Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 18th, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Microsoft says publicly that they have no claims in these cases, but then their lawyers come into the court and say whatever the police want them to say." – Sergey Kurt-Adzhiyev


"We don’t know how to price a gig. We’re experimenting. We’ll learn." – Harold DePriest

































Reddy Kilowatt Has a Brand New Bag

A new ISP will soon be offering lightning fast transfer speeds, by stagnant US standards at any rate. Old line Tennessee Valley electric utility EPB has finished running fiber to the home and is now leasing excess capacity to residents and businesses. The fiber was originally installed to increase distribution efficiencies in conjunction with so-called “smart meters,” but the utility found it has lucrative uses beyond that and has decided to jump into the ISP business. Speeds will start at 30 megs and go all the way up to an eye popping 1 gigabit. The price for the highest speed is a sobering $350.00 per month, but is half what I’m paying now on a per megabyte basis. Actually, it’s an even better deal because unlike mine the service is symmetrical, as fast going up as it is coming down.

While the price at first seems high I can see this subscribed to by house shares, dorms and small businesses with data heavy uploads (film production companies, ad agencies etc). Spread across an office of 20 employees, $350 is peanuts when each worker controls 50mbs both ways.

However I think the price for the gigabit service will drop to something blindingly competitive like $99 within 36 months as the electricity distributor begins poaching customers from the established players when it hits home that selling access to information is more profitable than burning coal.

In Connecticut the long established utility spun off its generation assets and became a distribution only entity somewhat like EPB, however it's not working anywhere near as competitively as was promised by regulators prior to deregulation. Connecticut has after all, the highest electrical rates in the continental US. Moving bits is an attractive addition to the bottom line, regardless of who generates the power.

Then again, it wouldn't surprise me if shareholders and even regulators eventually order a spinoff of this tail-wagging-the-dog broadband division, and it winds up with a cable company, where it all gets dialed back to the typical offerings.

In the meantime, this is file-sharing heaven:

A US network nearly 500 times larger than a KaZaa node, and more than 15 times bigger than one from a circa 2000 Napster server. A colossal WAN of tremendous throughput when fully subscribed.

That's a lot of content potential, and with theoretical transfer times of 3 1/2 minutes for an average Blu-Ray, a profound amount of P2P potential.

















Enjoy,

Jack


















September 18th, 2010




Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent
Clifford J. Levy

It was late one afternoon in January when a squad of plainclothes police officers arrived at the headquarters of a prominent environmental group here. They brushed past the staff with barely a word and instead set upon the computers before carting them away. Taken were files that chronicled a generation’s worth of efforts to protect the Siberian wilderness.

The group, Baikal Environmental Wave, was organizing protests against Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to reopen a paper factory that had polluted nearby Lake Baikal, a natural wonder that by some estimates holds 20 percent of the world’s fresh water.

Instead, the group fell victim to one of the authorities’ newest tactics for quelling dissent: confiscating computers under the pretext of searching for pirated Microsoft software.

Across Russia, the security services have carried out dozens of similar raids against outspoken advocacy groups or opposition newspapers in recent years. Security officials say the inquiries reflect their concern about software piracy, which is rampant in Russia. Yet they rarely if ever carry out raids against advocacy groups or news organizations that back the government.

As the ploy grows common, the authorities are receiving key assistance from an unexpected partner: Microsoft itself. In politically tinged inquiries across Russia, lawyers retained by Microsoft have staunchly backed the police.

Interviews and a review of law enforcement documents show that in recent cases, Microsoft lawyers made statements describing the company as a victim and arguing that criminal charges should be pursued. The lawyers rebuffed pleas by accused journalists and advocacy groups, including Baikal Wave, to refrain from working with the authorities. Baikal Wave, in fact, said it had purchased and installed legal Microsoft software specifically to deny the authorities an excuse to raid them. The group later asked Microsoft for help in fending off the police. “Microsoft did not want to help us, which would have been the right thing to do,” said Marina Rikhvanova, a Baikal Environmental Wave co-chairwoman and one of Russia’s best-known environmentalists. “They said these issues had to be handled by the security services.”

Microsoft executives in Moscow and at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., asserted that they did not initiate the inquiries and that they took part in them only because they were required to do so under Russian law.

After The New York Times presented its reporting to senior Microsoft officials, the company responded that it planned to tighten its oversight of its legal affairs in Russia. Human rights organizations in Russia have been pressing Microsoft to do so for months. The Moscow Helsinki Group sent a letter to Microsoft this year saying that the company was complicit in “the persecution of civil society activists.”

Tough Ethical Choices

Microsoft, like many American technology giants doing business in authoritarian countries, is often faced with ethical choices over government directives to help suppress dissent. In China, Microsoft has complied with censorship rules in operating its Web search service, preventing Chinese users from easily accessing banned information. Its archrival Google stopped following censorship regulations there, and scaled back its operations inside China’s Internet firewall.

In Russia, leaders of advocacy groups and newspapers subjected to antipiracy raids said Microsoft was cooperating with the authorities because the company feared jeopardizing its business in the country. They said Microsoft needed to issue a categorical public statement disavowing these tactics and pledging to never cooperate in such cases.

Microsoft has not done that, but has promised to review its policies in Russia.

“We take the concerns that have been raised very seriously,” Kevin Kutz, director of public affairs for Microsoft, said in a statement. Mr. Kutz said the company would ensure that its lawyers had “more clearly defined responsibilities and accountabilities.”

“We have to protect our products from piracy, but we also have a commitment to respect fundamental human rights,” he said. “Microsoft antipiracy efforts are designed to honor both objectives, but we are open to feedback on what we can do to improve in that regard.”

Microsoft emphasized that it encouraged law enforcement agencies worldwide to investigate producers and suppliers of illegal software rather than consumers. Even so, it has not publicly criticized raids against small Russian advocacy groups.

With pirated software prevalent in this country, it is not surprising that some of these groups might have some on their computers. Yet the issue, then, is why the police choose to focus on these particular targets — and whether they falsify evidence to make the charges more serious.

Microsoft also says it has a program in Russia to provide free and low-cost software to newspapers and advocacy groups so that they are in compliance with the law.

But the review of these cases indicates that the security services often seize computers whether or not they contain illegal software. The police immediately filed reports saying they had discovered such programs, before even examining the computers in detail. The police claims have in numerous instances been successfully discredited by defendants when the cases go before judges.

Given the suspicions that these investigations are politically motivated, the police and prosecutors have turned to Microsoft to lend weight to their cases. In southwestern Russia, the Interior Ministry declared in an official document that its investigation of a human rights advocate for software piracy was begun “based on an application” from a lawyer for Microsoft.

In another city, Samara, the police seized computers from two opposition newspapers, with the support of a different Microsoft lawyer. “Without the participation of Microsoft, these criminal cases against human rights defenders and journalists would simply not be able to occur,” said the editor of the newspapers, Sergey Kurt-Adzhiyev.

The plainclothes officers who descended upon the Baikal Wave headquarters said they were from the division that investigated commercial crime. But the environmentalists said they noticed at least one officer from the antiextremism department, which tracks opposition activists and had often conducted surveillance on the group.

The officers said they had received a complaint from a man named Dmitri Latyshev, who claimed that he had been in the headquarters and spotted unlicensed Microsoft software on the computers. The police produced a handwritten complaint from Mr. Latyshev, dated Jan. 27. The raid occurred the next day.

People at Baikal Wave said they had never seen or heard of Mr. Latyshev. Located in Irkutsk recently, Mr. Latyshev said by phone that he had filed the complaint but would not say why.

Baikal Wave’s leaders said they had known that the authorities used such raids to pressure advocacy groups, so they had made certain that all their software was legal.

But they quickly realized how difficult it would be to defend themselves.

They said they told the officers that they were mistaken, pulling out receipts and original Microsoft packaging to prove that the software was not pirated. The police did not appear to take that into consideration. A supervising officer issued a report on the spot saying that illegal software had been uncovered.

Before the raid, the environmentalists said their computers were affixed with Microsoft’s “Certificate of Authenticity” stickers that attested to the software’s legality. But as the computers were being hauled away, they noticed something odd: the stickers were gone.

In all, 12 computers were confiscated. The group’s Web site was disabled, its finances left in disarray, its plans disclosed to the authorities.

The police also obtained personnel information from the computers. In the following weeks, officers tracked down some of the group’s supporters and interrogated them.

“The police had one goal, which was to prevent us from working,” said Galina Kulebyakina, a co-chairwoman of Baikal Wave. “They removed our computers because we actively took a position against the paper factory and forcefully voiced it.”

“They can do pretty much what they want, with impunity,” she said.

A Company’s Pollution

The paper factory is located on Lake Baikal, the world’s oldest and deepest lake, which is home to hundreds of species that exist nowhere else, including a freshwater seal. Over the years, the factory has spewed mercury, chlorine, heavy metals and other pollutants into the water.

Baikal Wave rejoiced when the factory closed in 2008, having succumbed to sizable losses, as well as pressure from environmentalists. But after the financial crisis hit, the Kremlin worried about unrest from unemployment. In January, Mr. Putin reopened the factory, which has employed as many as 2,000 people, saying that it no longer polluted the lake.

Baikal Wave, which was founded in Irkutsk, one of Russia’s largest cities, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, began planning a protest. That was when the officers showed up.

In a statement, the Irkutsk police said the raid was proper. “The inspection of Baikal Environmental Wave was intended to protect intellectual property and had no connection whatsoever with the activities of the advocacy organization,” the statement said.
It said a forensic examination of the computers in February showed that several contained illegal software that would have cost more than $3,300. Baikal Wave said the examination was fraudulent.

Prosecutors say they are now weighing whether to press charges against Baikal Wave or its leaders. It is possible, though unlikely, that they could face jail time if convicted.

Neither Microsoft’s Moscow office nor its local lawyer contacted Baikal Wave to hear its side. The lawyer did provide testimony to the police about the value of the software that Baikal Wave was accused of illegally obtaining.

Baikal Wave sent copies of its software receipts and other documentation to Microsoft’s Moscow office to show that it had purchased the software legally. The group said it believed that the authorities would be under pressure to drop the case if Microsoft would confirm the documents’ authenticity.

Microsoft declined to do so. In a letter to Baikal Wave, the company said it would forward the materials only to the authorities in Irkutsk, which already had copies of them.

“A determination of the actual circumstances of this case and the question of whether a violation of the law took place is the duty of the court,” Microsoft said.

The company also told Baikal Wave that it was willing to have its specialists assist the police in Irkutsk in evaluating the computers.

In response to written questions, Alexander Strakh, Microsoft’s chief antipiracy lawyer in Moscow, said that in all these cases, Microsoft assisted the authorities only as called for under Russian law.

Mr. Strakh was asked whether Microsoft believed that these raids were a tool to suppress the opposition. “We have no direct knowledge of decisions by authorities to use investigations in that manner,” he said.

Microsoft has hired numerous private lawyers across Russia who represent the company in piracy cases. Several of the lawyers have cropped up in these politically sensitive inquiries.

This year, prosecutors in the southwestern city of Krasnodar brought a piracy case against an immigrant rights activist named Anastasia Denisova. She said in an interview that she was surprised at the aggressive posture of Microsoft’s local lawyer.

In an official document, the Interior Ministry said the case against Ms. Denisova was begun “based on an application” from the lawyer. (Microsoft’s Moscow office said that statement was not correct.)

Ms. Denisova said the lawyer overestimated the value of the allegedly pirated software. As a result, the accusations were more serious.

“The Microsoft lawyer was very active, coming to the court all the time, even though he was not summoned,” she said. “He also claimed that he was going to sue me, despite the fact that Microsoft had publicly stated that it would not do so against an advocacy group.”

In May, after Ms. Denisova had spent several months under the threat of a prison sentence, the charges were dropped. Prosecutors acknowledged that the investigation had been mishandled.

Samara, in Russia’s industrial heartland, has been a focal point for these raids. In May 2007, when Mr. Putin was holding a summit meeting there with European leaders, the police sought to prevent protests by seizing computers from several organizations, including Golos, an election monitoring and human rights group, and the local edition of Novaya Gazeta, the country’s most influential opposition newspaper.

Last year, they took computers from another newspaper, Samarskaya Gazeta. According to case records, the police conducted that search based upon a complaint from a man who admitted that he had never been in the newspaper’s offices or seen its computers.

Mr. Kurt-Adzhiyev, the editor of both newspapers, said Microsoft’s lawyer in the case regularly appeared at court hearings to back prosecutors and the police. He said the lawyer testified that seized computers contained pirated software even though it was later shown that the computers had never been examined.

“Microsoft says publicly that they have no claims in these cases, but then their lawyers come into the court and say whatever the police want them to say,” Mr. Kurt-Adzhiyev said.

The Damage Is Done

Prosecutors eventually dropped or suspended the charges against Mr. Kurt-Adzhiyev after he was able to discredit them. But he said the damage was done. He said the newspapers lost computers and data, and he spent an enormous amount of time ensnared in legal proceedings. The local edition of Novaya Gazeta had to close.

Mr. Kurt-Adzhiyev said he now realized that the authorities were not so much interested in convictions as in harassing opponents. Even if the inquiries are abandoned, they are debilitating when they require months to defend.

Microsoft’s Moscow office said its lawyers had conducted themselves properly in the cases in Krasnodar and Samara.

In Irkutsk, Baikal Environmental Wave has also struggled to recover from the raid. It located some old computers and was still able to hold protests against the paper factory.

The seized computers were not returned by the police until July, five months after they were removed. Their hard drives had been inspected by police experts in February. The environmentalists do not know whether all their data remain, and they are sure that files were copied.

Ms. Rikhvanova, one of the group’s co-founders, who has been fighting to defend Lake Baikal since the 1960s, was unable to use her computer. When she got it back, she discovered that it had been disabled by a virus.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/wo...e/12raids.html





4chan DDoS Takes Down MPAA and Anti-Piracy Websites
enigmax

Following a call to arms yesterday, the masses inhabiting the anonymous 4chan boards have carried out a huge assault on a pair of anti-piracy enemies. The website of Aiplex Software, the anti-piracy outfit which has been DDoSing torrent sites recently, is currently down having been DDoS’d. They are joined in the Internet wasteland by the MPAA’s website, also currently under huge and sustained attack.

Don’t mess with the Internet they say. Well, actually stronger terms than that are often used, but the end result is the same. When people get organized on the Internet, very strange and powerful things can happen and in few places can this be more true than on the 4chan message boards.

Sometimes things need sorting out, and what better way than getting hundreds of thousands of anonymous users of this notorious message board to work together to achieve it. If they’re not trying to bring down Scientology, they’re teaching foul-mouthed pre-teen girls a lesson or using their combined forces to destroy the lives of stupid bankers who think it’s ‘funny’ to throw cats in the trash.

Yesterday two new targets hit the radars of ‘Anonymous’, the faceless and powerful hoards who carry out 4chan attacks. The beauty is that anyone can join in the action, 4chan ‘membership’ is not even required. People wishing to participate can simply load up their Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) and enter the IP address they want to attack. The resulting assaults are massively distributed making defending against them almost impossible.

Yesterday’s target one was everyone’s favorite Indian anti-piracy company, AiPlex Software. A completely unknown entity until a couple of weeks ago when they stupidly admitted to DDoSing uncooperative torrent sites (then unsuccessfully trying to backtrack), it seems their rise to fame came at a price.

Following claims that AiPlex had DDoS’d The Pirate Bay, a few hours ago their website was taken down and remains that way at the time of writing. Along with the downtime came this message (pic):

How fast you are in such a short time! Aiplex, the bastard hired gun that DDoS’d TPB (The Pirate Bay), is already down! Rejoice, /b/rothers, even if it was at the hands of a single anon that it was done, even if ahead of schedule. now we have our lasers primed, but what do we target now?

We target the bastard group that has thus far led this charge against our websites, like The Pirate Bay. We target MPAA.ORG! The IP is designated at “216.20.162.10″, and our firing time remains THE SAME. All details are just as before, but we have reaimed our crosshairs on this much larger target. We have the manpower, we have the botnets, it’s time we do to them what they keep doing to us.

REPEAT: AIPLEX IS ALREADY DOWN THANKS TO A SINGLE ANON. WE ARE MIGRATING TARGETS.

While it’s claimed that AiPlex was taken down by a single attacker, the ongoing assault on the MPAA.org website is definitely a group effort. The site was attacked on schedule (9pm eastern time yesterday) and taken down in minutes. It remains down at the time of writing.
http://torrentfreak.com/4chan-ddos-t...bsites-100918/





Issues of Jurisdiction Surfacing in File-Sharing Lawsuits
wconeybeer

The 14,000 P2P users who have been recently sued for alleged illegal file-sharing may end up having the cases against them dismissed because of a technicality.

Rosemary Collyer, one of the federal judges overseeing the US Copyright Group cases in Washington, DC has ruled that because defendants in the cases reside all over the United States, the DC court may not have jurisdiction over many of them.

“These defendants appear to live outside of Washington, DC,” Collyer stated. “Mr. Ansell lists an address in Pennsylvania, and Mr. Wright lists one in Oregon. Because they live elsewhere, it is questionable whether Mssrs. Ansell and Wright have had sufficient contact with the District of Columbia to warrant this Court’s exercise of personal jurisdiction over them. Accordingly, it is hereby ORDERED that Plaintiff shall SHOW CAUSE, no later than September 30, 2010, why this case should not be dismissed against Mr. Ansell and Mr. Wright for lack of personal jurisdiction.”

Despite the jurisdiction issue, however, the cases could still move forward even if the DC court will not hear them. While it will be a much more expensive endeavor, the US Copyright group does have the option of filing lawsuits in a defendant’s local area once they are identified by the ISP and their location is known.

What strikes me about these cases is that they can be filed before the identity and location of the defendant is known. After the cases are filed, a subpoena is then sent to the ISPs in order to identify the owners of the offending IP addresses. It just all seems a bit backwards to me. Also, something tells me that if the RIAA and MPAA are willing to spend millions of dollars lobbying the government to get their way, they will probably be willing to spend the extra money to re-file all of these cases in their local jurisdictions.
http://www.myce.com/news/issues-of-j...awsuits-34313/





Anti-Piracy Law Test Case Sent to EU Court

The first case tried since the passage of Sweden's anti-file sharing law (Ipred) in April 2009 is heading for the EU Court of Justice after a ruling by the Supreme Court.

This issue concerns a case between five audiobook publishers and the Swedish ISP ePhone which appealed a lower court ruling ordering the firm to hand over information about the users connected to certain IP-addresses.

"It is heartening that the Supreme Court has taken this decision and that the Ipred law will now come under the scrutiny of the EU Court of Justice," said ePhone's lawyer, Peter Helle, to the Dagens Nyheter daily on Thursday.

The Swedish Supreme Court (Högsta Domstolen - HD) in June requested the parties involved to submit their view on whether it is necessary to send the matter for a preliminary ruling to the European Court - decision which was interpreted by experts as a victory for ePhone and taken to mean that the case would head for Luxembourg, a process that can take years.

It was thus no real surprise when on Thursday the Supreme Court made it formal ruling.

Bo Wigstrand, president of ePhone, argued at the time of the preliminary ruling that the law provides for private surveillance in an area that should be the reserve of the police and he does not expect to be forced to hand over his customer's IP information to the publishers.

"One should not claim success in advance but this shows that you can not have laws in which private investigators undertake these types of investigations. The police should do it," he said in June.

When the new Swedish law came into force on April 1st, the five publishers of audio books were the first copyright holders to file a case under the new measure.

The publishers, which include 15 authors who suspected their work has been spread illegally over the internet, demanded to know who owned a server suspected of containing some 2,000 audio book titles.

But ePhone refused to reveal who was using the IP-address in question, pointing out that a password was required in order to gain access to the works stored on the computer.

As a result, the company argued, the sound files weren’t publicly accessible and thus the matter wasn’t a case of copyright infringement.

The publishers then sought a court order which would force ePhone to divulge information about the users tied to the IP-address.

The Solna district court first ruled in June 2009 in favour of the publishers but the the Court of Appeal (Hovrätten) upheld ePhone's appeal of the decision, ruling that the publishers were unable to prove whether the audio books on the server really had been available to the public.
http://www.thelocal.se/29054/20100916/





Behind the Music: Moguls and Musicians Thrash out Filesharing

U2's manager and Gama Bomb's frontman enter the debate over whether to fight filesharing or embrace it

The filesharing debate that's been raging for close to a decade often tends to deal in absolutes from both sides: "filesharing is killing the music industry", "filesharing is good for artists", "filesharing is bad for record labels, but good for artists" (which turns into "record labels are evil" or "record labels are necessary for artists"), "filesharing is inevitable so get used to it", "filesharing should and can be eradicated". The reality, of course, is a lot more complicated.

The latest people to weigh into the debate are U2's manager, Paul McGuinness, and Philly Byrne, the frontman of Irish thrashers Gama Bomb. McGuinness wrote a piece called How to Save the Music Industry in the August issue of GQ, saying that demand for music to be free is unsustainable. He acknowledges that it's not as big a problem for his band as it is for others, but "indigenous music industries from Spain to Brazil are collapsing". While stating his opposition to lawsuits against filesharers (a tactic record labels are now largely moving away from), he endorses the gradual response initiative set out in the recent Digital Economy Act, which also suggests the music industry develops partnerships with ISPs for music subscription offers.

In an open letter to McGuinness, Byrne calls the manager's article "well-reasoned, well-informed and commendable in its aims – though it's crazily short-sighted".

Byrne's main argument is that it's impossible to police the internet, hence fighting filesharing is futile and artists will have to rethink how to profit from it. "Endorsing the idea of free content is the route to profit, creating a 'goodwill' industry," writes the singer. "Usenet groups currently charge users around £18 per month to download unlimited material. This is the best model for the future, with corporate tie-ins and advertising monetising the interactive space in which people will swap material." Which, I guess, means that he agrees with McGuinness, to a certain extent (though McGuinness does not believe ad-funding is a valid solution).

In an effort to put their proverbial money where their mouth is, Gama Bomb released their album Tales from the Grave in Space as a free download via Rapidshare in November 2009, with the blessing of their record label, Earache. Their aims, they say, were to increase their fanbase and promote their CD, which was officially released in January 2010, as well as concert ticket sales. They also hoped the exercise would give the album some media attention.

So has this experiment worked? The album has sold almost exactly the same number (7,653) of CDs to date as their previous album, Citizen Brain (7,665). "Not a spectacular result, but an interesting one," says Byrne.

"We expected a big increase," says Digby Pearson, founder of Earache. "Didn't happen. Our reading of the situation is the free album – downloaded over 40,000 times – undoubtedly helped the band's 'profile' with casual fans."

It appears US fans were less open to part with their cash than European fans, as sales in the US were down 36% compared to the previous album, while European sales were up 26% – a gain the label attributes to the "overall cheap price of a CD". "Overall the sales, while decent, are also nothing spectacular, compared to similar bands in the new thrash scene, some of which sell 35,000-plus," says Pearson. "I don't think the experiment of sharing a free album on the internet has been the runaway success it promised to be, but I'm glad we tried it."

Here we see a perfect illustration for my view on the subject: creators should be allowed to choose what happens with their music, and if the artist has decided to sign a deal with a label, getting investment in return for the copyright ownership, then it should be the choice of the copyright owner. If they want to use a Creative Commons licence, for example, then that is their choice. If they don't want their music to be given away for free, that should also be respected. It's important to distinguish illegal downloading from filesharing.

It's also worth noting that what may work in the thrash metal scene may not work for artists in other genres, as live shows and merchandising are a big part of metal culture. The bands also tend to write their own music, so there is no question of compensating songwriters who can only make money from the actual song, and don't share any ancillary income. However, there's usually a producer who needs to get paid for their work. As producers traditionally get an upfront fee, plus royalties from the record, this would mean that the upfront fee should be higher if the album is given away for free (though, according to the producers I've spoken to, the upfront fees have gone down considerably in the last five years).

Is there any right answer in the filesharing debate? And what's in it for the record label? "We've got a 360-degree deal with the band," says Pearson. "We share in the income from records, publishing and merchandise – but not live income. So it's probably more like a 270-degree deal. But this is basically why this label can spend money on making an album to give away ..."

Of course, we won't know for sure if their gamble has been a success or not until the band goes on tour. Will the 40,000 people who downloaded the album for free turn into paying concertgoers? And will that be enough for the band to continue and their label to keep investing in them?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musi...ic-filesharing





Pioneers To Gather To Chart The Future of Music
Sarah Lai Stirland

Back in 2000, Public Enemy’s Chuck D proclaimed on Charlie Rose that file-sharing heralded a new era in the music business. “The power is going back to the people,” he said.

Chuck D was debating Metallica’s drummer Lars Ullrich, whose band had filed a lawsuit against Napster. Ullrich told Rose that his main concern was one of control. Fans can’t just loot music online, he argued, and besides, file-sharing is wrong because it enriches everyone involved except for the artists themselves.

Metallica ultimately settled. But a decade later, Chuck D and Public Enemy are still struggling to build a viable business model out of the “power to the people” motto.

Public Enemy is trying to raise money to record its next album through SellaBand, a site that attempts to fund artists by aggregating fans’ donations online. In exchange for their funding, artsists can choose to share revenues with them, provide them with “free” downloads or merchandise.

The group had had a goal of raising a quarter of a million dollars in three months. But almost a year later, it has had to slash that goal by 70 percent. That was five months ago.

Public Enemy’s experiment is just one of many that will be discussed and dissected early this October at the 10th annual Future of Music Policy Summit taking place in Washington, DC.

Chuck D will be one of the many luminaries who will participate.

Among the many others scheduled to speak include Patrick Sullivan, CEO of Rightsflow, Brendan Benzing, Rhapsody’s Chief Product Officer, music manager Peter Jenner, and Vicki Nauman, a vice president at Seven Digital. They will be speaking about “copyright in the cloud,” which addresses the issues that arise once consumers’ digital lives are stored on servers the internet, rather than residing solely on their mobile devices or desktop computers.
http://broadbandbreakfast.com/2010/0...ture-of-music/





YouTube vs. Fair Use
Jeff Atwood

In YouTube: The Big Copyright Lie, I described my love-hate relationship with YouTube, at least as it existed in way back in the dark ages of 2007.

Now think back through all the videos you've watched on YouTube. How many of them contained any original content?

It's perhaps the ultimate case of cognitive dissonance: by YouTube's own rules [which prohibit copyrighted content], YouTube cannot exist. And yet it does.

How do we reconcile YouTube's official hard-line position on copyright with the reality that 90% of the content on their site is clearly copyrighted and clearly used without permission? It seems YouTube has an awfully convenient "don't ask, don't tell" policy-- they make no effort to verify that the uploaded content is either original content or fair use. The copyrighted content stays up until the copyright owner complains. Then, and only then, is it removed.

Today's lesson, then, is be careful what you ask for.

At the time, I just assumed that YouTube would never be able to resolve this problem through technology. The idea that you could somehow fingerprint every user-created uploaded video against every piece of copyrighted video ever created was so laughable to me that I wrote it off as impossible.

A few days ago I uploaded a small clip from the movie Better Off Dead to YouTube, in order to use it in the Go That Way, Really Fast blog entry. This is quintessential fair use: a tiny excerpt of the movie, presented in the context of a larger blog entry. So far, so good.

But then I uploaded a small clip from a different movie that I'm planning to use in another, future blog entry. Within an hour of uploading it, I received this email:

Dear {username},

Your video, {title}, may have content that is owned or licensed by {company}.

No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.

Sincerely,
- The YouTube Team

This 90 second clip is from a recent movie. Not a hugely popular movie, mind you, but a movie you've probably heard of. This email both fascinated and horrified me. How did they match a random, weirdly cropped (thanks, Windows Movie Maker) clip from the middle of a non-blockbuster movie within an hour of me uploading it? This had to be some kind of automated process that checks uploaded user content against every piece of copyrighted content ever created (or the top n subset thereof), exactly the kind that I thought was impossible.

Uh oh.

I began to do some research. I quickly found Fun with YouTube's Audio Content ID System, which doesn't cover video, but it's definitely related:

I was caught by surprise one day when I received an automated email from YouTube informing me that my video had a music rights issue and it was removed from the site. I didn't really care.

Then a car commercial parody I made (arguably one of my better videos) was taken down because I used an unlicensed song. That pissed me off. I couldn't easily go back and re-edit the video to remove the song, as the source media had long since been archived in a shoebox somewhere. And I couldn't simply re-upload the video, as it got identified and taken down every time. I needed to find a way to outsmart the fingerprinter. I was angry and I had a lot of free time. Not a good combination.

I racked my brain trying to think of every possible audio manipulation that might get by the fingerprinter. I came up with an almost-scientific method for testing each modification, and I got to work.

Further research led me to this brief TED talk, How YouTube Thinks About Copyright.

We compare each upload against all the reference files in our database. This heat map is going to show you how the brain of this system works.

