Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 19th, '08

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Never will we accept in our profession that a judge decides if a young girl is skinny or not skinny. That doesn't exist in the world, and it will certainly not exist in France." – Didier Grumbach


"Australians are notorious in their disrespect of academics, scholars and professionals - so called elites. Yet as I say to my students, 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?" – Sharman Lichtenstein


"When a sleek luxury goods company unleashes its lawyers on a [blogging] suburban mom for not liking their new fragrance, we know the world is changing." – Tania Sanchez


"The [RIAA] people running this lawsuit are not exactly human. They understand nothing. They are like the bad robots in RoboCop." – Ray Beckerman


"I fly a G4. How far do you think my G4 will go on stock options? I need cash." – Movie producer


"Nerdic." – PIXmania.com


































April 19th, 2008




Europe 'Should Not Criminalise File-Sharers'
David Meyer

People should not be criminalised for the file-sharing of copyrighted material if they are not profiting from doing so, the European Parliament has recommended.

On Thursday the parliament voted through two reports on the cultural industries. Both contained amendments that were directly related to the ongoing argument between the content industry and Internet service provider (ISPs). In this conflict, the ISPs are claiming that they should not have to disconnect those users who are persistent filesharers, but the content industry is calling for a "three strikes and you're out" rule in order to protect intellectual property.

The argument encompasses not only the prospect of users being "banned" from Internet use, but also the deep packet inspection techniques that would have to be employed in order to catch them.

One of the reports urged the European Commission and member states to avoid allowing measures that are in conflict with civil liberties, human rights and the principle of proportionality. The other, which passed with a much thinner majority, specifically called for the Commission to "rethink the issue of intellectual property in order to assure solutions that are equitable for both big and small actors and strike a balance between the respect of intellectual property and the access to cultural events and content".

"[The European Parliament] underlines that on the battle against digital piracy, the solution should not be to criminalise consumers who do not intend to make profit out of their actions," a parliamentary statement read.

A spokesperson for the parliament told ZDNet.com.au's sister site ZDNet.co.uk on Friday that, while the reports were recommendations and not legally binding, they summed up "what the mood is now" in Europe. "People downloading from sites -- often they don't know that it's not legal, so they shouldn't [be criminalised] if they're not trying to make a profit out of it," the spokesperson said, adding that people or companies who were trying to make a profit from the filesharing of copyrighted material should be criminalised.

However, another recommendation in the report called on the Commission to "do what is necessary to enforce and protect literary and artistic property rights, especially in the digital environment".

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) was quick to react on Thursday, saying that the European Parliament's recommendations on filesharing were "badly drafted [and] rushed through".

"If the aim of the report is to protect creative content, including in the online environment, we should be looking at all options available in the fight against copyright theft," said IFPI executive vice president Frances Moore. "Instead, this amendment suggested discarding certain options before there is even a proper debate."

However, IFPI has welcomed the news from France that filesharers of copyrighted material there may soon be thrown off the internet. The organisation called the French move "the single most important initiative to help win the war on online piracy that we have seen so far".

A spokesperson for the UK ISP Association was not available for comment at the time of writing.
http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa...0.htm?feed=rss





No Harm, No Foul, No Attorneys' Fees for RIAA Victim
Eric Bangeman

A hotly contested file-sharing case involving a man whose adult daughter admitted to sharing files over LimeWire has been dismissed, much to the dismay of the defendant. We've covered Lava v. Amurao previously because of the allegations raised about the conduct of MediaSentry, which was accused by defendant Roland Amurao of conducting private investigations without a required New York state license.

According to Recording Industry vs The People, the judge presiding over the case dismissed the case with prejudice at the RIAA's request during a hearing on Friday. The judge also dismissed Amurao's counterclaims, and told each party that it was responsible for its own fees.

Amurao was sued in 2007 after MediaSentry detected activity on LimeWire from an IP address that was assigned to his Internet account. After the usual Doe lawsuit was filed, Amurao was sued after refusing to take advantage of the settlement letter. During discovery, the RIAA learned that Amurao's adult daughter, Audrey Amurao, was responsible for the infringement. Amurao refused to negotiate a "global resolution" of the case that would involve both him and his daughter, according to an RIAA filing, so the labels decided to dismiss the case against him with each party to bear its own costs and fees.

Amurao felt that the labels shouldn't be able to walk away and leave him stuck with a mess of legal bills after suing the wrong person. In a recent filing, his attorney Richard Altman argued that if the judge was going to dismiss the lawsuit, he should do so only if Amurao was awarded attorneys' fees. "When the dismissal is with prejudice, the order granting the motion is tantamount to a final judgment in favor of defendant," according to the filing. " Thus, once this Court dismisses the plaintiffs' claims with prejudice, Mr. Amurao will become the prevailing party. He is then entitled to costs."

In an amicus brief (PDF), the EFF argued that the case raised important issues regarding the RIAA's conduct in its 25,000+ file-sharing lawsuits, and that dismissing the case at this point would legitimize the RIAA's attempts to "expand the scope of its copyright protections beyond with the statues provide." Furthermore, allowing the RIAA to walk away from its case against Amurao "could have disastrous consequences for innocent targets of careless copyright claims," the EFF wrote in its brief.

The judge was apparently unswayed by the argument and, with the dismissal of the case with prejudice at the RIAA's request, has put Amurao in the position of being a prevailing party in a copyright infringement lawsuit, but with nothing to show for his efforts in fighting the record labels' accusations that he infringed on their copyrights. The RIAA has also filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Audrey Amurao.

So far, courts have gone both ways on the question of whether the RIAA should be forced to pay attorneys' fees for those whom it has mistakenly targeted. In the case of Capitol v. Foster and Atlantic v. Andersen, the exonerated defendants were awarded attorneys' fees; in others such as Virgin Records v. Cliff Thompson (note the different surnames), the judges have said that each party is responsible for its own costs.

The disagreement on whether a prevailing party in a copyright case should get attorneys' fees has even extended to the appeals court level. Recently the Seventh Circuit ruled that a simple "material alteration" of the legal relationship between two parties was sufficient for an attorneys' fees awards. In contrast, the Fifth Circuit says that a number of factors need to be considered first before an award can be made. The Supreme Court has been asked by Cliff Thompson to settle the matter (and award him attorneys' fees). Until the highest court in the land decides to follow the Seventh Circuit's reasoning, the RIAA will be free to walk away from lawsuits, leaving their victims with thousands of dollars in legal bills.

Altman tells Ars Technica that he is now considering appealing the judge's decision to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...aa-victim.html





RIAA Sues Homeless Man
Ray Beckerman

In Warner v. Berry, where the RIAA was suing a man who lives in a homeless shelter, the Magistrate Judge -- Hon. Kevin Nathaniel Fox -- recommended that the plaintiffs' application for a default judgment be denied, and that the plaintiffs be ordered to show cause why they should not be sanctioned under Rule 11. The Judge agreed that the default judgment should be denied, but chose not to sanction plaintiffs' attorneys.

The facts were as follows:

On April 9, 2007, the RIAA's process server had posted a copy of the summons and complaint on the door of the defendant's apartment, which the RIAA knew was not a good address.

On April 17, 2007, the plaintiffs requested a 60-day adjournment of a scheduled conference because their "attempts at service at Defendant's last-known address were unsuccessful."Plaintiffs stated they were "now conducting a thorough address investigation to locate a current address at which to serve Defendant before the
June 13, 2007 service deadline."

On April 25, 2007, Plaintiffs' process server executed an affidavit of service, declaring that on April 9, 2007, at 3:50 p.m., she posted the summons by affixing one copy "in a conspicuous place on the property known as: 1713 Adee Ave Apt. 1 Bronx, N.Y. 10469", which was the address they knew was a bad address.

Meanwhile, Magistrate Judge Fox observed that at the time of Plaintiffs' April 17, 2007, letter to this Court, which sought an adjournment of the pretrial conference so that Plaintiffs could locate Defendant's current address, Plaintiffs "had already resorted to the 'affix and mail' method of service because they affixed the summons to the defendant's last known residence on April 9, 2007."

The Magistrate Judge found that "[b]y affixing the summons on April 9, 2007, the plaintiffs demonstrated they never intended to conduct 'a thorough address investigation ...' because they employed the 'affix and mail' method of service without exercising due diligence to effect personal service pursuant to CPLR s 308(1) and (2)." Magistrate Judge Fox concluded that Plaintiffs' representation to this Court to the effect that they intended to conduct an investigation to locate Defendant's current address implicated Fed.R.Civ.P. 11(b) because it was made for the improper purpose of unnecessary delay.

District Judge Harold Baer, Jr., agreed with the Magistrate in most respects, but declined to issue Rule 11 sanctions, because he felt the lawyers' misrepresentation was the result of sloppiness rather than an intention to mislead, "giving them as officers of the Court the benefit of the doubt": While Plaintiffs' lawyers should be faulted for failing to keep closer tabs on their process server and for failing to better supervise their paralegal, their actions do not rise to the level of a Rule 11(b) violation. Plaintiffs' lawyers might have been sloppy in their attempts to serve Defendant, but giving them as officers of the Court the benefit of the doubt, all their representations to this Court were, to the best of their knowledge, information and belief, not for the improper purpose of unnecessary delay.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...kes-sewer.html





An Interview With Ray Beckerman About The RIAA
Simon Barrett

If you are an internet music listener, the name Ray Beckerman will not be an unknown one. Ray has become the one shining star in the dark world that the music industry would prefer we live in. The Recording Industry of America Association (RIAA) supposedly is a loose industry group that assists the music giants to co-exist. In practice they have become the most hated organization in recent history. Their mandate being to seek out and destroy anyone that downloads illegal copies of music. To date they have threatened more than 20,000 people with law suits. What is truly insidious, is the tactic of ‘pay us $3,000 and promise not to do it again, or else we will take you to court, and go for megabucks’ letters that they send out to people who they deem as music pirates. They have targeted dead people, young kids, the chronically ill, and the chronically computer inept. It matters not to the RIAA, or more importantly the lawyers paid by the RIAA.

Ray has been at the forefront of defending people from the onslaught of the RIAA. He also runs the very informative website Recording Industry Vs The People.

Ray was gracious enough to spend some time talking with me. He is the master of not saying much, yet saying a huge amount.

Ray, I did a Google search on you, and there are over 34,000 references. You are without doubt the biggest pain in the butt to the RIAA. How did you get involved in this debacle?

In late 2004 or early 2005 I learned of these lawsuits from the EFF. I thought to myself “I’m a litigator, I’m a copyright lawyer, and I hate bullies. So maybe I can help some of these folks.”

Then in Summer or Spring 2005 I got my first client who wanted to fight back. It occurred to me that one of the RIAA’s strategic advantages was information. It had one law firm controlling all 25,000 cases, and knew what was going on in each one. A defendant’s lawyer, on the other hand, had no information at all except what the RIAA wanted us to know. I didn’t know what was going on in other cases, or, indeed, if there were any other cases where defendants were fighting back. So decided to set up the blog as a place to collect information.

The RIAA seems to think that suing their own customers is a good idea. I can not think of another industry that has played this game and won. Are they just a school yard bully?

Yes. The ugliest and cruelest school yard bully I have ever encountered, and I have seen some bad ones.

Does the RIAA understand the concept of freedom of choice?

The people running this lawsuit are not exactly human. They understand nothing. They are like the bad robots in RoboCop.

Some might say that the bully-boy tactics actually encourage people to “rebel” and go for illegal downloads? I guess the analogy here would be being told by your mom not to touch something, and of course you, as the 5 year old are now galvanized into action!

