to be resolved in court.

“My gut feeling is that the issue could even make it to the Supreme Court,” said Lita Rosario, an entertainment lawyer specializing in soul, funk and rap artists who has filed termination claims on behalf of clients, whom she declined to name. “Some lawyers and managers see this as an opportunity to go in and renegotiate a new and better deal. But I think there are going to be some artists who feel so strongly about this that they are not going to want to settle, and will insist on getting all their rights back.”

So far the only significant ruling on the issue has been one in the record labels’ favor. In that suit heirs of Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley, who died in 1981, sued Universal Music to regain control of and collect additional royalties on five of his albums, which included hits like “Get Up, Stand Up” and “One Love.”

But last September a federal district court in New York ruled that “each of the agreements provided that the sound recordings were the ‘absolute property’ ” of the record company, and not Marley or his estate. That decision, however, applies only to Marley’s pre-1978 recordings, which are governed by an earlier law that envisaged termination rights only in specific circumstances after 56 years, and it is being appealed.

Congress passed the copyright law in 1976, specifying that it would go into effect on Jan. 1, 1978, meaning that the earliest any recording can be reclaimed is Jan. 1, 2013. But artists must file termination notices at least two years before the date they want to recoup their work, and once a song or recording qualifies for termination, its authors have five years in which to file a claim; if they fail to act in that time, their right to reclaim the work lapses.

The legislation, however, fails to address several important issues. Do record producers, session musicians and studio engineers also qualify as “authors” of a recording, entitled to a share of the rights after they revert? Can British groups like Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and Dire Straits exercise termination rights on their American recordings, even if their original contract was signed in Britain? These issues too are also an important part of the quiet, behind-the-scenes struggle that is now going on.

Given the potentially huge amounts of money at stake and the delicacy of the issues, both record companies, and recording artists and their managers have been reticent in talking about termination rights. The four major record companies either declined to discuss the issue or did not respond to requests for comment, referring the matter to the industry association.

But a recording industry executive involved in the issue, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak for the labels, said that significant differences of opinion exist not only between the majors and smaller independent companies, but also among the big four, which has prevented them from taking a unified position. Some of the major labels, he said, favor a court battle, no matter how long or costly it might be, while others worry that taking an unyielding position could backfire if the case is lost, since musicians and songwriters would be so deeply alienated that they would refuse to negotiate new deals and insist on total control of all their recordings.

As for artists it is not clear how many have already filed claims to regain ownership of their recordings. Both Mr. Springsteen and Mr. Joel, who had two of the biggest hit albums of 1978, as well as their managers and legal advisers, declined to comment on their plans, and the United States Copyright Office said that, because termination rights claims are initially processed manually rather than electronically, its database is incomplete.

Songwriters, who in the past typically have had to share their rights with publishing companies, some of which are owned by or affiliated with record labels, have been more outspoken on the issue. As small independent operators to whom the work for hire argument is hard to apply, the balance of power seems to have tilted in their favor, especially if they are authors of songs that still have licensing potential for use on film and television soundtracks, as ringtones, or in commercials and video games.

“I’ve had the date circled in red for 35 years, and now it’s time to move,” said Rick Carnes, who is president of the Songwriters Guild of America and has written hits for country artists like Reba McEntire and Garth Brooks. “Year after year after year you are going to see more and more songs coming back to songwriters and having more and more influence on the market. We will own that music, and it’s still valuable.”

In the absence of a definitive court ruling, some recording artists and their lawyers are talking about simply exercising their rights and daring the record companies to stop them. They complain that the labels in some cases are not responding to termination rights notices and predict that once 2013 arrives, a conflict that is now mostly hidden from view is likely to erupt in public.

“Right now this is kind of like a game of chicken, but with a shot clock,” said Casey Rae-Hunter, deputy director of the Future of Music Coalition, which advocates for musicians and consumers. “Everyone is adopting a wait-and-see posture. But that can only be maintained for so long, because the clock is ticking.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/a...ng-rights.html





Gunning for the Copyright Reformers
Frédéric Filloux

Going after copyright reformers is risky business. To digital zealots, defending copyright is like advocating the return to the typewriter. (I personally like typewriters; I own several and I recommend a wonderful 1997 Atlantic piece on them at Longform.org). Going after sworn copyright opponents is what Robert Levine does in his just-published book Free Ride — How the Internet is Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business can Fight Back.

The pitch: Digital corporations are conspiring to promote the free ideology that has been plaguing the internet over the last decade. With their immense financial firepower, the Googles and the Apples and the Silicon Valley venture capital firms that funded Napster did whatever it took to undermine the concept of copyright. From lobbying the United States Congress to funding free-culture advocates, they created a groundswell for rip-and-burn products that would sell their MP3 devices. They got lawmakers and pundits to pave the way for a general ransacking of intellectual property — from music to journalistic content. Once Levine makes his point, he explores possible solutions to restore value to creativity (We’ll address these in a future column).

Needless to say, Robert Levine has produced a non-politically correct opus. And that’s what makes his book fascinating.

To start, the author reframes the famous quote, “Information wants to be free.” Free Ride recalls the complete sentence as far more nuanced. This is actually what tech writer Stewart Brand said at an 1984 a hacker conference:

“One one hand information wants to be expensive because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

Few quotes in recent history have been more twisted and misinterpreted than this one. Everyone jumped on Stewart Brand’s distinction between collecting information and making it available to the audience. While the cost of the former remains high — at least for those producing original information, or content — the marginal cost of broadcasting it fell dramatically, and that is what sparked the idea of a zero-cost culture. Yet, “media products have never been priced according to their marginal cost,” Levine says, and therefore, free is an idea that’s hard to defend.

As described in Free Ride, US lawmakers played a critical role in opening the floodgates of piracy and copyright violation on the internet. On October 28, 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law, says Levine, gave a “safe harbor” to internet service providers and some online companies. No longer liable for copyright infringement based on the actions of users, Levine writes that the “safe harbor made it easier for sites like YouTube to become valuable forums for amateur creativity. But it also let them build big businesses out of professional content they didn’t pay for.” That, he says, is how Congress created YouTube. (Google purchased it in 2006 for $1.65 billon).

The book’s most spectacular deconstruction involves Lawrence Lessig. The Harvard law professor is one of the most outspoken opponents of tough copyright. For years, he’s been criss-crossing the world delivering well-crafted, compelling presentations about the need to overhaul copyright. When, in 2007, Viacom sued YouTube for copyright infringement, seeking more than a billion dollars in damages, Lessig accused Viacom of trying to overturn the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was a de facto defense of Google by Lessig who at the time was head of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University. What Lessig failed to disclose is that two weeks after closing the deal to acquire YouTube, Google made a $2-million donation to the Stanford Center, and a year later gave another $1.5 million to Creative Commons, Lessig’s most famous intellectual baby. To be fair, Levine told me he didn’t believe Lessig’s positions on copyright were influenced by the grants from Google. Moreover, Google set aside $100 million to fight the Viacom lawsuit. Numerous examples throughout Free Ride show how technology companies are committed to influence public policy. Ironically, Lawrence Lessig’s newest crusade at Harvard is about corruption in Washington.

Robert Levine’s book could be disputed on a few items.

- One, he’s too kind to the music industry. (His view may have been influenced by his tenure as executive editor of Billboard magazine where he witnessed first-hand the self-inflicted deterioration of the music industry.) The music business missed all the trains: (a) it defended the physical model up to the last minute even as its annihilation seemed unavoidable; (b) it extended as long as it could the double screwing of consumers and artists alike (sadly, poor analog artists have been replaced by poor digital ones).

- Two, he tends to forget the general complacency of content creators toward all forms of digital looting. I’ve often described in the Monday Note how publishers – blinded by the short-term appeal of the eyeball count – became consenting victims of all sorts of aggregators (see my Lenin’s Rope series).

- Three, the advent of free content has in fact unleashed talent. Unknown authors have been able to rise from obscurity thanks to direct access to the audience. And some have found alternative ways to make money (more on this in another future column).

Lastly, the unfolding of technology made the relaxing of copyright unavoidable. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act may have accelerated the transition but it didn’t cause the upheaval. Today, BitTorrent file transfer for music and movies accounts for about 10-12% of the internet bandwidth consumption, and YouTube accounts for 11%. Pirated content represents almost 100% of the former and about a third of the latter. Huge numbers, indeed, and huge losses for the music and movie industries. But Netflix with its legitimate content now accounts for 30% of the entire internet traffic (Hulu has less than 2%) and iTunes is growing faster than ever. And some economists do consider that giving up a large quantity of content for free is the price that must be paid to preserve a marketable share.

The music industry paid a terrible price during the digital transition, with a drop of 50% of its sales in one decade. But it would be unfair to make lenient lawmakers and internet pirates the main culprits. Unbundling played a critical role as well, just as in the newspaper industry. Being able to buy a single song on iTunes (instead of an album), or hoping that a single article on a web page will generate enough viewers to pay for itself (instead or purchasing an entire bundled newspaper) caused a great deal of damage.

As plagued as it is by piracy, the movie industry is immune to the notion of unbundling, which partly explains why box office revenue between 2006 and 2010 rose by 30% outside the United States and by 15% in the US/Canada market. Although the number of moviegoers is slipping, the industry has been able to find its way into the digital world.

Robert Levine’s book is a must-read that reframes the debate on the evolution of copyright. In an unusual way, it encompasses a European view on the issue (Levine lives part-time in Berlin). That makes the book even more interesting as countries explore ways for content creators to finance their work while not killing the formidable creative freedom unleashed by the digital world.
http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/08/14...ght-reformers/





YouTube, Music Publishers Settle Copyright Beef
Greg Sandoval

A group of music publishers that joined a class action lawsuit filed against YouTube in 2007 have reached a settlement with Google's video-sharing site.

The National Music Publishers Association as well as individual music-publishing companies, such as Cherry Lane Music Publishing Company, the Harry Fox Agency, and Murbo Music Publishing, joined a class action lawsuit filed against Google by The Football Association Premier League among others.