Here we can see the reference file being compared to the user generated content. The system compares every moment of one to the other to see if there's a match. This means we can identify a match even if the copy uses just a portion of the original file, plays it in slow motion, and has degraded audio or video.

The scale and speed of this system is truly breathtaking -- we're not just talking about a few videos, we're talking about over 100 years of video every day between new uploads and the legacy scans we regularly do across all of the content on the site. And when we compare those 100 years of video, we're comparing it against millions of reference files in our database. It'd be like 36,000 people staring at 36,000 monitors each and every day without as much as a coffee break.

I have to admit that I'm astounded by the scope, scale, and sheer effectiveness of YouTube's new copyright detection system that I thought was impossible! Seriously, watch the TED talk. It's not long. The more I researched YouTube's video identification tool, the more I realized that resistance is futile. It's so good that the only way to defeat it is by degrading your audio and video so much that you have effectively ruined it. And when it comes to copyright violations, if you can achieve mutually assured destruction, then you have won. Absolutely and unconditionally.

This is an outcome so incredible I am still having trouble believing it. But I have the automatically blocked uploads to prove it.

Now, I am in no way proposing that copyright is something we should be trying to defeat or work around. I suppose I was just used to the laissez faire status quo on YouTube, and the idea of a video copyright detection system this effective was completely beyond the pale. My hat is off to the engineers at Google who came up with this system. They aren't the bad guys here; they offer some rather sane alternatives when copyright matches are found:

If Content ID identifies a match between a user upload and material in the reference library, it applies the usage policy designated by the content owner. The usage policy tells the system what to do with the video. Matches can be to only the audio portion of an upload, the video portion only, or both.

There are three usage policies -- Block, Track or Monetize. If a rights owner specifies a Block policy, the video will not be viewable on YouTube. If the rights owner specifies a Track policy, the video will continue to be made available on YouTube and the rights owner will receive information about the video, such as how many views it receives. For a Monetize policy, the video will continue to be available on YouTube and ads will appear in conjunction with the video. The policies can be region-specific, so a content owner can allow a particular piece of material in one country and block the material in another.

The particular content provider whose copyright I matched chose the draconian block policy. That's certainly not Google's fault, but I guess you could say I'm Feeling Unlucky.

Although the 90 second clip I uploaded is clearly copyrighted content -- I would never dispute that -- my intent is not to facilitate illegal use, but to "quote" the movie scene as part of a larger blog entry. YouTube does provide recourse for uploaders; they make it easy to file a dispute once the content is flagged as copyrighted. So I dutifully filled out the dispute form, indicating that I felt I had a reasonable claim of fair use.

Unfortunately, my fair use claim was denied without explanation by the copyright holder.

Let's consider the four guidelines for fair use I outlined in my original 2007 blog entry:

1. Is the use transformative?
2. Is the source material intended for the public good?
3. How much was taken?
4. What's the market effect?

While we're clear on 3 and 4, items 1 and 2 are hazy in a mashup. This would definitely be transformative, and I like to think that I'm writing for the erudition of myself and others, not merely to entertain people. I uploaded with the intent of the video being viewed through a blog entry, with YouTube as the content host only. But it was still 90 seconds of the movie viewable on YouTube by anyone, context free.

So I'm torn.

On one hand, this is an insanely impressive technological coup. The idea that YouTube can (with the assistance of the copyright holders) really validate every minute of uploaded video against every minute of every major copyrighted work is unfathomable to me. When YouTube promised to do this to placate copyright owners, I was sure they were delaying for time. But much to my fair-use-loving dismay, they've actually gone and built the damn thing -- and it works.

Just, maybe, it works a little too well. I'm still looking for video sharing services that offer some kind of fair use protection.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/201...-fair-use.html





Piracy!

The terror of the binary seas has arrived
with a few terrabytes of blank hard drive
hoist up the jolly roger and mutiny
were plundering the internet sea
pieces of 8 gigabytes in size
belay the antivirus so you dont capsize
and give no quarter all my privateer thieves
Im the quartermaster of the high speed seeds

Hit up a p2p then heave to
yo ho ho is practically yahoo
why would i ever buy DVD's?
a pirates life is the life for me

Dont need a sail dont mind the currents
im on the interwebs leeching your torrents
Yo ho Hoes and some MP3s
Everybody loves a little piracy
Aint got a boat I aint got a peg leg
i got a whole boat load of your MPEGS
Bury my booty all on a Re-
writable disc because its piracy

they call me captain jackin all my files online
downloading a stack of AVI's not mine
not gonna give em back no surprise cause I
live a scallywag life of pirate crime
Up at the helm im a real corsair
sing this shanty song while I steal software
pay heed to the code all my buccaneer brutes
maybe youll get a share of commandeered loot

go on account and raise up a tankard
click on a link come about weigh anchor
Captain Ulrich brought about a disaster
ran a shot right across the bow, sank napster

If you see captain Ulrich never parlay
make him walk the plank via CD tray

Dont need a sail dont mind the currents
im on the interwebs leeching your torrents
Yo ho Hoes and some MP3s
Everybody loves a little piracy
Aint got a boat I aint got a peg leg
i got a whole boat load of your MPEGS
bury my booty all on a on a Re-
writable disc because its piracy

Hit up a p2p then heave to
yo ho ho is practically yahoo
and why would i ever wanna buy CDs?
a pirates life is the life for me

Im a rap-scallion gonna make like a kraken
copy protection's gonna get cracked in
everybody prepare for the plunder and looting
fire in the hole my computers rebooting
100 megabyte pornography pics
hard drive overloaded jpegs and gifs
shes a yo ho ho so when nobodies around
im swabbin my deck while she blow the man down

Dont need a sail dont mind the currents
im on the interwebs leeching your torrents
Yo ho Hoes and some MP3s
Everybody loves a little piracy
Aint got a boat I aint got a peg leg
i got a whole boat load of your MPEGS
Bury my booty all on a Re-
writable disc because its piracy

Got hundreds of hours of tv- whole seasons
copies of shows that i hate- no reason
dont even like most of the games- im seizen
still Gonna need some CDs to put these in
Weigh the anchor and hoist up the mizzen
youll prolly pirate this after you listen
So sing along now if youre savvy
everybody loves a little piracy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1I3a...layer_embedded





Record and Release Free Music Without Copyrights
Aaron Dunn

Musopen is a non-profit library of copyright free music. This project will use your donations to purchase and release music to the public domain. Right now, if you were to buy a CD of Beethoven's 9th symphony, you would not be legally allowed to do anything but listen to it. You wouldn't be able to share it, upload it, or use it as a soundtrack to your indie film- yet Beethoven has been dead for 183 years and his music is no longer copyrighted. There is a lifetime of music out there, legally in the public domain, but it has yet to be recorded and released to the public.

This isn't just a crazy idea: we've done this before using donations from our website, but now we want to tackle something much more ambitious.

We want your help to hire an internationally renowned orchestra to record and release the rights to: the Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky symphonies. We have price quotes from several orchestras and are ready to hire one, pending the funds.

What can I do?
Donate, and vote on what we should buy with the money. Then we will release that music in lossless quality with a creative commons license.

You can also help by voting for us on these sites:
Vote for us on Digg (hopefully Digg V4 is working): http://bit.ly/9YUI35
Vote for us on Reddit: http://bit.ly/birkg8
Vote for us on BoingBoing: http://bit.ly/dBLdUN

Or Using Twitter, facebook etc to spread the word.

What about beyond 10k?

Every $1000 buys a complete set of Mozart violin sonatas, or all of Chopin's mazurkas, ballades, or nocturnes... a little money buys a LOT of music.

Where does the music go afterwards?
Thanks to generous and free hosting from ibiblio, music will remain on our website indefinitely, and we will share it with other organizations: included in Wikipedia articles, added to archive.org, and integrated with OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) laptops.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...out-copyrights





File-Sharing: Diversifying Our Lives
Dekunle Somade

As I watched the hands on the wall clock at my off-campus job tick ever so slowly by, I grew increasingly antsy at the prospect of the conclusion of my shift and the much deserved weekend that lay ahead. In a last-minute attempt to kill time, I asked a co-worker, who also appeared to be bored out of his mind, whether I could use his iPod. Luckily for me, this co-worker acquiesced, and I subsequently thanked the music gods for saving me from yet another idle hour at my job.

However, even though I was thrilled by the distraction the iPod provided, I didn’t expect much from this music session. My co-worker and I came from two completely different worlds: Me, a city kid from the outskirts of Washington, and him, a scrawny white male from the Eastern Shore.

But as I listened to the songs on his iPod, I slowly began to realize my assumptions were completely wrong. His eclectic musical selection ranged from urban classics such as 2Pac’s “Dear Mama” and a Tribe Called Quest’s “Midnight Marauders” to legendary groups such as The Commodores and The Temptations. Not only was I surprised at how diverse Bobby’s knowledge of music was, but I also couldn’t help but notice how I evolved as a music connoisseur. I found myself listening to bands such as TV on the Radio, Green Day and Maroon 5 just as much as the hip-hop groups I was familiar with.

As I walked back to my apartment at the conclusion of my shift, I began to ask myself, “Were people always this aware of such diverse forms of music?” My curiosity ran rampant, and I was moved to do some light research on the topic. My research confirmed my suspicion. I couldn’t find another time in the modern era when the lines separating genres of music had been so nonexistent, not just in the diversity of the music we listen to but also in the actual music being created. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to see artists such as Jay-Z and Linkin Park collaborate on an album or for John Mayer to assist Kanye West with a project. But what could this movement be attributed to? Why are barriers created by classified music genres becoming more and more blurred in the eyes of the consumer? My answer is the increase in illegal downloading and file-sharing — technologies that many experts believe are hurting the music business.

Downloading and file-sharing have created a previously unavailable medium for users to gain easy access to new music. If you’re a hardcore hip-hop fan, would you really be willing to spend your last $15 on a new Neil Diamond album that may or may not meet your expectations? These are the inherent barriers that had for years inhibited us from discovering new genres but have now been leveled due to file-sharing technology.
This translates to a more educated consumer who is well-versed in several genres of music. In any other business, this would be encouraged. But stubborn music executives have grown fat due to the money accumulated from the days before filesharing and refuse to see the benefits created by illegal downloading.
10 years ago, I wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to Maroon 5. Now it is my favorite band. I’ve attended many of its shows, spending upward of $100 on tickets, and I’ve spent plenty of time introducing others to its music. And none of this would have happened were it not for illegal file-sharing.
http://www.diamondbackonline.com/opi...ives-1.1594197





How Piracy Works

[Everything in this post is purely my own personal opinion, and may not reflect the opinions of everyone working at Mojang Specifications!]
Markus Persson

Large parts of the culture these days exists in a world where copies are free. Copying a physical book costs money, but copying a digital movie is free. In fact, simply moving a movie from one hard drive to another actually copies the movie first, then deletes the original. Copying games is also free. No resources are lost, nobody loses any money, and more people are having fun.

To people who want to get paid for their digital works, myself included, that is a bit of a problem. All of society and economics is based on an old outdated model where giving something to someone would rid the original owner of their copy, so everyone who wanted a copy had to buy one from someone else who would lose theirs, and the only source of new copies was you. There might be actual development costs involved in making these copies. For example, for every wheel in the market, someone had to make that wheel. With digital copies, you only need to make the wheel once.

I won’t bother analyzing why people copy games and other digital media, as that’s really a moot point. We’ve got an amazingly effective way of distributing culture that is extremely beneficial for humanity, but it clashes with our current economical models. Piracy will win in the long run. It has to. The alternative is too scary.

If someone pirates Minecraft instead of buying it, it means I’ve lost some “potential” revenue. Not actual revenue, as I can never go into debt by people pirating the game too much, but I might’ve made even more if that person had bought the game instead. But what if that person likes that game, talks about it to his or her friends, and then I manage to convince three of them to buy the game? I’d make three actual sales instead of blocking out the potentially missed sale of the original person which never cost me any money in the first case.

Instead of just relying on guilt tripping pirates into buying, or wasting time and money trying to stop them, I can offer online-only services that actually add to the game experience. Online level saving, centralized skins, friends lists and secure name verification for multiplayer. None of these features can be accessed by people with pirated versions of the game, and hopefully they can be features that turn pirates from thieves into potential customers.

Please don’t interpret this text as me being fine with people pirating Minecraft. I’d MUCH rather have people pay for it so I can reinvest in hiring people and developing more cool games in the future. It’s also quite possible that if I get into a business deal with a larger company, there might be a larger push towards fighting piracy mostly because they’d require it, and I understand why they’d want that.

But why fight the biggest revolution in information flow since the printing press when you could easily work with it by adding services that actually add some value beyond the free act of making a digital copy?

In other news, I’m voting for either Piratpartiet or Miljöpartiet in the Swedish elections on Sunday.
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1121596...w-piracy-works





Stallman Calls for File-Sharing to be Legalised
Sam Varghese

The chairman of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, has called for internet file-sharing to be legalised in order that people could benefit from sharing material that they should rightly be able to.

Stallman was giving a talk at the RMIT University in Melbourne today on "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks", one of the lectures he is giving during a six-week stay in Australia.

At the end of his talk, Stallman auctioned what he called "an adorable GNU" - a soft toy - saying, "if you have a penguin (the Linux mascot) at home, you need a GNU because the penguin is useless without the GNU." This was a dig at people who refuse to acknowledge the contribution the GNU Project has made to GNU/Linux distributions.

Stallman said file-sharing should be made legal to allow people to share files on a non-commercial basis as they had done during earlier eras.

During the days when printing presses were the main tool for rolling off copies of books, people could still share these or leave them to the next generation if they so wished, he said.

But with the advent of e-books - he cited the case of the Amazon Kindle which he referred to as the Amazon Swindle - publishers had started imposing restraints on people, even to the extent of deleting books which they had already paid for.

(Amazon did this last year, with the supreme irony being that the e-book in question was George Orwell's 1984.)

And e-publishers no longer sold one a copy of a book; they provided a licence for use of a book and could impose limits of time as they wished, Stallman added. "If someone comes to your house can you give them a copy of your e-book?" he asked. "You can't, you can only give them the device with your whole library on it."

The government did nothing to curb corporations as they imposed more and more restrictions on consumers, Stallman said. "The government should be of the people, by the people, for the people; instead it is of the people, by the flunkeys and for the corporations," he added to much laughter.

Restrictions were being imposed by the constant extension of copyright; in the US, the last extension moved the copyright period from 50 years after the death of a copyright holder to 70 years, he pointed out.

He said nobody could ask for a copyright to never expire without some kind of outcry resulting, "but they are doing it by degrees".

For example, the Disney Corporation did not want the use of an image like that of Mickey Mouse to be in the public domain. "So what do they do? They buy legislation. That's why we call it the Mickey Mouse Act," he said.

Stallman gave a brief account of the various digital measures that have been imposed in recent times to try and curb consumers from using software as they wished, prime among them being the Sony rootkit which was brought to light by Windows expert Mark Russinovich.

Sony did not earn any penalty for something which was akin to a felony, Stallman said. The company was incorporating the same technology as part of the hardware, for example in the Playstation 3.

He recommended that works which did a practical job should be kept free, and works that informed one about what people thought, and works of art and entertainment have a copyright regime that extended 10 years from the date of creation.

As far as music went, Stallman said there could be a small tax on internet connectivity to support artists with the distribution of the amount being on the basis of a cube root, instead of simply rewarding the most used recordings. Else, consumers could make voluntary payments to artists which went directly to them - though there needed to be some kind of mechanism created for doing this.

Else, there could be a scheme like Global Patronage where a monthly fee was paid to an ISP and the subscriber chose to apportion up to a third of this to artists of his or her choice; the rest was divided up according to the popularity of artists.
http://www.itwire.com/it-policy-news...o-be-legalised





Police Spent Tens of Thousands on Failed BitTorrent Probe

OiNK bust laid bare
Chris Williams

A failed three-year police investigation of a filesharing website, run in cooperation with the music industry, cost taxpayers at least £29,000, and probably much more.

Figures released by Cleveland Police detail some costs of Operation Ark Royal, a raid on invitation-only BitTorrent site OiNK.cd.

The probe was launched with a high-profile dawn raid in 2007 and ended this January with the failed prosecution of Alan Ellis, the Middlesbrough man who ran OiNK.cd, on charges of conspiracy to defraud. He was acquitted by a Middlesbrough jury, to the anger of the BPI and IFPI.

Immediately following the trial, The Register wrote to Cleveland Police under the Freedom of Information Act for details of the costs of the controversial operation. Following delays the request was twice refused, with an official writing: "It is my belief that disclosure could undermine any ongoing and future investigations and cause potential damage to the criminal justice process."

The data was eventally released this month after intervention by the Information Commissioner's Office. It reveals:

• More than £7,800 spent on police overtime
• More than £15,200 on forensics
• More than £4,300 on travel and subsistence for investigators

Cleveland Police point out that the investigation did not only cover Mr Ellis, but also four uploaders to the site who pleaded guilty to lesser charges last year. The case against a fifth was dropped following Ellis' acquittal.

However, the force admits the true total cost is likely to be significantly greater than disclosed because it did not keep records of normal hours spent on the case, or the involvement of other forces.

When it was launched, with TV cameras invited to record Ellis being led from his home in handcuffs, Operation Ark Royal was trumpeted by Cleveland Police as the result of "working closely with the music industry... the first such international operation in the country". It was viewed as a coup for the music industry, as the first time British criminal law had been used to attack a BitTorrent site.

Ellis' barrister Alex Stein suggested at his trial that authorities had been hoodwinked into action. "All of us here are being manipulated to some sort of marketing strategy by the IFPI. If anybody's acting dishonestly it's them," he told the court.

The failure of Operation Ark Royal to secure a conviction against its main target may mean police are less inclined to get involved in future online copyright issues. But to the record industry's consolation, OiNK.cd remains closed. Ellis meanwhile is a free man.

The only real loser is the taxpayer.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/15/oink_costs/





Talktalk Warns Customers Will Pay to Police Illegal File Sharing

ISPs could pass on charges to consumers in form of higher prices and less choice
Dinah Greek

Talktalk has slammed the Government’s decision to force internet service providers (ISPs) to pay towards combating online copyright infringement; warning consumers will end up the losers.

Talktalk, which has been a vocal opponent of the illegal file sharing penalties set out in the Digital Economy Act, said it was “absolutely outrageous that ISPs and broadband customers will be forced to pay for the costs of the music and film industries to enforce their own copyright.”

When asked if the provision to force ISPs to pay a quarter (25 per cent) of the costs of notification and appeals procedures would have financial repercussions for consumers, a Talktalk representative said it could.

“It's too early to talk about specific pricing implications but inevitably if ISPs are footing the bill to benefit rights holders it can have an impact on their quest to offer best value to customers," he said.

Under the terms of the Digital Economy Act, customers who are detected allegedly downloading copyrighted material must be sent notices warning them to cease or face penalties. An appeals procedure will be set up by telecommunications regulator Ofcom.

After a consultation, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skill’s announced today that the costs of these processes should be split; with copyright holders paying 75 per cent and ISPs 25 per cent.

Andrew Heaney, Talktalk’s executive director of strategy & regulation, said: “The Digital Economy Act means many innocent customers will be falsely accused of file sharing and put on an ‘offenders register’ though they have broken no law and now they are being forced to pay for the privilege.

“Far from encouraging a more digitally inclusive nation, these measures will simply alienate web users. Moreover, they don’t tackle the root cause of the problem – the creative industry’s failure to adapt its business model to the 21st century.”
http://www.computeractive.co.uk/comp...cises-decision





GAO Issues Report On Performance Royalty
FMQB

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued an in-depth report on the proposed Performance Royalty Act, predicting how much stations would have to pay out based on revenue percentages. While the GAO could crunch the numbers for radio, it noted that it could not put a dollar amount on radio's value when it comes to promotion of music for the labels.

The GAO used the rates proposed in the Senate's PRA proposal, which are essentially the same as the NAB and RIAA's compromise proposal. The GAO found that 2,556 stations would qualify for the largest payment, while 2,589 would pay a flat fee of $5,000. For the next tier, 2,485 would pay a $2,500 fee, 536 stations would pay $500 and approximately 1,900 non-commercial stations would pay either $1,000 or $500.

The GAO noted in its report that "Stakeholders from both the recording and broadcast radio industries agree that broadcast radio airplay can promote music sales, and past and current industry practices support this conclusion. A 2010 Arbitron study, as well as stakeholders from both the recording and radio industries, indicates that broadcast radio is the most common means by which listeners discover new sound recordings." The GAO also compared airplay to digital sales, but "found no consistent pattern between the cumulative broadcast radio airplay and the cumulative number of digital single sales."

The GAO also attempted to estimate the amount of money artists could recieve from the Performance Royalty, based off of 199 stations in the top ten markets. Using a PRA rate of 2.35 and based on data from Q1 of 2010, the GAO estimated that 79 percent of all recordings would generate royalties of under $1,000 annually. Lady Gaga’s "Bad Romance," the biggest hit of Q1, would have brought in $446,000 in performance royalties, with half of that going to her label.

The GAO also estimated that 56 percent of musicians would receive less than $100 annually in performance royalties, while 95 percent would get under $10,000 annually. As the most-spun artist, Gaga would make $300,000.

As for fears that stations may flip from music to Talk formats in the wake of a Performance Royalty, the GAO noted, "the feasibility of switching from a music format to a nonmusic format would also be determined by market factors. For example, if there are many talk radio stations in a market, a station may not switch to talk radio because the market cannot support another station of that format."

The entire GAO report is available for download as a 69-page PDF [url= http://www.fmqb.com/goout.asp?u=http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10826.pdf here[/url].
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1951631





Arms Makers Turn Focus from Bombs to Bytes
Deepa Seetharaman

Global arms makers that have long relied on planes, tanks and guns for profits are increasingly focusing on the bits and bytes of cybersecurity as they bend to new U.S. government priorities and a potential new battlefield.

Weapons manufacturers are snapping up smaller companies that specialize in cybersecurity. This is a fragmented market with smaller niche players whose services range from thwarting threats to computer networks to posing them in order to help defenders spot vulnerabilities.

"We have created a special business unit for cybersecurity because we think that it's a field of expansion for us," EADS (EAD.PA: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) Chief Executive Louis Gallois told the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit in Washington this week.

Cybersecurity is a growing concern across the U.S. government. This year, the Pentagon tapped Army General Keith Alexander as the first commander of U.S. Cyber Command. It was created to better defend the Pentagon's 15,000 computer networks that link more than 7 million machines.

It will centralize command of U.S. military cyberspace operations, pull together existing resources and seek synergies that officials say did not previously exist. The command is to become fully operational next month.

The confidential nature of the work as well as the rapidly morphing nature of the threat makes for big business opportunities, executives said.

"It's hard to put your arms around the size of that market due to the classified nature of that business," said L-3 Communications Holdings Inc (LLL.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) CEO Michael Strianese.

"You read about the bad things that happen, data being taken or things being hacked into in the public domain," Strianese told the Reuters summit. "Can you imagine what's going on that you don't read about?"

Expiration: 'Three Months'

Alastair MacWillson, a senior executive in Accenture's cybersecurity practice, estimated the value of the global cybersecurity market at $80 billion to $140 billion, depending on how broadly it is defined.

Boeing Co (BA.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the Pentagon's No. 2 supplier by sales, has made several acquisitions in the cyber sector, including the purchase of Argon ST earlier this year. Market Research Media has estimated the federal government will spend $55 billion between 2010 and 2015 on cybersecurity.

Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier, and Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the third-biggest, also told the summit they were keeping an eye out for possible cyber-related acquisitions.

A key challenge is that any defense against cyber threats must be constantly updated. A given defense could have a shelf life of as little as three months, Lockheed Martin Chief Executive Robert Stevens said at the summit.

"You don't want to buy something that has a rapidly expiring value because you own it as a core proprietary solution and it's of very little value in a year or two," Stevens said. "Almost by the time you integrate the company, the value could be gone."

'Talent Warfare'

This paves the way for what Accenture's MacWillson termed "talent warfare" among companies jockeying to enter the cybersecurity space.

"Cyber to us involves predominantly having the right very smart people and then creating a climate for those people where they have all the contemporary means and mechanisms of understanding the cutting edge of how technology is being applied and can respond with real creativity and adaptability to that cutting edge," Stevens said.

Defense companies are not the only ones eyeing cybersecurity acquisitions. Top suppliers already compete and partner with the information technology companies, and insiders expect competition to heat up.

"Not only the players in the defense industry, but there's plenty of commercial companies that are also players in the cyber market that have technologies," Strianese said.

(Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman; additional reporting by Jim Wolf and Karen Jacobs, editing by Matthew Lewis)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6893EI20100910





Police Say IPhones Can Store a Treasure Trove of Incriminating Evidence
Amber Hunt

Got an iPhone in your pocket? Then you might be storing even more personal information than you realize.

And some of it could be used against you if you're ever charged with a crime.

A burgeoning field of forensic study deals with iPhones specifically because of their popularity, the demographics of those who own them and what the phone's technology records during its use.

Law-enforcement experts said iPhone technology records a wealth of information that can be tapped more easily than BlackBerry and Droid devices to help police learn where you've been, what you were doing there and whether you've got something to hide.

"Very, very few people have any idea how to actually remove data from their phone," said Sam Brothers, a cell-phone forensic researcher with U.S. Customs and Border Protection who teaches law-enforcement agents how to retrieve information from iPhones in criminal cases.

"It may look like everything's gone," he said. "But for anybody who's got a clue, retrieving that information is easy."

Two years ago, as iPhone sales skyrocketed, former hacker Jonathan Zdziarski decided law-enforcement agencies might need help retrieving data from the devices.

So he set out to write a 15-page, how-to manual that turned into a 144-page book ("iPhone Forensics," O'Reilly Media). That, in turn, led to Zdziarski being tapped by law-enforcement agencies nationwide to teach them just how much information is stored in iPhones -- and how that data can be gathered for evidence in criminal cases.

"These devices are people's companions today," said Zdziarski, 34, who lives in Maine. "They're not mobile phones anymore. They organize people's lives. And if you're doing something criminal, something about it is probably going to go through that phone."

It's an area of forensic science that's just beginning to explode, law-enforcement and cell phone experts said. Zdziarski said the focus of forensics recovery has been on the iPhone over other smartphones in large part because of its popularity.

Although some high-stakes criminal cases have used cell phone towers to estimate a suspect or victim's whereabouts, few have laid out the information that iPhones have to offer. For example:

# Every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it. Savvy law-enforcement agents armed with search warrants could use those snapshots to see if a suspect is lying about whereabouts during a crime.

# iPhone photos are embedded with GEO tags and identifying information, meaning that photos posted online might not only include GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken, but also the serial number of the phone that took it.

# Even more information is stored by the applications themselves, including the user's browser history. That data is meant in part to direct custom-tailored advertisements to the user, but experts said that some of it could prove useful to police.

Clearing out user histories isn't enough to clean the device of that data, said John B. Minor, a communications expert and member of the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners who has written articles for law enforcement about iPhone evidence.

"With the iPhone, even if it's in the deleted bin, it may still be in the database," Minor said. "Much is contained deep within the phone."

Some of that usable data is in screenshots.

Just as users can take and store a picture of their iPhone's screen, the phone itself automatically shoots and stores hundreds of such images as people close out one application to use another.

"Those screen snapshots can contain images of e-mails or proof of activities that might be inculpatory, or exculpatory," Minor said.

Most iPhone users agree to let the device locate them so they can use fully the phone's mapping functions, as well as various global positioning system applications.

The free application Urbanspoon is primarily designed to help users locate restaurants. Yet the data stored there might not only help police pinpoint where a victim was shortly before dying, but it also might lead to the restaurant that served the victim's last meal.

"Most people enable the location services because they want the benefits of the applications," Minor said. "What they don't know is that it's recording your GPS coordinates."

Bill Cataldo, an assistant Macomb County, Mich., prosecutor who heads the office's homicide unit, said iPhones are treated more like small computers than mobile phones.

"People are keeping a tremendous amount of information on there," he said.

Cataldo said he has found phone call histories and text messages most useful in homicide cases. But Zdziarski, who has helped federal and state law-enforcement agencies gather evidence, said those elements are just scratching the surface when it comes to the information police and prosecutors soon will start pulling from iPhones.

"There are some terrorists out there who obtained some information about a network from an iPhone," he said.

Even people who don't take pictures or leave GPS coordinates behind often unwittingly leave other trails, Zdziarski said.

"Like the keyboard cache," he said. "The iPhone logs everything that you type in to learn autocorrect" so that it can correct a user's typing mistakes.

Apple doesn't store that cache very securely, Zdziarski contended, so someone with know-how could recover months of typing in the order in which it was typed, even if the e-mail or text it was part of has long since been deleted.

Apple did not return phone calls or an e-mail seeking comment.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_15986753





In Newport, but Not of It
Penelope Green



“ISN’T it pretentious?” That was Richard Saul Wurman, a slight figure in cargo shorts, T-shirt and sandals, at the door of his “super mansion” — to use the words of his friend the designer Massimo Vignelli — otherwise known as the Orchard.