I don’t agree with that, but the bully-boy tactics have created a whole new class of consumer — people who seek out independent music not tainted by the ghouls and freaks running the Big 4.

The RIAA make the argument that music piracy is killing the music industry, and they can back that claim up with statistics. My view is somewhat different. If you like something, you will buy it. Is music piracy the reason that sales are flat?

I think their sales are declining because the companies are being run by morons who have been hypnotized by some unscrupulous lawyers, who have never had any imagination as to how to sell music on the internet, and who are bringing lawsuits — and trying to blame others — strictly to cover up their failure to capitalize on one of the greatest money making opportunities ever.

Why do they actively attempt to blur the line before legal downloads approved by bands/put up by bands and those that are merely thieving?

I’m sorry, don’t understand the question. Their goal is to try to monopolize digital music. They will say and do anything to try to make that happen.

Why do they do it? Because these robots don’t understand competition. They do everything as a collusive pack of 4.

What do you see the RIAA doing in future as they become even more desperate?

Chapter 11.

I realize that you can not discuss cases that you are involved in, but maybe you could share some general thoughts about the way you see this issue moving. There are noises about taxing internet access, as a way of recompensing the music industry. This idea, at least in my mind, is about as sensible as invading Iceland. What are your thoughts?

The courts are starting to reject the RIAA’s stupid theories and starting to get irked at its lawyers’ frivolous behavior, and more lawyers and defendants are choosing to fight back, and are doing so in a better informed way. So the cost of pushing this madness forward is increasing.

Meanwhile, the shareholders can’t be happy to see the value of their stock declining so drastically, so I would imagine they’ll eventually wake up and stop the madness, even before the Courts — which move slowly — get around to it.

There are not many lawyers that can talk the talk, and walk the walk, when it comes to the computer world. Yet you talk happily about IP addresses, wireless routers, DHCP, and even the basic structure of the Internet. Was this a huge learning curve?

Yes of course I have had to learn a lot about the technology to keep up with the RIAA’s lies. If the RIAA’s lawyers weren’t professional liars, I might not have had to learn so much.

Recording Industry v The People has been a very successful and useful site. But it must take an enormous amount of time and effort to keep it up to date. How many folks work on it?

One.

Thanks for taking time to talk with us here at Blogger News, and good luck with your quest.
http://www.bloggernews.net/114968





Music Industry Dealt Pirate Bay Blow
David Landes

The recording industry’s branch organization has apologized to a pro-file sharing Swedish rap artist for including him as a party to their indictment against Pirate Bay without his permission.

The move is a major setback for the record companies, who have long pointed to artists as the ultimate losers from illegal file sharing.

“File sharing for private use without a profit motive is totally OK in my eyes. It’s not theft, it’s simply taking a copy of a product and spreading it around,” said Swedish rapper Max Peezay to the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD).

“I don’t want to be a part of putting anyone in prison.”

As an independent artist, Max Peezay, whose given name is Tom Piha, explained that he derives most of his revenues come from concerts, rather than album sales. By his account, the money he loses because his records are downloaded rather than purchased is more than covered by income generated from additional live shows driven by new fans discovering his music for free on the internet.

Piha found himself drawn into the file sharing controversy against his will on account of shoddy research by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (Ifpi), which coordinates recording industry efforts to combat piracy.

Ifpi included Piha’s album Discokommittén among the 25 albums selected at random by prosecutors for their indictment against the founders of The Pirate Bay.

The suit demands that the four individuals who founded the file sharing site pay record companies 15 million kronor ($2.5 million) in compensatory damages.

Ifpi incorrectly assumed that the rights to the album were owned by music distributor Bonnier Amigo, and thus never bothered to ask Piha personally if he wanted to be a party in the suit.

In fact, Piha himself owns the rights.

“It should have been checked out much more carefully,” said the head of Ifpi’s branch in Sweden, Lars Gustafsson, to Svenska Dagbladet.

Gustafsson downplayed the impact that the artist’s decision to remove himself would have on the case, other than reducing the level of compensation sought in the case by 120,000 kronor, the sum in the indictment associated with the Discokommittén album.

But the incident continues to have repercussions for Piha, whose credibility has been questioned by fellow artists and fans alike.

“I wish I hadn’t landed in this situation. I can see now how easy it is to become a pawn in this game,” he told the paper.

Piha disagrees with the record companies’ approach to the file sharing issue and doesn’t think that prison sentences and fines will have an impact on file sharing in the long run.

“I don’t care what happens to Pirate Bay. But if they disappear, someone else will take their place and I don’t want to see the war escalate. I want to see a dialogue.”

A trial date for the case has yet to be set.
http://www.thelocal.se/11144/20080416/





Chief Police Investigator in Pirate Bay Trial Employed by the Copyright Industry
Press release

Jim Keyzer has had a leading role in the prosecution against The Pirate Bay as head of the preliminary investigation. In the upcoming trial he is expected to be a key witness and due to being a police investigator to have high credibility.

Keyzer was also heading an investigation where The Pirate Bay sued some of the mayor media corporations for data trespassing. That case was recently cancelled by him.

But....

New information reveals that the 39-year old investigator isn't the objective professional a police investigator should be. Since March 16 this year, he is employed by Warner Bros, one of the plaintiffs in the prosecution against The Pirate Bay. Keyzer himself confirmed the information but refused to reveal what his position within the company is.

- It was yesterday that the blog, kopit.se, discovered that Jim had changed employer on his Facebook profile. The new employer was Warner Bros and we decided to call him up and ask about it. He confirmed that he is an employee there and we can't see it in any other way than this being the reward for a work well done from the new employer of the police - the entertainment industry, says Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay.

According to Peter Athlin, Sunde's laywer, the consequence of the information could be that the investigation has to be remade.

- If the trial wasn't already just a political theatre, this clearly shows that this is not a fair and balanced trial. The copyright industry stands no chance in an objective legal judgement and therefor have to cheat their way forward. Their legitimacy has hit rock bottom, says Magnus Eriksson of copyright critics Piratbyrån (Bureau for Piracy).

- This is a legal outrage. Talk about biased, Sunde continues. Keyzer is in charge of the investigation. No matter the reasons to switch employer, this investigation has not been fair. We have felt that the investigation has concentrated on trying to locate something to point out as wrong with The Pirate Bay instead of determining if the activities of the site are unlawful or not.

Monique Wadsted, laywer at MAQS law firm, representing Hollywood in the case, comments on the story this way:

- I suppose this is Warner Bros way of expressing how they feel about the good work Jim Keyzer has done. But nothing inappropriate has been going on during the preliminary investigation.

How nice of Hollywood to come up with yet another unbiased voice to tell us the truth...About time to investigate the investigators!
http://static.thepiratebay.org/pm/20080418_eng.txt





The Pirate Bay Demands Compensation for IFPI Block
Ernesto

The Pirate Bay has announced that it will file a complaint to ask for compensation from the IFPI for the traffic which was destined for its site, but blocked by the Danish ISP Tele2. If they win, the money will be spent on funding independent artists who share their music for free on filesharing sites.

In February, a Danish court ordered the ISP “Tele2″ to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The decision, which is currently under appeal, once again heated the debate on ISPs Internet filtering.

The court case was initiated by the IFPI - the infamous anti-piracy organization that represents the recording industry. The IFPI later tried to use the “landmark decision” to force Swedish ISPs to do the same, but failed. In fact, it seems that filtering traffic to The Pirate Bay is actually illegal according to European law.

Pirate Bay’s Brokep told TorrentFreak that they will file a complaint, and ask for compensation for the time they were blocked in Denmark. The Pirate Bay already fought back by launching The Jesper Bay, giving affected customers detailed instructions on how to regain access to The Pirate Bay. However, they think that it is only fair to ask compensation for the inconvenience the IFPI block has cost .

The money, which will be managed by the Danish Piratgruppen, could be used to fund Danish artists who want to share their music, according to Brokep, who assured us that they will only ask for a reasonable amount of money, unlike the IFPI. “The grant will give out money to Danish aspiring artists for making music and releasing it for free. And all will be sponsored by IFPI since they tried to fuck those people over. Poetic justice.”

Strangely enough, The Pirate Bay was never heard in the IFPI vs. Tele2 case. “Nobody ever asked us what we think about the block, although it does affect only us and we’re the reason for the lawsuit,” brokep said.

This is not the first time The Pirate Bay has fought fire with fire, last year they took legal action against 10 major media companies, including Paramount Home Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox and Universal Music Group, for using MediaDefender to sabotage their BitTorrent tracker.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-i...sation-080415/





Comcast Proposes File-Sharing 'Bill of Rights'

Largest American ISP moves to avoid government regulation of internet, but Canada still far behind
Peter Nowak

Comcast Corp., under investigation by U.S. authorities for interfering with the traffic of its internet subscribers, is proposing a "bill of rights and responsibilities" for users of file-sharing technology in an attempt to stave off government regulation.

The company — the largest internet service provider in the United States — promised in February to cease discriminating against certain types of traffic by the end of this year after the Federal Communications Commission held hearings into the company's decision to block file-sharing applications.

File-sharing, which uses peer-to-peer (P2P) technology such as BitTorrent, is popular among internet users for swapping copyrighted works such as movies or music, but it is also emerging as an efficient distribution method for legitimate businesses. The CBC, for example, released an episode of its show Canada's Next Great Prime Minister last month for free over BitTorrent.

The company is now looking to codify "best practices" for ISPs to deal with file-sharing traffic and to clarify what controls users have over the peer-to-peer applications running on their computers. Some of these operate in the background and give users little obvious information on what they're doing or how much bandwidth they're using.

A bill of rights would help all parties — ISPs, content providers and users — agree on acceptable uses of file-sharing and peer-to-peer technology, the company says. It hopes to get various stakeholders together to ratify the bill later this year.

"By having this framework in place, we will help P2P companies, ISPs and content owners find common ground to support consumers who want to use P2P applications to deliver legal content," Tony Werner, Comcast's chief technology officer, said in a statement.

Comcast made the announcement in conjunction with Pando Networks, which makes software that lets users transfer large files such as home videos using P2P technology.

Government intervention feared

The company said it was making the move in order to avoid government intervention in the internet. In February, the U.S. Congress introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, which would ban discriminatory practices by ISPs.

It's "another example of how we can work with the industry to solve these issues rather than getting the government involved," a Comcast spokesman told The Associated Press.

The announcement garnered immediate support from other industry players.

The Distributed Computing Industry Association — a trade organization that says it has more than 100 members representing P2P and social networking software providers, content rights holders, ISPs and service-and-support companies — backed Comcast's move.

"The DCIA and our member companies and participants in our working groups believe that private-sector initiatives are generally preferable to regulatory measures in such areas that are as technologically complex and fast-moving as this in terms of ongoing innovation," CEO Marty Lafferty said in a statement.

Some consumer groups, however, objected to the move by Comcast. Media watchdog Free Press said there was still a need for government oversight of the internet because Comcast and other service providers could not be trusted to act in the interest of consumers.

"Consumers cannot trust Comcast or any other phone and cable company with the future of the internet. Comcast has thumbed its nose at the existing consumer bill of rights," said Free Press general counsel Marvin Ammori in a statement. "Comcast's announcement is little more than the fox telling the farmer, 'I'll guard the henhouse, you can go home.' And that's all the attention it deserves."

Canada slow to act

In Canada, ISPs including Bell Canada Inc. have admitted to shaping traffic and slowing P2P traffic, but have thus far escaped regulatory scrutiny. However, several groups — including the government's standing committee on Canadian Heritage, the New Democratic Party, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers and the National Union of Public and General Employees — have called on the nation's regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, to curb such interference.