The suit--which accused YouTube of encouraging users to upload pirated video clips of TV shows, films, and music videos--was filed shortly after Viacom filed a copyright complaint against YouTube and Google. For efficiency, Viacom and the class action were reviewed by the court simultaneously even though they were separate complaints.

"As a result of this resolution," the publishers wrote in a statement, "music publishers will have the opportunity to enter into a license agreement with YouTube and receive royalties from YouTube for musical works in videos posted on the site."

Thanks to the agreement, music publishers can license Google the right to sync their music with videos posted by YouTube users and YouTube will pay the royalties. The parties involved didn't disclose the complete terms of the agreement.

That's nice but what's important here is that YouTube executives continue to put their copyright troubles behind them. The Web's top video-sharing service was once packed with pirated content but the service built a filter system and now most of the top film studios and TV networks consider the site to be swept clean.

Google has also penned content-licensing deals with the top music labels to offer music on the site and YouTube also has agreements in place with major Hollywood and independent film studios to offer streaming rentals.

"We already have deals in place with a number of music publishers in the U.S. and around the world," YouTube said in a blog post. "Today's deal offers more choice for rights holders in how they manage use of their songs."

YouTube triumphed in the first round of the Viacom copyright case as well as the class action suit last year when a U.S. district court in New York ruled that YouTube was "protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement."

Viacom's case only involves YouTube's actions prior to 2008. The media conglomerate and the parties belonging to the class appealed the ruling.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20...opyright-beef/





Box Office Heading Toward Record Despite Economy
Lisa Richwine

A popular boy wizard, comic-book heroes and some foul-mouthed women are leading Hollywood toward a record-breaking summer despite the sour economy and high unemployment resulting in tightened consumer spending.

Underscoring the notion that movies are recession-proof, U.S. and Canadian ticket sales are expected to finish nearly 5 percent higher than a year ago thanks to the "Harry Potter" finale and other big-budget sequels plus raunchy adult comedies such as "Bridesmaids."

Summer ticket sales in the domestic (U.S. and Canadian) market through last weekend stood at an estimated $3.8 billion. Attendance was up 2.8 percent, though that was compared with last year's 13-year low, according to figures from tracking firm Hollywood.com. Premium charges for 3D films and slightly higher average ticket prices helped raise revenue.

"If we keep at this pace, we should wind up with $4.5 billion," the highest summer total ever, said Paul Dergarabedian, box office analyst with Hollywood.com.

The summer film season -- usually measured from early May through Labor Day weekend in September -- represents the most lucrative time of the year for studios, providing as much as 40 percent of annual box-office dollars.

Still, year-to-date box office revenue is down 4 percent from 2010 while attendance has shrunk 5 percent after weak winter and spring ticket sales. Studios need a strong holiday season to regain lost ground at a time when the U.S. economy is sputtering.

"Overall I think people are feeling good" about the summer results, said Rory Bruer, president of worldwide distribution for Columbia Pictures, a unit of Sony Corp that rang up big sales with family film "The Smurfs."

Hollywood Bucks The Economy

The strong summer box office belies recent data on consumer spending from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which showed that Americans spent less and saved more money in June, just as the summer season was moving into full swing. It also goes against concerns among economists about the possibility of a double-dip recession brought on by high unemployment and anemic economic growth.

But moviegoing, which is one of the cheaper entertainment options for consumers, usually holds up in weak economies, industry players said. For instance, in summer 2008, the most recent comparable period to this summer in terms of the macro-economy, domestic box-office sales gained 0.5 percent year-over-year, though that was largely due to ticket price increases. Attendance actually fell 3.7 percent that summer.

Box-office success is tied more to the quality of the films than economic trends, Dergarabedian said. "Good movies are recession-proof," he said.

Chris Aronson, senior vice president for domestic distribution at 20th Century Fox, added that "lower-quality 3D films could be under pressure as audiences become more discerning." Overall box-office totals for 2011 "will probably get to a position where we are level with last year," he said.

Winners And Losers

This summer's standout performers thus far include "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2," which broke records worldwide and was among three movies to sell more than $1 billion globally. The others were the third "Transformers" and fourth "Pirates of the Caribbean."

"The one consistent area of success is still in the big franchise and in the big sequel," said Rob Moore, vice chairman of Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc.

Foul-mouthed women scored big with better-than-expected sales for "Bridesmaids" and "Bad Teacher." Another adult comedy, "The Hangover 2," also was a hit.

Superheroes abounded on screens -- to mixed results. "Captain America: The First Avenger" and "Thor" performed well while "The Green Lantern" fizzled.

Four of the five highest-grossing summer 2011 films were offered in 3D, as were several other summer flicks. But filmgoers often decided to live with two dimensions, sparking a debate in the industry over whether the appetite for 3D movies had petered out.

"Avatar" director James Cameron recently urged Hollywood to make sure 3D movies provided a quality experience to justify the higher price.

"This is a good moment for Hollywood to acknowledge that they have to try harder to maintain the idea that 3D is a premium experience. We can't take cheap routes," Cameron told Reuters in an interview.

Walt Disney Co's revered Pixar animation unit for the first time stumbled with critics who panned "Cars 2." The film has proven resilient with audiences, however, surpassing the original's box-office tally with more than $476 million in gross sales worldwide.

But the strong performance of sequels this summer has a downside.

"There really weren't any new franchises created ... This summer may wind up with record gross (box office), but I don't know if enough seeds were planted for the future," said Brandon Gray, president of industry tracking firm boxofficemojo.com.

From that perspective, the rest of the year appears ominous for studios, with sequels to "Twilight," "Mission Impossible," "Happy Feet" and "Alvin and the Chipmunks" all set for release.

(Reporting by Lisa Richwine; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte, Peter Lauria and Matthew Lewis)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...77G4QN20110817





Riots Put U.K. Rights at Risk, Says WikiLeaks’ Assange
Olivia Ward

The looters and rioters who torched Britain’s neighbourhoods are “doing Big Brother” a favour by giving the government more latitude to destroy citizens’ rights and freedoms, says WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“Great Britain has turned itself into an Orwellian 1984 during the last decade, yet all those cameras and anti-terror laws could not prevent this recent chaos,” he told the Star from England, where he is awaiting the outcome of his appeal against extradition to Sweden, which wants him for questioning in connection with a sexual assault case.

British Prime Minister David Cameron touched off a fierce debate Thursday by suggesting that the rioters, who have called up mob attacks through social media and instant messaging, could be shut down in cyberspace.

“When people are using social media for violence we need to stop them,” he told the House of Commons. “We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

The popular BlackBerry Messenger — produced by Canada’s Research in Motion — had given police a new headache because of its closed network, he added: “we’ve got to examine that and know how to keep up with them.”

Some MPs agreed, including Tory Louise Mensch, who tweeted that Cameron’s plans were “common sense” and if Facebook and Twitter were carrying messages that incited violence “the world won’t implode” if they were shut down for an hour or two. BlackBerry earlier announced that it was co-operating with police.

But advocates responded angrily that Cameron was “shooting the messenger,” and covering up the government’s inadequate responses by blaming social media and BlackBerry’s free messaging service that is widely used by younger and poorer Britons.

“The naive public often is ready to sacrifice its privacy, and laws safeguarding basic freedom and rights in exchange for safety, guaranteed by the state,” Assange said. “Now it is clear that governments cannot keep their promises.”

Britain has extensive security laws that date back to the days of IRA terrorism. Surveillance grew in the early 2000s after the 9/11 attacks, and “7/7” assault on London transport that killed 52 people in July 2005. But as the riots spread this week, Cameron said he had asked the police if they needed additional powers.

Assange said the British government was paying the price “for creating a society that denies young people both responsibility, trust and proper challenges,” adding “it is time to rethink rather than restrict things even more. The real problems, which led up to the riots, can only be solved by the whole community, not the government or police.”

While Britons are outraged by the destruction of the riots, many are reluctant to blame the new media.

“Digital technology did play a role in providing rioters with an organizational tool,” said sociologist Frank Furedi of University of Kent. “But the more important factor has been the role of the police or more specifically the disorganization of the institutions of law and order.

“Those who are involved in ‘recreational rioting’ are not abnormal feral youngsters but young people who simply have no stake in their community.”

Experts say that in any case shutting down social media sites or the Internet is unlikely to work.

“The first option requires every social media firm to cooperate with government,” says an article in politics.co.uk. “Even if that were achievable individuals would still be able to create a new account.”

And it said a Chinese-style “final option” of shutting down Internet access to turbulent regions would be so drastic “it would require highly controversial new powers to implement.”
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/ar...ileaks-assange





U.K. Men Get 4-Year Sentences for Facebook Riot Posts
David Meyer

Two men in North West England have been sentenced to four years in prison for using Facebook to incite others to riot, although neither man's actions resulted in any rioting.

Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, were sentenced at Chester Crown Court yesterday, a week after mob violence struck many parts of the U.K. The riots and looting had prompted prime minister David Cameron to say that those "using social media for violence" had to be stopped.

"If we cast our minds back just a few days to last week and recall the way in which technology was used to spread incitement and bring people together to commit acts of criminality, it is easy to understand the four-year sentences that were handed down in court today," assistant chief constable Phil Thompson of the Cheshire Constabulary said in a statement.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-200...ok-riot-posts/





UK PMs Internet Censorship Insinuation Receives Praise from China
Drew Wilson

You know your internet censorship plans are too strict when China praises you for it.

I’ll say this right off the bat, if someone told me one month ago that I would end up writing a headline like that, I would have told them they were insane. I am simply stunned that it has come to this.

Last Thursday, British Prime Minister said that he wanted to “stop people from communicating on social media” whenever that person is using it to instigate violence. A growing majority of observers are interpret this as meaning that he wants to block social media websites altogether whenever civil unrest is suspected.

Blocking social media has certainly caused some debate in many places – especially in the UK. The discussions around possibly censoring the internet has received international attention. This includes China. Chinese state media website Global Times weighed in on the debate suggesting that “Western” countries are coming to realize that free speech cannot go unhindered on the internet. From the report:

“The British Government’s wariness of the Internet and Blackberry Messenger – symbols of freedom of speech – is a forced reaction, which might upset the Western world. Meanwhile, the open discussion of containment of the Internet in Britain has given rise to a new opportunity for the whole world. Media in the US and Britain used to criticize developing countries for curbing freedom of speech. Britain’s new attitude will help appease the quarrels between East and West over the future management of the Internet.