Its double staircase stretched out prettily on either side of Mr. Wurman, the infamously bombastic architect, designer, cartographer and creator of the TED conference. (That’s the wildly profitable genius-fest — TED stands for technology, entertainment and design — where fractal finders and Apple makers, ex-presidents and cartoonists have mingled.) Above, thick green ivy twined atmospherically. Below him, parked in the pea-stone driveway, a black Lexus sedan sported the license plate “MOMSIE”; the plate on the white Lexus convertible nearby read “POPSIE.”

Sure, a visitor agreed, the place was pretentious.

Mr. Wurman beamed. But the joke’s not on him. It’s on his adopted city, its name still associated with the last vestiges of high WASP society.

Seventeen years ago, when Mr. Wurman and his wife, Gloria Nagy, an author of social satires, bought the house, a 19th-century copy of an 18th-century French country house that sits on eight high-walled acres, one grown son would tease on his visits, “Momsie, Popsie, Biff is here!”

“Our kids thought the house was a riot,” said Ms. Nagy, 65. She wore a long-sleeve white T-shirt and jeans cut off at the knee; her apricot hair was tucked into a white baseball cap. “Our friends acted like we had moved to another galaxy, like this was the scariest thing they could imagine. One friend in California was furious. She said, ‘I guess I don’t know anything about you if you could move to someplace like that.’ ”

Mr. Vignelli, too, was mock-horrified. “You don’t leave New York to go to Newport,” he said. “You go to London, Milan, Paris. In Newport, you know, there is nothing outside your house. All you have is your things inside, and that’s the end of it.”

He continued: “The kind of people there need each other. They need their booze at 5, their costume parties. They need to know who is who, and who married what and how much money. It’s a kind of zoo. In that zoo, of course, Ricky has his own private pavilion, and he never goes out. I think he is considered an alien.”

Indeed, most locals, particularly those who live in houses like Mr. Wurman’s, have never heard of their famous neighbor. Outside Newport, Mr. Wurman enjoys a happy notoriety as a connector and king-maker. Despite its proximity to nowhere convenient, his house is the hub from which he organized the TED conference — sold in 2002 for a reported $14 million — as well as its spin-off, TED MED (TED, with a medical focus), which he still owns, and a host of other synergistic projects and conferences. (In his spare time, Mr. Wurman writes and publishes books; his most recent, a fable about himself, is his 82nd.)

Exhausted by her husband’s constant stream of visitors, Ms. Nagy had him turn an old stable here into an air-cooled conference center. During one typical week last month, a member of the Clinton Foundation came to visit, as did a rear admiral, the dean of a design college, a digital entrepreneur, a German urban planner working in Bangalore and Martha Stewart, who phoned as she was driving through town (Mr. Wurman wasn’t home). “I’ve had better lineups,” he said later.

ONE hot August afternoon, Mr. Wurman, who is extremely fond of certain profane terms, employed a common one to dismiss his neighbors. Afterward, he added, “I love living in this house, and I’m not blasé about it at all, but this town is an intellectual wasteland without any sense of humor. I’ve been living here for 17 years, and if you asked me to tell you when I last had lunch with anybody but my wife or someone that came to see me from India or New York or Boston or Germany, I couldn’t come up with a name.”

Not that he really cares. The absence of a local social life, Ms. Nagy said, is the price of living here. “Everything comes down to choices. Nobody gets away with anything. We pay prices for everything,” she said. “Anyway, after 12 or 13 years here, I started to meet people.”

In 1993, Mr. Wurman and Ms. Nagy had had eight productive years in a New York City loft. “We have always worked at home, we are the original mom-and-pop shop, living above the store,” Ms. Nagy said.

She likes to say that she and her husband are both utterly unemployable. She was writing gently satiric novels; he had made a name for himself as an “information architect,” a phrase he coined to describe what he and others were increasingly doing, which was organizing data — information — into clear patterns. To wit, Mr. Wurman had created and self-published the Access Guides, intuitively designed and enormously successful city guidebooks, as well as a new United States road atlas; he had also redesigned Pacific Bell’s Yellow Pages and written a best seller, “Information Anxiety,” which was itself a kind of guidebook or map to information of all stripes, from idle chitchat to that produced by the news media.

A protégé of Louis Kahn, the modernist architect, Mr. Wurman had long ago flamed out in the world of traditional architecture. (Years before, he had been fired as dean of architecture and urban planning at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, for not putting in enough hours, he said. Earlier, he had dissolved his own practice because the service nature of the profession and the slow pace of the work was profoundly irritating to him.)

That year, the last of their four children had left for college, and there was no compelling reason to stay in New York. They were negotiating on three-quarters of an acre with a potato silo in the Hamptons, and Mr. Wurman had already drawn up plans for a new house there. But Ms. Nagy was feeling queasy about “New York with sand,” as she calls the East End of Long Island, and when she came across an ad in The New York Times Magazine, she was curious. “For Sale by Owner,” it read. There was a grainy photograph of the Orchard on its eight acres, with a $2.2 million price tag, half the price of the potato silo. They had never been to Newport, or known anyone who had. Its foreign-ness and relative remoteness were appealing.

“It was a point in our lives when we wanted to get off the merry-go-round,” she said. “I didn’t want to throw our lives away like the people I write about, frantic and empty and then you’re dead. My mother died when I was in my 20s, and I had this heightened sense that time was precious. I didn’t want to waste it being inauthentic. I wanted to do better work, dig deep with friends, or by myself. To paraphrase Anita Brookner, ‘At some point you’re going to have to come to terms with who you are, however unpleasant, if you’re going to be anything at all.’ ”

It was a Sunday in late spring, and as they drove up the long allée driveway toward the yellow brick-and-limestone house, they saw a chauffeur-driven Daimler and a Rolls-Royce out front.

“An old woman with a boy toy was coming down the stairs,” Ms. Nagy said. “And going up was a young vixen with a very old man. Welcome to Newport.”

The vixen nixed the place, Ms. Nagy recalled, because it had no ballroom.

Mr. Wurman added: “But the bones were fantastic. Everything was original. It just needed some spit and polish, and paint. The bedroom had pink shag carpeting, but underneath was pink terrazzo.”

There were 13 bedrooms, 11 perfectly maintained period fireplaces and 11 perfectly maintained period bathrooms.

The owner, a dealer of Erté prints, pressed a cocktail on them, but they retreated to a local restaurant to clear their heads. Mr. Wurman had a drink anyway. Ms. Nagy got very quiet. “When she’s that way, you know she’s wildly enthusiastic,” Mr. Wurman said.

THE two met 34 years ago, when they were seated next to each other at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art at a tribute to Charles and Ray Eames. “He was covered in chains,” Ms. Nagy said, shuddering slightly. “I thought he was some kind of movie producer.”

Mr. Wurman ignored her during dinner, and later told her he had been staring at her legs for two hours. She thought, “This guy is really creepy.”

Inevitably, they fell in love. Both were divorced. Ms. Nagy had a young son and daughter; he had two teenage sons. And everyone they knew, including their children, protested the marriage.

“Everyone objected to me,” Mr. Wurman said.

“He wasn’t flat broke, but he was one of those boy wonders that couldn’t find his derrière with two hands and a map,” Ms. Nagy said, raising an eyebrow at her husband. “I wasn’t paying your bills, so how did you manage?”

“I always manage,” he said. “In the 30 years since we’ve been married, I want to finish this one sentence” — he added, glaring at his wife, who had started to speak. “In the 30 years since we’ve been married, even though I wasn’t burning up the world in the beginning, at the end of each year we always had a little more money than before. It was clear we were better together.”

“I cleaned up his rough edges,” Ms. Nagy said. “I always had his back, and I told him the truth. And I told him some very tough truths. He was too old to be the boy wonder. Too old to be Louis Kahn.”

“My turn,” her husband said. “She’s the most honest person I know. Which bothers me sometimes.”

Frank Gehry, who is an old friend — Ms. Nagy was his first publicist — describes their marriage as “a match made in Heaven.”

“They’re both healthily ambitious, and they know how to enjoy life better than the rest of us,” he added. “Better than I do, anyway.”

Mr. Wurman turned 75 last March. “I was very difficult to live with,” he said. “O.K., I am always difficult to live with, but last year was very hard. I was focused on the birthday, on what happens. I’m a different weight.” Mr. Wurman, once famously bearlike, had lost 90 pounds.

He added: “ I decided I would celebrate the year by saying yes to everyone asking if I would give a speech, if they would throw me a birthday party.”

Ms. Nagy interjected: “You have to wait while I throw up all over the table. At 70, he was convinced it was all over, now his phone is ringing off the hook. When we moved 17 years ago, he was convinced it was over, too. I remember buying him a fishing pole.”

“She’s a stronger person,” Mr. Wurman said.

“I’m just a more self-aware person,” she countered. “The key to living with Richard is to make him think everything is his idea.”

Mr. Wurman: “I object to that.”

Can we talk about the house?

“Let’s talk about Gloria,” he said. “I live with this woman, and I read her books, and I can’t believe she has all these ideas and observations and I don’t see what she sees and I don’t hear what she hears. The dives she makes. I feel so shallow because I’m skimming on the top of the world, happy as a clam, and she’s diving deeply.”

“It’s called being a man, honey,” Ms. Nagy said.

But she is proud of her husband, and fiercely protective of his talents. She recalled sitting next to “a very famous German architect who was very snotty” and who prodded her to explain what, exactly, her husband did.

Ms. Nagy recalled saying something like: “What Richard does is allow his brain to operate like a great big cellular Cuisinart, mixing all his knowledge, thoughts, frustrations, observations, visual, conceptual and gathered information and feelings about everything together, hitting the high switch and pouring it all out in the form of ideas baked in one mold or another: conference, book, map, exhibit.”

The architect, she said, retorted: “Smoke, he sells smoke, unlike what we are doing, which is real creative work.” He said this while smoking, Ms. Nagy added.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder and former director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, had this to say, responding by e-mail to a reporter’s question: “Ricky has spent his life in the ‘understanding’ business,” Mr. Negroponte wrote. “That is what he does. He helps people understand places, people, health, processes, just about anything. TED is an eclectic party of intellectuals, innovators, designers and entertainers. The meeting affected the times and the times affected the meeting, synergistically making today a period where design is viewed as strategy, not fluff. The house — what can I say? Ricky has always been bigger than life, but the house is bigger than Ricky. He and Gloria use it for themselves, which is very different than most people, for whom it would be first and foremost a trophy or status symbol.”

IN the beginning, the huge wrought-iron gates were wide open, rusted out and unwieldy. But a porous property is confusing in a tourist town like Newport. The green lawns enticed picnickers, many of whom would knock on the door and ask for a tour. One morning, Ms. Nagy came downstairs and found an elegantly dressed woman and her teenage daughter lost in the front hall. They had mistaken the Orchard for the admissions office of the Salve Regina University across the street. Now the gates are oiled and working, locked up tight.

There are four full-time employees working inside and out, including a house manager and the couple’s personal assistant. Shortly after moving here, painting the place and buffing its rough edges, Mr. Wurman and Ms. Nagy moved their white loft furniture, their collections of ethnic pieces and textiles, the artwork from friends — Jim Dine, David Hockney, Dale Chihuly, among others — right into the place. Seventeen years later, it still looks contemporary and appealingly eclectic. The other day, the baby grand player piano was banging out Baroque compositions. Atop it was an intriguing nest of what looked like ribbon candy woven into a bowl. It was soft to the touch, a patented formula of what turned out to be packing glue that is the medium used by their son, Tony Wurman, a glass blower and artist. Joshua, his brother, is a severe-weather chaser; Reven, another son, is a photographer in New York; and Vanessa, their daughter, has developed an equestrian center in Charlestown, R.I.

The grounds are a cross between a French formal garden and a Slim Aarons photo, peppered with the massive volumes — cones, balls, pyramids — that Mr. Wurman is deeply fond of. In fact, he has redesigned all eight acres into contiguous landscapes of circles: there are roses planted in a spiral; a labyrinth of stones; a whorl of Indian columns; a pool shaped like a semicircle. He has collected giant iron submarine buoys that look like planets or land mines and deployed them about the place.

After the renovation, which took two months, and the move, which included packing up 55,000 pounds of books, Ms. Nagy was finishing a new novel. Coming up for air every few days, she would cast her eye on the town’s inhabitants. Who were these people, with their committees?

“I had no idea how different people were when you got outside the urban stew,” Ms. Nagy said. “People would say, ‘Did your people summer here?’ We came from families where you summered in your backyard. I never heard people talk with an English accent in America. I wanted six pals, and we can all be in the kitchen cooking spaghetti. I couldn’t meet one pal.”

They were asked to dinner, but Ms. Nagy soon realized that these overtures were coded entreaties for money — for the hospital, the library, the local museum. “I was turning 50, and I was really lost,” she said. “And Richard’s life was just taking off with TED. I didn’t even know how lonely I was. In the beginning, I was like Perle Mesta. We had houseguests all the time. Driving to Providence one day, I became completely undone and couldn’t stop crying. I realized that I was feeding and housing a lot of people who were only coming because I was feeding and housing them. And I drew a line in the house and told Richard, ‘If it’s business, take them out.’ I had no privacy. I learned a lot. We are down-to-earth, not fancy people, who happen to live in a fancy house. And nobody knows what to do with that.”

Home matters, she said, as the place to collect her family — there are now six grandchildren, and each has a bedroom painted in a different color — and a few close friends. It is a place to start writing less, she is hoping. Her husband, energized by his 75th birthday, is doing more than ever.

In typical Wurman-hyberbole, he said: “The ones upcoming are going to be the very best.” There’s TED MED in October; a cities project involving a new method to map the cities whose populations will soon top 21 million, as well as an accompanying documentary and the building of worldwide urban observatories; and something else that sounded like a conference, but this reporter wasn’t sure.

Oh, yes, Mr. Wurman said, it is the conference to end all conferences, “a game changer.” In any case, he’s super-busy in his super mansion. His wife rolled her eyes again.

“It’s been romantic to come here,” he said. “The best thing was dropping out of New York and the whole myth of the super-rich, the myth of superficial wisdom.”

But aren’t you super-rich, asked a visitor?

“I am super-wise,” he said. “And I’ve been lucky, I’ve sold a lot of things. I couldn’t do this without Gloria. She gives me permission.”

Ms. Nagy interjected: “What, do I put a vise on your head?”

“No,” he said. “It’s the permission of my being here with you.”

Ms. Nagy had the last word. “Richard has never done anything he hasn’t wanted to do since his mother made him stand in a bowl at 18 months and have his picture taken. You can see why nobody thought we would last 30 days.”

He grinned and stumped away, an elfin figure in sandals with semicircular soles, herded this way and that by his white Labs, Isaac, Jacob and Abraham.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/garden/09who.html





On Slow Weekend, 'Resident Evil: Afterlife' Leads at Box Office with $27.7 Million
Jake Coyle

On a weekend that Hollywood was largely content to cede to football and late-summer barbecues, Sony-Screen Gems' "Resident Evil: Afterlife" led the box office.

The 3-D horror film earned $27.7 million over the weekend according to studio estimates Sunday, a total that exceeded expectations. It's the fourth "Resident Evil" film, all of which have starred Milla Jovovich. This installment opened better than the three previous movies.

"Resident Evil" was the only film in new release on the historically slow moviegoing weekend following Labor Day. With an estimated box-office total of $82 million, it was the lowest grossing weekend of the year.

Screen Gems' "Takers," in its third week of release, came in second with $6.1 million. Last weekend's top film, the George Clooney thriller "The American," took in $5.9 million for Focus Features.

With little competition, "Resident Evil" was able to capitalize on the post-Labor Day weekend, when two of the previous entries to the franchise were also released.

"It had all of what its core audience was looking for and more," said Rory Bruer, president of worldwide distribution for Sony.

Bruer credited the marketing of the film and the draw of its 3-D, which he said "was made to be that way." The film also got a boost from IMAX, where it was released on 141 digital screens and earned $2.6 million.

That the fourth "Resident Evil" performed so well suggests that a fifth is likely. Asked if he expects one, Bruer said he didn't know, as it's produced by Constantin Film. But he acknowledged: "It wouldn't surprise me."

Hollywood.com analyst Paul Dergarabedian said the weekend's low performance wasn't reflective of any industry malaise but merely a historical trend. The same weekend last year performed similarly, with Tyler Perry's "I Can Do Bad All By Myself" debuting with $23.4 million.

"This is never known as a high grossing weekend, but it can be the land of opportunity for a film like 'Resident Evil,'" said Dergarabedian. "That's turning lemons into lemonade if I've ever seen it."

Next weekend begins the fall moviegoing season in earnest, with releases such as the potential Oscar-contender "The Town" from Ben Affleck, "Easy A," the Emma Stone-starring update of "The Scarlet Letter," and the limited release of "Never Let Me Go," another film being positioned for awards contention.

After a bumpy summer of lower attendance and a crop of disappointing movies, many are glad to see the season come to a close.

"Thank God it's over," said Dergarabedian.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. "Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D," $27.7 million.

2. "Takers," $6.1 million.

3. "The American," $5.9 million.

4. "Machete," $4.2 million.

5. "Going the Distance," $3.8 million.

6. "The Other Guys," $3.6 million.

7. "The Last Exorcism," $3.5 million.

8. "The Expendables," $3.3 million.

9. "Inception," $3 million.

10. "Eat Pray Love," $2.9 million.

http://www.courant.com/entertainment...,3770507.story





The World Where You Aren’t What You Post
A. O. Scott

Nowadays, when you hear people talking about “the Facebook movie,” chances are they mean “The Social Network,” David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s soon-to-open inquiry into the rise of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook. But the description might be even better suited to “Catfish,” a documentary by Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman that caused some hyperventilation at the Sundance Film Festival last winter.

“The Social Network” is about origins, while “Catfish,” at once narrower and more universal in implication, is about consequences. Mr. Zuckerberg may be the genius who invented Facebook and cashed in on its success, but many of the rest of us live, at least some of the time, in the world he made, and on the evidence of “Catfish,” it can be a pretty creepy place.

And also one stippled with contradiction. Does social networking make us more outgoing, or more narcissistic? Does the Web foster happy communities of far-flung, like-minded people, or does it provide cover for predators and scam artists?

On the Internet, an ancient New Yorker cartoon caption observes, nobody knows you’re a dog. But everyone assumes you’re a sucker, susceptible to the pleas of hard-luck Nigerian royalty or eager to enhance your sexual prowess. You can have so many friends, fans and followers that you might not grasp just how radically alone you really are.

“Catfish” flops down into this paradoxical reality and proceeds to generate some complications of its own. Judged by the usual standards, it is a wretched documentary: visually and narratively sloppy; coy about its motives; slipshod in its adherence to basic ethical norms. The filmmakers, who occasionally appear on camera, shoot and edit with at least minimal competence, but their approach to the potentially volatile and undeniably exploitive implications of their stumbled-upon story is muddled and defensive. Shame on them, if that would mean anything to them.

But at the same time — precisely because of these lapses — “Catfish” is a fascinating document, at once glib, untrustworthy and strangely authentic. I say this with a heavy sigh: this is, by far, one of the most intriguing movies of the year.

The story “Catfish” has to tell, at least in part, is older than the Internet, and certainly not limited to the latest technology. You may have read “The Confidence Man,” by Herman Melville, or followed the strange literary career of J.T. Leroy, or you may cherish the lore of your own favorite frauds and hoaxsters and impostors, from Jay Gatsby to Don Draper. America is the land of spurious, seat-of-the-pants self-invention, and Mr. Joost and Mr. Shulman, a couple of young men with cameras and college degrees, find themselves in a real-life variation on a venerable American theme.

I mention all of these precedents to give some of the flavor of “Catfish” without spoiling it outright. But be warned: There is a big, not entirely unsurprising twist that lies like a booby trap in the middle of the film, and the choice is either to reveal what happens or forgo a discussion of the movie’s logic and meaning. The directors and the distributors would obviously prefer the second option, but the expectation of discretion is a trap. So consider yourself warned. I’ll try not to spell out too much, but neither am I willing to play along in a rigged game.

Anyway, the story goes like this: A few years ago Nev Shulman, the younger brother of one of the filmmakers, was befriended by a girl in Michigan named Abby, who seemed to be an artistic prodigy. She wanted permission to use one of Nev’s photographs as the basis of a painting, and in the course of their correspondence revealed that she was, at the age of 8, exhibiting and selling her work online and in galleries in her hometown. Nev’s fraternal friendship with Abby led to a warm rapport with her mother, Angela, and also to a blossoming cyberflirtation with Megan, the girl’s 19-year-old sister, who posted enticing profile pictures on her Facebook page.

Megan seemed to be falling in love with Nev, whom she had never met. They exchanged sexy text messages and talked on the telephone, and she posted songs that she had written and pictures of the horse farm she was about to buy. At various points in their courtship, and in his dealings with Angela, Nev experiences a qualm, and tries to persuade his brother and Mr. Joost to let him out of the movie. They bully and cajole and keep the cameras running, and Nev, seemingly the most guileless and perhaps for that reason the most decent person in “Catfish,” plays along in spite of his queasiness.

When the time comes to pay a visit to Michigan, he also shows himself to be much braver than Mr. Shulman or Mr. Joost, who turn panicky when their little investigation into the nature of reality turns strange. When the going gets weird, Hunter S. Thompson used to say, the weird turn pro, but these filmmakers never transcend their own amateurism. They turn what could have been a brilliant exploration of the hidden corners of contemporary reality into an opportunity for gawking and condescension. Look at these crazy folks out there in the sticks! Let’s go back to New York and edit the footage so our friends can see just how crazy they are!

But the object of the film’s patronizing, pitying gaze is also the person who saves it: Angela, a woman whose life is, at first glance, a web of self-delusions, compulsive deceptions and plain desperation. Her whispery, sincere, wide-eyed lies and evasions were met, at the crowded screening I attended, with derisive laughter punctuated by gasps of horror. Plain-looking and soft-spoken, she seemed to be either a clown or a monster.

She might be those things, but in spite of its own facile, faux-naïf manipulations, “Catfish” reveals her to be something else as well, namely an artist. Mr. Joost and Mr. Shulman, young and entitled filmmakers, assume that the sophistication is all on their side, but Angela’s mastery of the media of modern self-expression — from painting to social media to her very being — surpasses theirs in every way.

Some acknowledgment of this power comes in a conversation with her husband, who tells the story that gives the movie its title, but everything that is radical, disturbing and true about “Catfish” belongs to the fabulist at its center. Mr. Shulman and Mr. Joost will continue to enjoy the success and cachet of having made a pop culture conversation piece, which is a tribute to their good luck and nimble opportunism. But the dark genius of their film lies elsewhere, beyond the parameters of its slick intentions, in the wild social ether where nobody knows who anybody is.

“Catfish” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some swearing and creepy suspense.

CATFISH

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost; directors of photography, Mr. Joost, Ariel Schulman and Yaniv Schulman; produced by Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling, Mr. Joost and Ariel Schulman; released by Rogue. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/09/17...17catfish.html





Kevin McCarthy, Actor, Dies at 96
Anita Gates

Kevin McCarthy, the suave, square-jawed actor who earned accolades in stage and screen productions of “Death of a Salesman” but will always be best known as the star of the 1956 science fiction movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” died Saturday at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass. He was 96 and lived in Sherman Oaks, Calif.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Lillah McCarthy.

Mr. McCarthy, whose sister was the celebrated author Mary McCarthy, was 35 and a veteran of seven Broadway plays when Elia Kazan cast him as Biff, the shallow, elder son of Willy Loman, in the London stage production of “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1949 drama about illusion and the common man. His portrayal of Biff in the 1951 film version earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

Five years and four forgettable films later Mr. McCarthy was cast in a low-budget B movie about a small California town where the residents are gradually replaced by pods from outer space. The pods, resembling giant cucumbers, bubble and foam as they slowly turn into creepy, emotionless duplicates of the townspeople.

Miles Bennell (Mr. McCarthy), a handsome bachelor doctor, and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), a beautiful local divorcée, spend the movie trying to escape podification (mostly just by staying awake; the transformation takes place while people are sleeping) and warn others.

The movie, selected for the National Film Registry in 1994 and named one of the Top 10 science fiction films of all time by the American Film Institute in 2008, came to be regarded as a metaphor for the paranoia of the era’s Communist witch hunts.

But the film’s leading man, like many moviegoers at the time, saw it differently, as a warning about mindless conformity.

“I thought it was really about the onset of a kind of life where the corporate people are trying to tell you how to live, what to do, how to behave,” Mr. McCarthy told The Bangor Daily News in Maine in 1997.

Over the decades Mr. McCarthy came to embrace the cult immortality he achieved with “Body Snatchers,” but he cheerily played hundreds of other roles in feature films and on television (including multiple appearances on series from “Studio One” in the 1950s to “The District” in 2000) and continued his stage career. He toured the United States as Harry S. Truman in the one-man show “Give ’Em Hell, Harry” for two decades.

Kevin McCarthy was born on Feb. 15, 1914, in Seattle, the son of Roy Winfield McCarthy and the former Therese Preston. Both parents died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and their four children were sent to live with relatives in Minneapolis. After five years of near-Dickensian mistreatment, described in Ms. McCarthy’s memoirs, the youngsters moved in with their maternal grandfather.

After graduating from high school in Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy studied at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, with an eye toward a diplomatic career. He changed his mind, however, and transferred to the University of Minnesota, where he became interested in acting.

After moving to New York he made his Broadway debut in 1938 in “Abe Lincoln in Illinois.” His career was interrupted by World War II, in which he served as a military police officer. After his discharge he became an early member of the Actors Studio, New York’s bastion of Method acting.

Despite his film and television success Mr. McCarthy never abandoned the stage. The 18 Broadway productions in which he appeared included Moss Hart’s “Winged Victory” (in which he was billed as Sgt. Kevin McCarthy), the political drama “Advise and Consent,” Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Kurt Vonnegut’s irreverent “Happy Birthday, Wanda June.”

Mr. McCarthy matured quickly into roles as judges, generals, politicians and other men of power — sometimes not very nice ones. On “Flamingo Road,” the soapy 1980s television series, he was a greedy small-town Florida millionaire. On the screen, in “The Best Man” (1964), he was a presidential candidate’s henchman, specializing in dirty tricks, and he played a similarly ignoble political type in “The Distinguished Gentleman” (1992). In “Innerspace” (1987) he was a devious industrial spy, in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976), a grabby publicist.

And although he did relatively little science fiction after “Body Snatchers,” he did star in the horror comedy “Piranha” (1978) as a mad scientist breeding killer fish. He also made a cameo appearance in the 1978 remake of “Body Snatchers,” playing a man who throws himself at the car driven by Donald Sutherland (the remake’s star), shouting, “Help! They’re coming! Listen to me!” and sounding much like his character in the original film.

His bad guys weren’t always all bad. He was a roguish poker player in “A Big Hand for the Little Lady” (1966) and Marilyn Monroe’s attractive but distant ex-husband in “The Misfits” (1961).

Mr. McCarthy continued acting well into his 90s. His last screen appearances were in 2009 in “Wesley,” (2008), an 18th-century costume drama, and the short film “I Do.”

He married the actress Augusta Dabney in 1941, and they had three children. They divorced in 1961. (Ms. Dabney died in 2008.) In 1979 he married Kate Crane, a lawyer, and they had two children. Ms. Crane survives him, as do three daughters, Lillah, of Los Angeles; Mary Dabney McCarthy, of Cape Cod; and Tess McCarthy, of New York City; two sons, James Kevin McCarthy of San Diego and Patrick McCarthy of Portland, Ore.; a stepdaughter, Kara Lichtman of Boston; a brother, Preston; and three grandchildren. Mr. McCarthy’s sister died in 1989.

Interviewers rarely asked him about subjects beyond “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” (He loved to tell the story about leaving Ms. Wynter a nostalgic trans-Atlantic telephone message: “Becky, it’s Miles. Wake up!”) But in 1991 he told a critic for The San Diego Union-Tribune about his feeling that purposeful employment was a remedy for many ills. “I try to get as much work as I possibly can,” Mr. McCarthy, then 77, said. “I love to work. I love to be in things.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/mo...3mccarthy.html





The Parable of the Telegraph
asymco

As previously described in an earlier piece on the transistor, there is a theory that underlies much of what this web diary is about. Telecommunications is undergoing wrenching change. And not for the first time. The history of the industry is filled with disruption and thus with drama that leads to fine storytelling.

One such great story is that of Western Union and the telegraph.

Western Union was formed as a company in 1851 and ten years later had completed the first transcontinental telegraph line. Following on that breakthrough, it introduced the first digital real-time data service, the stock ticker, in 1866. Business boomed and by 1870 it was the world’s most powerful telecommunications company.

By any standards it was innovative: it offered remarkable and revolutionary telecom data services, a century before the Internet. But in the century that followed why didn’t Western Union become the leader in voice communications, ceding that position to the Bell companies?