Critics have said Comcast's recent about-face on traffic shaping is the direct result of threatened regulatory intervention by the FCC, and Canadian authorities are well behind in addressing the problem.

"It's textbook," University of Ottawa internet law professor Michael Geist said last month. "Once there's regulatory writing on the wall, there's often a move from some companies to take matters into their own hands and address some of the concern."

The CRTC has said it is reviewing whether it should have jurisdiction over the internet, and expects to make a report in May. Industry Minister Jim Prentice, on the other hand, has indicated that he is against regulating the internet.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...h-comcast.html





More Bell Canada Misinformation and Misdirection in Attempt to Justify Questionably Lawful Throttling

In a Network World article by Dave Webb, Bell Canada’s chief of regulatory affairs Mirko Bibic attempts to justify the throttling of the last-mile connection to independent ISPs. As is typical, Bell Canada is abusing peoples confusion between issues around the last mile natural monopoly and Net Neutrality. I increasingly believe that if people continue to confuse these two related but separate issues, Bell Canada and other incumbent phone and cable companies will win this critical debate.

I strongly agree with Network Neutrality. I am, however, one of those who believe that market forces within a competitive marketplace will be better able to ensure this neutrality than government regulation of TCP/IP based services. In order for this to be possible we need to have a competitive marketplace where those of us that recognize the need to hire ISPs that provide us services based on the End-to-end design principle are able to do so. We will then continue to educate other people about this need as well.

There are times when congestion exists on the Internet (sometimes legitimate, and sometimes not), and customers should be able to hire an ISP that best matches their own beliefs in how to handle this congestion. While I believe that the government should mandate disclosure of routing policies by ISPs, I believe that regulating “Net Neutrality” directly may backfire.

This is an entirely different question than the fact that existing regulation of the “last mile” monopoly must be enforced and strengthened. There will always be a “last mile” monopoly for telecommunications for the same reason there is for roads: it makes no more sense for every telecommunications provider to run separate wires into our homes than for every retailer to run separate roads to our homes.

Solving the Net Neutrality ISP issues through competition requires that a competitive marketplace exist, and that requires that those managing that “last mile” are not able to leverage that monopoly to wipe out competition.

Bell Canada as a company operates in many different markets, and offers a number of different services. In each of these markets they are regulated (or not) in different ways. With Bell ExpressVu they are a cable company, regulated as a “broadcast undertaking” just like StarChoice, and very similar to Rogers when acting as a cable company. They are also a wireless cell carrier, and a ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier) offering a variety of telecommunications services. They own Telesat Canada, and an interest in CTVglobemedia.

Bell Canada also offers Internet Service Provider (ISP), including through the Sympatico brand. In this case they are using the same “last mile” infrastructure as any other competing ISP, allowing customers to connect point-to-point to their routers. After that point it is an “Internet” service where they offer transit (connections between their Internet routers and those of other ISPs locally and beyond) and other competing Internet-related services (email storage/delivery, Website hosting, DNS, etc).

In most of these marketplaces they operate as a regular private sector company, regulated just like any other competitor in that same marketplace.

There is one of their services where they are different and that is in the provision of physical wiring to our homes. This is a service where Bell was given privileged “right of way” access by various levels of government to place cabling (copper, fiber, etc) below and above public and private land. Bell could never offer this service without government intervention, and the superior property right is the public and private property that the cables run below and above — not the cabling.

Bell was given a number of requirements in exchange for this privileged government intervention. Historically the most often discussed was rural access, where Bell was mandated to offer phone services to rural locations — even at what might otherwise have been a loss, except for the fact that they were given practically guaranteed profits in other markets by the government, as well as massive government subsidies over the years. More recently the condition discusses more often is competitive access to the facilities which the public sector made possible (through right of way and subsidies) to allow services built upon this last mile to be provided by a competitive private sector.

I will state what seems to be the core of the confusion: when it comes to this last mile wiring below and above our property, the service that Bell Canada manages can no more be considered privately “owned” by Bell than Canada Post can be considered private. While the ideal would have been if this specific service had been separated by Bell Canada and operated as a proper crown corporation, we can’t go back in time and fix this problem.

We do have a number of ways to move forward from here. Some suggest that adequate enforcement of competitive access is sufficient. While I might have been convinced in the past, the claims by Bell Canada that their throttling of competitive access circuits is somehow related to P2P Internet traffic suggests that this alone is not going to work.

The type of management that Bell is trying to justify is not legitimately considered Internet traffic at all. In fact they may be violating both the terms of the regulated service as well as federal privacy legislation to inspect the packets within these point-to-point communications to the level to even detect if they contain TCP/IP packets. There is also no legitimacy to their being congestion on these circuits, unless it is temporary due to damage within the network. The speed of the connection between the customer and the ISP (and Bell is *NOT* an ISP in this transaction) is part of the regulation.

Given Bell can’t be trusted to live up to their end of the bargain with governments, it may be time to take back these services from Bell and allow the remaining company to operate the way Bell seems to want to operate. The louder Bell tries to justify their questionably legal activity, the more we need to push to take from the table the option of bell violating their end of the bargain and getting away with it.

We can give Bell a simple choice.

One option would be for this last mile infrastructure to be spun off into a separate company that would then become a crown corporation. Bell can even be given a contract to manage the services of this company for a 10 year period, after which it would be open to competition or to employees of this new crown corporation. With a separate corporate structure, Bell Canada would clearly no longer be able to allege that they “own” this infrastructure, or claim they can manage it any way they see fit.

Another option would be to allow Bell to retain ownership of this infrastructure, as long as they paid a rental fee at a fair price for the right of way, as well as returning any government subsidies — including interest over the last 50 years. We would be fair and only backdate this for 50 years, even though they have received privileges for far longer. It would be clarified that the Crown Corporation would still be created, and while historical right-of-way would be grandfathered, it would be this new Crown Corporation that would own any new last-mile infrastructure.

Given these options I believe Bell will choose the first, given I doubt even Bell with their guaranteed profits over the years could afford to pay back the various handouts from the public purse they have received. At that point we would have a competitive marketplace between competing phone and Internet access companies able to operate on equal footing, each able to build out their own networks using the (mandatory disclosed) policies of their choice. Customers can then read the public reports of these management choices, and hire the phone and Internet access company of their choosing.

Note: As part of the other work I do I look for electronic versions of older government documents (Bills and summaries, statutes, etc). While the 1987 version of the Bell Canada Act is online, earlier versions are not. It would be interesting to have adequate online references for the history of Canadian telecommunications, given how quickly people forget and then believe the “we own it, and we can do what we want with it” rhetoric from the phone and cable companies.

P.S. I participated in IT360 last week, and will BLOG about that later in the week. It just seems like questions around throttling and Net Neutrality are extremely hot at the moment (See ITWorldCanada’s Net Neutrality Resource Centre).
http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/insig...ul-throttling/





Virgin Media CEO: Net Neutrality is "Bollocks," Promises to Breach Agreement with Customers
Cory Doctorow

Neil Berkett, the new CEO of Virgin Media (my ISP at home in London, along with BT) has announced that he considers Net Neutrality to be "a load of bollocks" and he's promised to put any website or service that won't pay Virgin a premium to reach its customers into the "Internet bus lane."

As a Virgin customer, I'm not paying to see those services that bribe Virgin to reach me, I'm paying to reach the entire web, whichever bits I think are useful, as quickly as Virgin can deliver them.

Theoretically, I'm locked into a Virgin plan for another six months, but as far as I'm concerned, they've just announced that they're violating the agreement by announcing that the services I can reach will be systematically slowed down unless they pay Virgin extra. That means that we're now null and void. I'll be calling to cancel today.

Who's with me?

In an interview with the Royal Television Society’s Television magazine, far from covering up their intentions, Virgin Media’s new incoming CEO Neil Berkett - who joined the Virgin Media Board just a few days ago - has launched an attack on the ideas and principles behind net neutrality.

“This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks,” he said, adding that Virgin is already in the process of doing deals to speed up the traffic of certain media providers.

Link

Update: Charlie Stross is pissed -- and he's convinced that Virgin drops packets if they detect a router on your network. This jibes with my experience too.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/13...a-ceo-net.html





FCC Gets an Earful From Open-Net Defenders at Stanford
Ryan Singel

Stanford professor Larry Lessig brought down the house at a net neutrality hearing Thursday, calling for the Federal Communications Commission to finally move to make sure that the internet's architecture remain open and neutral, with the goal of having the internet become as uncomplicated as the electrical grid.

With his standard flair for stunning PowerPoint presentations, Lessig made the case that an open internet made possible the massive economic gains of the 1990s and that network operators who want to change the internet in order to create fast and slow lanes need to prove that such a 'smart' network would actually be better than an internet where the intelligence lies at the edges.

"We are facing these problems because of a failure of FCC policy," Lessig said, as the FCC's five commissioners sat behind him in a Stanford auditorium. "The FCC failed to make it clear to the network owners that if they are building the internet they need to build it neutrally."

"The burden should be on those who would change its architecture," Lessig continued.

Lessig hypothesized an electricity grid that would query whether a device plugged in was made by Sony or Toshiba, or was approved, saying that such a network could be built, but one would need very strong arguments to convince the world to change. That should be the same with the internet, he argued.

Lessig derided carriers' arguments that they need new business models in order to justify the costs of laying out new networks, referring to "coin-operated experts that populate Washington these days."

"We should have a Missouri attitude, a show-me attitude, that competition will continue," Lessig said.

Lessig's message was oddly echoed by the Christian Coalition of America's Michele Combs, who correctly pointed out that Comcast's ongoing interruption of BitTorrent programs uses one of the same techniques the Chinese government uses to censor the internet in China --- fake reset packets.

"We have seen network operators block political speech and block the most popular application on the internet -- Comcast blocked people downloading the King James bible," Combs said, referring presumably in the first case to Verizon blocking pro-choice SMS messages and in the second case to an AP story that tested out whether Comcast was interfering with BitTorrent by attempting to download a public-domain translation of the Bible.

FCC Chairman Martin noted at the opening of the scheduled seven-hour public hearing that Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner were all invited to speak, but declined to participate.

Their sole defender on the first panel was George Ou, a former network engineer and until recently, a ZDNet writer.

Ou cited traffic figures from Japan that showed that a small minority of users in Japan sucked up nearly half of the available bandwidth and argued that network traffic management has long been integral to intranets and the internet.

FCC commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate warned against federal rules that would limit ISPs' efforts to identify downloaded child pornography.

"Child pornography is a multi-billion dollar segment of our economy," Tate said, without referencing her source for the statistic. "I want to make sure that as we discuss these issues we don't end up with unintended consequences of regulatory actions."

She noted that ISPs spent $15 billion in 2007 adding capacity.

"We must remain vigilant against intrusive government action that could disrupt the process of this broadband deployment," Tate said, though the crowd rewarded her remarks with boos when she finished.

The entertainment industry weighed in as well, with a representative of the Songwriter's Guild calling for technology to prevent unauthorized music sharing on the internet. Jean Prewitt, the president of the Independent Film & Television Alliance, called for non-discrimination policies as a way to let artists not aligned with major studios to find an audience and innovate.

"We need to take proactive measures so that internet does not become the closed bastion that television has become," Prewitt said to cheers.

But perhaps the hero of the day for the audience was software engineer Robb Topolski, who first posted forensic proof of Comcast's use of fake packets to throttle BitTorrent usage.

Topolski said he was trying to use file sharing software to distribute old recordings of barbershop quartet music he's gotten off of old wax cylinders -- material that would clearly no longer be copyrighted.