As for China, advocates of an unlimited development of the Internet should think twice about their original ideas.

On the Internet, there is no lack of posts and articles that incite public violence. They will cause tremendous damage once they are tweeted without control. At that time, all governments will have no other choice but to close down these websites and arrest those agitators.

Turbulence must lead to self-examination, otherwise it’ll lead to great peril in one’s destiny.”

If you think that David Cameron is trying to censor the internet and that there is no difference between his policy and China’s policy, then this will no doubt pretty much cement that opinion. If you think that David Cameron should be censoring the internet, I think, for some, this revelation will make your position a little more uncomfortable.

I think that David Cameron should think very carefully how he plans on going forward on his plans to prevent rioting. On the one hand, the move to crack down on rioters will receive little resistance. On the other hand, trying to control the internet in any way is an extremely slippery slope with respect to free speech.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/95119/u...se-from-china/





Scheme May Thwart Internet Censorship

New technology could beat Internet censorship at its own game by making it virtually impossible for a repressive government to block individual sites.

“The Internet has the ability to catalyze change by empowering people through information and communication services,” says J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan.

“Repressive governments have responded by aggressively filtering it. If we can find ways to keep those channels open, we can give more people the ability to take part in free speech and access to information.”

The new system, dubbed Telex, “has the potential to shift the arms race regarding censorship to be in favor of free and open communication,” says Halderman, one of its creators.

Typical anticensorship schemes work by routing users around site blocks through an outside server called a proxy. But the censor can monitor the content of traffic on the whole network and eventually finds and block the proxy too.

“It creates a kind of cat and mouse game,” says Halderman.

How it would work

Halderman envisions that users could install Telex software after downloading it from an intermittently available website or borrow a copy from a friend. Internet service providers (ISPs) outside the censoring nation would then deploy equipment called Telex stations.

When a user wanted to visit a blacklisted site, he would establish a secure connection to an HTTPS website, which could be any password-protected site that isn’t blocked. This is a decoy connection.

The Telex software marks the connection as a Telex request by inserting a secret-coded tag into the page headers. The tag would then utilize a cryptographic technique called public-key steganography.

“Steganography is hiding the fact that you’re sending a message at all,” Halderman says. “We’re able to hide it in the cryptographic protocol so that you can’t even tell that the message is there.”

The user’s request passes through routers at various ISPs, some of which would be Telex stations. These stations would hold a private key that lets them recognize tagged connections from Telex clients. The stations would divert the connections so that the user could get to any site on the Internet.

Under the system, large segments of the Internet would need to be involved through participating ISPs.
“It would likely require support from nations that are friendly to the cause of a free and open Internet,” Halderman says.

“The problem with any one company doing this, for example, is they become a target. It’s a collective action problem. You want to do it on a wide scale that makes connecting to the Internet almost an all or nothing proposition for the repressive state.”

The technology is at the proof-of-concept stage. Experimenting software has been developed and researchers have put up one Telex station on a mock ISP in their lab that is being used for daily web browsing. A client in Beijing has been able to stream YouTube videos even though the site is blocked there.
http://www.futurity.org/science-tech...et-censorship/





Search the World's Smartphone Photos
Alex Armstrong

Researchers have devised and tested a system that can search mobile phones in realtime in an efficient way to find targets in crowd-sourced images.

The mobile phone has revolutionized many things, photography in particular. Now everyone carries a high resolution digital camera with them and the world has never been so well recorded. Of course to access and make use of this data we need to be able to search it. Photos that are uploaded to the web are searchable but they don't provide a realtime view - they are the past.

Now suppose that it was possible to search the mobile phones directly and obtain a realtime view of what is happening. Once you think about this possibility you can immediately think up applications for it. Suppose a small child wanders off or is abducted - realtime picture search could use their accidental inclusion in other peoples photos to return an location and perhaps even a realtime track. You need to find the realtime whereabouts of a criminal, political dissident or escaped prisoner ... no problem just put out a worldwide photo search and wait.

If you think that this is all crazy speculation then you might be surprised to hear that it has been tried out and it works. Ardalan Amiri Sani and co-workers at Rice University in Texas describe in a recent paper a new system called Theia that can search mobile phones in an efficient way for target images.

All you have to do is download an app that connects to a server. A user of the service submits a query and the phone app performs a search on the photo's met data and the photo itself. For example you could specify a particular face and a particular background. To avoid overloading the phone the search is a two-stage operation. First a set of local predicates are derived from the query. These are simpler matching criteria that can be used to quickly select likely candidates for second stage of the search. If a photo is not rejected by the local predicates then it is uploaded to the Theia server and fully analyzed.

The key to not overloading the mobile phone with work is to arrange the predicates in to an order that rejects photos as quickly as possible. In addition a subsequent query is processed faster because of relevance locality. If a phone has returned a positive result then it is likely that phones that are geographically close will provide hits on similar queries. For example, if a phone has returned a match on a missing child then phones that are geographically close are more likely to produce further results.

The trial system was implemented as an Android application. The user has to specify how much processing power they are prepared to expend to achieve the result. That is, the user can specify a budget for the search. The testing of the system seems to suggest that you can host real-time photo searches on a smartphone without too much difficulty and, because of the parallel nature of the search results come back very quickly.

So what about privacy and security?

The designers suggest that people can opt in to store their photos in a Theia accessible folder - private photos can be stored elsewhere. Of course this raises the question of why you might be happy to hand over your photos and some of the processing power of your phone?

The designers of Theia don't discuss this aspect of the problem but real time photo search has commercial applications - finding just the right photo of a sporting event or news incident for example - and this could be used to fund the app. You might well start to see ads saying

"Install Theia and earn big money with your camera phone".

It is also likely that people could be encouraged to install such an app in response to a request to help find a missing child, say.

When you consider it carefully it could well be that real-time photo search is not just possible but positively attractive to the user.
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/14...ne-photos.html





Anonymous Defaces BART Site, Leaks User Data
Eric Mack

Anonymous has apparently made good on a promise to wreak havoc on the Web site of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System today, although not exactly as planned.

Earlier, the amorphous collective had threatened to take Bart.gov offline for six hours today, or twice the amount of time BART managers took cell phone service offline at some BART stations Thursday night in order to head off a planned protest then. The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was supposed to begin at noon pacific time, according to a release from Anonymous.

As of 30 minutes past noon, the BART site was still online but running a little slow and with one notable change to the mybart.org Web site, which currently displays the Anonymous logo as seen below.

As screen captures of the defacement began rocketing around Twitter, news came that Anonymous hackers had also accessed and posted online a database of mybart.org with user e-mails and some addresses and phone numbers.

Shortly after the mybart.org defacement, a more elaborate mark was left on californiaavoid.org, a Web site maintained by the California Office of Traffic Safety. The #opBART Facebook page claims the defacements are part of Anonymous' protest effort against BART.

For a brief period, BART posted two news releases on its Web site, one advising customers that its Web site could be attacked and go offline Sunday afternoon, another warning of possible interruptions to train service due to Anonymous' planned peaceful, in-person protest during Monday evening's rush hour. As of this writing, both releases are no longer visible, and BART.gov remains online almost an hour after Anonymous planned to take it down for the remainder of the afternoon.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-200...aks-user-data/





As Networks Speed Up, Data Hits a Wall
Jenna Wortham

The newest smartphones are intended to run on speedy 4G networks that allow people to effortlessly stream music, watch Netflix movies and tune in live to a Mets game, wherever they are.

But there’s a catch, of course.

Cellphone plans that let people gobble up data as if they were at an all-you-can eat buffet are disappearing, just as a new crop of data-gobbling Internet services from Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Apple and the like are hitting the market or catching on with wide audiences.

These services use far more data than simply checking e-mail or browsing the Web, so their heaviest users may find themselves running over their plan’s monthly allotment and paying extra.

The wireless carriers say their tighter limits will affect only a small percentage of customers. And they say they are simply trying to get ahead of an exploding appetite for data and avoid problems with overburdened networks.

Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, said that if current trends continued, the company’s network would carry more data in the first two months of 2015 than in all of 2010. He described the pricing issue as a “balancing act,” adding: “The tiered data plans will meet the needs of the overwhelming majority of consumers. A lot of people think they’re heavy users, but they’re not.”

But analysts say that inevitably more people will find themselves in the “heavy user” category, particularly as more of them trade in their lower-end phones for smartphones and move to 4G networks.

For most people who use their phones to check e-mail, surf the Web and watch an occasional video, the move toward tiered pricing will not immediately raise their phone bills. Verizon’s monthly plan offering two gigabytes of data for $30, announced last month, costs the same as its old unlimited plan, for example. But even now it doesn’t take much for a media-hungry smartphone user to chew through two gigabytes; watching Netflix video for more than roughly 20 minutes a day will do the trick. And an extra gigabyte will cost Verizon customers an additional $10.

“Over time, as you give people faster devices with faster speeds, it’s going to be a lot easier to hit that two-gig mark,” said Philip Cusick, an analyst with JPMorgan Chase who follows the telecommunications industry.

In addition to worrying about overtaxing their networks, wireless carriers are looking for new ways to make money from mobile data and applications, rather than voice minutes.

Over the last three years, the amount of money consumers spent a month on mobile calling declined to $30 from $40, according to Recon Analytics. During the same period, the average amount spent on data nearly doubled, jumping to $13 from $7.

“We’ve fallen in love with data and the utility that we get from it,” said Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon. “The usage pattern has changed dramatically.”

AT&T and Verizon have both phased out their unlimited data plans in favor of tiered plans. Verizon offers 75-megabyte plans for basic phones, as well as two-, five- and 10-gigabyte plans for smartphones, topping out at $80 a month. Those in the more expensive plans who go over their limit are charged $10 for another gigabyte, as are AT&T customers who exceed the limit on that company’s two-gigabyte plan, which costs $25.