Alexader Graham Bell did not invent the voice telephone with the intention of toppling Western Union. In the language of today’s technology entrepreneurship he hoped Western Union would be his “exit”. He pitched the phone to them as an improvement to their core telegraphy business. Bell offered the patents for the telephone to Western Union for a mere $100,000, roughly $2 million in today’s dollars. In other words, today the deal would be: two million dollars to own all voice IP.

Western Union passed

Now why would they do that? Imagine you are an analyst at Western Union advising management on technology acquisition and M&A. What process would you use to evaluate it? First, most obviously, you would try to get feedback from marketing and sales. They should go out and survey their customer base to find out who would be interested and how much they would be willing to pay.

The sales force would naturally seek out their best customers and ask them first. Those customers were the stock ticker users. They were extremely voracious users of the ticker tape system. It should be no surprise why we have “ticker tape parades”–there was enough of the stuff lying around offices in New York to shower down and flood Broadway end-to-end”. Ticker tape was a boon to merchants and traders. Chicago would know what’s happening in the New York stock exchange instantaneously. Price data was traveling at the speed of light. The sender and receiver were in lock-step sync. To suggest to these customers a voice product would sound like a step backward. Why would they want to talk to the other party? The data was coming on tape and it was also recorded for posterity. Speaking with the other person meant confusion and delay and a mess of record keeping.

The word from the customers would be a resounding negative.

Second would be the business model. How would you charge for voice? Data was subscription based, and the fees were huge. Voice would be metered and the price low. If targeting consumers, telegrams were priced by the word, but you couldn’t price voice by the word. Marketing would stare back at you as if you had committed a judgement error.

Thirdly you would look at the cost side. Operations would give you more bad news. Voice technology was different enough that it needed new infrastructure. Switchboards, operators, handsets and new power and insulator requirements were all expensive and had no clear return. Voice was a loser all around.

So the decision was perfectly reasonable, smart even.

This is not to suggest that Western Union did not accept any new technology or invest in it. For decades after the phone, Western Union continued to invest in innovation: It introduced an electronic payment system (called money transfer) in 1871. In 1914 it offered the first charge card and in 1923 it introduced teletypewriters. Singing telegrams followed in 1933 and fax service in 1935. Intercity wireless microwave communications were introduced in 1943. Telex came in 1958 and the product of marketing genius, the ‘Candygram’ in the 1960s. By 1964 its network was all wireless using a transcontinental microwave system. Western Union became the first American telecommunications corporation to maintain its own fleet of geosynchronous communication satellites, starting in 1974. The fleet of satellites, called Westar, carried communications within the Western Union company for telegram and mailgram message data to Western Union bureaus nationwide.

And it wasn’t lacking in talent either. Western Union had the best telecom managers in the business and was raking in profits to fund expansion. It attracted the best and brightest engineers for generations. Western Union probably passed on hundreds of other inventions and ideas, and rightly so.

So what happened to WU?

It’s still around. However, due to declining profits and mounting debts, Western Union slowly began to divest itself of telecommunications-based assets starting in the early 1980s. Due to deregulation in the US, Western Union began sending money outside the country, re-inventing itself as “The fastest way to send money worldwide”. In 1987, an individual investor acquired control of Western Union through an outside of chapter 11 process that was a complex leveraged recapitalization. After several other changes in ownerships and moves through bankruptcy, WU is now a public company with an enterprise value of about $12 billion based entirely on international money transfer business.

3G as a disruptive technology

Today we’ve come around full circle. Whereas voice was disruptive to a data network provider in the 20th century, data is disruptive to a voice network provider in the 21st. The mis-application of 3G network technology to sustain voice-oriented business models gives one a strong sense of déjà vu.

The telecom world moved swiftly to 1G and 2G cellular voice. Each new generation of mobile telecom was sustaining the core business model of subscriptions feeding centrally managed networks and symbiotic device vendors benefiting from handset and switching system upgrades. Standardization, international expansion, lower price points and network effects made this industry the most ubiquitous technology distributor the world had ever seen.

3G however was different. It was effectively mobile broadband data. It enabled data services to be de-coupled from the network operators. IP protocols did not require the servers to be located on operator premises or even to be managed or monitored by them. Devices could be general purpose computers not specific purpose communicators. Incumbents did not adapt to this well. They continued to build business plans according to a central-switch blueprint.

So although incumbents did not reject the smartphone as a technology, they tried to make it sustaining when plainly it isn’t. They essentially tried to cram it into their business models.

The struggle to keep the service structure of telecom centered around the network operator will continue, but short of pulling the plug on 3G and LTE, there is little that the incumbents can do to stop it.

So what’s the lesson?

Some technologies are embraced and some are rejected. You can’t fault every rejection and you can’t praise every acceptance. The most likely reason for embracing something is that it helps grow your existing business. The most likely reason for rejection is that it may harm your business. Even acceptance sometimes leads to mis-application in sustaining the core rather than planning for its demise.

The decision on how to handle something new and potentially disruptive requires a different sense of what’s right and wrong about it.
http://www.asymco.com/2010/09/16/the...the-telegraph/





Why Broadband Prices Haven’t Decreased

Creating the first broadband consumer price index
Based on the Research of Shane Greenstein And Ryan McDevitt

After a new technology is introduced to the market, there is usually a predictable decrease in price as it becomes more common. Laptops experienced precipitous price drops during the past decade. Digital cameras, personal computers, and computer chips all followed similar steep declines in price. Has the price of broadband Internet followed the same model? Shane Greenstein decided to look into it.

Since there are no public data on what has happened to broadband prices over the last decade, Shane Greenstein, a professor of management and strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, and his co-author Ryan McDevitt, a graduate student at Northwestern University, analyzed the contracts of 1,500 DSL and cable service providers from 2004 to 2009. They found evidence of only a very small price drop, between 3 and 10 percent, nothing like the rates of price decrease that characterize the rest of the electronic world.

Pricing Policy

It might seem like the cost of obtaining access to broadband Internet service would be prohibitive for many, but Greenstein notes that cable television wires already pass by more than 95 percent of US homes, while 75 percent of homes are close enough to a telephone switch for a DSL provision. “Any place with a population above 50,000 is not going to have a problem getting service,” Greenstein says.

Greenstein says that a 2003 decision to leave regulation up to the broadband companies themselves has caused much of the stagnation in broadband service prices.

Greenstein says that a 2003 decision to leave regulation up to the broadband companies themselves has caused much of the stagnation in broadband service prices. In most urban markets, only two wireline providers supply the vast majority of homes, and the remainder are served by a range of wireless Internet providers. Revenue from homes makes up 70 to 80 percent of revenue in wireline Internet access market, while business demand makes up the rest.

“So if you were in such a market as a supplier, why would you initiate a price war?” Greenstein asks. With no new entries on the market, suppliers can compete by slowly increasing quality but keeping prices the same. According to Greenstein, quality is where providers channel their competitive urges.

Meanwhile, once companies have installed the lines, their costs are far below prices. “At that point, it becomes pure profit,” Greenstein says. A company might spend around $100 per year to “maintain and service” the connection, but people are paying nearly that amount every other month. Greenstein says that it is not surprising that prices were high during the buildout phase in the early and mid-2000s, since the firms were trying to recover their costs. “However, we are approaching the end of the first buildout, so competitive pressures should have led to price drops by now, if there are any. Like many observers, I expected to see prices drop by now, and I am surprised they have not.”

A New Trajectory

At the start of the 21st century, less than 5 percent of households had access to broadband Internet as most used dial-up systems. However, broadband soon achieved access to more homes through cable and telephone lines. Near the end of the decade, optical fiber lines had joined the ranks of broadband Internet providers. The decade started out with broadband representing just 6 percent of the total revenue from Internet services and that figure had grown to 72 percent by 2006. Greenstein and McDevitt decided to base their consumer price index on data from the second half of the decade, from 2004 to 2009, when the use of broadband really exploded.

They began by poring over 1,500 contracts from different years and services, including both standalone agreements and bundled contracts, in which a user combines Internet with cable television and/or phone service. They found that, even though prices stayed relatively constant, the quality of service rose through the years—for example, in 2004 the median cable modem contract price was about $45 with an upload bandwidth of 3000 bits per second, while in 2009 the median contract cost $53 but had an upload bandwidth of 8000 bps.

Greenstein says that a related problem may begin to creep into the system. With only slow quality upgrades and the rampant growth of streaming video online, most observers expect broadband to have multiple bottlenecks in its access networks soon.

The broadband consumer price index created by the Kellogg researchers has some limitations. An official price index would include a weighted average, which would give more share to the biggest providers to reflect the market more accurately. Greenstein and McDevitt were unable to create a weighted index because they lacked confidential data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics about market shares.

The most surprising discovery, Greenstein says, is that national decisions are being made without the type of data that he created in the consumer price index. “As an observer of communications policy in the U.S., I find it shocking sometimes how often government makes decisions by the seat of their pants,” he says. Without real data and statistics, decisions are based solely on who has better arguments—in essence, a debate. A better consumer price index will help produce better decisions for the future of the Internet and its users.
http://insight.kellogg.northwestern....vent_decreased





F.C.C. Likely to Open Airwaves to Wireless
Edward Wyatt

When the Federal Communications Commission first approved the use of unlicensed bands of the airwaves decades ago, it began a revolution in consumer electronics — first in television remote controls and garage door openers, then in baby monitors and cordless phones, and most recently in wireless computer networks.

This month, the F.C.C. is likely to approve what could be an even bigger expansion of the unlicensed airwaves, opening the door to supercharged Wi-Fi networks that will do away with the need to find a wireless hot spot and will provide the scaffolding for new applications that are not yet imagined.

“We know what the first kind of deployments will be,” Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the F.C.C., said in an interview, citing wireless broadband networks that can cover entire university or corporate campuses, for example — what is referred to in the industry as “Wi-Fi on steroids.”

The stronger, faster networks will extend broadband signals to bypassed rural areas and allow for smart electric grids, remote health monitoring and, for consumers, wireless Internet without those annoying dead zones.

“But this will also be a platform for innovators and entrepreneurs,” Mr. Genachowski said. “There is every chance of this leading to the development of one or more billion-dollar industries.”

Just as broadband-ready smartphones could hardly be imagined in 1938, when the F.C.C. first approved the use of unlicensed radio waves, or even in 1985, when it issued the rules that led to Wi-Fi, the eventual consumer products that will use the new airwaves are all but unknown.

“I’m absolutely confident that there will be a huge range of applications that we cannot yet predict,” said Dan Reed, corporate vice president for technology policy and strategy at Microsoft, which, alongside Google and Dell, has pushed hard for the F.C.C. to approve the new rules.

Anyone who has wandered through a hotel conference center waving a laptop and hoping for a signal knows that wireless broadband connections have their limitations.

The expanded access to airwaves offers a solution. The unused bands of spectrum were generated by the conversion of television signals from analog to digital. Because digital transmission uses a smaller slice of spectrum, more “white space” was freed up around each broadcast signal. It is those white spaces that the F.C.C. is now seeking to put to use.

The new airwaves are particularly attractive because television signals are low-frequency waves, meaning they can travel farther, go more easily through walls, trees and other obstructions, and provide more reliable connections.

As with any developing technology, uncertainties remain. Urban areas, which have the most demand for the new airwaves, have less of them available because more local television stations are using available bands. Also, by making the airwaves available free, the F.C.C. is bypassing the possibility of using them to generate revenue, either through auctions or user fees.

The F.C.C. is virtually certain to approve the new rules at its Sept. 23 meeting, because it already has approved a similar set of rules, in November 2008. Those rules have never been in effect, however, because both supporters and opponents of the concept objected to some of the details.

Supporters challenged the F.C.C.’s decision to require new devices to include a feature that conducts an electronic search for airwaves that are not occupied, as well as to rely on a database of unused airwaves in choosing a frequency on which to transmit its signal. That belt-and-suspenders approach would have made devices more expensive because of the complicated engineering required.

The use of the white spaces was more generally opposed by a coalition of industries that included broadcasters, who feared that the new signals would interfere with their transmissions, and theater owners, sports arenas and churches, which make extensive use of wireless microphones that they, too, feared would be subject to interference.

Exactly how the F.C.C. has addressed those objections will not be known until the new rules are released at the Sept. 23 meeting. But people in the telecommunications industry who keep close tabs on the agency say they expect that the searching requirement will be abandoned, and that wireless microphones will be given certain transmission priorities.

Wireless networks that use the white-space signals are already being tested in several locations. Microsoft uses the signals in a wireless network that stretches over its corporate campus in Redmond, Wash.

The city of Wilmington, N.C., and the surrounding New Hanover County has a trial network used by several government entities. The transportation department connects wirelessly to remote cameras that help it monitor traffic congestion. The parks department similarly monitors remote wetland areas and uses the signals to transmit environmental data that is required by federal regulators — saving the cost of sending an employee to scattered locations.

Some new devices undoubtedly will serve health care applications, allowing hospitals to move equipment easily without rewiring or allowing them to monitor patients in remote settings. And so-called smart grids — systems that allow a power company to track consumption and generation more closely or to control appliances from a central location — are also likely.

Blair Levin, a fellow at the Aspen Institute and a former F.C.C. official, said that although there was no guarantee that the new airwaves would produce the technological gold rush that some supporters have expected, “anything that is put to use that is now lying fallow is good for the economy.”

The fact that new applications can use unlicensed airwaves is important as an economic development tool, said Rebecca Arbogast, a managing director and telecommunications analyst at Stifel Nicolaus. Few companies have the billions of dollars required to buy spectrum that is periodically auctioned off by the F.C.C., she said, but unlicensed spectrum can attract cash-poor, start-up companies.

The deployment of television-band white spaces represents a rarely used model for the F.C.C., which historically has operated under more of a command-and-control model, in which it tells licensees what they can use their spectrum for.

“The last time we did this, no one knew what would happen,” Mr. Genachowski said. But the result — wireless computer networking and other consumer applications — has transformed the economy.

While issues of interference and other conflicts inevitably will arise and will be have to be addressed by the commission, he said, “we are confident that the benefits of moving forward are so significant that we should act now.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/te...gy/13wifi.html





Fastest Net Service in U.S. Coming to Chattanooga
Steve Lohr

In the global race to see who can offer the fastest Internet service, an unlikely challenger has emerged: Chattanooga, Tenn.

The city-owned utility, EPB, plans to announce on Monday that by the end of this year it will offer ultra-high-speed Internet service of up to one gigabit a second. That is 200 times faster than the average broadband speed in America.

Only Hong Kong and a few other cities in the world offer such lightning-fast service, and analysts say Chattanooga will be the first in the United States to do so. “This makes Chattanooga — a midsized city in the South — one of the leading cities in the world in its digital capabilities,” said Ron Littlefield, the city’s mayor.

There is one caveat: the highest-speed service will cost $350 a month, a price that may appeal to some businesses but few households, even though the service will be offered to all the 170,000 homes and businesses EPB serves.

“We don’t know how to price a gig,” said Harold DePriest, chief executive of EPB. “We’re experimenting. We’ll learn.”

Chattanooga’s effort is the byproduct of an aggressive high-tech economic development plan in recent years, helped along by funds from the federal economic stimulus program. But it comes at a time of increasing debate among communities, countries and corporations about how best to pursue the next generation of broadband, a technology seen as the gateway to a new wave of Internet-based products and services.

The Obama administration presented its broadband strategy earlier this year and set the goal of bringing broadband to 100 million American homes at download speeds of at least 100 megabits a second — a tenth of Chattanooga’s top speed — by 2020. The United States, according to studies, is a laggard among developed nations in broadband adoption and service speeds.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, and other leaders in technology and government point to the trailing broadband performance as a danger to American competitiveness that threatens to saddle the nation with an “innovation deficit” compared with other countries.

To help close the gap, Google pledged this year to supply service at one gigabit a second to up to 500,000 people in the United States. The company says that 1,100 communities have applied, and Google will make its selection — one community, or a few — this year.

In announcing the program, Google offered a glimpse of the benefits of ultra-high-speed Internet service. “Imagine sitting in a rural health clinic, streaming three-dimensional medical imaging over the Web and discussing a unique condition with a specialist in New York,” its statement said. “Or downloading a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes. Or collaborating with classmates around the world, while watching live 3-D video of a university lecture.”

Such visions of new high-speed services in health care, entertainment, education and business are behind the ambitious national programs under way in countries like Australia and South Korea. Already a leader in high-speed broadband, Korea plans to offer one-gigabit-per-second service nationally by 2012.

Higher-speed Internet service, experts agree, is an important national goal, but it is less clear whether moving quickly to very-high-speed service is worth the cost. Much of the economic gain can be achieved, and consumer demand met, by moving on a more measured path, they say.

Verizon, for example, has invested billions of dollars to upgrade much of its network for fiber optic Internet service, at speeds of 15, 25 and 50 megabits per second. Those speeds are three to 10 times standard broadband service; the monthly charges are $50 for 15 megabits, $65 for 25 and $140 for 50. And the vast majority of Verizon’s fiber optic Internet customers, analysts say, choose the 15-megabit, $50-a-month service.

The demand for one-gigabit-per-second service could be minuscule, experts say. “I can’t imagine a for-profit company doing what they are doing in Chattanooga, because it’s so far ahead of where the market is,” said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.

Even Mr. DePriest of EPB does not expect brisk demand for the one-gigabit service anytime soon. So why offer it? “The simple answer is because we can,” he said.

And, Mr. DePriest said, it can be done at minimal additional expense, once fiber optic cable is strung to homes and businesses, and the electronics for ultra-high-speed Internet — more than 100 megabits per second — are in place.

“The overriding consideration is that this is a real tool for economic development for our community,” Mr. DePriest said. “It is the basis for creating the products and services of the Internet of the future. And it’s in Chattanooga today.”

The utility started stringing fiber optics to homes about two years ago, and began offering high-speed broadband a year ago. It supplies 30-megabits-per-second service for $58 a month, 50 megabits for $71 a month, and 100 megabits for $140 a month (as of Monday, down from $175).

That service is now offered to 100,000 of the utility’s 170,000 customers, and will be available to all of them by the end of the year. At present, 15,000 customers subscribe to at least one fiber optic service — television, Internet access or phone service. And 12,000 subscribe to the Internet service, a strong sign-up rate in the first year, Mr. DePriest says.

The high-speed Internet service is piggybacked on top of the utility’s smart-grid network, which was the reason for stringing the fiber optic cable to homes in the first place. Smart grids are advanced electrical networks that can improve energy efficiency, enable variable pricing based on the time of day, and reduce disruptions. They require digital networks for two-way communications, and computerized meters in homes.

EPB had already begun a smart-grid program before the Obama administration included billions for grants for smart-grid projects in the economic stimulus program in 2009. But the Chattanooga utility did win a $111 million grant from the Energy Department, accelerating its smart-grid plan. The federal funds did not go to subsidize the high-speed Internet service, Mr. DePriest said.

The customers for the fastest offering may be few, but Dr. James Busch will most likely be one of them. He is one of 10 radiologists in a practice that reads and interprets medical images from 14 hospitals and clinics in Tennessee and Georgia. Those data-heavy medical images are shuttled over the Internet.

“The business model works because bandwidth is so available in Chattanooga,” Dr. Busch said.

The bandwidth requirements for the practice will only grow, he said, and the faster service to homes will help. “Our docs will be able to read images from home,” Dr. Busch said. “That could change our practice.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/te...broadband.html





Business ISP Timico Challenges Pigeon to Beat Rural Broadband
MarkJ

The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for business ISP Timico UK, Trefor Davies, has pitted two several homing pigeons - Rory and Tref - carrying a microSD card with 200MB of HD video data, against a fairly typical rural broadband connection to see which is faster.

The comical stunt is designed to raise awareness of the often woeful broadband speed experienced by many people who live in remote and rural parts of the country. The pigeons will race between a farm just north of Beverley (North Humberside) and a loft in Wrangle (Boston), a journey of approximately 84 miles.

At the same time the farms owner will attempt to UPLOAD an identical copy of the 200MB video file to YouTube. Much as you might expect, the first one to play the video in Wrangle will win. In addition, Trefor Davies himself will also be driving a copy of the same data from the farm to Wrangle, which is estimated to take just over 2 hours (the pigeons are expected to be there first).

However Davies does admit that "there isn't a benchmark for pigeon data speeds", yet, which could leave any comparison open to interpretation. Never the less, short of the pigeons ending up in the wrong place, the race should show that it's "still quicker to use carrier pigeons in the UK than to do it by broadband".

The event seeks to recreate a comical South African experiment where a homing pigeon carrying a 4GB (GigaByte) data card was raced over 40 miles against a broadband connection trying to transfer the same information (here). The pigeon won.

For anybody that really wants to know, the video showcases Trefor Davies having his haircut. Pigeons are of course a very asymmetric method of data transfer and nobody has yet found a way to measure their latency (ping), although we suspect that even a slow broadband link would win that battle.

However ISPs need not worry just yet, we suspect that Pigeons will not be replacing broadband connections anytime soon because they're apparently not terribly good at live instant messaging or Skype. In fact any kind of dynamic content might be a problem.
In related news, Rory Stewart - an MP for Penrith - is holding a Cumbrian Rural Broadband event on 18th September to discuss some of the problems with rural internet access: Details Here.

UPDATE 11:35am

The race has just begun.. result in a couple of hours.

UPDATE 12:42pm

At least one of the pigeons has landed and YouTube upload is at 24% after 54mins.

Also the farms connection speed is just 100-200 Kbps (Kilobits per second), so it never really stood a chance of winning but then that's not the point smile .
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/201...broadband.html





Anti-US Hacker Takes Credit for 'Here You Have' Worm

"I hope all people undestand that I am not negative person," hacker says.
Robert McMillan

A hacker who claims he was behind a fast-spreading e-mail worm that crippled corporate networks last week said that the worm was designed, in part, as a propaganda tool.

The hacker, known as Iraq Resistance, responded to inquiries sent to an e-mail address associated with the "Here you have" worm, which during a brief period early Thursday accounted for about 10 per cent of the spam on the Internet. He (or she) revealed no details about his identity, but said, "The creation of this is just a tool to reach my voice to people maybe... or maybe other things."

He said he had not expected the worm to spread as broadly as it had, and noted that he could have done much more damage to victims. "I could smash all those infected but I wouldn't," said the hacker. "I hope all people understand that I am not negative person!" In other parts of the message, he was critical of the U.S. war in Iraq.

On Sunday, Iraq Resistance posted a video echoing these sentiments and complaining, through a computer-generated voice, that his actions were not as bad as those of Terry Jones. Jones is the pastor at a small Florida church who received worldwide attention this week for threatening to burn copies of the Koran.

Security experts agree that the worm could have caused more damage. However, it did include some very malicious components, such as password logging software and a backdoor program that could have been used to allow its creator to control infected machines. But because the software was not terribly sophisticated, it was quickly shut down as Web servers that it used to infect machines and issue new commands were taken offline last week.

"Here you have" spread when victims clicked on a Web link and then allowed a malicious script to run on their computer.It is the more-successful follow-up to an August worm that included the e-mail address that Iraq Resistance used to communicate with the IDG News Service.

According to Cisco, the worm accounted for between six per cent and 14 perc ent of the world's spam for a few hours Thursday. It primarily gummed up corporate e-mail networks in the U.S.

It is the first worm in years to have such a widespread and noisy effect, hearkening back to the days of the Anna Kournikova worm. Nowadays, most malware writers don't want to draw attention to their activities, because they generally want to keep their malicious software hidden away on victims' computers as long as possible.

Disney, Proctor and Gamble, Wells Fargo and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are among the organizations reported to have been hit by the worm.

SecureWorks Researcher Joe Stewart believes that Iraq Defense is a Libyan hacker who is trying to gain followers for a cyber jihad hacking group called Brigades of Tariq ibn Ziyad.

Tariq ibn Ziyad was the eighth century commander who conquered much of Spain on behalf of the Umayyad Caliphate. Iraq Resistance's YouTube video has a Spanish theme too. It shows a map of Andalucia, and Iraq Resistance lists his location as "Spain" in his YouTube profile.

In his e-mails, Iraq Resistance did not answer questions about his identity, saying that he was worried about his safety. "I think this information is enough for you and having more looks like [an] investigation," he said. "I don't see myself that criminal."
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/articl...dit_here_worm/





'Padding Oracle' Crypto Attack Affects Millions of ASP.NET Apps
Dennis Fisher

A pair of security researchers have implemented an attack that exploits the way that ASP.NET Web applications handle encrypted session cookies, a weakness that could enable an attacker to hijack users' online banking sessions and cause other severe problems in vulnerable applications. Experts say that the bug, which will be discussed in detail at the Ekoparty conference in Argentina this week, affects millions of Web applications.

The problem lies in the way that ASP.NET, Microsoft's popular Web framework, implements the AES encryption algorithm to protect the integrity of the cookies these applications generate to store information during user sessions. A common mistake is to assume that encryption protects the cookies from tampering so that if any data in the cookie is modified, the cookie will not decrypt correctly. However, there are a lot of ways to make mistakes in crypto implementations, and when crypto breaks, it usually breaks badly.

"We knew ASP.NET was vulnerable to our attack several months ago, but we didn't know how serious it is until a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that the vulnerability in ASP.NET is the most critical amongst other frameworks. In short, it totally destroys ASP.NET security," said Thai Duong, who along with Juliano Rizzo, developed the attack against ASP.NET.

The pair have developed a tool specifically for use in this attack, called the Padding Oracle Exploit Tool. Their attack is an application of a technique that's been known since at least 2002, when Serge Vaudenay presented a paper at on the topic at Eurocrypt.

In this case, ASP.NET's implementation of AES has a bug in the way that it deals with errors when the encrypted data in a cookie has been modified. If the ciphertext has been changed, the vulnerable application will generate an error, which will give an attacker some information about the way that the application's decryption process works. More errors means more data. And looking at enough of those errors can give the attacker enough data to make the number of bytes that he needs to guess to find the encryption key small enough that it's actually possible.

The attack allows someone to decrypt sniffed cookies, which could contain valuable data such as bank balances, Social Security numbers or crypto keys. The attacker may also be able to create authentication tickets for a vulnerable Web app and abuse other processes that use the application's crypto API.

Rizzo and Duong did similar work earlier this year on JavaServer Faces and other Web frameworks that was presented at Black Hat Europe. They continued their research and found that ASP.NET was vulnerable to the same kind of attack. The type of attack is known as a padding oracle attack and it relies on the Web application using cipher-block chaining mode for its encryption, which many apps do.

Block ciphers need the messages they decrypt to be broken up into blocks that are some multiple of the specified block size, eight bytes for example. As messages don't always fit into neat eight-byte sizes, they often require padding to reach the specified size. The attack that Rizzo and Duong have implemented against ASP.NET apps requires that the crypto implementation on the Web site have an oracle that, when sent ciphertext, will not only decrypt the text but give the sender a message about whether the padding in the ciphertext is valid.

If the padding is invalid, the error message that the sender gets will give him some information about the way that the site's decryption process works. Rizzo and Duong said that the attack is reliable 100 percent of the time on ASP.NET applications, although the time to success can vary widely. The real limiting resources in this attack are the speed of the server and the bandwidth available.

In addition, an attacker could execute this technique without waiting for the error messages by using information gained through side-channel leakages.

"It's worth noting that the attack is 100% reliable, i.e. one can be sure that once they run the attack, they can exploit the target. It's just a matter of time. If the attacker is lucky, then he can own any ASP.NET website in seconds. The average time for the attack to complete is 30 minutes. The longest time it ever takes is less than 50 minutes," Duong said.

ASP.NET is a hugely popular Web framework, and Rizzo and Duong estimated that 25 percent of the applications online are built using ASP.NET. However, that number is far higher in the corporate and financial services worlds, and apps such as online banking and e-commerce would obviously be prime targets for this attack.

Although crypto attacks can be quite complex, Rizzo said that this technique can be carried out by a moderately skilled attacker.

"The first stage of the attack takes a few thousand requests, but once it succeeds and the attacker gets the secret keys, it's totally stealthy. The cryptographic knowledge required is very basic," Rizzo said.
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/ne...et-apps-091310





Report: More Than 1 Million Web Sites Serving Malware in Q2
Paul Roberts

Web anti malware firm Dasient has published data claiming that more than 1 million Web sites were compromised in the second quarter, 2010 - a sharp increase.

More than one million Web domains were infected with malicious code in the second quarter of 2010 - around one percent of all active Web domains, according to data released by Web security firm Dasient, Inc.

The number of infected domains was extrapolated from data gained through a sample scan of what Dasient describes as "millions of Web sites," as well as from customer deployments. It suggests that compromises of Web sites are on the rise, as attackers look to push out malicious programs through so-called drive by download attacks.

Web based attacks have been one of the fastest growing areas of malicious activity in recent years, as more applications migrate to the Web and as users engage deeply with social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Flaws in key Web development platforms have also made it easier for malicious hackers to have their way with Web surfers. These include the recently disclosed vulnerabilities in Sun's Java Web Start Framework and ASP.NET's handling of encrypted cookies.