He reported his findings to the popular DSLreports.com site, and then it quickly became news in the blogs and mainstream press sites. He also disputes Comcast's defense that it only messes with BitTorrent when the network is congested, saying he recently suffered from insomnia and noticed that Comcast was blocking P2P protocols at 1:45 a.m. in the morning.

"I see this pretty simply as an example of jamming of authorized communications," Topolski said, comparing the FCC's failure to force Comcast to stop the practice to the speed with which it moves when a ham radio operator reports radio interference.

"The situation continues today," Topolski said. "It is happening right now."

The hearing is continuing, and is likely to get heated when members of the public take to the microphone later this afternoon.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...ts-an-ear.html





Better start that download…

AT&T: Internet to Hit Full Capacity by 2010
Andrew Donoghue

U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

"The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today," he said. "In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."

Cicconi, who was speaking at the event as part of a wider series of meetings with U.K. government officials, said that at least $55 billion worth of investment was needed in new infrastructure in the next three years in the U.S. alone, with the figure rising to $130 billion to improve the network worldwide. "We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010," he said.

He claimed that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" would increase 50-fold by 2015 and that AT&T is investing $19 billion to maintain its network and upgrade its backbone network.

Cicconi added that more demand for high-definition video will put an increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure. "Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today," he said.

The AT&T executive pointed out that the Internet exists, thanks to the infrastructure provided by a group of mostly private companies. "There is nothing magic or ethereal about the Internet--it is no more ethereal than the highway system. It is not created by an act of God, but upgraded and maintained by private investors," he said.

Although Cicconi's speech did not explicitly refer to the term "Net neutrality," some audience members tackled him on the issue in a question-and-answer session, asking whether the subtext of his speech was really around prioritizing some kinds of traffic. Cicconi responded by saying he believed government intervention in the Internet was fundamentally wrong.

"I think people agree why the Internet is successful. My personal view is that government has widely chosen to...keep a light touch and let innovators develop it," he said. "The reason I resist using the term 'Net neutrality' is that I don't think government intervention is the right way to do this kind of thing. I don't think government can anticipate these kinds of technical problems. Right now, I think Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem."

Net neutrality refers to an ongoing campaign calling for governments to legislate to prevent Internet service providers from charging content providers for prioritization of their traffic. The debate is more heated in the United States than in the United Kingdom because there is less competition between ISPs in the States.

Content creators argue that Net neutrality should be legislated in order to protect consumers and keep all Internet traffic equal. Network operators and service providers argue that the Internet is already unequal, and certain types of traffic--VoIP, for example--require prioritization by default.

"However well-intentioned, regulatory restraints can inefficiently skew investment, delay innovation, and diminish consumer welfare, and there is reason to believe that the kinds of broad marketplace restrictions proposed in the name of 'neutrality' would do just that, with respect to the Internet," the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement last year.

The BBC has come under fire from service providers such as Tiscali, which claim that its iPlayer online-TV service is becoming a major drain on network bandwidth.

In a recent posting on his BBC blog, Ashley Highfield, the corporation's director of future media and technology, defended the iPlayer: "I would not suggest that ISPs start to try and charge content providers. They are already charging their customers for broadband to receive any content they want."
http://www.news.com/ATT-Internet-to-...3-6237715.html





Keeping Pace? Torrents of Traffic and the Internet Backbone
Nate Anderson

Video killed the ISP?

There's nothing worse than showing up to class only to be confronted by a pop quiz for which you haven't studied, but don't worry; this one will be pretty painless. It's only two questions long. Here's the first one.

Which of the following statements are true of US Internet traffic growth since 2000:
Internet traffic growth has increased exponentially year-over-year
Internet traffic growth has held steady year-over-year
Internet traffic growth is falling year-over-year

Question number two also concerns Internet traffic growth, but with a special focus on P2P. Hands on your buzzers? Here we go.

Which of the following statements is true of P2P growth over the last several years:
It is growing at 1,553 percent per year
It is growing at 690 percent each year
It is growing at 100 percent each year

Before we get to the answers, let's consider why the questions matter. A prominent strain of recent argument has claimed that the Internet is headed for an "exaflood" of traffic (which will soon be measured in exabytes), largely coming from the rise of online video, and that the ISPs and backbone providers are in danger of having their levees knocked down. The first question gets to the heart of the issue: are Internet growth rates surging in such a way that Internet providers need to start popping Xanax like it's candy?

The second question is like the first, though with a focus on P2P, which is of course largely made up of video traffic. Comcast and others have asserted to the FCC in the last few weeks that P2P apps are designed to consume all available network bandwidth, that they are an essentially voracious and unstoppable force of carpenter ants that will chew through even the most generous of network upgrades. There is, therefore, no legitimate way to handle the P2P onslaught except through limits, filters, or "delays." The question is whether actual P2P growth rates bear out that assertion.

As traffic increases on the Internet, ISPs and content owners have shown increased interest in blocking, throttling, or limiting it for different reasons. When judging these questions, which bear on network neutrality, Comcast's BitTorrent blocking, and other Internet traffic issues, it's important to start with a solid factual basis. With that in mind, let's turn to the answers.

Surprised to learn that the answer to both questions is number 3? (If not, go make yourself a cup of tea and dig into the cookie jar; you deserve it.) Let's take a look at what the answers mean for the Internet as we come up against the end of the first worldwide Internet decade.

Hurricanes and gales

When Ars last looked at the concept of the exaflood, we concluded that the fear-mongering imagery of a "flood" was overblown and unhelpful to rational debate. It also hid the fact that these sorts of "we're all going to drown in traffic!" stories have been cropping up for years. At the time, I concluded, "Fear of future traffic is an old story on the Internet. It didn't start with 'gigalapses' and it won't stop with the 'exaflood.'"

To get more context on the issue, I sat down with Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota, one of the top US experts on Internet traffic patterns. Odlyzko runs the Digital Technology Center on campus and also heads up the Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies (MINTS) project, and we met recently at his Minneapolis office to talk traffic trends.

The main point that Odlyzko wants to hammer home from his body of research is that Internet traffic growth is slowing (overall traffic itself is increasing, of course). On the MINTS site, he points out that this can be counterintuitive, even for those in the industry.

"As one striking example," he writes, "at the end of 2005, John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, claimed that Internet traffic was growing at about 100 percent per year, and similar claims are common. Chambers also predicted both in 2005 and in a keynote at the NXTcomm conference in June 2007 that growth might accelerate towards 300 to 500 percent per year, and that the internal Cisco corporate network traffic load is currently growing at such rates."

But Odlyzko tells me that over the last five years, "traffic growth has been slowing down." In 1995 and 1996, there were periods in which Internet traffic could double in as little as a hundred days, a rate of growth that looked almost terrifying. But it wasn't long before it began to slacken. By the late 1990s, traffic was doubling each year; that is, it was growing at 100 percent a year. But from 2002-2007, the growth rate has dropped, and it now hovers at 50 to 60 percent a year.

That's substantial growth, yes, but it's hardly a flood. Odlyzko tells me that traffic growth is more akin to a gale than a hurricane, and he says that "with a gale, you shorten your sails and you can still steer to some extent." The whole problem with a loaded term like "exaflood" is that "it implies that we're getting overwhelmed, which I don't see happening."

In fact, the Internet backbone has plenty of capacity. If the tubes are going to get clogged, then it's the last mile that will need a good plumber... especially as user-generated content and P2P alter the download-centric model that has undergirded most last-mile network architecture to date.

Into the core

Eric Schoonover, a senior analyst with Telegeography, agrees with Odlyzko that the Internet backbone has yet to suffer any serious osteoporosis; in fact, it's hale and hearty.

There's "no major hockey stick graph going on" when it comes to backbone traffic, he says. Telegeography has good insight into these traffic levels, too, after signing deals with major ISPs to monitor actual traffic flows between major routers. While this approach gives the company less information on the throughput of last-mile connections, it does give it backbone data that goes beyond mere extrapolation and estimate.

Schoonover says that despite the rise of P2P, YouTube, and stores like iTunes and eMusic, backbone capacity faces no real problems unless usage suddenly starts an exponential spike upwards. Even peak usage is growing within manageable limits, and backbone operators are upgrading equipment "fast."

As an example, consider Telegeography's international Internet traffic growth numbers from the last three years. From 2004 to 2006, total international bandwidth grew at a rate below that of traffic. This is clearly not a sustainable situation in the long term, but Schoonover explains that the graph looks this way because most major bandwidth upgrades are "lumpy." Such upgrades tend to boost capacity so much (and cost so much to roll out) that carriers wait until peak traffic crosses an internal threshold, then upgrade their equipment, often by adding more 10Gbps wavelength circuits to their fiber backbones.

This upgrade pattern means that bandwidth upgrades don't track demand in a linear fashion, something you can see in the chart below. For several years, traffic growth was exceeding bandwidth growth, but the trend suddenly turned around in 2007 as many carriers upgraded to deal with the need for more capacity.

This growth pattern means that, when looking at Internet traffic and bandwidth, longer trends are more important than single-year snapshots. Just looking at the data from 2004, for instance, you might conclude that backbone operators were about to be "flooded." (The providers themselves didn't seem to think this was true, judging by their next two years of moderate investment.)

But a longer analysis shows that ISPs have no trouble increasing bandwidth more quickly than traffic when they need to do so. According to a recent Telegeography report, "While some predicted that surging Internet traffic could overwhelm the available infrastructure, the expansion of Internet backbones has stayed well ahead of the curve."

That expansion should get even simpler in future. At a recent conference, Doug van Houweling, the head of Internet2, talked about just how easy these sorts of upgrades could be once the fiber is in place. The core is fine, he argued, pointing to Internet2's dynamic provisioning system that can add new wavelengths to particular fiber connections on the fly when the bandwidth is required. Such technology should become more common on the consumer Internet as well.

Out at the edges

But last-mile connections, like cable and DSL lines, haven't been increasing their bandwidth at the same rate as the backbone. This is simple enough to see in the recent Comcast case, where the company finally admitted to "delaying" P2P uploads during periods of congestion. Comcast's cable network, a hybrid fiber/coax system, shares its total bandwidth with all the users in a single neighborhood (up to 450 homes per node), and as few as 15 concurrent BitTorrent upload sessions can cripple applications like VoIP for the entire neighborhood. Such limitations have been around for years, and won't vanish anytime soon (though Comcast's current DOCSIS 3.0 rollout should greatly increase the shared bandwidth).

DSL suffers from its own speed issues, despite the fact that each home has a line all the way back to the central office. While speeds of 25Mbps are theoretically possible, AT&T currently offers a maximum of 6Mbps on its DSL lines and 10Mbps for some U-verse customers. Most DSL is actually "ADSL," as well; that is, it's asymmetric. Maximum upload speed for AT&T's top-tier 6Mbps is a paltry 768kbps.

It's these last-mile issues that cause congestion; the backbone operators have no real trouble upgrading their core routers, switching on more wavelengths over fiber, etc. But Comcast, AT&T, and other last-mile operators generally need more than a quick fix at the central office; they need an (expensive) infrastructure improvement.

Comcast is making good efforts with DOCSIS 3.0 and new modems, hoping to reach 100Mbps in the next several years. AT&T is in a tougher position, as long copper loop lengths in the US make bumping DSL's speed more difficult. The company is trying a hybrid fiber/copper system with its U-verse upgrades, but this is still not expected to top out at anything more than 25Mbps, and most of this will be used to carry several HD TV channels.

Only Verizon is pumping the cash into a comprehensive network architecture upgrade (something like $18 billion has been committed so far), ditching copper altogether and running fiber directly to the home. An additional advantage of this approach (apart from sheer bandwidth) is that fiber is fully symmetric; Verizon therefore appears best poised to serve the Web 2.0 generation.