T-Mobile, which AT&T is hoping to acquire, offers tiers from 200 megabytes up to 10 gigabytes. Those on the 200-megabyte plan are charged 10 cents for an extra megabyte. And if those with the upper-tier plans exceed their limits, the company slows their data connections until the next billing period.

Sprint is the last carrier to hold onto its unlimited data plan, but analysts and industry experts say it is unlikely to last.

All of the carriers let customers track their data use through their Web sites and on their phones, and they send alerts when customers are in danger of going over.

Of course, those who want to avoid paying more can simply wait until they are connected to a Wi-Fi network to, say, download high-definition videos, since this will not count against the monthly limit. But that doesn’t help someone who wants to stream movies or music on a long evening commute.

Terry Hartup, 34, who works as a technology consultant in Clearwater, Fla., said he was frustrated that his connection might be slowed if T-Mobile decided he was using too much data.

“These new services are coming out that let us do more, but the pipe is getting smaller and smaller,” he said. “And costing us more.”

Mr. Hartup, who streams audio throughout most of the day on Spotify and Pandora over T-Mobile’s network and Wi-Fi, says he rarely goes over two gigabytes a month. But he worries that new apps and services will make it harder to stay under that cap.

The data caps are very much on the minds of developers of mobile apps and services, who need to think about how they will affect the way people use their phones.

Malthe Sigurdsson, vice president for product design at the Internet music service Rdio, said the company was adapting to the data limits. Rdio includes several features intended to help prevent users from unwittingly churning through their data allowance.

“You can set Rdio to play at a lower quality when using a cellular network, and then decide to use a higher quality when on Wi-Fi,” he said. “We try to help people out so they don’t use up their cap in a few hours of using our service.”

Most people, he said, have adjusted their behavior to stream only when they are on a Wi-Fi network, or make use of a feature that lets them store songs on their phones to play when they are away from Wi-Fi.

Kevin Systrom, one of the founders of Instagram, a popular photo-sharing application for iPhones, said he was concerned that data caps would constrain developers from creating innovative and possibly data-intensive features and services.

“Any low data limits imposed would curb usage of all services,” he said. He called the introduction of data caps “a step backwards for mobile technology.”

Yet AT&T and other carriers, along with some developers, argue that the caps make data use more affordable and improve the performance of the carriers’ networks for all.

The main issue, developers say, is that most people have no idea how much data they are using when watching a YouTube video or sending an e-mail.

“They don’t have an intuitive feel for how much data they’re using,” said Rick Osterloh, vice president for development at Skype. “You can so easily blow through a data plan if you’re watching videos, browsing the Web and making Skype calls.”

Mr. Osterloh said he sympathized with the challenge the carriers face in managing demands. But he is concerned that mobile Skype users who accidentally go over their limits may get upset with the company rather than their carrier.

The wireless carriers, who will increasingly compete with one another for customers, could raise their data caps to best rivals and accommodate customers’ increasing appetites.

During a recent call with investors, Lowell McAdams, Verizon’s newly appointed chief executive, said it was not inconceivable that carriers might once again dangle unlimited data plans to lure subscribers.

“There may be some that hold out longer with unlimited, and I wouldn’t be surprised if unlimited comes back in and out from a promotional perspective,” he said. But he added that the trend toward limits was “inevitable.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/t...ts-capped.html





Why U.S. Broadband is So Slow
Dane Jasper

March 5, 2011 – 4:16 pm

Today The New York Times wrote about Gigabit fiber broadband in Hong Kong, which is available there for only $26 per month. The article includes mention of Sonic.net, and the Google fiber project.

In the article, author Randall Stross wrote,

“In the United States, we don’t have anything close to that. But we could. And we should.”

Here is why we don’t:

In 1996, the US Congress kicked off the broadband revolution when it passed the Telecom Act. The 1996 Act created a level playing field for competitive carriers, and brought about widespread deployment of DSL and other broadband technologies.

Then in 2003 and 2004, the then Republican led FCC reversed course, removing shared access to essential fiber infrastructure for competitive carriers and codifying instead a policy of exclusive use and “multi-modal competition”.

This concreted our unique US duopoly: cable versus telco, the two broadband choices that most Americans have today.

In exchange for a truly competitive market, the US received promises of widespread deployment. And, to some degree this has worked. Unfettered by significant competition or price pressure, broadband in at least in its most basic form can now be delivered to most homes in America, albeit at a comparatively high cost to the consumer.

What was given up in exchange for this far-reaching but mediocre pablum was true competition and innovation.

Elsewhere in the world, regulatory bodies followed the lead of the US Congress and separated essential copper and fiber infrastructure from the services and providers who used them, and the result has been amazing. In Asia and Europe, Gigabit services are becoming common, and the price paid by consumers per megabit is a tiny fraction of what we pay here at home.

I won’t deny the innovation that has occurred in the telco/cable duopoly. They’ve got TV, Internet and telephone bundles designed to serve up prime time network shows in over-saturated HD glory, with comparatively middling Internet speeds, all offered with teaser rates and terms that would baffle an economics professor. The clear value of the bundle is to baffle, and pity the consumer who wants to shed a component. At least during the intro periods, it’s often cheaper to take the whole package than just a component or two.

For cable companies, the entrenched interest in the television entertainment portion creates a clear conflict: why should they offer an uncapped broadband connection that can deliver enough video entertainment to allow consumers to cut the TV cord? And if you do drop the TV, up goes the price for even this slow and capped Internet connection, so you pay more either way. And now that telcos have gotten into the television business too, their interest in slowing the pace of increasing broadband speed is aligned as well.

This has yielded a competitive truce in America.

In a slow tide, back and forth, cable delivers a slightly better product, then telco slightly better again, all at the highest possible cost. It is iterative, not innovative, and Americans deserve more. After all, we invented the Internet, right?

Sonic.net can reach nearly half of the homes and businesses in the Bay Area today with our Fusion Broadband + Phone service. Fusion offers the latest ADSL2+ broadband, with speeds of up to 20Mbps per line (with two line bonding available if you want to double your speed!), plus home land line voice with unlimited calling, all for $39.95/mo for one line, or $69.95 for two.

Fusion is innovative technology and innovative pricing.

This is possible because the skeleton of the 1996 Act, copper lines, are still available as a shared resource for all competitive carriers. But the reach of copper is limited to just a couple miles. (You can see if Fusion reaches your location here.) This limited reach creates islands of competition around the old telephone exchanges.

For the rest of you, a bit over half of the households in the Bay Area who are located too far from the shared telephone offices, I am afraid you are out of luck for now. We must build new fiber all the way to your home, passing by along the way the idle fiber infrastructure that the FCC set aside nearly a decade ago.
http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/03/05...nd-is-so-slow/





(Most) ISPs Don't Inflate Their Speeds (Too Much): FCC
Michael Santo

Most ISPs advertise the upload and download speeds of their broadband, but just how much "truth in advertising" is there? A recent study by the FCC can give consumers the answer, at least for the providers in the study.

The Federal Communications Commission has released the results of a year-long scientific study it conducted with regard to the upload and download speeds of thirteen American Internet service providers. Among the ISPs included in the study were: AT&T, Cablevision, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Cox, Frontier, Insight, Mediacom, Qwest, Time-Warner, Verizon (DSL), Verizon (Fiber), Windstream

Most of the ISPs hit 90 percent of their advertised upload speeds, which is good, except that the reason that the upload speeds of broadband providers are always significantly lower than their download speeds is because most people are much more concerned with how long it takes for something to download than it does to upload.

Of the 13, only four (or less than 1/3) averaged at or even above their advertised download speeds (Charter, Comcast, Cox, and Verizon Fiber). It wasn't that bad for most of the rest; nearly all hit about 80 percent of their promised speed. However, Cablevision fared the worse, with average speeds of less than 80 percent, and speeds during peak times (7 p.m. - 11 p.m. M-F) that were about 50 percent of its promised speed.

The tests were performed by a private firm that has run similar tests in the U.K. It measured performance at 6,800 "representative homes" nationally in March. Fiber-optic services like Verizon's FiOS service did the best, while cable-based ISPs like Comcast came next. DSL-based services were the least likely to meet their advertised rates.

Still, Derek Turner, research director of Free Press, a nonprofit that advocates for consumers on a number of telecommunications and media issues, was critical of the results.

Turner said, "The way we look at the results, most of the ISPs -- nine of the 13 -- are failing to deliver their promised speeds at all times of the day. The fact that four of the 13 can deliver means the others could be. If they are unable deliver on their promises, than their advertising is highly misleading. ... If you got 80 percent of your pay for work you did, you wouldn't be happy about it."

This might not be as important to non-geeks as it should be. When asked to identify the service speed they were paying for, nearly 80 percent said they did not know. Meanwhile, of those who said they did know, 49 percent got it wrong.
http://hothardware.com/News/Most-ISP...-Too-Much-FCC/





AT&T Sues Customers Seeking to Block T-Mobile Deal

AT&T Inc is turning to the federal courts to thwart an effort led by law firm Bursor & Fisher to derail AT&T's $39 billion takeover bid for Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobile.

In eight lawsuits filed last week, AT&T accused Bursor & Fisher and a second plaintiffs' firm, Faruqi & Faruqi, of trying to pressure AT&T into "an extortionate settlement" by encouraging AT&T customers to file multiple claims against the merger.

Bursor & Fisher launched a "Fight the Merger" campaign in July, saying the megadeal would violate federal antitrust law and restrict competition. So far, Bursor & Fisher has filed 26 arbitration demands and more than 900 notices of dispute on behalf of AT&T customers who oppose the merger.

In the lawsuits filed last week, AT&T argued that the claims, brought under antitrust law, could not be decided in arbitration. AT&T accused the firms of "taking a thousand bites at the apple" in hopes of finding one arbitrator willing to block the merger.

The suits are a dramatic turnaround for AT&T, which just last November argued strongly in favor of arbitration in the U.S. Supreme Court case, AT&T v. Concepcion.