The .com domain continues to be popular among Web attackers. The .com and the .cn top level domain for Chinese Web sites accounted for the lion's share of top level domains used by attackers in Q2, according to the Dasient report.

Structural vulnerabilities are a major cause of attack, said Neil Daswani, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Daswani. "You've got Web sites that rely on third party resources. When those compromised, it can really accelerate the spread of malware," he said.

Daswani noted the heavy reliance on third party widgets as one area of concern. More than 75% of Web sites use widgets, including tools for traffic measurement or to deliver audio or video content through the site. Those widgets provide an avenue of attack - either directly, through the widget maker's infrastructure, or indirectly, through DNS caching attacks against ISPs that redirect widget requests and traffic to a malicious Web site, Daswani said.

Third party ad networks are also vulnerable to attack, a phenomenon Dasient refers to as "malvertising," which can result in even legitimate Web domains being used to serve drive by attacks, he said.

Companies need to invest in Web monitoring tools and also pay closer attention to updates and patches for third party widgets and tools they've deployed, he said.

The complexity of modern Web sites and Web services poses problems for companies that want to secure their site, as well as for those who are trying to investigate online crimes and other incidents. Researchers at the National Institute for Science and Technology (NIST) recently proposed the creation of Forensic Web Services tool that could gather evidence on Web based attacks and compromises.
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/re...ware-q2-091510





GCreep: Google Engineer Stalked Teens, Spied on Chats

We entrust Google with our most private communications because we assume the company takes every precaution to safeguard our data. It doesn't. A Google engineer spied on four underage teens for months before the company was notified of the abuses.

David Barksdale, a 27-year-old former Google engineer, repeatedly took advantage of his position as a member of an elite technical group at the company to access users' accounts, violating the privacy of at least four minors during his employment, we've learned. Barksdale met the kids through a technology group in the Seattle area while working as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google's Kirkland, Wash. office. He was fired in July 2010 after his actions were reported to the company. [Update: Google has confirmed the security breach. An update appears below.]

It's unclear how widespread Barksdale's abuses were, but in at least four cases, Barksdale spied on minors' Google accounts without their consent, according to a source close to the incidents. In an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her.

In other cases involving teens of both sexes, Barksdale exhibited a similar pattern of aggressively violating others' privacy, according to our source. He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back. (He later apologized to one for retrieving the information without her knowledge.) In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer.

What motivated Barksdale to snoop on these teens is not entirely clear. Our source said Barksdale's harassment did not appear to be sexual in nature, although his online communication with the minors (such as inviting underage kids to attend to the movies with him) demonstrated extraordinarily questionable judgment on Barksdale's part. "My gut read on the situation was that there wasn't any strong sexual predatory behavior, just a lot of violating people's personal privacy," our source explained.

Barksdale declined to speak with us by phone. Via email, however, he confirmed that he'd been fired by Google, although he refused to elaborate on the circumstances behind his departure or the specific allegations made against him. "You must have heard some pretty wild things if you think me getting fired is newsworthy," he responded by email.

It seems part of the reason Barksdale snooped through the teens' Gmail and Gtalk accounts was to show off the power he had as a member of a group with broad access to company data. A self-described "hacker," Barksdale seemed to get a kick out of flaunting his position at Google, which was the case when, with a friend's consent, he pulled up the person's email account, contact list, chat transcripts, Google Voice call logs—even a list of other Gmail addresses that the friend had registered but didn't think were linked to their main account—within seconds. The friend wasn't concerned; Barksdale seemed to him to be a "silly," good-natured nerd.

The parents of the teens whose Google accounts were violated by Barksdale were hardly amused, however. Several attempted to cut off Barksdale's access to their children and withdrew them from the technology group where they'd first encountered the Google engineer. (Barksdale was kicked out of the group after his abuses came to light.) In July, officials at Google were notified of Barksdale's actions. We've obtained an email exchange between one person who complained about Barksdale to Google and Eric Grosse, an Engineer Director in Google's security group at the company's Mountain View, Calif. headquarters. Grosse quickly responded to the complaint with a curt email: "Thank you very much for reporting; we'll investigate quietly and get back to you if we need anything more."

If Google was already aware of Barksdale's privacy violations, Grosse didn't mention it. But while Google seemed initially helpful and friendly when dealing with those who'd notified Google of his conduct, they became increasingly tight-lipped as company officials realized the seriousness of the problem.

Later, when asked if Google had taken steps to deal with Barksdale, Grosse would only say, "I am personally satisfied that we've taken decisive steps to limit any additional risk." When emailed again several weeks later about whether Barksdale was still employed by Google, or if the company had determined the extent of his privacy violations, Grosse refused to get into any specifics: "Google has taken the appropriate actions, I can't say more."

Right around the same time, Barksdale was quietly fired by the company.

It's no surprise that Google execs were skittish about discussing the case in detail. Site Reliability Engineers (or SREs) have access to the company's most sensitive data. Responsible for a variety of tasks including responding to technical difficulties across Google's ever-expanding portfolio of products, SREs are given unfettered access to users' accounts for the services they oversee, according to a former SRE who left the company in 2007.

"If you're an SRE, for instance, on Gmail, you will have access to mailboxes because you may have to look into the databases," the former Google SRE—who did not work with Barksdale—explained to us by phone. "You'll need access to the storage mechanisms," he explained, pointing out that in order to determine the cause of a technical issue with Gmail, an SRE might have to access emails stored on Google's servers to see if data is corrupted.

Barksdale's intrustion into Gmail and Gtalk accounts may have escaped notice, since SREs are responsible for troubleshooting issues on a constant basis, which means they access Google's servers remotely many times a day, often at odd hours. "I was looking at that stuff [information stored on Google's servers] every hour I was awake," says the former Google employee. And the company does not closely monitor SREs to detect improper access to customers' accounts because SREs are generally considered highly-experienced engineers who can be trusted, the former Google staffer said.

"There's a whole bunch of trust involved. There's a lot of data inside Google, and I'm willing to bet some of it is really valuable. But for me and the people I worked with, it was never worth looking at."

It's unclear how many accounts Barksdale inappropriately accessed while employed by Google, or if the company has conducted a thorough investigation into possible privacy abuses by other employees. (Calls to Google for comment were not returned.) It's also not clear what measures are in place to prevent Google staffers from snooping on users.

The Barksdale case comes as Google has attempted to address concerns about privacy by encrypting Gmail to protect messages from hackers, and by simplifying its privacy policies to make them more comprehensible to users. Ironically, just last week Google launched its Family Safety Center, dedicated to helping parents keep their children safe on the Internet. But as this disturbing incident suggests, the biggest threat to kids' privacy might be Google employees themselves.

Additional reporting by Sergio Hernandez.

Update:

Google has released a statement confirming it fired Barksdale for privacy violations:

"We dismissed David Barksdale for breaking Google's strict internal privacy policies. We carefully control the number of employees who have access to our systems, and we regularly upgrade our security controls–for example, we are significantly increasing the amount of time we spend auditing our logs to ensure those controls are effective. That said, a limited number of people will always need to access these systems if we are to operate them properly–which is why we take any breach so seriously."

— Bill Coughran, Senior Vice President, Engineering, Google

http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-goo...spied-on-chats





Is Sarah Palin a Computer Criminal?
Marcia Hofmann

Vanity Fair suggests that Sarah Palin's distinctive voice on Facebook and Twitter is actually someone else's. According to the article, she appears to have given a ghostwriter access to her social networking accounts to speak on her behalf:

When it was first set up, in January 2009, Palin's Facebook page might as well have been a file cabinet for official press releases ("Palin Pushes Parental Consent Legislation") written mostly in a stiff, third-person form. The same was true of her Twitter feed, which went live in April. After [writer Rebecca] Mansour's voice disappeared on [the pro-Palin blog] C4P, however, Palin's voice on Facebook and Twitter started sounding increasingly provocative and irascible. A company called Aries Petra Consulting was formed in September and registered to Mansour's home address, but under someone else's name. (In astrology, Aries is the ram—or "RAM.") SarahPAC's first payment to the firm was made in October, about two weeks before Palin began her book tour. By then, Palin's new virtual voice was growing in intensity. The more shrill it became, the more news Palin made: "QUIT MAKING THINGS UP DNC" … "OBAMA ADMINISTRATION'S ATROCIOUS DECISION: HORRIBLE DECISION, ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE" … "ARE YOU CAPABLE OF DECENCY, RAHM EMANUEL?" The payments to Mansour were not made public until February 1, 2010, when SarahPAC had to disclose its quarterly filings with the Federal Elections Commission. The day before the disclosure, knowing what was coming, C4P made an official announcement acknowledging that . . . Mansour . . . had left the site months earlier and gone to work for SarahPAC.

Let's assume that Palin created her own Facebook account, and then hired Mansour to manage it. So what, right? Lots of high-profile people probably don't update their own Facebook pages. In fact, President Obama's Facebook page explicitly says that it's maintained by Organizing for America.

The problem is that Facebook's terms of use prohibit several things that Palin and her ghostwriter may have done. Specifically, it forbids users from:

* accessing someone else's account
* sharing their passwords to let someone else access their accounts
* transferring their accounts to someone else (without Facebook's written permission)
* providing false personal information
* "facilitating" or "encouraging" someone else to violate the terms of use

If Palin and her ghostwriter are in fact violating Facebook's terms of use, that probably doesn't seem like a big deal to most people. Just by surfing around the internet, we "agree" to dozens of website terms of use every day, usually before we even read them. These terms can say anything a website operator wants, and often specifically note that they can be changed at any time without notice (or with minimal notice).

But violating a website's terms of use is a big deal, according to Facebook. In fact, Facebook says it's a federal crime.

In Facebook v. Power Ventures, Facebook has sued a service that lets social network users view all their information from various social networking sites on one page. Like the way Sarah Palin's ghostwriter accesses Sarah's account, Power's service uses your password to access your account, with your permission. Facebook claims that this violates its terms of use, and any act that violates its terms of use is a violation of computer intrusion laws such as the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits intentionally accessing certain computers without authorization or in excess of authorization. Violations of this law are punishable by both civil and criminal penalties. Facebook also tried to claim that Power's service violated California's state computer crime law, but a federal court recently rejected that argument.

In short, Facebook believes that if you use Facebook in a way that Facebook doesn't like — as defined by its terms of use — you commit a federal crime.

Facebook's position is ridiculous. It's also dangerous. If we commit a crime every time we violate a website's terms of use, then millions of Americans are becoming criminals every day through routine online behavior and could be subject to lawsuits or even prosecution. And worse, internet companies have the power to decide what behavior a person could go to prison for, simply by instructing their lawyers to draft a document to forbid certain acts.

Are Sarah Palin and Barack Obama computer criminals? We don't think so. Facebook and other companies need to stop trying to misuse computer crime laws to turn violations of terms of use into crimes.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09...puter-criminal





New Survey Reveals Why Jon Stewart is the Biggest Long Term Threat to Fox News
Jason Easley

The newest Pew Research Center’s survey of where and how people get their news has been released, and while Fox News is still polling the oldest viewership, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are pulling the youngest. As Stewart educates his young viewers in the ways of FNC on a nightly basis, it is clear that he is the biggest long term media threat to Fox News.

The good news is that digital media is causing people to spend more time each day with the news. According to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press survey of where and how people get their news, “The net impact of digital platforms supplementing traditional sources is that Americans are spending more time with the news than was the case a decade ago. As was the case in 2000, people now say they spend 57 minutes on average getting the news from TV, radio or newspapers on a given day. But today, they also spend an additional 13 minutes getting news online, increasing the total time spent with the news to 70 minutes. This is one of the highest totals on this measure since the mid-1990s and it does not take into account time spent getting news on cell phones or other digital devices.”

Newspapers are still struggling and have only partially been able to make up for the decline in print readership on the Internet. Print newspaper readership has declined from 38% in 2006 to 24% today. Online newspaper readership has grown from 9% in 2006 to 17% today. When the totals are combined 37% of Americans said that they got their news from a newspaper, which puts the industry on par with the radio, and the Internet, but way behind television.

Speaking of television, Fox News has been able to hold its audience share because Republicans have been fleeing to the network. In 2002, Republicans were just as likely to watch CNN as they were to watch Fox News, but eight years later, 40% of all Republicans regularly watch FNC. Twelve percent of Republicans watch CNN and 6% watch MSNBC. Fox News does not lead the cable news ratings because there are more Republicans in the United States. They lead because they have been successful in consolidating the Republican audience.

It is no surprise than that Fox News, just like the GOP caters to an older audience. Sixty three percent of Bill O’Reilly’s viewers are over 50 years old, and 65% of Hannity’s viewers are over 50. Only 44% of the nation as a whole are over 50 years old, so the over 50 demographic is overrepresented on Fox News. If the younger viewers aren’t watching Fox News, then what are they watching?

The answer to this question can be found on Comedy Central Monday through Friday from 11 pm-12 am. Colbert and Stewart’s audiences are young. In fact, they were the youngest in the survey. Eighty percent of Colbert’s audience is between 18-49, and 74% of Stewart’s audience falls into the 18-49 demo. Although their audiences are double the amount of liberals in the overall population, Colbert and Stewart also appeal to Libertarians, as they make up 29% and 27% respectively of their audiences. Interestingly 53% of Colbert’s audience and 43% of Stewart’s said that they watch these programs for entertainment. They may come for the entertainment, but they also get a healthy dose of the news.

Fox News has made no secret of their distaste for Colbert, and especially Jon Stewart, and it is pretty obvious why. Colbert and Stewart are educating an entire generation of younger viewers to critically think about what they see in the media. The long term health of Fox News is going to depend on their ability to attract and retain younger viewers. These are the same viewers that are watching Jon Stewart expose and mock Fox News on a nightly basis. This is why FNC goes out of it’s way to impugn the credibility of Stewart anytime they can. It is funny to think that the competition that may do the most long term damage to Fox News is not Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow, but a comedian who hosts a nightly mock newscast on a comedy network.
http://www.politicususa.com/en/fnc-colbert-stewart





Hollywood Reporter to Become a Weekly Magazine
Brooks Barnes and Jeremy W. Peters

The Hollywood Reporter has been dying a slow death for a decade, bleeding from layoffs, vanishing advertisers and diminished relevance in a news cycle now dominated by cutthroat entertainment blogs.

Its top editors and executives all agreed: to save The Reporter, a mere refocusing of the business model would not do; they needed to eviscerate it.

Starting next month, Janice Min, who became the editorial director in June, and Richard Beckman, chief executive of The Reporter’s parent company, e5 Global Media, will remake the five-times-a-week publication as a glossy, large-format weekly magazine.

The content in the magazine, which will include a mix of analytical and feature articles and photo spreads, will be coupled with an aggressive and redesigned Web operation built around breaking news. A daily digital edition, in a PDF file, will replace the daily printed version distributed to subscribers now.

The Reporter’s message to the competition: Traditional trade reporting in Hollywood has been in need of heart paddles for a long time and — clear! — we’ve finally arrived with them.

“It’s our negligence — the way we’ve served up our content over the last couple of years has allowed some really poor competitors to emerge,” Mr. Beckman said in a recent interview from his office at e5’s Manhattan headquarters. “But we are going to rectify that starting right now.”

The Reporter wants to transform the way it does business but also change the model that has allowed the Hollywood trade publications to exist for nearly a century. Heavily dependent on advertising from the entertainment industry, publications like Variety and The Reporter have long provided favorable coverage of the films and studios that pay their bills. Mr. Beckman is gunning for a larger slice of the advertising market: beauty, fashion, consumer electronics and liquor, for starters.

“We’re not going to be a product that purely strokes the industry because the industry won’t respect that,” said Mr. Beckman, a former top executive with Condé Nast who is known as Mad Dog.

Ms. Min, who ended a successful run at Us Weekly last year, has certainly wasted no time giving The Reporter an edge.

On July 28, she ran an article in which anonymous sources said that the abrupt resignation of Stephen McPherson, ABC’s former entertainment president, was tied to “multiple harassment complaints.”

Mr. McPherson hired the litigator Marty Singer to demand a retraction and threaten a lawsuit. Ms. Min said she faxed a letter back to Mr. Singer saying that The Reporter would relish the opportunity to depose Mr. McPherson and sift through his work e-mail.

Another prominent article delved into the pornography business, a topic the chaste trades have traditionally ignored. Most recently, Ms. Min’s reporters had Time Warner in knots by reporting that it had hired an executive recruiter to solve a succession problem at Warner Brothers. An infuriated Jeffrey L. Bewkes, Time Warner’s chief executive, immediately denounced the article as inaccurate, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times.

“I guess it shakes the system out here that a so-called trade would dare to break news that wasn’t spoon fed,” Ms. Min recently said over lunch. “Well, people had better get used to it.”

Producing more relevant, provocative journalism is only half the battle. The Reporter will have to convince jaded, overstimulated Hollywood readers that it is worth another look.

“I do think The Reporter lost a lot of its luster,” said Lorenza Munoz, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Southern California and a former entertainment reporter for The Los Angeles Times. “It just hasn’t been very stable. And whenever that happens you lose your brand identity. People stop reading you, and it’s hard to get them back on your bandwagon. But they can make it a must-read. And if they are covering Hollywood aggressively and breaking stories, then people will have to read it.”

The Reporter, along with its older rival, Variety, has also been struggling to adjust to a sharp downturn in industry-oriented advertising. Movie and television companies — making fewer films, battling a sharp decline in DVD sales, watching digital video recorders erode ad sales — have been slashing trade ads. Warner Brothers, the largest movie and TV studio, last year spent half as much on trade ads as it did the previous year.

At the same time, the sort of insider knowledge that once made the Hollywood papers daily must-reads has become ubiquitous, and free, on the Web. IndieWire.com is now the favored destination for specialty film information. In a challenge to Variety, TheWrap.com has started organizing industry conferences, while Deadline.com regularly breaks news that sends the traditional trades, including The Reporter, scrambling.

Annual revenue at the paper, about $50 million four years ago, is now closer to $30 million, propped up in part by consumer ads.

Mr. Beckman’s plan is to enlarge The Reporter in every way possible. He says that its circulation will grow to 60,000 in the first months after the weekly has its premiere, with the goal of quadrupling that in three years. Its current circulation, including international distribution and free copies mailed to celebrities and other industry insiders, is 47,000. (It would not release its total paid circulation.) The price will rise to $5.99 on the newsstand (now $2.99 for the daily issue). The price of a year’s subscription, however, will fall to $249 from about $300 now.

Mr. Beckman would not say how much the remake is costing e5, but he said the editorial staff of The Reporter would grow by about 50 percent, to 70 people, and that the company had spent several million dollars for a redesign of its Web site, by the agency Razorfish. Ms. Min also did not come cheap; her annual salary at US Weekly was in the $2 million range.

What is going to pay for all this? In large part, ads that are aimed at wealthy consumers — or “influencers,” as Mr. Beckman calls them. The key to his model, he explained, is to get The Reporter into the hands of more than just entertainment industry executives. He wants to reach the opinion leaders, early adopters and taste makers who set consumer trends. In a twist on the traditional trade publication model, known as B2B for business to business, Mr. Beckman calls the new Reporter B2I, with I standing for influencer.

Rivals in the entertainment media seem unimpressed. “I don’t see any business model that supports what they are doing,” said Sharon Waxman, editor of TheWrap.

The prototype of the redesigned Reporter shows how he and Ms. Min plan to reach both audiences. It includes a new, more stylized logo and is printed on heavy, glossy paper. It is divided between fluff — an “About Town” section offers extensive coverage of parties and premieres — and substantive, reported features with tart language like “Coroner’s Report,” an examination of a movie that flopped. “How ‘Mad Men’ Inspired Prada,” reads the headline of another feature in the prototype.

The changes have challenged a rather sleepy newsroom culture. When Ms. Min arrived at The Reporter on June 15, she was shocked to discover that the paper did not hold daily news meetings. “That explained a lot about why coverage had grown very dry and very small,” she said. “It’s the equivalent of covering baseball and only reporting stats.”

She added, “The whole organization had a collective self-esteem problem. It wasn’t ‘What do we think the news is here?’ It was ‘Here is what we are chasing from the Internet, and here is what the studios and networks want us to write about.”‘

And although some in Hollywood may be skeptical, Mr. Beckman, never one to lack brio or confidence, is not deterred. “It makes me laugh to get pigeonholed by these morons,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/bu...hollywood.html





The Still-Evolving Newsonomics of Digital Transition
Ken Doctor

It seems like a simple enough question. If newspaper companies could make the switch to digital publishing, how much would they save in costs?

Newspapers have been Big Iron companies, operating on a industrial manufacturing cost basis, as the information revolution has developed all around then. They’ve participated, triumphed here and there, yet seen their business model effectively cut in half, as first the classified business cratered and then other ad lines shrank.

Surely, as newspaper companies go digital-first, multi-platform and tablet-ready, there’s a financial path from here to there. Surely we can see how the old costs of physical production, printing and truck-based distribution can be winnowed, replaced by hyper-efficient digital creation and distribution.

I’ve been plumbing around in those numbers for a couple of weeks, and I can report back that the print-to-digital transition is at best a work in progress. Sometimes it seems more like an exercise in the pseudoscience of numerology. There are all kinds of intriguing numbers — but they just don’t add up yet.

The numbers we know, though, tell stories, and offer pointers.

Take this one: 4.1 percent. That’s what Warren Webster, president of AOL’s newly expanding Patch, recently told me it costs his company to match the content production of a “like-sized newspaper.” Meaning that Patch can produce the same volume of content (quality, pro and con, in the eye of the beholder) for 1/25 the cost of the old Big Iron newspaper company, given its centralized technology and finance and zero investment in presses and local office space. (Staffers work out of their homes.)

That’s an astounding number, which even if tripled, gives a legacy publisher or editor pause.

Yet the second sentiment coming out of that publisher’s or editor’s mouth is this: Tell me exactly how is Patch going to make enough just to be profitable, even if it only pays one very full-time reporter, plus freelance, per community.

For Dave Hunke, publisher of USA Today, which has just announced a major restructuring to get itself “ready for the next quarter-century,” such cost questions are very much on his mind. Yet asked how much cost could be cut out of the legacy enterprise if it went wholly digital, he pauses, laughs and says, “That’s honestly one of the few questions we haven’t looked at. You could have a reasonable number if you had a business model around the digital business.”

Hunke’s point is a big one. You can have a business model that supports a wholly digital news enterprise — it just won’t be a very big one. Take SeattlePI.com, supporting about 20 editorial staff and flirting with profitability. For Hunke, the question is how you keep a big news staff and a big news footprint as you transition. That’s the still-looming question for metro newspapers, who see the many startups forming around, under, and near them. And, at this point in the digital evolution, there’s simply nowhere near the money necessary to pay for big newsrooms.

Still, the question of digital transition economics is one that’s on many minds.

If you could flip that print to digital switch, what might it mean in numbers?

Start with 60 percent. That’s the rough percentage of costs that might come out of an enterprise, as print production, printing, circulation and distribution expenses, along with those jobs, were eliminated. The 40 percent or so remaining? Figure about 20 percent of costs are newsroom, and 10-15 percent are ad sales. Add in a reduced (from print heyday) number of finance, HR, marketing and management jobs. As one publisher told me: “There are still way too many managers around, managing lots fewer people and lots less money.”

That 40 percent or so number gives a notion, though, of where this is all headed, though it’s only a marker. Hunke announced a 9-percent staff reduction with the restructuring, and, of course, everyone wanted to know where those cuts were coming from — production, circulation, advertising or elsewhere. He says he couldn’t say because he doesn’t yet know.

“Nothing’s a clean cut,” he says. He makes the point — one familiar to many publishers — that he’s leading a digital transition, but one that includes maintaining (and maybe growing) a print product along the way. His multi-platform, segmented audience approach means that job descriptions themselves are in flux. That, of course, makes budgeting even more difficult in the transition.

The notion of continued care and feeding of the print product — Hunke, correctly I believe, sees it as a niche product for a certain group of readers — is key. Remember that daily newspapers still depend on print for 85-percent-plus of their revenue. My sense is that the tablet will accelerate a print-to-digital transition — especially for baby-boomer readers — and that hastening will favor newspaper companies that manage products, costs, and revenues smartly.

There’s no template, though, and no formulae that anyone can share. The transition road is too dark and bumpy at this point, without map or GPS.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/09/the...al-transition/





Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed: Sparse, But Clean; Source Code Released
MG Siegler

A post has just gone up on Diaspora’s blog revealing what the project actually looks like for the first time. While it’s not yet ready to be released to the public, the open-source social networking project is giving the world a glimpse of what it looks like today and also releasing the project code, as promised.

At first glance, this preview version of Diaspora looks sparse, but clean. Oddly enough, with its big pictures and stream, it doesn’t look unlike Apple’s new Ping music social network mixed with yes, Facebook. A few features they note:

* Share status messages and photos privately and in near real time with your friends through “aspects”.
* Friend people across the Internet no matter where Diaspora seed is located.
* Manage friends using “aspects”
* Upload of photos and albums
* All traffic is signed and encrypted (except photos, for now).

But no matter what Diaspora looks like now, the point is to have many different versions hosted all over the place. Some will look different than others — so it make sense to have a simple, clean base to build off of.

The team notes that the public alpha of the project is still on course for October, and will include Facebook integration off the bat, as well as data portability.

“Getting the source into the hands of developers is our first experiment in making a simple and functional tool for contextual sharing. Diaspora is in its infancy, but our initial ideas are there,” the team writes today. “Much of our focus this summer was centered around publishing content to groups of your friends, wherever their seed may live. It is by no means bug free or feature complete, but it an important step for putting us, the users, in control,” they continue.

Diaspora is a particularly interesting project because it was first unveiled at a time when Facebook was facing a lot of user backlash due to privacy issues and changes being made. This helped the project raise over $200,000 in crowd-sourced funding via Kickstarter.

Of course, Facebook continues to grow and is now well past 500 million users, as much of the controversy that existed a few months ago has died down — as expected. The project also faces the hurdle of trying to popularize an open source project — these projects often sound great on paper, but doesn’t work too well in practice. That said, Diaspora is still interesting, and we’re rooting for these guys to pull it off.

Developers, get building — you can find the code on github here. But note their warning:

Feel free to try to get it running on your machines and use it, but we give no guarantees. We know there are security holes and bugs, and your data is not yet fully exportable. If you do find something, be sure to log it in our bugtracker, and we would love screenshots and browser info.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/15/diaspora-revealed/





A Loophole Big Enough for a Cookie to Fit Through
Riva Richmond

If you rely on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s privacy settings to control cookies on your computer, you may want to rethink that strategy.

Large numbers of Web sites, including giants like Facebook, appear to be using a loophole that circumvents I.E.’s ability to block cookies, according to researchers at CyLab at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Engineering.

A technical paper (note: clicking on the link will initiate a download of a pdf) published by the researchers says that a third of the more than 33,000 sites they studied have technical errors that cause I.E. to allow cookies to install, even if the browser has been set to reject them. Of the 100 most visited destinations on the Internet, 21 sites had the errors, including Facebook, several of Microsoft’s own sites, Amazon, IMDB, AOL, Mapquest, GoDaddy and Hulu.

Typos and honest mistakes likely explain many of the errors, says Lorrie Faith Cranor, director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory and one of the paper’s authors. But she estimates that more than half represent deliberate efforts to keep I.E. from blocking certain types of third-party cookies based on privacy policies.

Cookies are used to store information about a user or computer’s Web use so sites can customize that user’s experience, including what ads they see. So-called persistent or tracking cookies are data placed not by the site visited, but by other third-party Web sites that have placed content or advertising on the visited Web page. These types of cookies can stay on computers for long periods of time and gather data about surfing habits, and have long raised hackles among those concerned about privacy online.
The loophole resides deep in an exchange of data between browser and site. Normally, Internet Explorer checks the privacy policy of a site to see if it complements the browser’s own security settings.

This checking is done through “compact policies”: lines of computer code (in this case, three- or four-letter codes) that reflect the content of the tomelike privacy policies that sites have written out in English. For illustrative purposes, imagine an interaction between browser and site that goes something like this:

Browser: I don’t allow cookies that store personally identifiable information that could be used to contact me without permission.
Site: I do have some cookies to place here, but none do that.
Browser: That sounds fine. Come on in.

Compact policies are voluntary and are part of an Internet standard called Platform for Privacy Preferences, or P3P, that was developed in the 1990s. Dr. Cranor was on the standards committee that developed P3P. The goal of compact policies was to create a way of describing sites’ privacy practices when it comes to cookies that computers could read and use.