The exaflood: not drowning Asia

The "exaflood" is usually dragged out when a set of specific points are made about how to handle Internet traffic. Bret Swanson's original article coining the term argued that we need major investment in US broadband infrastructure to keep innovation from stalling, to which we say: amen, brother!

But Swanson goes further. After spinning out rosy scenarios about Our Great Broadband Future, he makes the case that necessary investment in network will only happen if network neutrality rules are defeated. "Net neutrality's rules, price controls and litigation would prevent broadband networks from being built, limit the amount of available bandwidth and thus encourage the zero-sum discrimination supposedly deplored," he says.

What price controls is he talking about?

"Google, for example, has guaranteed $900 million in advertising revenue to MySpace and paid Dell $1 billion to install Google search boxes on its computers; YouTube partnered with Verizon Wireless; MySpace signed its own content deal with Cingular," notes Swanson. "But these kinds of preferential partnerships, where content and conduit are integrated to varying degrees—and which are ubiquitous in almost every industry—could be outlawed under net neutrality."

It's hard to see how any of this would be banned by net neutrality rules that allow paying Internet customers to access any destination on the Internet without added delay (and the first two examples don't even concern network operators at all).

But the reality is that we aren't facing a "flood" that can only be averted by having ISPs sign preferential access deals with web sites. As the traffic numbers above show, total Internet traffic growth has been slowing and backbone providers aren't yet having any trouble keeping up with the load.

We need only look to some of our international friends to see that it's not a crisis we're facing, just an opportunity to catch up with what others are already experiencing.

Odlyzko, who finds all this flooding talk to be "convenient politically" when it comes to jacking up prices or bashing net neutrality, points out that places like Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong all have far higher traffic rates than are seen in the US. South Korea, in fact, has nearly as much traffic as the entire US, and each user's traffic runs six to seven times higher than the US per capita average. In Japan, 100Mbps fiber connections are common, and can be had for less than the cost of many 6Mbps connections here.

The fascinating thing about these places is that they've managed to cope with high traffic loads without resorting to super-secret wasabi-powered routers; traffic is handled using off-the-shelf hardware from companies like Cisco and Juniper. If these countries can deal with much higher per-capita traffic loads than currently exist in the US, then we probably don't have much to worry about, and it's certainly not clear that giving priority to the websites with the fattest wallets is the only way to pay for upgrades. As Schoonover puts it, there's "no evidence" that networks are actually becoming more congested, since upgrades can easily keep pace with bandwidth needs.

It's the last-mile problem, discussed above, that keeps US per-capita traffic levels below those of places like South Korea. With speeds limited, certain high-bandwidth applications like HD video transmission simply take too long to be feasible, and people don't use them. Countries like South Korea, Japan, and several European countries like France have all made broadband deployment a national priority. Each has responded with a different mix of government incentives, subsidies, and regulations, but one thing that they tend to share is mandatory line-sharing rules.

In Europe, where cable infrastructure is less developed, the main access point into each home is the telephone network (though mobile use has been surging in recent years). Governments have generally mandated that the incumbent telecom firms provide wholesale access to their networks, often at regulated rates. Odlyzko and Schoonover both point out that line-sharing was an important stimulus to the development of ISP competition.

The US used to follow this model for telephone companies, but the telcos argued that this put them at a huge disadvantage with cable, which had no such requirement. We all know the eventual result: the FCC decided that neither group would be forced to share its lines, a move that has left most Americans with a duopoly that seems far less interested in competing with each other than do companies in places like the UK, which aggressively offer services like free broadband when phone service is purchased.

Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea all have other advantages, of course, including the prevalence of high-density apartment living (it's cheaper to run one fiber line to an apartment building than it is to run one to 50 homes). But Odlyzko doesn't think this explains the broadband advantage such countries have. Even in the US, with its large rural population and an abundance of aging copper wire infrastructure, more could be done. With DSLAM prices plummeting over the last few years, Odlyzko says that prices could certainly be lower and speeds could be higher in a truly competitive market.

So what do we do about P2P?

One of the key pieces in any good "exaflood" argument is P2P, which is generally portrayed as a ravenous monster that eats up all available bandwidth, making a mockery of network upgrades that attempt to keep up. Odlyzko isn't so sure that's true, certainly not when made as an "absolute statement."

What he sees is P2P growth that isn't skyrocketing but instead growing at fast—but measurable—rates. The highest P2P growth rate numbers he could find anywhere showed 100 percent a year growth; fast, yes, but not something that poses any real danger to the Internet backbone or to DSL and fiber last-mile connections.

Worldwide, P2P traffic levels vary from 20 to 70 percent of total network traffic, and it's common to see claims along the lines of "5 percent of all users are taking up 80 percent of the bandwidth." This can be a very real problem for ISPs, and few Internet surfers would be excited to find that some user in their neighborhood downloading Battlestar Galactica episodes was causing Skype issues and slow browsing. The current solution for some ISPs is to talk about how unfair this is and to crack down on that small minority that uses the most traffic. As a business practice, this may be fine, but Odlyzko says that issue gets more interesting when you look more closely at the numbers.

While it's true that five percent of users consume more than half the bandwidth on many networks in a country like Japan, recent studies there have found that it's not always the same five percent. That is, a much larger percentage of users consume a disproportionate amount of bandwidth, but not all the time.

P2P poses the biggest threat to upload links, especially on cable networks, which can quickly become saturated. One of the technology's biggest effects on ISPs is that it is pushing most of them more in the direction of symmetric networks. Schoonover notes that legitimate P2P apps will force companies to adjust the way they do business as ISPs "certainly" will move in the direction of symmetry (though most won't get there for some time).

Phil Asmundson, a Deloitte vice chairman who runs the company's Technology, Media, and Telecommunications practice, tells Ars that high-quality broadcast video will be significant driver of traffic as it migrates onto the Internet (see FOX/NBC's joint venture Hulu for a prime example). As video quality gets higher and the shows become longer-form, media companies will get killed on bandwidth costs and will be forced to move to a P2P model (see NBC's moves in this direction with Pando). That, in turn, will create tremendous pressure on last-mile ISPs to reconfigure their networks to be more symmetrical.

Odlyzko sees the same shift happening and chalks it up to a deeper change; the era of "content is king" may be winding down. The asymmetric nature of most networks was due to the fact that people were seen largely as consumers of professional content, not as creators or distributors. The rise of podcasts, video chats, YouTube, and other services has shown that "consumers" are in fact much more than that label suggests. The download-centric model was essentially total when it came to things like television, but with the Internet, it's no longer quite so important.

We're already there

The takeaway is pretty simple: the Internet core is humming along just fine, but last-mile networks are the bottlenecks. While increasing download speeds will continue to make new Internet applications feasible, it's increasingly important to boost upload speeds and move in the direction of a symmetric network. Can this be done only by signing preferential deals with web sites so that Google's bits are served up faster than Yahoo's? Can traffic only be handled if we specifically target certain P2P traffic for throttling regardless of its legal uses?

To answer both questions, we have only to look at a case here in the US that's just winding up: the FCC investigation into Comcast's P2P "delaying" tactics. Though the FCC phase of the inquiry isn't over, Comcast has already signed a deal with BitTorrent and has agreed that it can manage its network without discriminatory throttling (throttling will be continue to be used as necessary). That transition should be complete by the end of 2008, and the company is already rolling out DOCSIS 3.0 in places like the Twin Cities and providing subscribers with up to 5Mbps of upload capacity. And Comcast has found the investment capital without resorting to sticking up web site operators.

The thing about the "exaflood"? We're already experiencing it. According to Odlyzko, the total monthly US Internet bandwidth was somewhere between 750 and 1,250 petabytes at the end of 2007 (an exabyte is 1,000 petabytes). It's clear that the Internet can already handle exabytes of data; worldwide, we're already seeing 3 to 5 exabytes of traffic each month.

I mentioned at the top that Cisco boss John Chambers was not long ago predicting the possibility of 300 to 500 percent growth. That's still a possibility, of course, especially given the interest in high-quality video, but it's not a current reality. Cisco's own Robert Pepper, a senior policy exec, said at a recent conference that traffic growth isn't really a problem; the core is fine, and new compression technology will help with congestion at the edges.

The Internet core is so far from being overwhelmed that Odlyzko suggests ISPs should attempt to stimulate more usage rather than limit it. We're still early in the Internet experiment and new, good things are likely to spring into being so long as users and ISPs continue to push the boundaries of what's possible with their networks. Thanks to Moore's Law, equipment grows ever cheaper, and Odlyzko writes on the MINTS site that even the current "growth rates of 50 percent per year can be sustained without substantial increases in spending."

While we may choose to let ISPs charge more for certain priority traffic delivery or quality of service, the data suggests that we don't need to do so to ward off a catastrophic flood. Net neutrality is a complicated-enough issue to debate all on its own; it doesn't need an injection of hyperbolic disaster rhetoric.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...-happening.ars





He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)
Noam Cohen

It’s not easy to write a book. First you have to pick a title. And then there is the table of contents. If you want the book to be categorized, either by a bookseller or a library, it has to be assigned a unique numerical code, like an ISBN, for International Standard Book Number. There have to be proper margins. Finally, there’s the back cover.

Oh, and there is all that stuff in the middle, too. The writing.

Philip M. Parker seems to have licked that problem. Mr. Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, “the most published author in the history of the planet.” And he makes money doing it.

Among the books published under his name are “The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea” ($24.95 and 168 pages long); “Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers” ($28.95 for 126 pages); and “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India” ($495 for 144 pages).

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.

And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

Perusing a work like the outlook for bathmat sales in India, a reader would be hard pressed to find an actual sentence that was “written” by the computer. If you were to open a book, you would find a title page, a detailed table of contents, and many, many pages of graphics with introductory boilerplate that is adjusted for the content and genre.

While nothing announces that Mr. Parker’s books are computer generated, one reader, David Pascoe, seemed close to figuring it out himself, based on his comments to Amazon in 2004. Reviewing a guide to rosacea, a skin disorder, Mr. Pascoe, who is from Perth, Australia, complained: “The book is more of a template for ‘generic health researching’ than anything specific to rosacea. The information is of such a generic level that a sourcebook on the next medical topic is just a search and replace away.”

When told via e-mail that his suspicion was correct, Mr. Pascoe wrote back, “I guess it makes sense now as to why the book was so awful and frustrating.”Mr. Parker was willing to concede much of what Mr. Pascoe argued. “If you are good at the Internet, this book is useless,” he said, adding that Mr. Pascoe simply should not have bought it. But, Mr. Parker said, there are people who aren’t Internet savvy who have found these guides useful.

It is the idea of automating difficult or boring work that led Mr. Parker to become involved. Comparing himself to a distant disciple of Henry Ford, he said he was “deconstructing the process of getting books into people’s hands; every single step we could think of, we automated.”

He added: “My goal isn’t to have the computer write sentences, but to do the repetitive tasks that are too costly to do otherwise.”

In an interview from his home in San Diego and his offices nearby, Mr. Parker described his motivation as providing content that the marketplace has otherwise neglected for lack of an audience. That can mean a relatively obscure language is involved, or a relatively obscure disease or a relatively obscure product.

Take, for example, the study of bathmats in India.

“Only one person in the world may be interested in that,” he conceded, “probably a strategic planner for a multinational that makes those.” But he points out that once he has trained the computer to take data about past sales and make complex calculations to project future sales, each new book costs him about 12 cents in electricity. Since these books are print-on-demand or delivered electronically, he is ahead after the first sale, he said.

His company, the Icon Group International, is the long tail of the bell curve come to life — generating significant total sales by adding up tens of thousands of what might be called worst sellers. For example, a search at the Galter Health Sciences Library of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University found half a dozen Icon books, mainly in the library for patients and their families.