There, customers had sued AT&T for allegedly advertising discounted cell phones, but charging sales tax on the full price. The Supreme Court sided with AT&T in April, finding that customers who signed phone contracts containing mandatory arbitration clauses waived their right to bring class action lawsuits against the company. Customers, the court held, had to resolve their disputes with the company in arbitration.

By filing close to a thousand individual arbitration claims, Bursor & Fisher is trying to circumvent the Supreme Court's ruling, AT&T's lawyers said in the eight complaints, which were filed in federal courts across the country.

The complaints point to specific language from customer contracts, which state that customers can only bring claims in their "individual capacity" and "not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class or representative proceeding."

Class-Wide Relief

AT&T argued that although the arbitrations were filed by individual customers, they are not seeking damages for any personal harm they suffered. Rather, they're seeking an injunction to block a $39 billion merger that would affect more than 120 million wireless customers, one complaint said.

"Our arbitration agreement prohibits any form of class-wide relief. The Supreme Court upheld that," AT&T's lawyer, Andrew Pincus, told Reuters. Pincus, of Mayer Brown, also argued the Concepcion case before the Supreme Court.

Scott Bursor, the lawyer behind the "Fight the Merger" campaign, said the American Arbitration Association has already overruled AT&T's objections and moved forward with the arbitration process.

"AT&T's filing of these lawsuits appears to be an act of desperation, since AT&T now realizes it faces substantial likelihood that one or more of these arbitrations will stop the takeover from happening," he said in an email, describing the company's legal arguments as "frivolous."

Richard Brunell, the director of legal advocacy at the American Antitrust Institute, described AT&T's legal action as "ironic," given AT&T's prior arguments in the Concepcion case. The problem with the lawsuits, he said, is that AT&T would also prevent customers from filing lawsuits in federal court. "So their preferred position is that consumers not be able to bring class actions anywhere, which divests consumers of their right to challenge anti-competitive conduct."

But Pincus argued that a single arbitrator should not be able to make a decision that affects "the whole world," preempting official reviews by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice and numerous state regulators. Arbitration is not the appropriate venue for an "extremely complicated" analysis of relevant markets, potential effects of the merger on competition and prices and possible enhancements of technological innovation, the complaint said.

Michael Hausfeld, a lawyer who has represented plaintiffs in unrelated antitrust arbitrations, said he knew of no merger that has ever been blocked by an arbitration filed by an individual customer. A pending Department of Justice investigation would likely prevent arbitration proceedings from moving forward, he said.

A representative lawsuit is AT&T Mobility v. Gonnello et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 11-5636.

(Reporting by Terry Baynes; Editing by Eddie Evans and Gerald E. McCormick)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...77G59020110817





Fox Starts Its Web Pullback, and ABC Gets Ready to Follow

Fox has formally kicked off the The Great Free TV Web Pullback of 2011. Now get ready for ABC to do the same.

Yesterday Fox followed through with its previously announced plans to keep its new shows off the Web for eight days, except for Hulu Plus and Dish Network subscribers. (Fox is owned by News Corp., as is this Web site.) Disney’s ABC is now set to do the same thing, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.

Disney hasn’t formally commented on its plans for “authentication” for ABC broadcast shows on ABC.com and Hulu, but CEO Bob Iger pretty much spelled it out last week during his company’s earnings call.

Asked repeatedly about his Web and digital video strategy, Iger said he was all for distributing his stuff via nontraditional outlets like Hulu and Netflix — as long as it didn’t disrupt his existing relationships with the cable guys who are paying him big money for his shows. And that’s the main point of authentication — keep the cable guys happy.

Some Iger quotes from his call, via Seeking Alpha:

“The relationship that we have with the distributors is a very valuable one, and it’s one that we aim to respect by both protecting what we currently have and determining or figuring out ways that we can expand on it.”

“Our overall approach of late has been to make deals that increase revenue, while at the same time, protect and respect basically the multichannel or the channel distribution value that we see today. So, we’re looking at deals that are largely library in nature, meaning very little if any content that would be in season, mostly prior season. But also, trying to build into at least some of these deals, some form of authentication, [that] … will allow access to our programming faster or in a more aggressive window, if the customer is a multichannel subscriber.”

“You are right in your assessment that we’ll basically push the window back or make access to the programming more difficult or later, except if customers are authenticated as a subscriber.”

You won’t hear much carping about the pullback yet, but that’s because there’s barely any new programming going up in August. Right now, this only affects folks who want to catch up on “Hell’s Kitchen” and “MasterChef” (Team Adrien!). You’ll hear plenty more griping once the new fall shows go up next month.

On the other hand, this is good news for “Modern Family” creator Steve Levitan, who is going to get his wish.
http://allthingsd.com/20110816/fox-s...ady-to-follow/





Nokia CEO Says "Watch Out" to Android Phone Makers

Phone makers depending on Google Inc's Android software should worry about the Web search leader's deal to buy Motorola Mobility, the head of rival Nokia said on Wednesday.

Nokia has teamed up with Google arch-rival Microsoft for mobile phone software, while phone makers such as Samsung Electronics, HTC Corp and Motorola have bet on Android.

But Google's plan to buy Motorola for $12.5 billion has generated some analyst concern about whether Motorola will get preferential treatment over rivals Samsung and HTC. Nokia Chief Executive Stephen Elop said these concerns may be justified.

"If I happened to be someone who was an Android manufacturer or an operator, or anyone with a stake in that environment, I would be picking up my phone and calling certain executives at Google and say 'I see signs of danger ahead,'" Elop told a Helsinki seminar.

As for Nokia, Elop appeared to suggest that Google's move reinforced the logic for Nokia's agreement with Microsoft

"The very first reaction I had was very clearly the importance of the third ecosystem and the importance of the partnership that we announced on February 11, it is more clear than ever before," Elop said.

He also said that since the February announcement of the deal with Microsoft, there are now 25,000 to 30,000 applications delivered for the upcoming platform.

Before Elop become CEO of Nokia last year, he was president of Microsoft's Business Division.

(Reporting by Jossi Rosendahl. Writing by Sinead Carew. Editing by Robert MacMillan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...77G45F20110817





Reporter's Letter Ties Murdoch Execs to Hacking
Kate Holton and Georgina Prodhan

Many senior executives at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World knew about phone hacking at the British tabloid, according to a 2007 letter written by a reporter which contradicts James Murdoch's denials and drags Britain's prime minister back into the scandal.

The claims put new pressure on James Murdoch, who runs News Corp's European operations, and further hurt his chances of succeeding his father, Rupert, as chief executive.

In a letter written four years ago in an appeal against his dismissal from the tabloid, former royal reporter Clive Goodman said the practice of hacking was openly discussed until the then-editor Andy Coulson banned any reference to it.

Coulson, who has repeatedly denied all knowledge of the practice, went on to become the official spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron, a move which took the affair into the political arena and forced the government to turn on Rupert Murdoch after years of courting his favor.

"This practice was widely discussed in the daily editorial conference, until explicit reference to it was banned by the Editor," the Goodman letter said, published as part of a parliamentary investigation into hacking. "Other members of staff were carrying out the same illegal procedures."

Goodman, who was jailed in 2007 along with private detective Glenn Mulcaire, said he had been told he could keep his job if he agreed not to implicate the newspaper -- but was fired nonetheless after being sentenced to prison.

The committee investigating the hacking scandal said on Tuesday it would probably recall the younger Murdoch to give further evidence after receiving the Goodman letter and statements from other parties which contradicted his previous testimony.

"I think it is very likely that we will want to put those points to James Murdoch," said committee head John Whittingdale, adding that it was unlikely to recall Rupert Murdoch.

Tom Watson, the parliamentarian who has most doggedly pursued the scandal, told Sky News it could be months if not years before the full picture of what had happened at the newspaper emerged. "If this letter is accurate, the whole foundation of the company's defense collapses," he said.

Allegations of widespread hacking at News Corp's British newspaper arm, and in particular reports that journalists had used investigators to hack in to the voicemails of murder victims, sparked an uproar in Britain that dominated global headlines for almost the whole of July.

It forced the company to close the 168-year-old News of the World, drop its most important acquisition in decades -- the $12 billion purchase of BSkyB -- and accept the resignation of two of its most senior newspaper executives.

Two of Britain's most senior police officers also quit over their failure to properly investigate the scandal and 12 people have been arrested.

"The Prime Minister took no action and looked the other way amid these allegations that he had brought someone aware of criminal activity into 10 Downing Street," opposition leader Ed Miliband said in a statement.

"Every new bit of evidence shows how catastrophic his judgment was."

Jonathan Tonge, politics professor at Liverpool University, said Cameron's credibility had been damaged at a time when he is striving to fix what he calls Britain's "broken society" following riots and looting in a string of cities last week.

"He's made a lot of worthy pronouncements about wanting to mend a broken society yet he's managed to appoint someone who presided over a paper that operated in the most amoral sense it's possible to conceive of," he said. "That doesn't look good."

No Denial

News International, the British newspaper wing of the News Corp media empire, did not deny the accusations made by Goodman.

"We recognize the seriousness of materials disclosed to the police and parliament and are committed to working in a constructive and open way with all the relevant authorities," it said in a statement.

The most damaging aspect for James Murdoch within the evidence was the assertion by Tom Crone, the former top legal officer at News International, that he had told Murdoch in 2008 about an email that revealed widespread hacking.

Murdoch has said he did not know about the email when he approved a large payout to English soccer executive Gordon Taylor, who sued the paper -- Britain's most popular Sunday tabloid until its demise -- over phone hacking.

Crone and Colin Myler, editor of the News of the World until it was shut down in July, had already publicly disputed Murdoch's denial, but Crone elaborated on Tuesday, saying they had only made the large payout because of the email.

The email had also been seen by Taylor's lawyers.

"Since the 'for Neville' document was the sole reason for settling and, therefore, for the meeting (with James Murdoch), I have no doubt that I informed Mr Murdoch of its existence, of what it was and where it came from," he said.

James Murdoch in his written statement said he had no recollection of the "for Neville" email. The letter will also make difficult reading for Les Hinton, one of Rupert Murdoch's most senior and loyal executives who quit over the scandal in July.

