Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 25th, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Downloading is a citizen’s right." – James Climent


"To end the war on sharing is an imperative. Its goal is bad because sharing is good; sharing is the way we build a society." – Richard Stallman


































September 25th, 2010




GNU Founder Warns of Threats to a Free Digital Society
Liz Tay

Surveillance, censorship, restrictive data formats and software-as-a-service threatened the freedom of IT users, GNU founder and free software activist Richard Stallman claimed.

In a keynote presentation at the World Computer Congress in Brisbane on Tuesday, Stallman asserted that digital society had to be "free" in order to be a benefit, and not an attack.

"It may turn out that technology is a huge disaster for society," he said, highlighting its potentials for censorship and surveillance.

He criticised Australian plans to force telcos and ISPs to store browsing and call logs in a similar fashion to the European Directive on Data Retention.

The proposal was led by the Attorney-General's department, which in July claimed that the release of details "may lead to premature unnecessary debate".

Stallman argued that it was never "too early to debate the question of whether the government should watch all of us".

"Often they don't record what people say, but who they speak with," he said about data retention.

"That's enough for them to attack whatever political opposition groups they seek to destroy. No country is safe and immune to the possibility of a tyrant," he said.

Noting that "surveillance is one of the major dangers" to a free digital society, Stallman also criticised government surveillance of cars in the UK.

Censorship was another threat, he said, highlighting Australian ISP-level filtering plans and current penalties for hosting or linking to prohibited online content.

"This is intolerable in a free country," he told local and international delegates. "It's an ugly assault on human rights."

"Digital technology is a platform for convenient censorship ... It's not just China and Iran anymore; we have to fight against censorship wherever we are."

War on sharing

Stallman named Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon and Apple in his tirade against proprietary software and "restrictive data formats".

Asserting that a user either controlled, or was controlled by, a program, Stallman said a "non-free" program essentially was an instrument that gave vendors power over users.

The term "free" was not about price, he said. Rather, it required four "essential freedoms": to run software as a user wished; to access source code and compute freely; to distribute the software; and to modify and distribute modified copies of the code.

Stallman called digital rights management (DRM) technologies "malware" that could monitor usage and said they were "explicitly designed to do things to the detriment of users".

Using software-as-a-service (SaaS) was the same as using non-free software, he said, because users did not have access to the source code or executable file.

"SaaS means that instead of doing your computing in your own computer, you do it by sending the relevant data to someone else's computer," he said.

"You absolutely can't study it, and you absolutely can't change it, and you're even further away from having control over your computing."

Art tax

Stallman called for an end to the "global war on sharing", where the use and distribution of software was controlled.

While artists and musicians were "not entitled to" compensation from listeners, Stallman said governments could introduce a tax to support their work.

He had two suggestions. In the first, governments would collect taxes and distribute these resources to authors or artists according to the cube root of their popularity so "fairly successful" artists would be adequately supported.

Alternatively, artists, authors and musicians could use a voluntary payment method that allowed users to donate small amounts at the push of a button.

"A lot of people will push that button because it feels good to support the artist," Stallman said.

"To end the war on sharing is an imperative," he said. "Its goal is bad because sharing is good; sharing is the way we build a society."
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/233002...n-sharing.aspx





New Wave Pioneer Aids an Accused Downloader
Eric Pfanner

A Frenchman convicted of copyright theft for illegally downloading thousands of songs on the Internet has found an unlikely patron: a famous film director.

Jean-Luc Godard, the 79-year old director of movies like “Breathless” and “Alphaville,” has come to the support of James Climent, a photographer who faces a fine of €20,000, or $26,250, for violating musical copyrights.

Mr. Climent, who lives in Barjac, a picturesque old town of artists and organic farmers in the Gard region of southern France, wants to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The highest French court rejected his last appeal in June, siding with music royalty collection agencies that brought the complaints against Mr. Climent five years ago.

Mr. Climent said Mr. Godard this month donated €1,000 to his fund, getting him more than halfway toward the €5,000 he needs for legal fees and other costs of taking his case to the European Court.

While Mr. Godard’s views on intellectual property are widely shared on the libertarian fringes of the Internet, they might seem surprising coming from a director who, under French law, retains editorial control over his work, and derives financial benefit from it.