Icon is “a very innovative and interesting example of print on demand,” said Kurt Beidler, a senior manager at Amazon.com who runs the publishers’ services for BookSurge, Amazon’s print-on-demand company. “A lot of examples of print on demand take older books and bring them back — really acting as a supply-chain tool. In this kind of business, it’s a new business, using this capability to introduce new material to customers.”

Mr. Parker compares his methods to those of a traditional publisher, but with the computer simply performing some of the scut work. In an explanatory YouTube video, Mr. Parker shows a book being created. The computer is given an assignment — project the latent demand for antipsychotic drugs around the world, based on the sales figures in the United States.

“Using a little bit of artificial intelligence, a computer program has been created that mimics the thought process of someone who would be responsible for doing such a study,” Mr. Parker says. “But rather than taking many months to do the study. the computer accomplishes this in about 13 minutes.”

An editor picks the years to be covered, but the computer picks the optimum model for extrapolating sales in various countries, and in alphabetical order produces a chart for each country. “It will then open a Word document and export the information into Word just like a real author would out of their minds, so to speak, or spreadsheets,” he says.

Artificial intelligence researchers say computers are far from being what the general public would consider authors.

“There is a continuous spectrum, also known as a slippery slope, between a program that automatically typesets a telephone directory and a program that generates English texts at the level of variety you would expect from a typical human English speaker,” said Chung-chieh Shan, an assistant professor in the computer science department of Rutgers. “The former program is easy to write, the latter program is very difficult; in fact, the holy grail of linguistics. Like Mad-Libs, Parker’s programs probably lie somewhere between the two ends of this spectrum.”

Mr. Parker has lately taken to lighter fare intended to educate. He said he had invested “up to seven figures into the animation business” for word-based video games and animated game shows that will teach English to non-English speakers. YouTube has many examples of these games, which have computer- generated scripts.

A low-tech version of those games are the thousands of crossword puzzle books Mr. Parker has made in about 20 languages. The clues are in a foreign language and the answers are in English. The computer designs the puzzles and ensures that the words become harder as one progresses.

As part of his love of words, and dictionaries in all languages, Mr. Parker said he has taken to having his computers create acrostic poems — where the first letter of a series of words spells a synonym of those words, often to ironic effect.

Of course, one of the difficulties of generating a hundred thousand poems is stepping back and assessing their quality.

“Do you think one of them is Shakespeare?” he was asked.

“No,” he said. “Only because I haven’t done sonnets yet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/bu...ia/14link.html





Publishers Sue Georgia State on Digital Reading Matter
Katie Hafner

Three prominent academic publishers are suing Georgia State University, contending that the school is violating copyright laws by providing course reading material to students in digital format without seeking permission from the publishers or paying licensing fees.

In a complaint filed Tuesday in United States District Court in Atlanta, the publishers — Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications — sued four university officials, asserting “systematic, widespread and unauthorized copying and distribution of a vast amount of copyrighted works” by Georgia State, which the university distributes through its Web site.

The lawsuit, which may be the first of its kind, raises questions about digital rights, which are confronting many media companies, but also about core issues like the future of the business model for academic publishers.

Indeed, as the printed word is put in digital form, holding onto rights seems to many like climbing up the slippery sides of a glass. The case centers on so-called course packs, compilations of reading materials from various books and journals. The lawsuit contends that in many cases, professors are providing students with multiple chapters of a given work, in violation of the "fair use" provision of copyright law. The publishers are seeking an order that the defendants secure permissions and pay licensing fees to the copyright owners.

Officials at Georgia State, in Atlanta, declined to comment on the lawsuit. “We have been informed that a lawsuit is being filed,” a spokeswoman, DeAnna Hines, said. “However, we have not received it, and therefore we won’t be able to comment, pending potential litigation.”

Over the years, electronic course packs have become increasingly common, supplanting their physical counterparts. They consist of reading material taken from a variety of printed sources, which is then scanned, compiled and posted on a university’s Web site. By some estimates, electronic course packs now constitute half of all syllabus reading at American colleges and universities.

“Digitally delivered course content is probably more widespread than we’d like to think,” said Patricia S. Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, which supports the lawsuit.

R. Bruce Rich, a partner in the law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, which is representing the plaintiffs, said that in spite of repeated attempts to work with Georgia State, “they indicated that they had no interest in having a discussion.”

Mr. Rich said that in a letter his firm received last summer, Georgia State officials “indicated their view that all of their practices are covered under the fair use doctrine.”

He said that over the last year or so, half a dozen or so other universities had been contacted about copyright violations. Those institutions, he said, showed more willingness to work with the copyright holders and establish stricter university policies around licensing the material.

Legal precedents exist for cases involving course packs from photocopied material, but experts say the lawsuit against Georgia State is the first to be filed over electronic course packs.

In 1991, Basic Books and others won a suit again Kinko’s, which was selling course packs it had photocopied.

And in 1992, Princeton University Press and others sued Michigan Document Services, a photocopying service, which was producing course packs for University of Michigan students without permission from the copyright holders. The business was eventually found to be in copyright infringement.

“Georgia State’s activity seems identical with Michigan Document Services’ activity,” said Susan P. Crawford, a visiting professor at Yale Law School.

But she pointed out that unlike Kinko’s and Michigan Document Services, Georgia State was not making money from the electronic course packs.

Yet, she added: “It’s difficult to argue that this is a truly noncommercial use. Georgia State may be a nonprofit institution, but its students pay a lot of money for course materials, and would presumably pay money for the materials being provided to them by the university.”

Frank Smith, editorial director for academic books at Cambridge University Press, said that for electronic use in a course, Cambridge typically charges 17 cents a page for each student, and generally grants permission for use of as much as 20 percent of a book.

“Publishers have created a market for course materials that is very similar to the market for luxury goods,” Professor Crawford said. “There is only one version available, and at a very high price.”

The dispute recalls problems the music industry had in protecting the format of an album on a CD. “What publishers don’t understand is they could disaggregate,” Professor Crawford said. “They could electronically rip apart their books and sell them chapter by chapter, and everyone would be happier.”

The publishing industry’s reluctance to do so , she said, stemmed from “a fear that they would cannibalize the market for the printed object, and they’re reluctant to let go of that model.”

Other experts wonder if such a lawsuit might be premature, emphasizing that in many ways it is too early to settle on a business model for the distribution of digital materials.

“In academic publishing, we need to find the digital services people really want,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library based in San Francisco. “I wonder if this will turn out to be an ‘attack the innovator’ suit like the peer-to-peer suits for the music industry. Sometimes a bit of slack can help us all discover a winning formula."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/te.../16school.html





Rowling to Testify in Trial Over Potter Lexicon
Motoko Rich

J. K. Rowling’s public appearances usually take place in bookstores and theaters, before thousands of her fans. But on Monday, Ms. Rowling, the author of the wildly popular Harry Potter series, is expected to turn up in a much different place: on the witness stand in a Lower Manhattan federal courtroom, testifying against a small publisher looking to bring out an encyclopedia based on her work.

Ms. Rowling’s books about the boy wizard have spawned countless fan Web sites and chat rooms, as well as dozens of companion books that seek to analyze every minute detail of the seven titles in the series, which ended in July with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”

Ms. Rowling has supported much of the fan output, doling out awards to Internet sites and granting interviews to Web masters. But when RDR Books, a small publisher in Muskegon, Mich., announced it was planning to publish a print version last fall of a popular fan Web site called “The Harry Potter Lexicon” (hp-lexicon.org), Ms. Rowling and Warner Brothers, the movie studio that has adapted her books into films, balked. Their objection is that the book merely repackages Ms. Rowling’s work and, unlike the free fan sites, is intended to make money for its publisher.

In October Ms. Rowling and Warner Brothers sued RDR for copyright infringement, and in November the company suspended publication so that Judge Robert P. Patterson Jr., of the Southern District of New York, could assess the merits of the suit.

The case is scheduled to go to trial on Monday, with Ms. Rowling flying over from Scotland to testify. At stake is whether authors other than Ms. Rowling have the right to publish books that rely substantially on her work as source material, and whether the “Harry Potter Lexicon” in particular sufficiently adds to and transforms the content of her books to be protected by copyright law.

The case also explores the line between free Web content created by fans and a commercially published book. Ms. Rowling has openly praised the Web site on which the Lexicon is based, giving it a “fan site award” in 2004 and commenting in interviews that she even relied on the site — which provides an annotated catalog of characters, spells, magic potions, locations and events in her books — while writing. It was only when RDR decided to transform the site into a book that she objected.

In court papers Ms. Rowling and Warner Brothers have argued that the Lexicon, which is being written by the Web site’s founder, Steven Vander Ark, and three other writers, “merely compiles and repackages Ms. Rowling’s fictional facts derived wholesale from the Harry Potter works without adding any new creativity, commentary, insight or criticism.” (Mr. Vander Ark is not a party to the suit.)

What’s more, Ms. Rowling said the proposed Lexicon book flouted her plans to write her own encyclopedia and donate the proceeds to charity. She argues that Mr. Vander Ark’s book could deter fans from buying hers.

Roger Rapoport, publisher of RDR Books, said he believed that Mr. Vander Ark’s work and Ms. Rowling’s encyclopedia could both exist. “We don’t think we’re a threat to J. K. Rowling,” Mr. Rapoport said in an interview. He said he paid Mr. Vander Ark a “tiny advance” for the book last August and was planning to print about 10,000 copies.

In court filings RDR argues that Mr. Vander Ark’s book “provides a significant amount of original analysis and commentary concerning everything from insights into the personality of key characters, relationships among them, the meaning of various historical and literary allusions, as well as internal inconsistencies and mistakes in the novels.”

The publisher said the Lexicon follows a long tradition of literary commentary. “For hundreds of years everybody has agreed that folks are free to write companion guides,” said Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford Law School and one of RDR’s lawyers. “This is the first time that anybody has argued seriously that folks don’t have the right to do that.”

Mr. Vander Ark said he had initially worried that a book might constitute copyright infringement. “I honestly can’t tell you the origin of that belief,” he said. But when RDR assured him it wasn’t a problem, he said he assumed that because the material was available online and had never been challenged by Ms. Rowling, the book wouldn’t be either.

On her Web site (jkrowling.com) Ms. Rowling says she does not object to authors publishing literary criticism or reviews of the Potter books. That, she wrote, “would be entirely legitimate — neither I nor anybody connected with Harry Potter has ever tried to prevent such works from being published.”

Neil Blair, a lawyer for the Christopher Little Literary Agency, which represents Ms. Rowling, said he was aware of only two similar lawsuits filed by her and Warner Brothers against other publishers, including a plagiarism case in the Netherlands and a suit against a book in Germany that simply summarized the plots of the Harry Potter books. He said he believed that they had also brought an administrative proceeding against a Chinese encyclopedia.

A call to Ms. Rowling’s press agent in Scotland was not returned. Mr. Blair referred any inquiries to a publicist in Los Angeles who is coordinating media contacts for Warner Brothers and Ms. Rowling.

In a number of cases Ms. Rowling and Warner Brothers have pushed publishers of other planned Harry Potter reference books in the United States to withdraw them from the market, though without filing suit. Ben Schoen, manager of operations at mugglenet.com, one of the most popular Potter fan Web sites, said that when a publisher asked editors of the site to write an encyclopedia, Ms. Rowling objected, and the publisher did not proceed. “If she asks us to do anything, we basically comply with it,” Mr. Schoen said.