Though the younger Murdoch had long been seen as a successor to his father, mounting claims of a cover-up could ruin his chances of running the $50 billion media conglomerate. Rupert Murdoch told investors last week he still has full confidence in his son.

The Goodman letter was also sent to Hinton, who appeared just four days later before the select committee and said he had not seen any evidence to suggest the hacking involved anyone else at the newspaper.

The claims and counter claims delivered on Tuesday added to an already-murky picture of who knew what at News Corp.

James Murdoch was not overseeing the newspaper when the alleged offences occurred but he has been accused of trying to bury the extent of the problem.

For Prime Minister Cameron, the damage is by association. He repeatedly defended Coulson after hiring him as his spokesman and denied accusations that the appointment was designed to secure Murdoch's support.

He has said he will apologies if it transpires that Coulson lied over what he knew about hacking.

(Additional reporting by Mohammed Abbas and Michael Holden; and Yinka Adegoke in New York; editing by Rosalind Russell and Matthew Lewis)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...77F2FE20110816





Porn, Piracy, & BitTorrent

The film industry mounts a sketchy legal strategy in response to illegal downloads.
Keegan Hamilton

The bad news arrived in John Doe 2,057's mailbox in May. His wife unsealed a thick envelope from Comcast and read a carefully worded message explaining that a company called Imperial Enterprises, Inc. had filed a lawsuit against him in Washington, D.C., federal court. He stood accused of having illegally downloaded a copyrighted film five months earlier, at precisely 6:03 a.m. on the morning of January 27. The name of the Imperial Enterprises movie he purportedly purloined wasn't mentioned until four pages later. Though printed in tiny italic font in a court filing, it practically leapt off the page: Tokyo Cougar Creampies.

Yet when Mrs. Doe set eyes on that ignominious title, she couldn't help but crack a smile at the absurdity of the situation. Her husband is legally blind, with vision roughly 1/100th of that of a person with normal sight. He is physically incapable of watching any film, this particular porno included.

"To be honest, it's a little ridiculous," Doe 2,057 says with a rueful chuckle. "My movie-watching ability is nonexistent. My kids watch movies, but they are 4 and 6, so they don't watch porn either. Well, hopefully they don't."

The amusement quickly turned to anxiety. Doe, then living in Santa Clara, Calif., had just accepted a job in the network-security division of a Seattle software company. (He is able to work using a pair of computer programs that read his e-mails aloud and magnify a portion of his computer screen.) The mere suggestion that he swaps illicit smut online could jeopardize his career.

At least at the outset, he could remain anonymous. The attorneys for Imperial Enterprises tracked his Internet protocol (IP) address, the unique number assigned to a computer when it connects to the Web, but they didn't yet—and perhaps still don't—know his real name. He is referred to in the court documents as John Doe 2,057, and he requested anonymity for this story, fearing repercussions if his employer hears of the lawsuit. But as he learned via his letter from Comcast, Imperial's lawyers had already asked the judge to order the cable company to identify him.

Doe remains adamant that he is innocent. Seated in his Eastside apartment clad in black slacks and a black turtleneck, his eyes visibly disfigured from ocular illness that leaves him living his life in a literal blur, the network-security professional recounts the rookie mistake that got him into this mess.

"I didn't have time to set up the wireless network in my old apartment," he says. "I was working 18-hour days so I just told my wife to go to Best Buy and pick up a router. She installed it, hit next, next, finish, and boom, that was it. We lived in a very upscale building, there was no riffraff. We just assumed we didn't have anything to worry about."

In the following months, Doe says he contacted Comcast on numerous occasions to complain that his Internet connection was frustratingly slow. In hindsight, he believes his neighbors were using his unprotected wireless to download movies. But after researching his options online and consulting an attorney, he realized his predicament was thornier than he'd initially perceived. A simple mea culpa would not suffice.

To fight the case in court would set him back thousands of dollars in attorney's fees. Plus he'd be entangled in litigation in Washington, D.C., while living 2,700 miles away in Washington state. Finally, if he were to lose the case, he could be ordered to pay up to $150,000 under federal copyright law.

But it just so happens that the offices of Dunlap, Grubb, and Weaver—the D.C.-based attorneys who represent Imperial Enterprises—offer an easy alternative: Doe can pay a few thousand dollars in fees and the porn case will disappear. In exchange for the settlement, they will drop their lawsuit, and John Doe 2,057 can rest assured that he will remain blissfully anonymous.

"The sad part about this entire porn thing is it will cost more to go to a judge," Doe says. "At the end of the day, I'll probably settle and pay the fee to make this go away."

He is hardly alone in his predicament: Number 2,057 is one of 3,545 John Does being sued in a mass lawsuit for allegedly infringing on the copyrights of Tokyo Cougar Creampies and/or Teen Paradise 4, another Imperial Enterprises production. This lawsuit isn't unique, either: Since January 2010, 194,345 John Does from across the country have been sued in 296 cases for alleged copyright violations, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit digital-rights advocacy organization. Virtually all the cases stem from the use of a popular file-sharing technology called BitTorrent, and all are the work of a handful of enterprising attorneys suing on behalf of independent film studios and distributors, purveyors of everything from Academy Award winners like The Hurt Locker to low-budget schlock and hard-core porn.

The film industry loses $6.1 billion annually to digital piracy, according to a study conducted by economist Stephen Siwek and cited recently by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). And the Independent Film and Television Alliance (IFTA) says royalty rights for indie films have been halved from what they were five years ago. The John Doe lawsuits are a way for desperate movie studios and distributors to recoup those losses. Armed with a list of IP addresses and draconian copyright laws, lawyers for the scorned studios are treating a broad swath of the Internet-browsing public like their own personal ATM.

The litigation is taking place on an unprecedented scale. During its campaign against file-sharers from 2003 to 2008, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued approximately 35,000 individuals. In comparison, a whopping 94,000 John Does have been sued in just the first seven months of 2011. Tellingly, not a single case has ever been decided by a jury.

"These lawsuits are not geared toward going to trial," says Robert Cashman, a Houston attorney who defends accused copyright infringers. "They're geared as extortion schemes to pull out thousands of dollars for every accused downloader. It's not illegal, it's just wrong. It's an abuse of the legal process."

It's the sequel to the music industry's war on digital pirates, and the margins of Hollywood are exacting revenge as in some twisted Johnny Depp flick. Most of the accused are likely guilty, and the attorneys going after them say the cyber-thieves are simply getting what's coming to them. But, in a turn that's more tragic than comic, many innocent Internet surfers are serving as legal cannon fodder while moviemakers and their lawyers line their pockets with plunder.

Admittedly, John Doe 2,057 knows a thing or two about BitTorrent. Working with computers, it's hard not to. The latest in peer-to-peer, or "P2P," file-sharing, Torrents, as they are known in techie vernacular, are staggeringly popular. With more than 100 million monthly users—more than Hulu and Netflix combined— Torrent file transfers account for 20 to 40 percent of all Internet traffic at any given time, according to BitTorrent, Inc., the San Francisco company that developed the technology.

"I have friends at work who download," Doe confesses. "They said they have Netflix, but some of the movies they want aren't streaming—they're only on DVD. With downloads, they said, you can get movies that aren't even in the theaters yet."

For better or worse, BitTorrent has made it easy to swap a DVD-quality feature film or a musician's entire discography. Created in 2002 by a San Francisco computer programmer named Bram Cohen, the technology is much different than Napster and its descendants, LimeWire and Kazaa. With these earlier applications, files were transferred directly from one person's hard drive to another on a centralized network. BitTorrent, on the other hand, divides the workload among dozens of users, each of whom shares fragments of the file that are combined like puzzle pieces when the download is completed. In essence, it creates a unique network, known as a "swarm," dedicated to sharing each specific file. The more people exchanging data, the faster the download happens.

As the attorneys for Imperial Enterprises put it in Doe 2,057's case, BitTorrent causes "rapid viral spreading" of their copyrighted porn. But Shahi Ghanem, executive vice president of marketing for BitTorrent, is quick to point out that the technology is merely a file-sharing protocol, not a cohesive network like its P2P ancestors. "We at BitTorrent have as much to do with [piracy] as Google or Comcast, the companies providing the web browser and Internet connection," he says. "We don't condone or support any form of piracy or copyright infringement."

The piracy is made possible by websites that host links to BitTorrent "trackers," which direct users to people sharing the copyrighted content they hope to acquire. The Sweden-based Pirate Bay, to name one well-known example, is a repository for innumerable Torrent trackers, which provide access to movies, music, books, software, and more. These trackers, as their name suggests, keep track of the IP addresses participating in the swarm.

To make their sprawling cases against thousands of John Does, the attorneys who represent the scorned movie producers connect to a tracker and identify as many IP addresses as possible, along with the date and time they joined the swarm. Then comes the tricky part: convincing a federal judge that all those BitTorrent users are in cahoots.

"People come and go from the swarm," explains Chris Ridder, a copyright attorney and a fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. "They pop in and share for a while, then they're done sharing and they leave. It's not like everybody got together in a smoke-filled room and decided to rob a bank. It's considerably different."

The pirate chasers in Doe 2,057's case contend that "because of the nature of the swarm downloads . . . every infringer is simultaneously stealing copyrighted material." Hence, they should be considered co-conspirators who can be sued in any court in the country where a single download took place.

"Thousands of people are lumped together in one lawsuit just because, basically, a few lawyers have decided they can be," says Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the EFF. "They're suing where their firms are, where it's easiest for them—not where the alleged infringement occurred. It can make it really hard for people to defend themselves."

Major Hollywood studios, however, have yet to file a single John Doe lawsuit. The RIAA spent millions on their piracy crusade and suffered a series of public-relations meltdowns, such as the time they targeted a dead woman. (Her name was Gertrude Walton, she died at age 83, and her daughter told reporters that the dearly departed didn't even own a computer.) Meanwhile, the two largest John Doe suits, with a combined 48,905 defendants, were filed against alleged pirates of The Hurt Locker and Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables, both owned by independent studios.