Microsoft’s I.E. browser is the only major browser to make meaningful use of P3P; it uses compact policies to block and control certain cookies by default with its “medium” privacy setting. (Access the settings in I.E. Version 8 by clicking “Tools,” then “Internet Options” and then “Privacy.” Change your setting using the slider.) And it has been the power of I.E.’s market share—60 percent, according to NetMarketshare—that has led sites that want to install cookies onto PCs to use compact policies, say experts like Dr. Cranor and Ari Schwartz, vice president at the Center for Democracy and Technology until he joined the Obama administration last month.

Browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Safari have simpler security settings. Instead of checking a site’s compact policy, these browsers simply let people choose to block all cookies, block only third-party cookies or allow all cookies.

The loophole sites are using to evade I.E.’s cookie blocker shows up in the process the browser uses to check compact policies. I.E. checks only for codes that indicate a site doesn’t have the right privacy protections, Dr. Cranor says. If it finds a compact policy with bad inputs — say, the codes are wrong (there are certain three- and four-letter combinations) or there aren’t enough of the codes to complete a proper policy (at least five) — it simply lets the cookies install.

When students at Carnegie Mellon started investigating these bad codes, they noticed the exact same insufficient three-code combination showing up in more than 2,700 Web sites. Curious how everyone could make the same mistake, they searched for the code in Google and found, surprisingly, a Microsoft support page.

Microsoft says it has now “retired” the page cited by CyLab (you can see it, cached, here), adding that the codes shown there were meant only to be an example, not a recommendation. It notes it also provides an article to guide Web developers on how to properly configure P3P so it matches their written privacy policy.

CyLab found that some of the Internet’s largest sites make use of the loophole, and through other means than the inaccurate Microsoft codes. For instance, Facebook last year had a compact policy with the cheeky entry “HONK,” Dr. Cranor says. (“Honk” is not a valid compact-policy code, nor does it resemble any valid codes, which would explain codes that were mistyped.) Facebook now has a policy with two correct codes, which is unusable because there must be at least five codes.

A Facebook spokesman said in an e-mailed statement: “We’re committed to providing clear and transparent policies, as well as comprehensive access to those policies. We’re looking into the paper’s findings to see what, if any, changes we can make.” Ben Maurer, a software engineer at Facebook, said that the site used only two codes instead of five because current compact-policy codes do not “allow a rich enough description to accurately represent our privacy policy.” Mr. Maurer said he did not know the history of how “HONK” made it into a compact policy.

The paper also notes that 134 sites with TRUSTe seals, which are meant to reassure consumers that strong privacy measures are in place at a Web site, have faulty compact policies. Only 391 of more than 3,000 sites with the seal had compact policies at all.

TRUSTe’s president, Fran Maier, said in a blog post that the group was investigating the matter and contacting customers mentioned in the paper. She noted that customers self-attest to the accuracy of their policies, though TRUSTe will help them accomplish that. She said P3P adoption has been poor across the Internet because it was difficult to put into effect and because consumers didn’t see value in it.

Dr. Cranor says she thinks the real trouble is the lack of a regulatory requirement to use P3P, noting that few consumers know what P3P is. “I’m hoping companies will do the right thing, and it may take pressure form regulators to make that happen,” she says. “Beyond companies that are basically trying to look good on privacy, there is no incentive because you don’t have to do it.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...o-fit-through/





3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution
Ashlee Vance

Businesses in the South Park district of San Francisco generally sell either Web technology or sandwiches and burritos. Bespoke Innovations plans to sell designer body parts.

The company is using advances in a technology known as 3-D printing to create prosthetic limb casings wrapped in embroidered leather, shimmering metal or whatever else someone might want.

Scott Summit, a co-founder of Bespoke, and his partner, an orthopedic surgeon, are set to open a studio this fall where they will sell the limb coverings and experiment with printing entire customized limbs that could cost a tenth of comparable artificial limbs made using traditional methods. And they will be dishwasher-safe, too.

“I wanted to create a leg that had a level of humanity,” Mr. Summit said. “It’s unfortunate that people have had a product that’s such a major part of their lives that was so underdesigned.”

A 3-D printer, which has nothing to do with paper printers, creates an object by stacking one layer of material — typically plastic or metal — on top of another, much the same way a pastry chef makes baklava with sheets of phyllo dough.

The technology has been radically transformed from its origins as a tool used by manufacturers and designers to build prototypes.

These days it is giving rise to a string of never-before-possible businesses that are selling iPhone cases, lamps, doorknobs, jewelry, handbags, perfume bottles, clothing and architectural models. And while some wonder how successfully the technology will make the transition from manufacturing applications to producing consumer goods, its use is exploding.

A California start-up is even working on building houses. Its printer, which would fit on a tractor-trailer, would use patterns delivered by computer, squirt out layers of special concrete and build entire walls that could be connected to form the basis of a house.

It is manufacturing with a mouse click instead of hammers, nails and, well, workers. Advocates of the technology say that by doing away with manual labor, 3-D printing could revamp the economics of manufacturing and revive American industry as creativity and ingenuity replace labor costs as the main concern around a variety of goods.

“There is nothing to be gained by going overseas except for higher shipping charges,” Mr. Summit said.

A wealth of design software programs, from free applications to the more sophisticated offerings of companies including Alibre and Autodesk, allows a person to concoct a product at home, then send the design to a company like Shapeways, which will print it and mail it back.

“We are enabling a class of ordinary people to take their ideas and turn those into physical, real products,” said J. Paul Grayson, Alibre’s chief executive. Mr. Grayson said his customers had designed parts for antique cars, yo-yos and even pieces for DNA analysis machines.

“We have a lot of individuals going from personal to commercial,” Mr. Grayson said.

Manufacturers and designers have used 3-D printing technology for years, experimenting on the spot rather than sending off designs to be built elsewhere, usually in Asia, and then waiting for a model to return. Boeing, for example, might use the technique to make and test air-duct shapes before committing to a final design.

Depending on the type of job at hand, a typical 3-D printer can cost from $10,000 to more than $100,000. Stratasys and 3D Systems are among the industry leaders. And MakerBot Industries sells a hobbyist kit for under $1,000.

Moving the technology beyond manufacturing does pose challenges. Customized products, for example, may be more expensive than mass-produced ones, and take longer to make. And the concept may seem out of place in a world trained to appreciate the merits of mass consumption.

But as 3-D printing machines have improved and fallen in cost along with the materials used to make products, new businesses have cropped up.

Freedom of Creation, based in Amsterdam, designs and prints exotic furniture and other fixtures for hotels and restaurants. It also makes iPhone cases for Apple, eye cream bottles for L’Oreal and jewelry and handbags for sale on its Web site.

Various designers have turned to the company for clothing that interlaces plastic to create form-hugging blouses, while others have requested spiky coverings for lights that look as if they could be the offspring of a sea urchin and a lamp shade.

“The aim was always to bring this to consumers instead of keeping it a secret at NASA and big manufacturers,” said Janne Kyttanen, 36, who founded Freedom of Creation about 10 years ago. “Everyone thought I was a lunatic when we started.”

His company can take risks with “out there” designs since it doesn’t need to print an object until it is ordered, Mr. Kyttanen said. Ikea can worry about mass appeal.

LGM, based in Minturn, Colo., uses a 3-D printing machine to create models of buildings and resorts for architectural firms.

“We used to take two months to build $100,000 models,” said Charles Overy, the founder of LGM. “Well, that type of work is gone because developers aren’t putting up that type of money anymore.”

Now, he said, he is building $2,000 models using an architect’s design and homegrown software for a 3-D printer. He can turn around a model in one night.

Next, the company plans to design and print doorknobs and other fixtures for buildings, creating unique items. “We are moving from handcraft to digital craft,” Mr. Overy said.

But Contour Crafting, based in Los Angeles, has pushed 3-D printing technology to its limits.

Based on research done by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, Contour Crafting has created a giant 3-D printing device for building houses. The start-up company is seeking money to commercialize a machine capable of building an entire house in one go using a machine that fits on the back of a tractor-trailer.

The 3-D printing wave has caught the attention of some of the world’s biggest technology companies. Hewlett-Packard, the largest paper-printer maker, has started reselling 3-D printing machines made by Stratasys. And Google uses the CADspan software from LGM to help people using its SketchUp design software turn their creations into 3-D printable objects.

At Bespoke, Mr. Summit has built a scanning contraption to examine limbs using a camera. After the scan, a detailed image is transmitted to a computer, and Mr. Summit can begin sculpting his limb art.

He uses a 3-D printer to create plastic shells that fit around the prosthetic limbs, and then wraps the shells in any flexible material the customer desires, be it an old bomber jacket or a trusty boot.

“We can do a midcentury modern or a Harley aesthetic if that’s what someone wants,” Mr. Summit said. “If we can get to flexible wood, I am totally going to cut my own leg off.”

Mr. Summit and his partner, Kenneth B. Trauner, the orthopedic surgeon, have built some test models of full legs that have sophisticated features like body symmetry, locking knees and flexing ankles. One artistic design is metal-plated in some areas and leather-wrapped in others.

“It costs $5,000 to $6,000 to print one of these legs, and it has features that aren’t even found in legs that cost $60,000 today,” Mr. Summit said.

“We want the people to have input and pick out their options,” he added. “It’s about going from the Model T to something like a Mini that has 10 million permutations.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/te...y/14print.html





The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing
Simon Bradshaw, Adrian Bowyer and Patrick Haufe

1. Introduction

Throughout recorded history most people who have wanted a household article have bought or bartered it from someone else – in past times an artisan or trader, more recently a seller of mass-produced products. With few exceptions (such as some clothing) it is rare that any of us make such articles for ourselves these days. That may soon change. Thirty years ago only dedicated enthusiasts would print their own photographs or edit and reproduce their own newsletters. The advent of the home computer, and in particular of low-cost high-quality printers, has now made such things simple and commonplace. Recent developments in producing affordable and hobbyist-friendly printers that can reproduce three-dimensional rather than just flat objects may mean that printing a toast-rack or a comb becomes as easy as printing a birthday card.

Any lawyer familiar with copyright and trade mark law can see, however, that printing one’s own birthday cards could, depending on the source and nature of the images used, infringe a number of intellectual property (IP) rights. Tempting as it may be to copy and use a picture of a well-known cartoon character, the resulting cards would very likely be an infringement of the copyright and perhaps trade marks owned by the relevant rights holder. But what if someone uses a printer capable of producing a mobile phone cover bearing such an image? Or reproducing a distinctively-styled piece of kitchenware? What about printing out a spare wing-mirror mount for your car? Do these uses infringe IP rights?

In the first part of this paper, we review the history of 3D printing and describe recent developments, including a project initiated by one of the authors to bring such printers into the home. We then examine the IP implications of personal 3D printing with particular reference to the bundle of rights that would typically be associated with a product that might be copied.

2. Personal 3D Printing: The Technical Aspects of Home Manufacturing

2.1. A Brief History of Manufacturing

People have three ways to make solid objects:

Cutting shapes out of a block of material;

Adding material piecemeal to build up shapes; and

Forming material that is liquid or plastic into the required shapes that then set.

All forming processes are secondary in the sense that the dies and moulds for them must initially be cut or built by one of the other two primary processes. Pre-industrial examples of these three are carving wood, bricklaying, and moulding a jelly.

Since the industrial revolution, an enormous number of variations on these three techniques have been developed and pre-industrial techniques have been much refined. Cutting and forming have, in particular, received a great deal of attention, resulting in sophisticated lathes and milling machines for cutting, and injection-moulding and die-casting machines for forming.

Just after the Second World War, John Parsons invented the idea of numerical control.1 In this, a manufacturing machine has all its parameters and variables continually controlled by a computer, allowing a previously hand-controlled process to be completely automated. A typical numerically-controlled machine tool is a lathe or a mill that can produce a complicated-shaped part from a simple block entirely without human intervention. This idea has been called the Second Industrial Revolution, and - directly or indirectly – it is the basis of virtually every engineering product that is made and sold today.

Since the creation of the microcomputer in the late 1970s the cost of numerically-controlled machine tools has fallen dramatically and it is now possible for organizations of modest means (such as schools) and also private individuals in the developed world to own lightweight ones. However, the vast majority of all these machines - heavy and light - are still cutting machines, as opposed to additive or moulding machines.

Numerically-controlled cutting machines suffer from an inherent problem: given a computer model of a shape to be made, it is extremely difficult to compute the paths that the cutting tools have to follow in order to make that shape automatically. The more complicated the shape, the more difficult this problem becomes. Further, it is straightforward to design shapes that are perfectly valid three-dimensional objects but that cannot be cut out at all. Almost all these problems stem from the fact that the tool doing the cutting and the device attaching it to the machine must not strike any part of the object being cut except at the point where the actual cutting is happening.

2.2. 3D Printing

Until the late 1970s the alternative primary manufacturing idea - adding material - had received comparatively little attention (except in the electronics industry for chip manufacture, where it was, and still is, ubiquitous, if microscopic). But in 1974 a joke was written and in 1977 a patent was granted that caused that situation to change.

The joke was by David Jones, writing his column under the pen-name “Daedalus” in the New Scientist.2 He made what he imagined was a tongue-in-cheek proposal that one could shine a laser through a vat of liquid plastic monomer and cause it to solidify along the path of the beam. The photons of light might thereby be made to initiate the covalent cross-linking of the liquid monomer to form a solid polymer. He further proposed that, if the wavelengths were adjusted appropriately, the cross-linking could be made to happen only where two beams intersected, resulting in an intense spot of energy at one point, and that - by computer-controlled mirror deflection - that intense point could be made to trace out the volume of a required solid object.

The patent was granted in 1977 to Wyn Kelly Swainson for essentially the same idea, though he had originally filed the patent well before the appearance of Jones’s piece.3 In Swainson’s system the laser caused covalent cross-linking at the surface of the liquid monomer and the object being manufactured rested on a tray that was gradually lowered into the vat.

This was the start of the 3D printing industry, which engineers sometimes call the rapid prototyping industry. (The latter term has become less current over the last few years – the field is evolving rapidly.) It was called “rapid” because one-offs could be made much more easily and quickly using it than by conventional numerically-controlled machining and it was called “prototyping” because it was too slow and expensive to be used for production (it could not compete with injection moulding for making many copies of a single item, for example).

The primary reason that 3D printing technology was (and is) so easy to use was that it completely eliminated the tool-path calculation problems of numerically-controlled cutting machines. Because parts are built up layer by layer, there is always a flat-topped surface with unrestricted access for the laser (or other solidifying or depositing device) to gain access to build upon. This makes it very simple to write a computer programme to control the machine from a computer model of the shape required. There are other advantages (and disadvantages) to 3D printing, but this is the most significant one.

Although it is typically slightly less accurate than cutting, 3D printing is capable of manufacturing more complicated and intricate shapes than any other primary manufacturing technology. Most 3D printing technologies work using plastics but technologies such as selective sintering of metal granules have allowed the printing of metal shapes4 and there are systems that can work with ceramics.5

2.3. Home 3D Printing

At the time of writing, the lowest-cost conventionally-made and marketed 3D printing machine (the SD-300 made by Solido Ltd in Israel) was being retailed at about €12,000. Machines range in price from that up to around €300,000 and a typical mid-range machine might cost €40,000. In quick succession after Swainson’s patent, all the obviously possible ways of making objects by adding layers under automatic computer control were patented. Those early patents are now expiring but patents for newer 3D printing techniques continue to be issued.6

One of the technologies developed was fused-filament fabrication.7 This is essentially a computer-controlled glue gun. Molten plastic is extruded from a fine nozzle and laid down on a flat plate by scribbling with the nozzle to form the bottom layer of the object to be made. The plate then drops a small distance, and the next layer is added. Because the plastic is molten when it emerges from the nozzle the second layer welds to the first, and in this way complete three-dimensional solids can be built. This is a comparatively simple technology that requires no hard-to-make parts (such as a laser).

In 2004 Adrian Bowyer realised that 3D printing was such a versatile technology that it ought to be possible to design a fused-filament fabrication 3D printing machine that could manufacture a significant fraction of its own parts.8 Conventional industry has little use for this idea: why sell a machine to your customers that means that they never need to come back to you to buy another, never need to buy spares, or even that allows them to go into production themselves in direct competition with you? But owning such a machine would have real advantages for people in general: anyone who had one could use it to make things, and could also make another such machine and give that to a friend. This is an interesting example of a failure of the market: such a self-replicating machine is an object that people would value, but that it is in no one’s interest to sell. For these reasons it was decided to make the machine and to give all its designs away free under the GNU General Public Licence on the web.9 This was the start of the RepRap project. RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper.

From the beginning RepRap was conceived as a machine that would be owned and used by people in the home to make things, as well as by industry. The cost of all the materials needed to make a RepRap is low - about €400 - bringing it well within the budget of individuals in the developed world (as well as small communities in the developing world). RepRap makes items at a slightly lower quality than the commercial machines do, but at about 1 per cent of the cost.

Any development or improvement of RepRap design, software or electronics arises out of its users’ own initiatives. There is no central institution giving directions: users themselves invest time and thought in the evolutionary process of RepRap design. If they inspire other users they can all team up and combine their efforts. Because of the lack of deadlines for developmental goals, progress is very wide ranging, but it is also admittedly slower than in industrial R&D departments. However, personal ambition to realise their own ideas for the project drives the progress of the users’ work. Involving users in product design by providing tool kits has become more important in recent times.10

The reactions of industry to RepRap have been twofold: the conventional 3D printing manufacturers have (to the best of the authors’ knowledge) ignored it, but there has been a flurry of garage start-ups (for example Bits from Bytes Ltd in Bristol and MakerBot Industries LLC in New York) making very low cost machines that are based on RepRap technology. There is also another significant open-source 3D printer: the Fab@Home machine, which was inspired by RepRap.11 Unlike RepRap, these machines do not copy themselves. They are however all able to make RepRap machines, as are almost all the large-scale commercial 3D printing machines. The asymmetry that this introduces into the population dynamics of 3D printing has not escaped us.

Many companies and organisations have bought these low-cost RepRap derivatives or have built RepRap machines, but by far the greatest majority of owners and users are private individuals. MakerBot runs a popular website (www.thingiverse.com) where anyone may upload and download designs of a great range of items to be manufactured by 3D printers for free.

As technology has become more miniaturised, the possible functionality of a single product has massively increased. This is, of course, useful and space-saving. On the other hand these versatile devices can, because of their large functional content, be rather complicated to handle. This is not always in the interests of the customer, as seen in Cooper.12 Additionally, often not all the functions are used by customers.13 Home 3D printing technology provides a way of manufacturing customised objects which have precisely the features an individual user needs.

All this may be heading towards a world in which people do not buy consumer goods any more but instead download them from the web and print them themselves. They will be able to customise them at will and may avoid some of the environmental and monetary cost currently entrained by the (often global) physical transport of manufactured goods; indeed, work is in train to make RepRap run on home-recycled plastic which would further reduce such costs. In particular, the ability of a 3D printer to, in principle, print a copy of itself, and for both machines to print further copies and so on, suggests that the cost of 3D printing may rapidly fall to the point where it becomes a widely-available technology.

Of course, having many people making few items in the home, instead of few people making many items in factories, is against the idea of economies of scale. But economies of scale are not universal: in the past people took clothes to central laundries to have them washed; now people use their own washing machines. Today electricity is generated in 2 GW power stations tomorrow it may be generated by individual photovoltaics on everyone’s roofs. And industrial printing presses offer far greater economies of scale than the home inkjet printers mentioned in the first paragraph that are – for many types of printing – replacing them.

What might this 3D printer be useful for? Working just in plastic would limit it to producing items not requiring great strength or heat resistance, whilst the fabrication volume would preclude production of large objects (other than in parts). However, as mentioned above, there is a great deal of active research going on to extend the range of materials that these low-cost systems can work with. There are many potential applications.

• Spare Parts. Many appliances require unique and often expensive spare parts. Often these are small, made of plastic and relatively simple design, and would be amenable to domestic fabrication. Examples familiar to the authors include door parts for washing machines,14 lids for food processors15 and camera lens accessories.16 Significantly, provision of third-party spares has led to many IP disputes.17

• Craft and Hobby Items. Craft hobbies often require plastic moulds; as with appliance spares, these are often expensive but could be produced with a 3D printer.18 A 3D printer could equally produce items directly, such as model figures for war-gaming19 or specialist add-on parts for model-making.20

• Educational Uses. School science teaching frequently requires small specialist components for demonstrating or conducting experiments.21

• Unique Requirements. A 3D printer, allied with user-friendly design software, would allow the ready creation of bespoke items. The RepRap website cites the fabrication of a unique bracket to allow an MP3 player to be attached to the coin-holder in a car dashboard.22 Individually-tailored body-fitting items such as frames for glasses could be produced, an extension of the use of 3D printing to make tailored medical implants.23

• Fashion Accessories. Existing 3D printing systems have been used to make jewellery.24 Personal 3D printers could add a new dimension (literally) to many forms of fashion art, and allow customisation of personal accessories.

Although discussion so far has assumed home use of low-cost 3D printers, they may appear first in commercial or educational settings such as copy bureaux or schools, just as photocopiers were more common in such venues before combined scanner/printers brought them into the home. These different forms of use are very significant as there are exemptions against infringement of some IP rights for personal or non-commercial use, but not in other circumstances.

3. Introduction to Intellectual Property Implications

Might, however, the promise of low-cost 3D printing be constrained by IP law? Surely, it might be thought, home 3D printing of household items might infringe such rights as copyright, design right, trade marks or patents? The second part of this article will examine such questions. To illustrate the legal issues in question it will consider a hypothetical manufacturer, Acme, which produces a range of goods. Acme’s products are protected by various IP rights, such as design right, copyright, patent and trade mark. A consumer, Bridget, owns various Acme products, but finds that additional items, or spares or accessories for the ones she already has, are expensive. Being a 3D printing enthusiast, she creates 3D designs for such items and uses her personal 3D printer to print them out. She also shares her designs over the Internet with Charlie, who downloads them and prints his own ersatz Acme products. What of Acme’s rights, if any, have Bridget and Charlie infringed?

Such questions have received surprisingly little attention. A comprehensive literature search for legal references to “3D printing”, “rapid prototyping” or related terms found few matches; one referred to the copyright in 3D printing reconstructions of archaeological finds25 whilst another briefly noted 3D printing as facilitating the overseas manufacture of patented products.26 Even searching within 3D printing engineering journals found only one article considering the prospect of widespread Internet-enabled dissemination of design files,27 whilst the sole relevant UK case report concerned ownership of copyright in commissioned models; their production by 3D printing was entirely incidental.28

3.1. Aim and Legal Assumptions

Sections 3 through 7 of this paper are a first attempt to fill this gap. Based on the LLM dissertation of one of the authors (SB) they aim, from the perspective of EC and UK IP law,29 to identify where widespread low-cost 3D printing may impinge on IP rights or where IP law may constrain its development. Perhaps surprisingly, under UK law it transpires that in the scenario presented Bridget and Charlie may not have infringed Acme’s IP rights. Purely personal use of 3D printing to make copies of household objects and spare parts does not infringe the IP rights that commonly protect such items, such as design protection, patents or trade marks. However, there are areas, such as the reproduction of artistic works, where IP rights such as copyright may be infringed. The advent of low-cost 3D printing may therefore pose challenges to several communities: manufacturers, who may be unable to enforce design protection against private users of 3D printing; artists, who may see a new forum for infringement of works previously difficult to copy, and users of low-cost 3D printing, who may face confusion as to what is legitimate and illegitimate use of the technology.

3.2. Intellectual Property Rights and 3D Printing

There are four main classes of IP rights that may be infringed by using a 3D printer, which may be divided into those which require registration and those which arise automatically (unregistered rights):

1. Copyright is an unregistered right that protects mainly artistic and creative works.

2. Design Protection exists in both registered and unregistered forms and protects the distinctive shape and appearance of items (in particular those that are mass-produced).

3. Patent is a registered right that protects novel and innovative products such as mechanisms or pharmaceutical compounds.

4. Registered Trade Marks serve to inform consumers of the origin (and by association, reputation) of goods.

English common law also provides the action of Passing Off against acts that might confuse customers as to the origin of goods.

This paper will briefly introduce each right and focus on the extent to which it may be infringed by use of a 3D printer and the potential legal defences for such infringement. More detailed discussion may be found in relevant educational and practioner texts, to which reference will be made as appropriate.30 These rights interact and overlap; in particular the interaction between design protection and copyright has been the subject of much judicial interpretation. It is therefore convenient to consider design protection first.

4. Design Protection

Design protection protects the appearance of items, especially commercial products that might not otherwise be protected by patent or copyright law. Design protection may apply to relatively simple products, to components of more complex ones, or to the overall appearance of such “complex products”. In domestic law there are two main forms of design protection: registered design and unregistered design right (UDR). In the wider European context, registered designs may also be registered with the Community Design Register, whilst there is a short-duration unregistered Community design right (UCD). This discussion will concentrate on registered design (for which the domestic and Community provisions are now virtually identical) and UDR.

4.1. Registered Design

The Registered Designs Act 1949 (as amended) provides that registration of a product protects its “appearance of the whole or a part of a product resulting from the features of, in particular, the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture or materials of the product or its ornamentation”31 where a “product” is any industrial or handicraft item.32 The requirements for the registration of designs (such as novelty and individual character) will not be examined in detail;33 however, some of the constraints on what may be registered are relevant to issues arising from 3D printing of spares or parts for repair of a product.

• Component Parts. A component part of a complex product may only be protected as a registered design if it is both visible to the user in ordinary use (which excludes maintenance or repair) and is of novel and individual design.34 Many spare parts for cars or domestic appliances will be hidden in everyday use whilst many others, even if normally visible, may be of commonplace design, such as a pipe or washer.35

• Designs Dictated by Technical Function. Features of a product dictated solely by technical functionality may not be protected by registered design.36 This constraint was considered by the ECJ in Philips v Remington37 where Colomer AG opined that protection would not be available where the design was the only way of achieving the required function. Cornish contrasts this with the decision of the House of Lords in Amp v Utilux38 under the previous UK legislation where it was held that whilst an electrical terminal could have been designed in various equally effective ways, all would have been dictated by technical function and so been unregistrable.39 (It would now be unregistrable as an invisible component part.)

• “Must Fit” Exception. A design or design element is not registrable if it comprises “features of appearance of a product which must necessarily be reproduced in their exact form and dimensions so as to permit the product in which the design is incorporated or to which it is applied to be mechanically connected to, or placed in, around or against, another product so that either product may perform its function”.40 There has been little if any judicial consideration of this point, but by analogy with similar provisions for unregistered design right this provision will exclude many spares and accessories from protection if their shape is determined by the need to connect to or fit into or around another product.

The effect of these exemptions is that many items attractive for 3D printing will not be protected as registered designs. Many spare parts are likely to be components or fall under the “technical function” or “must fit” exemptions. The latter also applies to the shape of accessories and customisation items such as covers for mobile phones (but not, as noted below, to copyright artwork decorating them). Furthermore, even if a spare part escapes these exemptions and is protected as a registered design, such protection is not infringed by its use for “the repair of a complex product so as to restore its original appearance”.41 This would cover the 3D printing of a part such as a car wing panel that was normally visible and not wholly constrained in design by its function or fit, but which had to be replicated in order to maintain the vehicle’s original appearance.

Even where a registered design is copied via a 3D printer this would not be an infringement if it were done “privately and for purposes which are not commercial”.42 Both criteria must be met; it is insufficient that copying is not done for profit. Purely personal use of a 3D printer to make items will thus not infringe a registered design, so long as the purpose for which the item was made was genuinely non-commercial. In the introductory scenario therefore, even if Acme’s product is protected as a registered design, neither Bridget nor Charlie infringe that design by making a copy for personal use (although this may not be so if, say, Bridget makes an item for use in paid work from home). However, use in other settings, such as a repair shop, will have to avoid registered designs if it is not to infringe them, unless the “complex product repair” exemption applies. For non-private educational purposes, there is a “fair dealing” exemption,43 but this only applies where the use does not prejudice normal exploitation of the design,44 e.g. by substituting for purchase of the item itself. So if Charlie works in a school and uses Acme test-tube stands, if these are registered designs he could not legitimately 3D-print copies to avoid buying new ones from Acme.

4.2. Unregistered Design Right

UK UDR was introduced by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to help resolve anomalies in industrial design protection regarding the supply of third-party spare parts (especially for cars) that had culminated in the House of Lords decision in Leyland v Armstrong.45 UDR provides protection akin to registered design, but rather than requiring registration it arises automatically, as with copyright. Like copyright it is therefore only effective against actual copying.46 As an unregistered right its subsistence will be a question of law in each case.

UDR subsists in the shape and configuration of an item, but not its surface decoration or method or principle of construction.47 It also excludes features that are required for it to be “connected to, or placed in, around or against, another article so that either article may perform its function” or which “are dependent upon the appearance of another article of which the article is intended by the designer to form an integral part.”48 The “must fit” exception is similar to that for registered design, whilst the “must match” exception is analogous to the “repair of complex products” provision.