Though the case pits a billionaire author against a tiny publishing house, the Potter fan base seems to have little sympathy for RDR. Melissa Anelli, Web mistress of the Leaky Cauldron (the-leaky-cauldron.org), another popular fan site, said her board had voted to sever ties with the Harry Potter Lexicon site because of the lawsuit and comments Mr. Vander Ark has made about it.

“You’re put in the position of having loved the site all these years,” Ms. Anelli said, “and then having to understand why J. K. Rowling had to take an action.”

David Hammer, another lawyer representing RDR Books, said he believed that Ms. Rowling was acting out of vanity. “She wants to be the only one to write this encyclopedia about Harry Potter,” he said. “She’s determined to write it, and she doesn’t want competitors.”

Mr. Vander Ark, who is now living in England, is finishing up another companion book, “In Search of Harry Potter,” a travel memoir about places in Britain that served as the basis for some of the fictional locales in the novels. It is being published by Methuen in July, though neither the company Web site nor amazon.co.uk currently mention the book. A spokesman for Methuen said it was keeping a low profile because of the pending trial but did not expect any problems.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/books/14potter.html





Rowling Says Lexicon Theft of Her Work
Larry Neumeister

J.K. Rowling testified before a packed courtroom in a lawsuit to block publication of a Harry Potter lexicon, telling a judge that the book amounts to a "wholesale theft" of nearly 20 years of her hard work. "We all know I've made enough money. That's absolutely not why I'm here," Rowling told the judge in U.S. District Court.

The British author sued Michigan-based RDR Books last year to stop publication of Steven Vander Ark's "Harry Potter Lexicon," claiming copyright infringement. Vander Ark runs the popular Harry Potter Lexicon Web site, and RDR wants to publish a print version of the site and charge $24.95.

Rowling claims the book is nothing more than a rearrangement of her own material and told the judge it copied so much of her work that it amounted to plagiarism.

"I think it's atrocious. I think it's sloppy. I think there's very little research," she testified Monday. "This book constitutes wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work."

She also said she has recently started work on her own encyclopedia and plans to donate the resulting profits to charity _ adding that she does not expect to complete it for two to three years because she wants to do it right. If Vander Ark's lexicon is published, "I'm not at all convinced that I would have the will or the heart to continue with my encyclopedia," she said.

RDR's lawyer, Anthony Falzone, in an opening statement defended the lexicon as a reference guide, calling it a legitimate effort "to organize and discuss the complicated and very elaborate world of Harry Potter." The small publisher is not contesting that the lexicon infringes upon Rowling's copyright but argues that it is a fair use allowable by law for reference books.

Rowling said she believed that a victory by Vander Ark could damage the Harry Potter name and embolden imitators.

"Should it be published, I firmly believe that carte blanche will be given to anyone who wants to make a quick bit of money, to divert some Harry Potter profits into their own pockets. ... I'm not delighted to have work I consider to be this shoddy associated with Harry Potter," she said.

The non-jury trial will be decided by U.S. District Judge Robert Patterson Jr., who must determine whether the use of the material is legal because Vander Ark added his own interpretation, creativity and analysis. The testimony and arguments could last most of the week. Rowling will spend her breaks in the seclusion of a jury room, away from fans of her wildly popular series.

The trial comes eight months after Rowling published her seventh and final book in the series. The books have been published in 64 languages, sold more than 400 million copies and produced a film franchise that has pulled in $4.5 billion at the worldwide box office.

In sometimes emotional testimony, Rowling recalled starting work on the first book in 1991 when she was 25 and so destitute that she sometimes had to choose between purchasing typewriter ribbon and food. She said the Harry Potter characters were a fantasy world to which she could escape from the hard work of raising a child on welfare as a single mother.

Rowling choked up when her lawyer, Dale Cendali, asked what Harry Potter meant to her.

"I really don't want to cry because I'm British you know," the mother of three said. Then she added, "These characters continue to mean so much to me over a long period of time. It's very difficult for someone who is not a writer to understand what it means to the creator. The closest you could come is to say, 'How do you feel about your children?' These books, they saved me."

Rowling, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with her husband and children, also testified she had stopped work on a new novel because the lawsuit has "decimated my creative work over the last month."

She said Vander Ark sometimes simply translated a Latin word. "Any 7-year-old with a pocket Latin dictionary could do that."

"There are incorrect translations, there are incorrect etymologies and there are places where Mr. Vander Ark quite literally has not understood the books," she said.

Outside court, she read a statement saying she was fine with lots of books in many languages that comment on or criticize Harry Potter.

"But the book in this case is different. It provided no analysis and virtually no commentary. It takes far too much and it offers precious little in return," she said.

Vander Ark, 50, has said he joined an adult online discussion group devoted to the "Harry Potter" books in 1999 before launching his own Web site as a hobby a year later. The Web site attracts about 1.5 million page views per month and contributions from people all over the world.

He said he initially declined proposals to convert the Web site into an encyclopedia, in part because he believed until last August that in book form, it would represent a copyright violation.

After Rowling released the final chapter in the "Harry Potter" series last July, Vander Ark was contacted by an RDR Books employee, who told him that publication of the lexicon would not violate copyright law, he said. Still, to protect himself, Vander Ark said he insisted that RDR Books include a clause in his contract that the publisher would defend and pay any damages that might result from claims against him.

He said it was decided that the lexicon would include sections from the Lexicon Web site that give descriptions and commentary on individual names, places, spells and creatures from Harry Potter stories.

Rowling acknowledged she once bestowed an award on Vander Ark's Web site because, she said, she wanted to encourage a very enthusiastic fan.

But she said she "almost choked on my coffee" one morning when she realized Vander Ark had warned others not to copy portions of his Web site. She said she now has second thoughts about all the encouragement she has given to online discussions and Web sites devoted to her books.

"I never censored it or wanted to censor it," she said, adding that if she loses the lawsuit, she will conclude she essentially gave away her copyrights by encouraging the Web sites.

"Other authors will say, 'I need to exercise more control. She was an idiot. She let it all go,'" Rowling said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...041400646.html





This Isn't a Parody - This is a F***in' Outrage!
Jack

Fake Murdoch gets bent over fake Wall Street Journal:"You're f***ing ass is on a plate!" Real Murdoch's minions try to buy up all the copies.







Ex-Classmate Challenges Claim to Facebook Name
Michael Liedtke

The hard feelings between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and a former college classmate have boiled over into another legal dispute, this time over the popular online hangout's trademark.

In a petition filed Tuesday with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Aaron Greenspan is seeking to cancel Facebook's legal claim to its name.

Greenspan, 25, argues Zuckerberg, 23, had no right to trademark the Facebook name in 2005 because the term had been used generically for decades at Harvard University, where they first met. What's more, Greenspan maintains he used the term "Face Book" as part of an online service called houseSYSTEM a few months before Zuckerberg unveiled his now-famous Web site in 2004.

The former Harvard classmates are now both building companies in Palo Alto with differing degrees of success. Greenspan's software venture, Think Computer, hasn't caught on quite like Zuckerberg's Facebook, which boasts 70 million users worldwide.

This isn't the first time legal questions have been raised about whether Zuckerberg came up with the idea that blossomed into one of the Internet's hottest companies and made him a billionaire in the process.

A trio of former Harvard students have been fighting over Facebook's origin since 2004, alleging in a federal lawsuit that Zuckerberg stole the social networking concept after they hired him to work on a Web site that eventually became ConnectU.

Facebook reportedly is nearing a settlement with ConnectU's founders: twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their partner, Divya Narendra. The New York Times reported the confidential settlement talks earlier this month.

Long before Zuckerberg moved to Silicon Valley in 2004, the Facebook term was widely used at Harvard to describe any paper or electronic book that displayed the faces of students and faculty "in a structured manner," Greenspan wrote in his petition.

Picking up on that theme, Greenspan said houseSYSTEM introduced a student locator called "the Face Book" in September 2003 - at least four months before Zuckerberg unveiled "thefacebook.com."

A Facebook representative declined to comment on Greenspan's petition.

Greenspan acknowledged he might be willing to drop his petition for the right amount of money. But he said what he really wants is the legal right to use the term Facebook in the title of a 335-page "memoir" that he plans to self-publish later this month.
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_8942118?dlbk





Top Hard-Drive Maker Files Suit Against Rival
Laurie J. Flynn

Seagate Technology, the largest maker of computer hard drives, made a pre-emptive strike against an emerging competitor on Monday when it filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing STEC Inc. of patent infringement.

In the suit, Seagate contends that STEC’s solid-state drive products violate four Seagate patents covering how such drives interface with computers.

STEC, based in Santa Ana, Calif., makes solid-state drives for corporations and other large enterprises, a market that Seagate executives have said the company plans to enter this year. The suit was filed in Federal District Court in the Northern District of California.

Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at STEC, said Seagate was clearly feeling threatened by the growing demand for solid-state drives and that it was “defending its turf.” He added that Seagate executives did not contact STEC about infringement before filing the complaint.

Solid-state drives are beginning to challenge traditional hard drives for storage use in both home and office computers. The technology is just starting to show up in commercially available systems, like Apple’s MacBook Air, introduced in January, and more recently in the HP Mini from Hewlett-Packard.

“It’s not a big financial issue yet because the market is just taking off,” said William D. Watkins, chief executive of Seagate, which is based in Scotts Valley, Calif. “But that’s why we want to set things straight now.”

Mr. Watkins said the goal of the suit was to promote the kind of cross-licensing and partnerships that have always been part of the hard-drive market.

Unlike hard drives, which are mechanical, solid-state drives are made of chips and have no moving parts; so-called flash drives are an example. They use less power and are quieter and faster than hard drives, but that performance comes at a hefty price.

The hard-drive version of Apple’s new MacBook Air, for example, costs $1,799 for an 80-gigabyte version; the solid-state version of the Air costs $3,098 and stores only 64 gigabytes.

“Right now there’s a lot of excitement about the solid-state market, but not a lot of business,” said James Handy, an analyst with Objective Analysis, a market research company.

Mr. Watkins said that Seagate had spent $7 billion over the last year in research and development of the technology at issue in its suit. At the center of the suit is how solid-state drive technology interacts with computers, for purposes like error correction.

Shares of Seagate declined 57 cents a share on Monday to close at $19.97, just after the suit was disclosed, then rose slightly in after-hours trading. STEC shares closed up 13 cents, to $6.94, then declined in late trading.

Seagate has fought to remain the largest producer of computer hard drives, swallowing up its nearest competitor, Maxtor, just two years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/te...15seagate.html





China: We're Fighting Piracy, Honest!
Jacqui Cheng

If there's one thing China is known for aside from its Internet censorship practices, it's piracy. China insists, though, that it is making an effort to crack down on piracy, especially in anticipation of the Olympic Games this summer. Chinese officials said at a news conference this morning that the state had convicted 4,322 people for piracy in 2007, and that it would make a special effort to ensure that the Olympic trademark would be protected.

"The Chinese government has taken concrete steps and its success is there for all to see," State Intellectual Property Office spokesperson Yi Xintian told the press, according to the AP. "We are extending comprehensive and strict protection to Olympic intellectual property. The Chinese government has the resolve and capability to make sure that during the Olympic Games we create a favorable climate for intellectual property."

It's no secret that China is rife with intellectual property rip-offs—not just of music, movies, and software, but of everything you can possibly think of. Handbags, Beanie Babies (yes, still), shoes, cell phones, other gadgets, home appliances, clothing—anything that has a well-known brand name can be found in knockoff form. This fact is amplified significantly if you actually visit some cities in China; it's near impossible to turn your head and not be greeted with blocks upon blocks of street vendors trying to hawk their ripped-off wares for cheaper than it costs to buy a bottle of pop in the US.