Not coincidentally, both pictures underperformed at the box office. Traditionally, they likely would have been reliable earners at the video store, with The Hurt Locker cashing in on the cachet of winning multiple Oscars (the film did net more than $32 million in DVD sales) and The Expendables relying on a star-studded cast to woo renters. But these days, both films can easily be obtained for the low, low price of free with just a few simple mouse clicks.

"There's been a sea change of how content and information is exchanged," says Lory Lybeck, a copyright attorney from Seattle who's led several high-profile legal clashes against the RIAA and now defends John Does. "Copyright owners and distributors of that content can either adapt to the new technology or they can adapt in a mutant way. They can sue and exact hundreds of thousands of dollars for something they could only charge $20 for previously. All they need to do is find out who is sharing that content, and all of a sudden it becomes a gold mine."

Porn studios are the ones who have sued the majority of John Does. They too have been hit hard by piracy: One industry expert estimates that adult-entertainment revenues shrank 40 percent between 2004 and 2009.

"It's a helpless feeling to know that when you put a title out, it's free everywhere within an hour," says Jason Tucker, head of anti-piracy efforts for Private Media Group, one of the largest international porn distributors. "It happens so fast—in the blink of an eye. And it's not just here; it's everywhere for anyone with a computer, all over the world, instantly. People either don't realize or don't care that there's work and money that went into making that product."

Rodney Githens got his John Doe letter in the mail in January, a month before he was scheduled to ship out to Afghanistan. The 45-year-old North Carolinian retired from the army as a captain shortly after completing a tour of duty in Iraq in 2004, but was headed to Kabul to work as a civilian contractor. Ironically, Githens was accused of downloading The Hurt Locker, which tells the tale of an army Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Baghdad.

"I just didn't have a lot of interest in watching that," Githens says, his Southern drawl audible all the way from Afghanistan during a Skype chat. "I was kind of there. I didn't need to see it. I don't have any of the Torrent software installed on my computer. My son, who is 19, said the same thing. He allowed me to go through his computer, and I didn't see anything. I'm fairly confident it didn't happen at my house."

Githens hired an attorney and was prepared to fight, but the case against him and all but a handful of his 24,583 fellow John Does was eventually dropped. According to the EFF, the judge in the case was perturbed by the slow progress of the proceedings, and "set up a schedule for the timely dismissal" of the Does who had already been identified via subpoena. The soldier, though, says he never had any intention of forking over a settlement. "I feel like if you pay, it marks you as a victim, and they'll come right back a second and a third time," he says, echoing a claim made by several John Doe defense attorneys. "It's a never-ending well for them. It's a fishing expedition."

Coincidentally, the men casting the nets are veterans like Githens. Thomas Dunlap and Daniel Grubb are the founding partners of Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver. Both men are active National Guardsmen, and Dunlap, a former New York stockbroker, spent 33 months in Afghanistan as an embedded trainer with Afghan security forces.

In January 2010, Dunlap and Grubb trademarked the name US Copyright Group. Later that month, they filed the first large-scale copyright lawsuit against John Does in U.S. history, subpoenaing information about 749 IP addresses that had allegedly downloaded The Gray Man, a low-budget horror flick about a grandpa who cannibalizes children. Once they had the names and addresses of the presumed pirates, the lawyers mailed them a notice bearing the newly minted, official-looking seal of their US Copyright Group. The message made it clear that the John Does could do things the easy way or the hard way: fork over a settlement or risk getting slapped with a $150,000 judgment in federal court, plus the cost of attorneys' fees.

The tactic was not original. Starting in late 2007, a British law firm began suing thousands of alleged pirates in Europe and squeezing them for settlements. The scheme fell apart when two of the lawyers were convicted of six counts of professional misconduct, including charges that they were "acting in a way likely to diminish trust in the profession" and knowingly targeting innocent victims.

Nevertheless, the US Copyright Group broke new ground in American courts. Over the next five months they proceeded to sue nearly 15,000 John Does in Washington, D.C.—about 9,000 more people than had ever been sued for copyright infringement in all federal courts combined in a single year.

It remains unclear exactly how much cash the pirate hunters have reaped from their John Doe scheme. The settlements are private agreements, and the attorneys are not obligated to divulge their earnings. That being said, it's conceivable that a movie studio and their attorneys could turn a handsome profit on a film without ever selling a single ticket or DVD. In the case of The Expendables, for instance, if even half of the 23,322 John Does involved each doled out a $3,000 settlement, the total haul would have been nearly $35 million.

Needless to say, copycat attorneys have clamored to get in on the lucrative action. Chief among them is John Steele, a Chicago divorce lawyer who was the first to file John Doe suits on behalf of porn studios. By his own estimate, in the past year Steele has sued roughly 15,000 John Does in 110 separate cases, and he plans to file another 50 cases in the next month. Steele has no qualms about the fact that most people he goes after are unlikely to defend themselves, even if they are not guilty, because of the embarrassing nature of the films involved. "I don't feel embarrassed about watching porn," he says. "I don't think you should have to hide it. I think you should be embarrassed about a federal lawsuit being filed against you for stealing. Whether it's adult content or not, the issue is theft."

In December 2010, four months after he began targeting John Does, the website Ars Technica called out Steele for plagiarizing passages from the legal filings of Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver, and earlier this year the firm threatened to sue Steele for $25,000 for creating the Media Copyright Group, a name the D.C. attorneys claimed was "confusingly similar" to their US Copyright Group. Dunlap did not return multiple calls seeking comment for this story; Steele says the quarrel was resolved amicably. "We had a nice conversation and realized this is silly," he says. "We're actually good friends now. That firm did some good pioneering stuff, and then we kind of took it to another level."

Steele certainly isn't the only imitator out there. West Virginia lawyer Kenneth Ford created the Adult Copyright Company (motto: "Hardcore Protection"), and last July a north Texas attorney named Evan Stone established the Copyright Defense Agency. If Stone's name sounds familiar, that's because he shares it with a popular male porn star: Indeed, the guy representing the creators of Debbie Does Dallas in copyright cases has the same name as one of the leading men in Debbie Does Dallas . . . Again.

Reached by phone recently, Stone says he is no longer filing John Doe suits on behalf of adult studios, but for ordinary independent filmmakers only. He explains that he is an aspiring director himself, and fighting to keep the movie business profitable. To that end, he believes his work has already made a difference. "Anecdotally, I've had friends tell me their friends aren't using BitTorrent anymore," Stone says. "They're looking for new ways to pirate shit, because so many people are getting caught by guys like me."

Then again, Stone acknowledges that his operation suffered a serious setback when judges in Texas began to toss out his cases, ordering him to go after pirates individually rather than en masse. With a mandatory $350 filing fee per case, the prospect of suing 1,337 John Does, as Stone once did, is significantly less palatable when it costs $467,950 up front.

"Obviously they got fed up with the adult cases, and so they shit-canned all of those," Stone grumbles. "That's just how it is. The same thing happened in West Virginia."

Steele too has had a handful of John Doe cases derailed in northern Illinois by Judge Milton Shadur, who in one court filing criticized the attorney's legal strategy as "shoot first, and identify his targets later." Steele says he has since shifted course, and is now suing Does in significantly smaller groups, and only in jurisdictions where alleged downloads have occurred.

But where Stone and Steele's cases have fizzled, attorneys using nearly identical tactics in other jurisdictions are still being granted carte blanche to sue Does by the bushel.

Most cyber-pirates are prosecuted in the nation's capital. More than 85,000 John Does are currently caught in ongoing litigation in the district's federal court, according to the EFF. Not only is D.C. the home court of Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver, it is also the jurisdiction of Judge Beryl Howell, who worked as a lobbyist for the RIAA from 2004 to 2009, during the peak of the organization's anti-piracy campaign.

In February, Howell issued a ruling that is now frequently cited by pirate-chasers as proof that their tactics are valid. Howell shot down a request by the EFF, the ACLU, and Public Citizen, a national nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization, that she not issue subpoenas for the IP addresses of 1,062 John Does accused of downloading the children's movie Call of the Wild. Among other points, the judge asserted that the Does "cannot demonstrate any harm that is occurring to them" before their names are disclosed to the attorneys who are suing them.

David Abrams, a fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, points out that while Howell's ruling is legally sound, she ignores the reality of the situation on this particular point. "None of these lawyers expect to get to court," Abrams explains. "They want a subpoena so they can send out that settlement letter. I suspect it works well on people who download the movies and just as well with people who didn't, because of the threat of being exposed for downloading something like transsexual porn."

Naturally, Howell's background has prompted skepticism about her impartiality when it comes to ruling on John Doe cases. She was paid $415,000 to lobby on the RIAA's behalf as the Executive Managing Director and General Counsel at Stroz Friedberg LLC, a consulting firm, according to the Center for Responsive Politics and the implu Corporation, a company that tracks spending by lobbying firms.

"There is certainly bias," says Cashman, the Houston copyright attorney. "As soon as we saw [the ruling] and saw who she was, we knew she should have recused herself."

Through a court spokesperson, Howell declined an interview request for this story, citing the fact that she is currently presiding over an ongoing John Doe case.

Sergeant West is a 38-year-old ex-Marine living in Michigan. She works as a financial planner and maintains a rental property to help make ends meet. She includes free Wi-Fi in her lease agreement, so when she got a John Doe letter in March accusing her of downloading the Maverick Entertainment Group film Smile Pretty (aka Nasty), it didn't take much deduction for her to figure out that her tenant was the likely culprit.

"I called Comcast first; I said, 'This isn't me! This is a mistake!' " recalls West, who requested a pseudonym because she fears retribution from the attorneys who filed the lawsuit against her. "The guy basically said, 'Sorry, lady, you're on the chopping block. The account is in your name. You can try to fight it, but they're probably going to fry you.' "

Though West, Githens, and Doe 2,057 all offer compelling claims of innocence, the vast majority of those accused are likely guilty as charged. They are identified by their IP address, a method that, while far from foolproof, is reliable enough to be used in criminal prosecutions for more serious cyber-crimes such as child pornography and hacking.