• Originality. To qualify for UDR, a design must be original, defined as not being “commonplace in the design field in question at the time of its creation”.49 In Farmers Build v Carrier50 Mummery LJ noted:

The designs are “original” in the sense that they are the independent work of the designer of the TARGET machines: they have not been simply copied by him from the GASCOIGNE or SUDSTALL machine….Time, labour and skill, sufficient to attract copyright protection, were expended by Mr Hagan in originating the designs of the individual parts. Similarly, he originated the assembly or combination of those parts in the TARGET machine as a whole.

Laddie J’s remarks illustrate that UDR may subsist in individual parts of a design, the design as a whole, or both. Consequently, an allegedly infringing design may be analysed by being broken down into component parts, some of which may be held to infringe UDR whilst others do not. The meaning of “design field in question” was considered in Lambretta v Teddy Smith51 where Jacob LJ held it to be the range of designs with which the designer of the item in question would be familiar.

• Method or Principle of Construction. In Rolawn v Turfmech52 Mann J summarised prior case law as indicating that this provision prevented UDR subsisting in what he described as abstract, generalised design concepts. Under Mann J’s interpretation aspects of design dictated solely by manufacturing technique or necessitated by sound engineering design will be likely to fall within it. As noted by the Court of Appeal in Landa & Hawa International v Azure53 this provision seeks to prevent a designer gaining a monopoly over a particular way of making a type of product.

• “Must Fit” Exception. The “must fit” exception for UDR has been the subject of considerable judicial consideration. In Parker v Tidball,54 the disputed designs were for mobile phone cases, which had both to fit around the phones they were designed for and to allow access to keyboards and displays. Robert Englehart QC adopted the approach of breaking each design down into its components in order to assess whether each element’s design was commonplace and, if not, if it was constrained by the need to fit the phone or if alternatives would have been possible. In Dyson v Qualtex55 the exception was held to apply to those elements of spare parts that were shaped so as to allow them to conform with the product they were to be fitted to. The “must fit” exception has even been extended to designs that conform to parts of the human body, such as contact lenses in Ocular Sciences56 – although in Amoena v Trulife57 it was held that breast implants were not caught by this exemption, as they were too flexible to be considered “constrained” in their design.

• “Must Match” Exception. The “must match” exception is analogous to the “complex repair” provision for registered design. The example of a car wing panel illustrates it well, and has been cited as epitomising this provision, e.g. by Jacob LJ in Dyson v Qualtex. Dyson concerned “pattern parts”, spares which replicated the appearance as well as function of the original manufacturer’s parts, in that case for vacuum cleaners. Jacob LJ distinguished between spares for cars, where matching overall appearance was paramount, and those for more mundane items – such as vacuum cleaners – where it was less so. Without clear Parliamentary intent to exclude spares from UDR altogether, he held that the “must match” exception applied only in the former instance.58

How, then, does UDR affect the use of 3D printers to make copies of items in which it might subsist? The operative phrase is “might subsist”, as being an unregistered right it will be for the owner of the original item’s design to assert UDR. The factors listed above will determine whether UDR subsists – potentially not if the item is a commonplace design or has a shape and configuration determined by the item it “must fit” onto or around.

For 3D printing of spares, the “must fit”, “principle of construction” and “original design” requirements mean that UDR is unlikely to subsist in items that are of mundane design (c.f. the example of pipes or washers noted earlier) or where shape is dictated by the need to fit against another element of a product or is necessary for proper operation. However, as emphasised in Dyson, UDR is by no means excluded for spares, and in particular closely-matching “pattern spares” may fall outside the “must match” exception if they are destined for products where appearance is not critical.

The “must fit” exception would also apply to items such as customised covers for mobile phones although, as was noted with in the discussion of registered designs, this would not cover the use of copyright artwork as surface decoration. But of the other forms of items attractive for copying with a 3D printer many, such as craft and hobby items, would be protected by UDR and so reproducing them may infringe it. Whether they would depends on the statutory exemptions.

For UDR there is no positive provision in CDPA 1988 corresponding to that in RDA 1949 allowing private, non-commercial reproduction of a registered design. Instead, s 226(1) provides that:

(1) The owner of design right in a design has the exclusive right to reproduce the design for commercial purposes—

(a) by making articles to that design, or

(b) by making a design document recording the design for the purpose of enabling such articles to be made.

On its construction s 226(1) implies that the exclusive right does not apply to non-commercial use. This interpretation is supported by Copinger and Skone James, which notes “it seems clear enough that…a person who (for example) makes articles to a design intending to use them domestically does not thereby infringe design right”.59 In the Acme scenario, neither Bridget nor Charlie infringes any UDR subsisting in Acme’s products by 3D printing copies for personal use.

The authors of Copinger dismiss the impact of this provision, commenting that “as a person is unlikely to make many articles with a view to non-commercial purposes, it should in practice create few problems.” This may be true even with personal 3D printers, but what might change is that many more people will be in the position to make such articles. Furthermore, and in contrast with the situation for registered designs, there is no requirement that non-commercial use also be private. Indeed, by confining infringement to commercial use, defined as making an article or design document with a view to selling or hiring it in the course of business,60 the legislation appears to make all non-commercial uses non-infringing. This would include use within educational establishments, or bureau services where a 3D printer is made available for members of the public to use. CPDA 1988 provides that authorising infringement (which, by analogy with copyright, includes permitting infringing activities) is itself primary infringement of design right.61 But this only extends as far as acts that are themselves infringing, which non-commercial use is not. This is a fine point, and it may be argued that if a charge is made for such a service (e.g. at a commercial copy bureau) then the article is actually being made for the purpose of sale; equally, a private school or commercial training centre may well be “commercial” in this sense. If no charge is made though, for instance in a publically-funded school or training centre, then there is seemingly neither infringement of design right or authorisation of such. Taking the example used earlier, if Acme’s test tube stands were protected only by UDR, Charlie could legitimately copy them for use at his school, but not for sale to others.
Genuine commercial use will still be caught by s 226(1). To avoid infringement, business users will have to confine 3D printing to items not protected by UDR (such as spares within the constraints noted above), or will have to licence the right to produce them. This may well be attractive if it allows dealers to avoid holding large stocks of diverse parts, instead 3D printing them on demand from manufacturer’s authorised patterns. As will be discussed below, sale of self-3D printed unofficial spares, even where not infringing UDR, may fall foul of trade mark and passing off law.

4.3. 3D Printers and Design Protection

In summary, the exemptions for personal and private reproduction of registered designs and the exclusion of non-commercial use from UDR protection mean that the domestic use of a personal 3D printer to reproduce an item will infringe neither registered nor unregistered design protection. Perhaps more surprisingly the exclusive right provided by UDR appears not to cover such public but non-commercial users as schools; subject to interpretation, it may not prevent use in a commercial reproduction bureau. Even for commercial use, many items that are attractive for 3D printing, such as spare parts, may be unregistrable as registered designs and excluded from protection by UDR.

Two further issues arise regarding design protection, however: rights in surface decoration of an item to be reproduced by a 3D printer and rights in the design file used by a 3D printer for reproducing an item. Both of these concern copyright, and so will be covered in the next section.

5. Copyright

Copyright is an unregistered right that arises automatically on creation to protect creative works. Different jurisdictions vary as to the works for which copyright can subsist, but they generally follow Art 2(1) of the Berne Convention,62 which provides that copyright shall be available for “literary and artistic works”, where this includes musical and dramatic works and 2D and 3D artistic works. In the UK, CDPA 1988 s 1(a) recognises four classes of work in which copyright can subsist: literary, dramatic, musical or artistic. Regarding works that a 3D printer might produce infringing copies of, the artistic category is of most relevance.

Copyright infringement requires actual copying of the original. However, copying need not be exact, with “substantial copying” sufficing to infringe. The meaning of “substantial” was considered in Designers Guild63 in which the House of Lords decided that the original and alleged copy had to be considered in their entirety, the test being whether the copier had appropriated a substantial part of the skill and labour of the original author.

In contrast to registered design or UDR there is no threshold for novelty in copyright, with even commonplace works attracting protection if original;64 creative merit is not required, merely minimal expenditure of effort.65 In UK law, the circumstances under which copying is not infringement are strictly delineated by a number of “fair dealing” provisions, which include the right to reproduce extracts from a work for purposes of study or review.66

5.1. Artistic Copyright under CDPA 1988, s 4

“Artistic works” are defined at CDPA 1988 s 4. The definition is not straightforward and, given the issues it poses, it is reproduced here:

4. Artistic works.

(1) In this Part “artistic work” means —

(a) a graphic work, photograph, sculpture or collage, irrespective of artistic quality,

(b) a work of architecture being a building or a model for a building, or

(c) a work of artistic craftsmanship.

(2) In this Part—

“building” includes any fixed structure, and a part of a building or fixed structure;

“graphic work” includes—

(a) any painting, drawing, diagram, map, chart or plan, and

(b) any engraving, etching, lithograph, woodcut or similar work;

“photograph” means a recording of light or other radiation on any medium on which an image is produced or from which an image may by any means be produced, and which is not part of a film;

“sculpture” includes a cast or model made for purposes of sculpture.

The definitions of 2D works such as paintings, drawings and photographs are relatively straightforward, as is that of buildings. However, 3D works are less precisely defined, which is regrettable as these are the category of work where 3D printers offer novel opportunities for copying. The definition of “sculpture” is unhelpfully circular, whilst no definition of the catch-all category of “work of artistic craftsmanship” (WAC) is given at all. Numerous judicial authorities have been advanced regarding the meaning of both sculpture67 and WAC68 in the context of both current and previous legislation, leaving lawyers and scholars alike with a complex legal thicket to navigate. In 2008 Mann J gave judgment in Lucasfilm v Ainsworth69 and in doing so comprehensively surveyed these authorities and sought to elucidate clear tests for the meaning of these two terms.

To qualify as a sculpture, he held that an object had to have “…the intrinsic quality of being intended to be enjoyed as a visual thing” even if it had other uses.70 On this basis, Mann J excluded such industrial prototypes as the models in Metix71 (deemed by Laddie J not to be sculpture) and those in Wham-O72 and Breville73 (which had previously been held to be such). In the Court of Appeal, Jacob LJ concurred, whilst emphasising that the key point was the intention of the creator.74 Turning to WACs, he surveyed the disparate opinions of five Law Lords in Hensher75 before turning to the interpretation placed on it in the New Zealand case of Bonz v Cooke,76 where Tipping J held that for a work to be a WAC the author had to combine elements of craftsmanship and art. Whilst this may sound a trivial observation, Mann J explained it in the context of the items under dispute (helmets from the original Star Wars film), noting that whilst their creator had undoubtedly employed great craftsmanship, they had not been made for artistic purposes in their own right.77 Following Lucasfilm it appears therefore that copyright protection as a sculpture or WAC is confined to objects created principally for their artistic merit.

A further important distinction regarding 3D objects is the protection afforded to a graphic design on their surface. Even if not classified as a sculpture or a WAC, such an object may attract design protection. As already discussed, registered design protection includes its outward appearance,78 but UDR specifically excludes surface decoration.79 Such decoration may be protected by artistic copyright, be it 2D or 3D (in the latter case, presumably as a WAC), although if the object has been exploited industrially80 this copyright is limited to twenty five years.81

5.2. Artistic Works a 3D Printer May Infringe by Copying

A 3D printer, particularly one capable of colour reproduction, can copy a graphic work by laying down a single layer. Of itself, this poses no novel copyright issues beyond those arising from conventional printers. What is novel, however, is that it may apply such a work to the surface of a 3D item. It is not relevant whether such a design is applied to the surface, or if it extends into it in the manner of the lettering in a stick of rock candy (this being readily achievable with a 3D printer). In Lambretta82 Jacob LJ specifically rejected the suggestion that such a distinction could affect whether the appearance of an object was protected by copyright or by registered design;83 it is excluded from UDR protection in either case.

The significance of this can be illustrated by imagining in our scenario that Bridget owns an Acme mobile phone and decides to make a faceplate illustrated with Heidi Hamster, a cartoon character whose rights are owned by Acme. The faceplate itself is unlikely to attract design protection because of the “must fit” provisions of both registered design and UDR. (Related considerations would apply to, for example, a decorated pencil case, the shape of which would probably be deemed too commonplace for protection.) The decoration would be excluded from UDR though (although not registered design, if recorded as part of the registration), but its reproduction on the 3D-printed item would be an infringement by Bridget of the original copyright in it.

However, this assumes that the phone cover is a novel application of the cartoon. But in these days of extensive merchandising this may well not be the case, and the implications of this are significant. Normally the artwork copyright would last for the full copyright term, but via CDPA 1998 s 52 if it has already been applied industrially, e.g. by licensed production of items bearing it, then after twenty five years it may be copied by making articles of any description.84 The original cartoon would still receive full term protection, but its use as a surface design on products would not be infringed once the twenty five-year period had expired.85 If Bridget had copied the design from a sufficiently old product – and some well-known intellectual properties are much older than this ― then her use as surface decoration would be legitimate.

The practical effects of this are not as dramatic as might be imagined since commercial exploitation of such artwork is also constrained by laws regarding trade mark use and passing off, as discussed later. However, as will be noted, it is unlikely that either sanction prevents private use of such artwork. Well-known cartoon characters might thus be available for legitimate personal use on 3D-printed items if they have a long-enough history of commercial exploitation. (As will be noted in the conclusion, purely private copyright infringement is in any case difficult to police.)

It should also be remembered that it is an infringement of copyright in a 2D item to make a 3D representation of it. In the example given, to take a cartoon character and to 3D print a 3D figurine based on it would infringe the cartoon’s copyright – a point established with regard to the “Popeye” cartoon in the 1941 case of King Features Syndicate v Kleeman.86 Again though, if there is sufficient prior commercial exploitation of such items, then their copyright might be drastically shortened via s 52 and they may have fallen out of protection, at least for non-commercial use.

Turning to 3D items, a key question will be whether they fall within the definitions of sculpture or WAC. If not then, like the helmets in Lucasfilm, they will not be protected by copyright. They may enjoy UDR protection, but again this does not apply to non-commercial reproduction. Even if they are protected by copyright, s 52 CDPA may limit the term to twenty five years if they have previously been commercially reproduced, as may well be the case with items small enough to be amenable to 3D printer reproduction.87 Certain forms of artwork are excluded from this provision, however, such as original sculptures.88

5.3. Copyright and 3D Printer Designs

A further complication arises via CDPA 1988 s 51. This provides that the copyright in a design document is not infringed by making an article from it. Introduced to avoid the use of copyright to restrict the sale of third-party spares89 it means that even if prior graphical artwork exists of a product, if it is deemed to be a design document for that product then its copyright is not infringed by making a copy of that item. This was the case in Lucasfilm where the concept artwork for the Stormtroopers was held to be a design document for the helmets, so copying the latter did not infringe copyright in it.90

S 51 has additional and potentially more wide-ranging implications for 3D printer use. To produce an item a 3D printer must have a design file specifying its shape and, if appropriate, surface decoration. Questions thus arise of the legal status of such a 3D printer design file (“3DPDF”) and the IP rights relating to it.

• Copyright of 3DPDFs. Is a 3DPDF protected by copyright? It is an original work of authorship and may be protected by literary copyright in the same manner as computer software (which, as a series of instructions, it resembles); in Autospin v Beehive Laddie J accepted, albeit obiter dictum, that such a design file of such type would be so protected.91 Additionally, that diagrammatic instructions for producing an artwork or design are protected by artistic copyright was established in Lerose v Hawick,92 although under pre-1988 law, but Whitford J’s reasoning that the instructions need not depict the artwork for artistic copyright to subsist still appears sound.

• Design Files as Design Documents. Is a 3DPDF a design document within s 51? S 51(3) defines “design document” as “any record of a design, whether in the form of a drawing, a written description, a photograph, data stored in a computer or otherwise.” This clearly encompasses a 3DPDF and any doubt should be dispelled by Mackie v Behringer93 where Pumfrey J held that a document (a circuit diagram) embodying the topology rather than actual geometric shape of a design was a design document. Since a 3DPDF by definition does embody the shape of a design, it manifestly falls within Mackie.

Thus, although a 3DPDF will be protected by copyright, as a design document its copyright is, by virtue of s 51, not infringed by using it to make an item. It is still an infringement of copyright in a 3DPDF to copy it without authorisation, so trafficking in copies of a manufacturers’ official 3DPDFs for spare parts would be illegitimate. However, if a new 3DPDF is created for an object protected by design right, by, for example, using a 3D scanner to create a model of it from which a 3DPDF is derived, does the new 3DPDF infringe copyright in the original 3DPDF, or indeed any original design document? This point was considered in Mackie, and in the previous case of BBC v Pally94 which it relied on.

BBC v Pally concerned the production of garments depicting the “Teletubby” characters. The claimants said that these were 2D infringing copies of their 3D creations. Laddie J held admissible an argument that the Teletubbies did not enjoy copyright (the position later adopted in Lucasfilm) and the only infringement could have been of original artwork showing them. He then held that as such artwork was a design document (there being no prior artwork as in Kleeman) then s 51 applied to it. Crucially, he interpreted s 51(1) as meaning that copyright in a design document was not infringed by any form of copying of the subject article, including making a 2D copy of it. Thus, the garments did not infringe copyright in any original Teletubby design artwork, as they had not been directly copied from them.95

Although BBC v Pally was a preliminary hearing, Laddie J’s reasoning was specifically approved by Pumfrey J in Mackie. He held that reverse-engineering a circuit diagram from a device did not infringe copyright in the original manufacturer’s circuit diagram, as the latter was a design document. It is nonetheless still true that s 226(1)(b) CDPA 1988 makes it an infringement of design right to make a design document with the aim of allowing the item protected by that right to be reproduced. But as with ss 226(1)(a), this only applies to commercial use.

The significance of these rulings for use of personal 3D printers can be illustrated by considering the use of a 3D printer to make a copy of a vase produced by Acme PLC. Acme owns copyright in the design drawings for the vase, and it is assumed here that the vase is protected either by design registration or UDR. Bridget reverse-engineers a 3DPDF for the vase and uses it to make her own copy of it. She also posts her 3DPDF on the Internet for other 3D printer users to download and use. Charlie downloads it and prints out his own vase. Have Bridget or Charlie infringed any of Acme’s rights?

• Acme’s copyright in the vase design documents is not infringed by Bridget creating a new 3DPDF, by virtue of s 51(1) as interpreted in BBC v Pally and Mackie. Nor therefore is it infringed by Bridget posting the 3DPDF to the Internet.

• Acme’s design right in the vase design documents is not infringed by Bridget creating a new 3DPDF, as s 226(1)(b) only applies where there is commercial intent.

• Acme’s copyright of design documents is not infringed either Bridget or Charlie making a copy of the vase, by simple operation of s 51(1).

• Acme’s design protection is not infringed by either Bridget or Charlie making a copy of the vase, as neither registered design nor UDR is infringed by private and non-commercial use.

It thus seems that, within the UK at least, the provisions of design and copyright law are such that it is not an infringement to create 3D printer designs for items protected by design right, to disseminate such designs or to use a 3D printer to make copies of said item for personal, private use. As noted earlier, it will likely be an infringement to 3D-print designs based on or embodying pre-existing artwork, although in some cases the copyright for such artwork will have been greatly shortened if it has previously been industrially applied. Even so, many household items and spares will not be covered by artistic copyright and so may be legitimately reproduced by personal 3D printing.

6. Patent

Will use of a personal 3D printer infringe patent rights? As a registered right, there will be no question of law as to whether a patent exists, and the question is therefore whether 3D printer use to make a copy of a patented item falls into any statutory exemptions from infringement.

A patent grants an exclusive right to the owner for a defined period (normally 20 years) to make the subject invention, which is infringed by another making or disposing of the item without permission or offering to do so.96 “Making” includes manufacturing the invention from new and also, as explained in United Wire v Screen Repair Services (Scotland),97 undertaking such comprehensive refurbishment of a patented item as to effectively remanufacture it. “Dispose” is interpreted by Terrell as commercial sale or loan or proposals to do so.98

If Bridget buys a patented product from Acme, creates a 3DPDF for it and 3D-prints a copy, she has on the face of it infringed Acme’s patent. It might be thought that the 3D printer described earlier would be unable to reproduce any invention likely to meet the requirements for novelty and inventive step needed for grant of a patent.99 However, simple but genuinely innovative ideas still gain patent protection, such as the Haberman “Anyway” baby feeder100 that could in principle be copied in flexible plastic by a 3D printer. Furthermore, as 3D-printer technology improves, the range of patentable inventions the machines can 3D-print will widen, so the question is worth considering.

If Bridget makes the invention privately and for non-commercial purposes she does not infringe Acme’s patent.101 This exception matches that for registered designs, and Cornish notes that, as there, this does not apply to non-commercial uses that are not private, such as educational or charitable ones.102 Equally, “experimental” use is non-infringing;103 this might for example cover testing the capability of a 3D printer to reproduce a complex, patented invention.

However, should Bridget then upload her 3DPDF to allow others to make the design, she may encounter problems. Unlike registered design law, the Patent Act includes a specific provision against providing others with the means to infringe a patent. S 60(2) provides that Bridget so infringes if she “…supplies or offers to supply in the United Kingdom…any of the means, relating to an essential element of the invention, for putting the invention into effect…”. Is a 3DPDF such a means? Supplying a kit of parts may constitute “means”,104 but it is not obvious that a 3DPDF counts as such. One interpretation would be that a 3D printer, raw materials and a 3DPDF for a patented item together count as a kit for making that item, on which basis the 3DPDF is the essential “means” that the 3D printer user would require to infringe the patent, thus bringing supply of it within s 60(2). The opposite view would present the 3DPDF as a document describing the patent, which of course the patent itself does – albeit not necessarily with the level of detail necessary to directly make the item. Judicial or legislative clarification may be required to settle the question of whether a patent is infringed by providing instructions allowing a 3D printer to make it. What is clear, despite the convoluted wording of the legislation,105 is that Bridget cannot escape s 60(2) even if the use she intends others to make of the 3DPDF is, like her own, private and non-commercial.106

Where a patented invention is capable of being made by a 3D printer, it therefore appears that personal and private use is permissible, but disseminating 3DPDFs (even freely and with the intent that they be for personal and private use) may be an infringing act. Furthermore, the use of a 3D printer to repair a patented item for commercial purposes would only be legitimate if it stayed within the “remanufacture” boundary set by United Wire.

7. Trade Marks and Passing Off

7.1. Trade Marks

Trade marks are a registered right serving to indicate the trade origin of goods.107 Once registered, they last for as long as the mark is kept in use. Trade marks are infringed by use in the course of trade of the same mark on identical goods;108 infringement also arises through use of a similar mark on the same goods, or the same mark on similar goods.109 Sufficiently famous marks may be protected against competing use on any form of goods.110 Trade marks traditionally took the form of distinctive words or graphical devices, but more recently their definition has broadened to include shapes and combinations of colours. This widens the scope for infringement of a trade mark via 3D printing; the distinctive narrow-waisted Coca-Cola bottle is a trade mark of the Coca-Cola Company,111 and making a bottle of that shape might infringe it. It is not necessarily the case that it would, though, as there may an exemption for private use, or the mark may not be being used in what is deemed “the trade mark sense”.

The exemptions from design protection and patent for purely personal use have already been noted. Is there a similar exemption for trade mark use? It appears uncontroversial that purely personal use cannot be “in the course of trade” and so cannot infringe. Giving the Advocate-General’s Opinion in the ECJ hearing of Arsenal v Reed, Colomer AG noted that it would not infringe BMW’s trade mark for an individual to put it on a key ring. Indeed, he went further and cited both use in artistic work (e.g. Warhol’s use of Campbell soup tins) even for reward, and educational use, as being non-commercial use against which the mark owner had no rights. 112

Commercial use of a trade mark is likely to infringe it, though. If Bridget owns an Acme car she might create 3DPDFs for some of its spare parts, to allow herself to 3D print copies should she need them. One of these is a cap for the windscreen wash reservoir. It is of commonplace design and has to have a diameter and screw pitch to fit the reservoir opening, so it is assumed that no design protection subsists. It does however have Acme’s name moulded into it, a trade mark registered in numerous categories including vehicle parts, and Bridget’s 3DPDF includes this. Bridget makes the 3DPDF available online, and it is downloaded by Dave, who owns a small garage. One of Dave’s customers needs an Acme reservoir cap, so Dave uses his workshop 3D printer to make one from Bridget’s 3DPDF and sells it. He infringes no design right or design document copyright by doing so, but he has sold goods bearing Acme’s trade mark, which he has therefore infringed. If, though, Bridget had removed or omitted the trade mark, Dave could have legitimately labelled the cap as being for an Acme™ car as there is specific provision for a mark to be used to indicate the intended purpose of a product, such as a spare part.113

There are other circumstances where commercial use of a trade mark may not infringe it, depending on whether the mark is being used in “the trade mark sense”, i.e. as an indication to customers that there is a link between the owners of the mark and the person using it.114 The law here is complex and subject to conflicting ECJ decisions,115 but as an example it was held in Opel v Autec that sale of a model car bearing Opel’s trade mark logo was not infringing use as the mark’s use was for verisimilitude rather than as a badge of origin. Similar issues may arise from the use of personal 3D printers due to the ease of including trade marks as surface decoration.

7.2. Passing Off

A form of IP protection related to trade marks is the common-law tort of passing off. Passing off arises where the goodwill of a trader is appropriated in a way that causes confusion as to the origin of goods, as when a competitor packages or presents products in a way misleadingly similar to that of a more established and reputable trader. Passing off requires three elements, per Lord Oliver in the “Jif Lemon” case:116 that the offended party has goodwill (i.e. an established positive reputation in trade) amongst the public; that there has been misrepresentation as to the origin of goods; and that actual damage to the offended party has resulted.117

Passing off only applies to non-private use, as one cannot mislead oneself. In the car parts scenario, Dave might misrepresent the origin of the reservoir cap, either explicitly (if it bears Acme’s logo) or implicitly (if he supplies it when asked for an Acme spare).118 Presuming Acme’s goodwill, Dave has cost it trade (so damage) and is liable for passing off. Although this is in no way different in principle to existing cases of the supply of counterfeit or misleadingly-described spares, the advent of low-cost 3D printers may increase the scope for such deception – particularly, as in Jif Lemon, where goodwill exists in the distinctive shape of goods. As noted earlier, passing off may arise even where other rights, such as copyright of industrially-reproduced artwork, have expired, if the resulting goods are sold so as to appropriate the goodwill of the original rights holder.

8. Conclusion

Hitherto a technology limited to the production within industry of models or prototypes, 3D printing is, like the computer in the 1970s, becoming available to the domestic enthusiast. Like the home computer, personal 3D printing has the potential to radically change aspects of the way in which we live; we can even envisage a society where home manufacturing of many items is the norm. However, as with home computers, such developments may have wider effects. The convergence of the Internet, digitised music and media players has had dramatic consequences for music copyright. 3D printing technology may have similar implications for artistic copyright, design right, trade marks and patents, but in a rather more diverse legal framework.

Indeed, it is clear that – within the UK at least – personal use of 3D printing technology does not infringe the majority of IP rights. Registered design and patent explicitly exempt personal use, trade mark law has been interpreted as doing so, and UDR is only applicable to commercial use. There is no such exemption for copyright, but the CDPA 1988 has been interpreted so as to provide numerous instances where copyright does not subsist for certain 3D items or is substantially shortened. Furthermore, the experience of music copyright is that purely local and personal infringements (e.g. format shifting from CD to MP3) are in practice impractical to pursue. Many attractive uses of a 3D printer, such as to make spare parts, are in any case likely to be permitted by specific legal exceptions. It thus appears that the legal environment, in the UK at least, is surprisingly favourable towards the use of low-cost 3D printers for personal, and even in many cases commercial, purposes.

Equally clearly, rights holders are likely to be concerned if personal 3D printers become widespread and effective enough to impinge on commercial exploitation of their IP rights. Indications as to how they might react can be seen from the recent history of music copyright infringement via the Internet. Both technical and legal responses have been tried, including the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology and proposals to strengthen legislative measures.119 Will these be applied to restrict low-cost 3D printing?

Technical measures would quickly founder on the problem that, unlike music file-sharing, personal 3D printing does not produce an exact copy that can be digitally signed or protected with DRM. It is the sharing of (as seen, legitimately) reverse-engineered designs that is the issue, not original design documents. Although scanners and printers have incorporated anti-forgery measures to detect attempts to duplicate banknotes, such techniques are very specifically targeted at one well-defined item.120 Whist commercially-produced low-cost 3D printers might be configured to only use authorised DRM-protected 3DPDFs digitally signed by the rights holder, such measures would seriously constrain their usefulness and make them unattractive compared to open-source 3D printers.

It is worth noting, however, that this same point indicates that it may be some time before the level of detail and accuracy attainable by personal 3D printers becomes sufficient to seriously impinge upon the market for quality products, as distinct from utilitarian goods or spare parts (the reproduction of which, as has been noted, is in any case less likely to infringe IP rights.) Unlike digital audio and video copying, which produces perfect copies, copying of articles via 3D printing will be readily distinguishable from the original.