It's no surprise, then, that the International Olympic Committee could be a little concerned over its trademarks being abused when the Olympics touch down in Beijing. For an organization that undoubtedly makes lots of money on official merchandise sales, China can be a very scary place.

China's statements come at a time when the country is still widely criticized for not doing enough to combat piracy. A year ago, US Trade Representative Susan Schwab filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization over China's "inadequate protection of intellectual property rights," and later that month the WTO named China again at the top of its piracy watch list. Although some organizations—such as the Business Software Alliance—say that the piracy situation in China is improving, China has continued to butt heads with government officials and even Hollywood.

Some companies, though, are trying to compete with pirates instead. Twentieth Century Fox, Warner China, and Paramount have all begun selling DVDs in China at a severe discount in hopes of attracting would-be buyers away from illicit copies being sold on the street. These studios have priced their movies at between 10 and 25 yuan (roughly $1.40 to $3.50)—the lower end being roughly the same price at which pirated movies are commonly found.

The studios have apparently found that selling their DVDs for so cheap is still better than not selling any at all. If the IOC is smart, perhaps it should plan to sell official merchandise on the cheap during the Games, too.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...cy-honest.html





France's TF1 Files YouTube Lawsuit
Charles Masters

France's leading commercial network TF1 has filed a lawsuit claiming 100 million euros ($155 million) in damages, alleging illicit use of its programming content from YouTube, it was reported here Thursday.

A YouTube spokesperson told newspaper Les Echos that the legal challenge had been received a few days ago by the company in California but that the case would be heard by a Paris court. TF1 declined comment on the report.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...53053f88589e9e





Chef’s Lawsuit Against a Former Assistant Is Settled Out of Court
Pete Wells

The owner and chef of a Greenwich Village seafood restaurant has settled the lawsuit she brought against her former sous-chef after he opened a restaurant that she said was a “total plagiarism” of her own.

The chef, Rebecca Charles of Pearl Oyster Bar, had accused her former assistant, Edward McFarland, of copying “each and every element” of her restaurant, including the white marble bar, the color scheme and the Caesar salad recipe when he and his partners opened Ed’s Lobster Bar in SoHo.

Both sides in the case agreed to keep the terms of the settlement confidential.

The case, brought last June (WiR - June 30th, '07), was avidly followed in the hospitality business because it cited principles of intellectual property law, including trade secrets and trade dress — the kind of tactic more commonly used by large corporations than by restaurants like Pearl, a tiny storefront on Cornelia Street known for urbane takes on lobster rolls, chowder and other New England clam-shack standbys.

The suit had demanded that Ed’s Lobster Bar, at 222 Lafayette Street, stop using visual elements that Ms. Charles claimed were copied from Pearl. On a visit Friday afternoon, though, Ed’s Lobster Bar looked much the same as it had last June, except for several small details of décor that were singled out in the complaint as being virtually identical to those at Pearl. The wainscoting on the walls, once gray, and the stained-wood backs on the chairs and bar stools are now painted white.

According to Mr. McFarland, the place had been spruced up while he was on his honeymoon in February. A partner, Andrew Rasiej, said, “We wanted to make it a little more bright, a little more inviting.”

A few weeks after the repainting, Ed’s Lobster Bar had new menus printed, introducing several new dishes and changing the names of others. The lawsuit had charged that Ed’s menu consisted “almost entirely of dishes created by Charles.”

Now the Lobster Bar’s bouillabaisse, an item long offered at Pearl, is called “New York Shellfish Stew.”

But “Ed’s Caesar” is still there. Ms. Charles had been particularly indignant about it, claiming that Mr. McFarland had stolen a recipe passed down to her by her mother. Distinctively, it is made with English-muffin croutons and a coddled egg.

“When I taught him, I said, ‘You will never make this anywhere else,’ ” Ms. Charles said last summer.

The croutons on Ed’s Caesar are, to all appearances, still made from English muffins, although Mr. McFarland and Mr. Rasiej would not say whether that was so.

Mr. McFarland said he felt “fantastic” about the settlement and was looking forward to opening new branches of Ed’s in other New York neighborhoods.

Ms. Charles said she had been living in Maine since March, taking care of her mother, who was ill. As a result, she welcomed the chance to settle the lawsuit, although she was sorry she had not been able to set a legal precedent.

“I still feel strongly that I did the right thing,” she said in a telephone interview. “I think it’s important to our industry to find some way to help chefs protect what they create.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/nyregion/19suit.html





Everyone’s a Critic
Ruth La Ferla

IN the realm of perfume, one man’s pudding is the next man’s tar. That the reaction to a fragrance can be visceral, and personal, is not news to Luca Turin, who over the years has inhaled and critiqued hundreds of scents. In assessing them, Mr. Turin, a scientist and fragrance expert, makes no attempt to hide his partisanship.

He describes Attrape-Coeurs, an amber violet perfume from Guerlain, as “an intense radiant Wurlitzer organ blast of rose violet and iris notes,” but paints a bleaker picture of Creed’s Love in White: “If this were a shampoo offered with your first shower after sleeping rough for two months in Nouakchott, you’d opt to keep the lice.”

Readers react to such colorful snippets from his new book, “Perfumes: The Guide” (Viking), written with his wife, Tania Sanchez, with varying degrees of admiration and respect. Mr. Turin is, after all, a dominant voice in a chorus of critics airing their views in books and magazines and, increasingly, on the Web.

In the last half-dozen years, their opinionated chatter has become catnip to consumers, some of whom stay up until the wee hours, reading about new scents on sites like makeupalley.com, which Mr. Turin characterized as “a 24-hour pajama party.”

That chatter, however, is also the bane of the fragrance industry, which, when it comes to romancing products, has traditionally claimed the last word.

“Perfume is the only art in which there’s never been a true word spoken,” Mr. Turin said in an interview, with a directness that has made him a thorn in the side of the industry. In his book, he recalled that as little as a year ago, Le Labo, a small New York perfumer, refused to send him samples, its makers sneering that “writing about perfume is like dancing about architecture.”

Today reviewers on Web sites and blogs like aromascope.com, scentzilla.com, boisdejasmin.com and perfumeposse.com have rendered that argument moot. Increasingly, critics like Robin Krug of Now Smell This, who said she has around 10,000 hits a day, and Chandler Burr, who reviews fragrance for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, cultivate a following by speaking directly to consumers, many of whom are aspiring connoisseurs themselves.

Often those shoppers collect, amassing as many as 200 bottles and vials in their homes. And many have learned to distinguish among olfactory families like fougère (fern) and gourmand (edible smells), and even to pronounce chypre (SHEE-pr, roughly), a classification based on citrus and woody notes.

As critics, they are fierce, responding to certain fragrances with rapture or, as often, with venomous contempt. A perfume like Poison, from Dior, is especially polarizing to bloggers, many of whom are stay-at-home moms or professionals in other fields. An enthusiast on Now Smell This described Poison as “a warm, luxurious velvet blanket draped across a satin settee. On the same site, the perfume was assailed as “a railroad spike through the brain.”

Black Orchid from Tom Ford was praised as “melting cupcakes on hot skin.” But a detractor called it “aged Romano in a carnivorous orchid hothouse.”

When they wish to be especially withering, bloggers designate a scent as a “scrubber,” the kind of smell you can’t wash off fast enough.

Their enthusiasm, though, can be infectious. Online scent aficionados have become a force to be reckoned with in the $2.9 billion high-end fragrance industry, which has had a slight decline in sales since 2007. Their interest in mostly unadvertised, limited-distribution brands has helped drive niche sales in 2007 to $253 million, a rise of 19 percent, said Karen Grant, the senior beauty analyst of the market research firm NPD. Niche brands have doubled in volume since 2005, accounting for 9 percent of sales, Ms. Grant said.

Not surprisingly, these critics’ uncensored comments have been anathema to the Estée Lauders and Cotys of the world, industry giants that have relied almost exclusively on advertising and glowing magazine commentary to spread their message and spur sales.

“No question, the industry people are unnerved,” said Rochelle R. Bloom, the president of the Fragrance Foundation, a trade group. “I often get calls from executives pleading, ‘Can’t you do something about all this chatter.’ ”

Yet traditional marketing does not address consumer desire to learn about the dizzying number of annual fragrance introductions — up from 300 ten years ago to more than 1,000 last year, according to NPD.

“In their marketing, mainstream perfumers have lost control, and that puts a lot of pressure on them,” said Allan Mottus, the editor of The Informationist, a cosmetics and fragrance trade magazine. He added that mass and high-end brands, as well as fragrance producers and suppliers like Givaudan and Symrise, are “just waking up to the news that they can’t own the customer.”

The explicit advertising for Tom Ford’s new men’s fragrance, which shows an amber-colored bottle wedged between a woman’s naked thighs, will likely have no impact on Richard Saja, an artist and embroiderer who stood inhaling fragrances at Bergdorf Goodman on Saturday morning. “I don’t care about perfume advertising or the bottle it comes in,” Mr. Saja said. “For me perfume is a visceral experience,” one that is deepened, he added, by scanning sites like sniffapalooza.com, an organizer, with several New York retailers, of a weekend of sniffing and sampling.

“Three years ago, this was a world I hadn’t explored,” he said. “But now the Web has demystified so much of the world of fragrances for me.”

Mr. Saja was among some 200 customers swarming the Bergdorf fragrance floor that day. Shoppers from London, Berlin and Piscataway, N.J., poked their noses into bottles, sniffed scent strips and inhaled deep draughts from decanters. Some parted with as much as $200 for a flacon of Sycomore, a new offering from Chanel.

Enthusiasts included Christine Jelley, the chief executive of a surge-protection gear maker. Swayed by blogs, she was intent on exploring new violet-scented offerings from Serge Lutens and Annick Goutal. “When someone becomes rhapsodic about a scent,” she said, “I want to see what they’re seeing in it.”

Kevin Saunders, an art therapist circling the Lutens and Jo Malone counter, is an occasional reader of basenotes.net and Now Smell This. Mr. Saunders carries with him on an iPod a list of scents he has read about, some to be sampled, others to buy. “At the least,” he said, “those blogs may prompt me into trying something.”

And there are signs that the industry is responding to Mr. Saunders and his online cohort. “Today you see more bloggers being invited to traditional press events, and a greater awareness among executives of emerging forms of media,” Jenny B. Fine, the editor of the trade journal WWD Beauty Biz, noted.

Marianne Diorio, a spokeswoman for Estée Lauder, acknowledged as much: “In the beginning we were nervous about the blogs. As with any new media, there were mixed emotions.” Pointedly, she added, “Now we could never think of launching a fragrance without contacting the bloggers.” The company engages in dialogues with critics, she said, and advertises some of its fragrances on sites like Now Smell This.

Firmenich, a producer and supplier of fragrances, operates osMoz.com, which made its debut in 2001 and claims 300,000 members. In recent months, the company has encouraged readers to share information and to rate fragrances, its own and others, Julien Levy, the site’s marketing director, said.

Commentators on coty.com prompted Coty, which makes fragrances by David Beckham and Jennifer Lopez, among others, to think of reissuing its greatest hits, scents like Emeraude and L’Origan, said Stephen C. Mormoris, a senior vice president of global marketing.

Such developments cannot come soon enough for Tania Sanchez. In “Perfumes: The Guide,” she chided that the perfume industry “hasn’t yet figured out the benefits or relaxing control.” She told of a prominent blogger threatened with a lawsuit by a perfume company because she had deemed its product only “O.K.,” and “a little disappointing.”

“When a sleek luxury goods company unleashes its lawyers on a suburban mom for not liking their new fragrance,” Ms. Sanchez wrote, “we know the world is changing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/fashion/17SNIFF.html