There are, however, several key differences between the way the FBI goes about nabbing a pedophile and the way trolling copyright attorneys pursue their prey. For one thing, says Mike Freedman, a computer-science professor affiliated with Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, the folks in law enforcement have a strong incentive to make a tight case. They must convince a judge to issue a search warrant, and then turn up evidence that the illegal files actually are on their suspect's hard drive. "If their false-positive rate is high, they waste a lot of man-hours," Freedman says. "It's in their best interest to get good data. They are working with limited time and resources."

But since an innocent John Doe is just as likely to pay up as a guilty one, unscrupulous copyright lawyers might not be so meticulous in their search for targets. "The end game isn't to win a lawsuit for some of these people," says Quentin Boyer, spokesperson for Pink Visual, a large porn distributor that opposes the John Doe suits. "It's to exact a settlement. And if you're not worried about prevailing, maybe you're not worrying about the accuracy of your data."

Pirate-hunters are cagey about the exact methods they use to trace IP addresses ("It's a secret-sauce kind of thing," says Steele), but experts like Freedman suspect it is a relatively simple process. Either the attorneys themselves or a cyber-security firm contracted for the task connect to a swarm for their client's copyrighted file and start sharing.

"Essentially, they think we're one of them," Steele says. "They try to give us copyrighted info not knowing we're gathering that for our clients. They're giving us all the proof we need, just handing it to us."

For some judges, a list of the IP addresses that allegedly participated in a swarm is enough to order Comcast and other Internet service providers to provide the names of their customers. "Comparing it to a criminal case," Freedman says, "it's like you walk into a bad part of town where there's a substantial amount of drug use and you see lists on the ground with the addresses of suspected drug users. Would that be enough to issue a subpoena, without any further verification?"

The gaping flaw in the system, according to Freedman and other experts, is that not every IP address involved in the swarm is sharing copyrighted data. In fact, not every IP address corresponds to an actual person. In 2008, a team of researchers from the University of Washington's Computer Science Department set out to determine if it is possible to draw the ire of pirate-chasers without sharing a single copyrighted file. By adding their IP addresses to a BitTorrent tracker—but never uploading or downloading any data—the academics received more than 400 complaints ("takedown notices," filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), including several that were addressed to their office printer.

"Some monitoring agencies don't verify that a user reported to be sharing a file actually is sharing that file," Michael Piatek, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Arvind Krishnamurthy write in their paper, Tracking the Trackers. They conclude that "practically any Internet user can be framed for copyright infringement today."

The savviest Internet users can also use "spoofing" technology to scramble their IP address or make it appear as though they are surfing the Web from a computer halfway across the globe. For a network-security expert like Doe 2,057, this is the most galling aspect of his case: If he'd really wanted to pirate porn, he could have done it undetected.

"There needs to be a reasonable effort to prove guilt," he says. "They're accusing me because of an IP address? Please. I could go on the web right now, and in a few seconds I could make it appear as though my IP address was coming from Russia. It's that easy."

In addition to being the leading source for BitTorrent news, the Dutch website TorrentFreak publishes articles such as "5 Ways to Download Torrents Anonymously." But even Ernesto Van Der Sar, the pseudonymous author behind the site, doesn't mince words when asked how many of the John Does are responsible for cyber-theft.

"On average, 95 percent or more of the cases are accurate," Van Der Sar says from his home in Amsterdam. "Someone in that household probably downloaded that file. But if you have four persons in a home, it's basically impossible to determine who downloaded what. And there's also the issue of open Wi-Fi and shared networks."

Of course, the lawyers leading the charge against the John Does argue that leaving a wireless network unprotected is like being an accessory to a crime. "It's like if you take a pistol, put ammunition in it, leave it in the front yard, and somebody uses it to shoot somebody," Steele says. "Yeah, you're going to be held responsible for that."

Unfortunately for Steele, the law doesn't quite work that way. At Harvard's Center for Internet and Society, Abrams points out that the accused John Doe is supposed to be the person who clicked the button that initiated a download. But it's cost-prohibitive for misidentified John Does to go to court and prove it was somebody else behind the keyboard.

"If people say 'I didn't do it,' that's perfectly OK, but you have to get in front of a judge and jury," Abrams says. "That's a very expensive proposition. Unless somebody wants to prove a point, it's not going to make economic sense to take it to a jury."

While numerous John Does have fought to remain anonymous by asking a judge to "quash" the subpoenas filed against their IP addresses, thus far only one person has had the resources and inclination to wage a full-scale counterattack against his accusers. In February, a Massachusetts man named Dmitriy Shirokov filed a class-action lawsuit against Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver on behalf of himself and 4,576 other John Does accused of downloading a German-made film titled Far Cry. Shirokov is seeking $5 million in damages from the attorneys, arguing that they engaged in "fraud and extortion" by pressuring him for settlement payments and intentionally overstating the possible repercussions of not paying up.

"It's clear that this is an injustice, and our client wanted to see something done about it," says Shirokov's attorney, Dan Booth. "The statutory damages—what they are threatening people with and saying 'If you don't settle, we may go after you in a court of law seeking these damages'—they reference cases that just don't apply. They have no relationship to what they could actually get in this case. They're not playing it straight. The law doesn't support their claims."

Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver are fighting back in court, and the outcome of the case against Shirokov and his co-defendants is still pending. On that front, Washington, D.C., Judge Rosemary Collyer allowed Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver to subpoena cable companies for information about the John Does, but later remarked in court that she regrets the decision.

"It's clear to me that not all the named people are actually sitting at the computer downloading," Collyer told Dunlap and his colleague Nicholas Kurtz during a hearing last June. "I'm feeling a little bit like I was terribly naive, to be perfectly frank, when you filed this, and I just blithely signed the subpoena and headed you off into the wilderness. And I think I did that wrong. I think we need to rethink how you're going to go about this."

On July 7, the five largest Internet service providers and the heavyweights of the movie, music, and TV industries announced that they have devised a novel new strategy to combat piracy: Educate, don't sue.

An alphabet-soup coalition—which includes the RIAA, MPAA, and IFTA—will monitor BitTorrent file transfers and report offending IP addresses to cable companies. Under a new "Copyright Alert System," the ISPs will then send a warning to the offending subscriber stating that their account "may have been misused for content theft," and that "consequences could result." The potential pirates will also receive information about "the abundant sources of lawful music, film, and TV content." The ISPs will issue up to six such warnings before they resort to "mitigation measures," such as throttling back the bandwidth of the infringing IP address.

The underlying theory behind the alert system is that many parents or people with open wireless networks are likely oblivious to the rampant piracy being perpetuated on their dime, and "subscribers have a right to know when their Internet accounts are being used for content theft." According to the website for the new Center for Copyright Information, recent studies conducted in Norway, France, and England found that up to 70 percent of users stopped downloading illegally once notified that their ISP was on to them.

However, attorneys on both sides of the John Doe battle are skeptical about the plan. "It's a step forward," says Stone, the north Texas pirate pursuer. "But it's also a bit of a fucking joke."

"My understanding, and the understanding of a lot of attorneys, is this is a flat-out disaster," adds Cashman, the Houston John Doe defender. "The conclusion I came to is I don't want to be a subscriber to any ISP that signed on to this."

Though courtroom rivals, the Texas lawyers both believe that cable and media companies would be better off adhering to the laws already on the books. Stone argues that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act obligates ISPs to provide information about infringing IP addresses without a civil subpoena, an arrangement that would seem to preclude the need for lawsuits. He also says that it's improper to sue John Does who did not participate in the same BitTorrent swarm because "there's nothing to prove they were working together."

Cashman agrees with Stone's latter point, and adds that people should only be sued individually or in small groups, and in the jurisdiction where the downloading occurred. A handful of copyright attorneys for adult studios generally abide by those guidelines, including Florida-based Marc Randazza.

Randazza says he speaks with each accused pirate and works with them to weed out cases of mistaken identity. He believes that when the John Doe cases are "done right" and combined with savvy marketing and the utilization of new technology, piracy will ultimately decline. "I think it is a wise company that does enforcement plus business-model changes," Randazza says. "You aren't going to stop it entirely with enforcement, but with that and business changes, you can really stem the tide."

Indeed, virtually everyone interviewed for this story agrees that the only real solution to piracy is to make more movies available online for an affordable price. As long as it remains difficult for people to access the most popular types of content from their home computer, illegal downloading will continue unabated. Services like Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes have made momentous strides in this regard, but industry observers—and frustrated movie viewers—still say that Hollywood has been too reluctant to embrace new technology.

"The movie industry often functions as an ocean liner," says Jason Squire, editor of The Movie Business Book and a professor at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. "It's very tough to make deliberate change; it does take time. The studios historically wait on the sidelines while somebody else takes a chance and makes a mistake and loses money, and then they find a way to make money from new technology. It happened with TV and home theaters, and it's what's happening on the Web."

Porn, on the other hand, is everywhere online—yet piracy is still pervasive. Addressing the paradox, Boyer, the spokesman for adult distributor Pink Visual, blames YouTube-like sites that stream unlicensed content, as well as a history of underhanded business practices like overbilling, for driving away customers.

"There has been mistreatment of the consumer," Boyer says. "It's not industry-wide, but common enough for people to notice. All it takes is a few sites that are highly trafficked doing it to sour a lot of consumers. They say 'The heck with paying for it, I'll just go to the site where they give it away.' "

Earlier this year, Pink Visual organized two "copyright retreats" for leading porn studios and distributors to brainstorm effective ways to combat piracy. Boyer says that among the attendees there was "tremendous sympathy" and majority support for the John Doe tactics, but that his company and others are wary.

"It's carpet-bombing," says Tucker, the Private Media Group executive. "With technology we have now, when you can strategically target somebody and put the missile down the air shaft, it doesn't make sense to carpet-bomb the entire city. In the process, innocent people are getting swept up. It's the wrong way to fight a war. There's too much collateral damage."

Yet John Doe 2,057, despite his claims of innocence, paid a settlement to make his case go away. He hired an attorney, who negotiated a settlement with undisclosed terms. The experience, he says, taught him a valuable lesson.

"The moral of the story is: Never leave your wireless network open," he says. "It could end up costing you a few thousand dollars."
http://www.seattleweekly.com/content...rsion/1395372/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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