Legal measures might entail removing the personal use exemptions for registered designs, or making UDR enforceable against any copying. However, doing so would require amending the underlying EC Directive and would seriously prejudice the right of individuals to repair products they own. Furthermore, as Part 1 of this paper has explained, there may be policy grounds for seeking to encourage domestic manufacture of household products to reduce the environmental impact of the large-scale transport of them. It to be hoped that such factors might mitigate legislative attempts to extend the scope of IP rights, or reduce the personal and non-commercial use exceptions to them, in such a way as to constrain the development of 3D printing.

The most optimistic evangelist of low-cost 3D printing would probably admit that the household domestic 3D printer is years, if not decades, from widespread use. Its impact will be gradual, as unlike file-shared MP3s it will not immediately provide for the reproduction of faithful copies. Rather, as its ease-of-use, fidelity and range of materials increases, so will its attractiveness and range of applications. This should, at least, allow for a more measured consideration of the legal issues that will arise from such use. In the longer term, personal 3D printers may conceivably lead to radical changes in the nature of the manufacturing economy; the IP implications of such further developments have so far been imagined only in science fiction.121
http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-...1/bradshaw.asp





Appeals Court Guts Landmark Computer-Privacy Ruling
David Kravets

Bowing to the Obama administration, a federal appeals court Monday gutted its own decision that had dramatically narrowed the government’s search-and-seizure powers in the digital age.

The 9-2 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nullifies Miranda-style guidelines the court promulgated last year that were designed to protect Fourth Amendment privacy rights during court-authorized computer searches. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, as solicitor general last year, had urged the court to reverse itself amid complaints that federal prosecutions were being complicated, and computer searches were grinding to a halt, because of the detailed guidelines.

The original ruling required the government to cull specific data described in the search warrant, rather than copy entire hard drives. When that’s not possible, the feds were advised to use an independent third party under the court’s supervision, whose job it would be to comb through the files for the specific information, and provide it, and nothing else, to the government. The ruling said judges should “deny the warrant altogether” if the government does not consent to such a plan in data-search cases.
The ruling came in a case that dates to 2004, when federal prosecutors probing a Northern California steroid ring obtained warrants to seize the results of urine samples of 10 Major League Baseball players at a Long Beach, California, drug-testing facility. The players had been tested as part of a voluntary drug-deterrence program implemented by Major League Baseball.

Federal agents serving the search warrant on the Comprehensive Drug Testing lab wound up making a copy of a directory containing a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with results of every player that was tested in the program. Then, back in the office, they scrolled freely through the spreadsheet, ultimately noting the names of all 104 players who tested positive.

The government claimed the right to prosecute the Major League Baseball players or use the the test results that weren’t sought in the warrant, arguing that the information was lawfully found in “plain site,” just like marijuana being discovered on a dining room table during a court-authorized weapons search of a home

The San Francisco-based appeals court threw out the evidence beyond the originally sought players, and in the landmark decision last year, set out specific steps the government should follow to keep a search warrant for computer data from turning into a license for a fishing expedition.

Monday’s 58-page ruling in a rehearing of the case still excludes the evidence, and reiterates that law enforcement cannot use seized materials in a computer search that are beyond the scope of the warrant. But the ruling omits the detailed guidance to which the Obama administration had objected.

Instead, the judges urged “greater vigilance on the part of judicial officers in striking the right balance between the government’s interest in law enforcement and the right of individuals to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Matthew Parrella, the government’s prosecutor in the case, declined comment on whether the government would ask the Supreme Court to review the decision. On Parrella’s side were the two dissenting judges, Sandra S. Ikuta and Consuelo M. Callahan.

They wrote that their colleagues’ decision does not explain “why the Supreme Court’s case law or our case law dictates or even suggests that the plain view doctrine should be entirely abandoned in digital evidence cases.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...iranda-rights/





Craigslist to Explain ‘Adult’ Takedown to Congress
Ryan Singel

Craigslist is set to break its silence on why it abruptly took down its Adult Services section Aug. 30, as its director of law enforcement relations and an attorney with its outside law firm are scheduled to testify to Congress Wednesday.

William “Clint” Powell, Craigslist’s director of customer service and law enforcement relations, will testify before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security in a hearing on domestic-minor sex trafficking. Also listed on the schedule is attorney Elizabeth McDougall, a partner at Perkins Coie in Seattle. Though McDougall isn’t listed as representing Craigslist on the witness list, her law firm represents Craigslist. and she has appeared in court cases on Craigslist’s behalf.

After years of pressure from state attorneys general and anti–human-trafficking groups, Craigslist removed the Adult Services sections for U.S. cities on the eve of the Labor Day weekend with no public comment, other than to replace the link with the word, “Censored.”

Craigslist has rebuffed or ignored requests for comment or explanation, and despite telling Wired.com that it would put up a blog post explaining the decision, the company has gone to ground — not even explaining to the attorneys general if the removal is permanent.

Craigslist created the section to keep escort-service ads from appearing in its personals section, and began charging at the behest of attorneys general. Craigslist was manually screening the ads to keep out pornographic images or ads that seemed to be referring to minors, blocking more than 700,000 such ads in the last year, according to public statements by CEO Jim Buckmaster.

But those concessions did not stop the mounting criticism. A federal law protects Craigslist and sites like Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and Wired.com from legal liability for content created by users. That law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, was enacted in 1998 and has withstood numerous court challenges.

Other witnesses include five present and former members of Congress, along with Francey Hakes, the Justice Department’s national coordinator for child-exploitation prevention and interdiction; Ernie Allen, CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children; Tina Frundt, executive director of Courtney’s House; Nicholas Sensley, the Truckee, California, chief of police; Suzanna Tiapula, director of the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse; and Deborah Richardson, chief program officer of the Women’s Funding Network.

While Craigslist is one of the web’s most popular sites, it is run by a staff of fewer than 50 from an office in a residential neighborhood in San Francisco. Its yearly revenues are unknown, as it’s a privately held company, but it’s estimated to make more than $100 million a year, mostly from housing- and job-listing ads in major U.S. cities.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/...dult-congress/





The Bomb Chroniclers
William J. Broad

They risked their lives to capture on film hundreds of blinding flashes, rising fireballs and mushroom clouds.

The blast from one detonation hurled a man and his camera into a ditch. When he got up, a second wave knocked him down again.

Then there was radiation.

While many of the scientists who made atom bombs during the cold war became famous, the men who filmed what happened when those bombs were detonated made up a secret corps.

Their existence and the nature of their work has emerged from the shadows only since the federal government began a concerted effort to declassify their films about a dozen years ago. In all, the atomic moviemakers fashioned 6,500 secret films, according to federal officials.

Today, the result is a surge in fiery images on television and movie screens, as well as growing public knowledge about the atomic filmmakers.

The images are getting “seared into people’s imaginations,” said Robert S. Norris, author of “Racing for the Bomb” and an atomic historian. They bear witness, he added, “to extraordinary and terrifying power.”

Two new atomic documentaries, “Countdown to Zero” and “Nuclear Tipping Point,” feature archival images of the blasts. Both argue that the threat of atomic terrorism is on the rise and call for the strengthening of nuclear safeguards and, ultimately, the elimination of global arsenals.

As for the atomic cameramen, there aren’t that many left. “Quite a few have died from cancer,” George Yoshitake, 82, one of the survivors, said of his peers in an interview. “No doubt it was related to the testing.”

The cinematographers focused on nuclear test explosions in the Pacific and Nevada.

Electrified wire ringed their headquarters in the Hollywood Hills. The inconspicuous building, on Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon, had a sound stage, screening rooms, processing labs, animation gear, film vaults and a staff of more than 250 producers, directors and cameramen — all with top-secret clearances.

When originally made, the films served as vital sources of information for scientists investigating the nature of nuclear arms and their destructiveness. Some movies also served as tutorials for federal and Congressional leaders.

Today, arms controllers see the old films as studies in gung-ho paranoia.

“They have this very odd voice,” said Mark Sugg, a film producer at the World Security Institute, a private group in Washington. “You and I would be appalled that some hydrogen bomb vaporized a corner of what used to be paradise. But they’ve got a guy bragging about it.”

A 2006 book, “How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb,” explores the nature of the cameramen’s secretive enterprise, its pages full of declassified photographs and technical diagrams.

“They’re kind of unrecognized patriots,” said Peter Kuran, the book’s author and a special-effects filmmaker in Hollywood. “The images that they captured will, for a long time, be a snapshot of what our last century was like.”

After inaugurating the nuclear age and dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in World War II, the United States threw itself into expanding its nuclear arsenal. New designs required test detonations to make sure they worked properly. Between 1946 and 1962, the nation set off more than 200 atmospheric blasts.

The secret film unit, established in 1947 by the military, was known as the Lookout Mountain Laboratory. Surrounded by the lush greenery of Laurel Canyon, just minutes from the Sunset Strip, the lab drew on Hollywood talent and technology to pursue its clandestine ends.

“The neighbors were suspicious because the lights were on all night long,” Mr. Yoshitake recalled.

Film historians say the unit tested many technologies that Hollywood later embraced, including advanced lenses and cameras, films and projection techniques.

The cameramen fanned out from Wonderland Avenue to governmental test sites in the South Pacific and the Nevada desert, their job to chronicle the age’s fury. It put them as close as two miles from the blasts.

The visual records helped scientists do everything from estimating the size of nuclear detonations to measuring their destructive power. Mock towns went up in flames.

Mr. Yoshitake recalled documenting what a fiery explosion did to pigs — whose skin resembles that of humans.

“Some were still squealing,” he said. “You could smell the meat burning. It made you sick. I thought, ‘Oh, how terrible. If they were humans they would have suffered terribly.’ ”

The cameramen were allowed to simply witness, not photograph, their first hydrogen bomb explosions, which were roughly one thousand times more powerful than atomic blasts. The goal was to get them accustomed to the level of violence.

“The purple glow in the sky — that was so eerie,” Mr. Yoshitake recalled. “And we were not even close, about 20 miles way. It filled the whole sky.”

Hollywood stars appeared in some of the films. Reed Hadley, star of the 1950s television show “Racket Squad,” portrayed a pipe-smoking military observer who, in 1952, witnessed the world’s first hydrogen blast.

“As you can imagine, feeling is running pretty high,” he said, standing aboard a warship in the Pacific. “And there’s reason for it. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll soon see the largest explosion ever set off on the face of the earth.”

Official Washington saw many of the films. Members of Congress, who controlled the appropriation of atomic funds, got special viewings.

Atomic leaders “put on their best shows” for Congress, Charles P. Demos, a former classification official with the Department of Energy, which runs the nation’s nuclear weapons program, recalled in an interview. “They probably affected a lot of the decisions.”

The guarded enterprise lost its subject matter in 1963 when the superpowers agreed to move all testing of nuclear weapons underground, ending the spectacle of atmospheric blasts and what governments had come to regard as serious risks to human health from radioactive fallout.

In 1997, Hazel R. O’Leary, the secretary of energy under President Bill Clinton, sought to declassify the old movies.

At a news conference, Ms. O’Leary called the archive “a treasure trove” and promised to release the films after they had undergone any needed redactions for purposes of national security. Nuclear specialists say the shape and size of a weapon — especially a hydrogen bomb — can reveal design secrets.

The department’s goal was to make public up to 20 films a month and complete the declassification project in five to seven years.

Late in 1997, an event in Hollywood at the American Film Institute honored the atomic filmmakers. Present were some two dozen of the survivors.

“You had to have the cameras running before the detonation,” Douglas Wood, 75, a cinematographer, told a reporter at the gathering. If not, he said, the blinding flash “would burn the film and jam the film gate.”

Mr. Kuran, the filmmaker, organized and filmed the Hollywood event. Impressed with the skill and courage of the cinematographers, he mixed the event footage with declassified bomb imagery to produce “Atomic Filmmakers,” a video he sells on his Web site, www.atomcentral.com.

The declassifications stopped in 2001. The arrival of the Bush administration, and an outbreak of atomic jitters after the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, combined to bring about the program’s demise.

Today, the Energy Department says it has released publicly some 100 movies from the vast stockpile, which the military controls. “What you see is what we have,” said Darwin Morgan, a department spokesman in Las Vegas.

A page on the department’s Web site features links to clips from the atomic films that visitors can view free of charge and sells full versions as videodiscs for $10, plus shipping. It calls them “an enduring, awesome visual documentation of the power and destruction of nuclear weapons.” Many are available free on YouTube under the search heading “declassified U.S. nuclear test film.”

Mr. Kuran continues to work on the old movies, using high-tech methodologies to improve their clarity and restore faded images to their original glory.

“He fixes things pixel by pixel,” said Mr. Sugg of the World Security Institute. “He’s this fanatical quality guy.”

“My passion is to find ways of fixing them up,” Mr. Kuran said in an interview. “The whole point is not to lose something that needs to be preserved. I doubt very much that they’re going to be shooting off these bombs again in the atmosphere.”

Viewers include President Obama.

In April, he hosted a White House screening of “Nuclear Tipping Point.” The documentary profiles a bipartisan group of former atomic officials who are promoting a vision of the world free of nuclear arms — an objective in line with Mr. Obama’s own policies.

Mr. Yoshitake, the atomic cameraman, said the release and restoration of the images were healthy developments because their disclosure improved public understanding of the nuclear threat.

“It’s a good thing to show the horror,” he said.

And he wondered — now that the cold war is over — why advanced nations still retain more than 20,000 of the deadliest of all weapons.

“Do we need all these bombs?” Mr. Yoshitake asked. “It’s scary.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/science/14atom.html





HDCP Master Key Confirmed; Blu-Ray Has Been Cracked
Mark Hachman

The leaked HDCP master key protecting millions of Blu-ray discs and devices that was posted to the Web this week has been confirmed as legitimate, Intel representatives said late Thursday.

The disclosure means, in effect, that all Blu-ray discs can now be unlocked and copied.

Intel spokesman Tom Waldrop said after two days of investigation, the company had informed its partners and licensees that the key, which was posted online on Tuesday, was indeed legitimate.

"We have tested this published material that was on the Web," Waldrop said. "It does produce product keys... the net of that means that it is a circumvention of the code."

As a practical matter, the most likely scenario for a hacker would be to create a computer chip with the master key embedded it, that could be used to decode Blu-ray discs. A software decoder is unlikely, "but I'd never say never," Waldrop said.

"It's really hard to predict 100 percent, but that seems to be the prime scenario," Waldrop said of the possibility that a chip might be created.

Waldrop said that the company has contacted hundreds of its licensees, and still believes that the HDCP technology represents a legitimate protection. Now, however, the content industry will have to turn to legal remedies if pirated material is detected.

The "key" was posted to the Internet on Tuesday, where it was quickly picked up and disseminated via Twitter and other social media links.

HDCP (High Definition Content Protection) is the content encryption scheme that protects data, typically movies, as they pass across a DVI or an HDMI cable. The bitstream now can be recorded and decrypted, allowing an encrypted film to be copied - a huge blow to Hollywood.

HDCP was created by Intel and is administered by Digital Content Protection LLP.

Weaknesses in the HDCP protocol have been known since 2001, when Scott Crosby discovered what he claimed were flaws in the HDCP 1.0 revision. (HDCP is currently in revision 1.3.) Whether there is in fact a master key algorithm, whether that key was published, and whether users could take that key and extract previously encrypted data is unknown.

"I have no way of knowing if this is the actual master secret, but if it is, I am not surprised," Crosby said in an email on Tuesday night. "I am not the only one to predict that this could occur; the master secret can be calculated from the secret keys stored on as few as 40 TV's, computer monitors, video cards, or video players and millions of HDCP supporting video cards and TV's are in people's homes all over the world."

However, the wealth of HD content available for download at pirate sites like The Pirate Bay indicates that pirates have had no problems obtaining copyrighted HD movie data.

The code to unlock DVDs protected by the Content Scrambling System have been known for years, and are protected by the DVD-CCA, which has sued companies like RealNetworks and Kaleidescape that have attempted to market solutions that rip or store DVD content on a hard drive.

The "master key" instructions follow:

"This is a forty times forty element matrix of fifty-six bit hexadecimal numbers," the instructions say.

"To generate a source key, take a forty-bit number that (in binary) consists of twenty ones and twenty zeroes; this is the source KSV," the instructions say. "Add together those twenty rows of the matrix that correspond to the ones in the KSV (with the lowest bit in the KSV corresponding to the first row), taking all elements modulo two to the power of fifty-six; this is the source private key.

"To generate a sink key, do the same, but with the transposed matrix."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369280,00.asp





HDCP Master Key

1.
HDCP MASTER KEY (MIRROR THIS TEXT!)
2.

3.
This is a forty times forty element matrix of fifty-six bit
4.
hexadecimal numbers.
5.

6.
To generate a source key, take a forty-bit number that (in
7.
binary) consists of twenty ones and twenty zeroes; this is
8.
the source KSV. Add together those twenty rows of the matrix
9.
that correspond to the ones in the KSV (with the lowest bit
10.
in the KSV corresponding to the first row), taking all elements
11.
modulo two to the power of fifty-six; this is the source
12.
private key.
13.

14.
To generate a sink key, do the same, but with the transposed
15.
matrix.
16.

17.

18.
6692d179032205 b4116a96425a7f ecc2ef51af1740 959d3b6d07bce4 fa9f2af29814d9
19.
82592e77a204a8 146a6970e3c4a1 f43a81dc36eff7 568b44f60c79f5 bb606d7fe87dd6
20.
1b91b9b73c68f9 f31c6aeef81de6 9a9cc14469a037 a480bc978970a6 997f729d0a1a39
21.
b3b9accda43860 f9d45a5bf64a1d 180a1013ba5023 42b73df2d33112 851f2c4d21b05e
22.
2901308bbd685c 9fde452d3328f5 4cc518f97414a8 8fca1f7e2a0a14 dc8bdbb12e2378
23.
672f11cedf36c5 f45a2a00da1c1d 5a3e82c124129a 084a707eadd972 cb45c81b64808d
24.
07ebd2779e3e71 9663e2beeee6e5 25078568d83de8 28027d5c0c4e65 ec3f0fc32c7e63
25.
1d6b501ae0f003 f5a8fcecb28092 854349337aa99e 9c669367e08bf1 d9c23474e09f70
26.

27.
3c901d46bada9a 40981ffcfa376f a4b686ca8fb039 63f2ce16b91863 1bade89cc52ca2
28.
4552921af8efd2 fe8ac96a02a6f9 9248b8894b23bd 17535dbff93d56 94bdc32a095df2
29.
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108.
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115.
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117.
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126.
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134.

135.
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143.

144.
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151.
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152.

153.
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159.
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160.
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161.

162.
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170.

171.
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178.
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179.

180.
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181.
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182.
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183.
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184.
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187.
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188.

189.
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190.
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191.
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192.
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193.
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195.
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196.
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197.

198.
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199.
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201.
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202.
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203.
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205.
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206.

207.
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208.
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209.
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210.
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http://pastebin.com/kqD56TmU





Intel Threatens to Sue Anyone Who Uses HDCP Crack
David Kravets

Intel threatened legal action Friday against anybody who uses its proprietary crypto key — leaked on the internet — to produce hardware that defeats the so-called HDCP technology that limits home recording of digital television and Blu-ray.

“There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers,” said Tom Waldrop, a spokesman for the company, which developed HDCP. “Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies.”

Intel’s comments came as it confirmed that the internet leak of the “master key” to the High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection system was authentic.

HDCP is a copy-protection technology that encrypts high-definition video traveling from Blu-ray players or set-top boxes to television monitors. The technology was approved by the Federal Communications Commission in 2004, and is a standard feature in televisions, cable boxes, satellite receivers and Blu-ray players in much of the modern world.

The anonymous release this week of the HDCP master key means black market hardware makers, perhaps in China, can now create hardware capable of defeating the copy protection scheme. The leak comes just months after the movie studios persuaded the FCC to let them remotely switch-off the analog ports on your satellite receiver or cable box, so that Hollywood could sell new movie releases as pay-per-view offerings without fear that they’ll be recorded from non-HDCP outputs.

Waldrop declined comment on whether Intel has already brought in federal law enforcement to investigate the breach as a potential trade-secret violation. Federal prosecutors and the FBI in Silicon Valley also declined to comment.

The master crypto key for HDCP appeared Monday on the clipboard site Pastebin, and has since been mirrored on hundreds of other websites, in a scene reminiscent of the 1999 crack of the Content Scramble System that once protected DVDs from copying.

The HDCP master key in question — a long string of numbers — is used to generate lower-level “device keys.”

Device keys are embedded in hardware cards in set-top boxes, televisions and other electronics — enabling them to send and receive protected content in an encrypted format. The device keys verify that electronics are authorized to interact with each other.

Among the legal options available to Intel is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which prohibits the marketing of devices that circumvent encryption programs. The Hollywood studios, for example, recently sued and beat RealNetworks in a federal lawsuit after it produced a device that copied and stored DVDs, which are encrypted with the long-ago cracked Content Scramble System. Marketing in such devices could also violate criminal copyright laws.

Waldrop said Intel did not believe that a “human source” entrusted with the master key leaked it because the master is “created and structured that nobody sees it.”

“Someone has used mathematics and computers to be able to work back to what the master key is,” he said, declining to elaborate.

Paul Kocher, chief scientist at Cryptography Research in San Francisco, said in a recent interview that somebody in the business of making HDCP-compatible devices, who had access to at least 50 individual device keys, would have been able to reconstruct the master key by analyzing “mathematical similarities” in the individual device keys. That was a vulnerability in the technology, Kocher said, that was bound to be exploited.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ens-consumers/





Microsoft Changes Policy Over Russian Crackdown
Clifford J. Levy

Microsoft announced on Monday that it would essentially prohibit its Russian division from taking part in software piracy cases against government opponents, responding to criticism that it was assisting the authorities in a crackdown on dissent.

The security services in recent years have seized computers from dozens of outspoken advocacy groups and opposition newspapers in raids that all but paralyzed their operations. Officials claim that they are merely investigating the piracy of Microsoft software, but the searches typically happen when these groups are seeking to draw attention to a cause or event.

The new Microsoft policy was announced by the company’s general counsel, Brad Smith, at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash. He said the company would thwart such piracy inquiries by offering advocacy groups and opposition newspapers a blanket software license that would automatically cover them, without having to apply for it.

In other words, Microsoft would formally declare that the programs on their computers were legal, making it all but impossible for the authorities to charge these groups with stealing Microsoft software.

“We want to be clear that we unequivocally abhor any attempt to leverage intellectual property rights to stifle political advocacy or pursue improper personal gain,” Mr. Smith said in a post on the company’s blog. “We are moving swiftly to seek to remove any incentive or ability to engage in such behavior.”

The policy is intended to last until 2012 but could be extended, he said. In the meantime, he said Microsoft would step up efforts to ensure that nonprofit groups have access to a program that provides free and low-cost Microsoft software.

The policy could have repercussions beyond Russia because the company indicated that it would apply to other countries as well, though it did not identify them.

Microsoft was reacting to an article in The New York Times on Sunday that detailed how lawyers retained by the company in Russia had strongly supported prosecutors and the police in piracy cases against advocacy groups and opposition newspapers.

The lawyers made formal declarations that the company was a victim and asserted that criminal charges should be pursued, according to interviews and a review of law enforcement documents.

The article described the case of a prominent environmental group in Siberia, Baikal Environmental Wave, which was raided by the police in January just as it was planning protests against a decision by Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin to reopen a paper factory that had long polluted Lake Baikal.

Plainclothes officers took 12 computers from Baikal Wave and immediately charged the group with piracy, even though its leaders said they had only licensed Microsoft software.

Leaders of Baikal Wave said they had been disappointed that Microsoft had rebuffed their pleas for help in defending themselves against the inquiry.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/wo...pe/14raid.html






Why Pornographers No Longer Love the Web

THE adult-entertainment industry recently posted a video on YouTube in which the actresses kept their clothes on, for a change. In a clip released by the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), a trade association, they begged viewers to pay for the porn they watch online.

These are tough times for peddlers of e-sex. Craigslist, a huge online marketplace, closed the “adult services” area of its website last week, under pressure from the attorney-general of Connecticut, a crusader against prostitution. That will mildly inconvenience internet pimps, but they will soon move to new websites. Pornographers are in bigger trouble, thanks to technology. The web has spawned so-called “tube” sites, such as PornHub.com, that post short clips from users. These are typically pirated and free. That somewhat undermines the porn industry’s business model.

Under the law, the onus is on those who claim their content has been stolen to serve “takedown” notices. So porn studios face fat legal costs even as their revenues are falling. Gill Sperlein, a lawyer who works with the FSC, reckons some studios have seen sales drop by 30-40% in the past two years. For an industry that once thought itself recession-proof, that is shocking.

Since April, a group of studios has been using “digital fingerprinting” technology to make it easier for tube sites to spot pirated content. The aim is to get operators to block offending clips and replace them with legal ones linked to additional content that can be purchased. The tubes will then get a cut of the revenue generated.

But Peter Acworth of Kink.com, an online outfit that specialises in bondage, reckons that the best way to beat the tubes is to innovate more. His firm is experimenting with technology that lets viewers interact with performers in real time. And it plans to launch a social network, which will no doubt bind its members together very tightly.
http://www.economist.com/node/17046637





Open source chocolate

Rival Candy Makers Both Parse Cocoa’s DNA
Andrew Pollack

Scientists say they have determined the complete DNA sequence of the tree that produces cocoa beans, an accomplishment that is expected to vastly accelerate efforts to assure a stable supply of chocolate and to make it better-tasting and healthier.

But there are two separate groups vying for credit in what some might consider the research arm of a chocolate factory war.

The candy maker Mars is expected to announce on Wednesday that a project it financed has essentially completed the raw sequence of the genome of the cacao tree, and that it would make the data freely available to researchers.

The announcement upstages a consortium involving French government laboratories and Pennsylvania State University that is backed in part by a competitor of Mars, Hershey. This group says it has also completed the sequence, but cannot discuss it until its paper analyzing the genome is published in a scientific journal.

The rivalry between the two big chocolate companies’ projects in some ways mirrors what occurred in the race to sequence the human genome, between Celera Genomics and the publicly financed Human Genome Project. That battle was officially declared a tie.

Still, scientists in both groups say that cocoa farmers, candy companies and chocolate lovers will benefit from having two sequences, of different varieties of cacao, that can be compared.

“This will help guarantee a sustainable future for cocoa for the farmers, the consumers and Mars Inc.,” Howard-Yana Shapiro, the head of plant research at Mars, said in an interview.

Having the DNA information, he said, could help in breeding trees that have higher yields and are more resistant to diseases. The cocoa crop in Brazil, for instance, was decimated some years ago by a fungal disease called witches’ broom.

Today, about 70 percent of the world crop is grown in West Africa, and several million small farmers depend on it for their livelihoods. Scientists say it might be possible to as much as quintuple the output of beans per acre in Africa through breeding that relies on genetic information.

Mars, the maker of Snickers, M&M’S, Milky Way and other confections, announced two years ago that it would spend $10 million over five years to sequence and analyze the cocoa genome, in a project involving the Department of Agriculture, I.B.M. and some academic collaborators. The analysis is only now getting under way in earnest.

Dr. Shapiro said a goal of the project was to make sure the genetic data was available for all to use without intellectual property restrictions. Those gaining access to the data on the group’s Web site www.cacaogenomedb.org have to agree not to patent anything, like specific genes, from their findings.

He said that while Mars would gain from larger supplies and potentially lower prices for cocoa, the company would have no special advantage over other companies.

“We have a sustainable supply of cocoa, but so does everybody else,” he said.

Mark J. Guiltinan, a professor of plant molecular biology at Penn State, a leader of the other effort, said his group also intended to make its data freely available, though it would not explicitly prohibit others from patenting inventions made by using the research.

Dr. Guiltinan said the new genetic information could lead to chocolate that tastes better and contains more flavonoids, ingredients that scientists think may be healthful. He said one of his graduate students spent five years isolating and studying just four genes involved in making flavonoids.

“After we sequenced the genome,” he said, “we got all the genes in a couple of days.”

Dr. Guiltinan said there had initially been efforts to do one genome project, but that Mars and the Agriculture Department “decided to go it alone, so we decided to keep doing what we had planned to do.”

Raymond J. Schnell, a geneticist at the Department of Agriculture’s Subtropical Horticulture Research Station in Miami, said the Mars project started before the other one. He said his group wasn’t trying to upstage the other consortium’s paper, but that the genome data was being released now because it was ready.

The tree, known officially as Theobroma cacao (meaning “food of the gods”), contains about 420 million DNA units, represented by the letters A, C, G and T. That is fairly small for a plant. The human genome has about three billion units.

The Mars group used so-called second generation sequencers made by Illumina and 454, a division of Roche. But that left some gaps that had to be resolved by resorting to the older sequencing technique known as Sanger sequencing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/bu...chocolate.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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