Yet Mr. Godard, a pioneer of the New Wave of French cinema in the 1960s, whose films skewered the conventions of bourgeois society, clearly still delights in provoking the establishment, even if it could cost him money.

Mr. Godard’s support for Mr. Climent comes at a time when the debate over file-sharing is growing ever more politically charged in France. Mr. Climent was convicted under longstanding copyright legislation; but now the authorities are set to begin enforcement of a tough new law, under which the Internet connections of persistent pirates could be suspended.

“Downloading is a citizen’s right,” Mr. Climent said. “Even if there is only a small chance, there is a chance that a favorable judgment could change the laws across Europe.”

Mr. Godard has yet to comment publicly on Mr. Climent’s case, but he laid out the rationale for his opposition to French copyright rules in a recent interview with the cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles, in which he declared: “There is no such thing as intellectual property.”

“Copyright really isn’t feasible,” Mr. Godard said. “An author has no rights. I have no rights. I have only duties.”

Mr. Godard could not be reached, but an associate, who insisted on anonymity because the director had not authorized him to speak, confirmed the donation. Mr. Godard, the associate said, wanted to make a “symbolic” gesture to draw attention to what he described as Mr. Climent’s plight.

In addition to the money, Mr. Climent said he had received a handwritten note that included a picture of a model sailboat and the valediction, “Surcouf, Jean-Luc Godard” — referring to Robert Surcouf, a maritime pirate of the French Revolutionary era.

Mr. Godard’s support for Mr. Climent reflects some unusual twists in the debate over piracy in France, where digital sales of media content from authorized, licensed services have been far slower to take hold than in the United States.

The conservative government of President Nicolas Sarkozy has championed tough measures to strengthen intellectual property enforcement. His efforts have been fiercely resisted by the opposition Socialists, which poses a bit of a paradox since they are traditionally the party with closer links to the cultural establishment.

The centerpiece of Mr. Sarkozy’s crackdown on piracy is the so-called graduated response law, under which people who share digital songs, films or other media content could face the suspension of their Internet connections if they ignore repeated warnings to quit.

The first e-mailed warnings will be sent out to accused pirates within days, according to the government agency set up to administer the law. It could be many months, however, until the government’s resolve to disconnect people from the Internet is actually tested; more than a year can pass before accused file-sharers will receive their final warning, notifying them that they may be taken to court.

To have a chance of a hearing at the high court in Strasbourg, Mr. Climent must file suit there by the end of the year. European high court cases can drag on for years.

Nicolas Gallon, Mr. Climent’s lawyer, acknowledged that Mr. Climent’s chances of victory were slim, given the series of judgments against him in France.

“In all honesty, it will be very difficult,” said Mr. Gallon, who has previously represented other counterculture figures, like the French anti-globalization campaigner José Bové. “We are not very optimistic. But we have to take this debate as far as we can.”

In the meantime, Mr. Climent is unrepentant. He said he continued to download copyrighted material from unauthorized sites, despite the series of judgments against him. While the legal judgments against him cite downloads of more than 13,000 files, Mr. Climent said his cache had grown to more than 30,000 songs and 800 movies.

As for Mr. Godard, he has applied his libertarian values to his own works. He made his latest film, “Socialisme,” available on the Internet to coincide with its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May, several days before its release in French cinemas. An accelerated, four-minute version was uploaded to YouTube.

Mr. Godard’s disdain for much of the filmmaking establishment was also on display when he kept the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences guessing for months this year about whether he would accept an honorary Oscar. He said recently that he might travel to Los Angeles next year — schedule permitting — to collect the award.

Whether other French cultural figures will join Mr. Godard in supporting Mr. Climent remains to be seen.

“It’s like the New Wave,” Mr. Climent said hopefully. “When one of them goes on the screen, the others will follow.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/te...ht-godard.html





YouTube Can’t Be Liable on Copyright, Spain Rules
Eric Pfanner

A Spanish court on Thursday sided with Google in a dispute with the broadcaster Telecinco, saying Google’s online video-sharing service, YouTube, did not have to screen television clips for potential copyright violations before posting them on the site.

The decision, by a commercial court in Madrid, follows a similar ruling in the United States in June, when a judge rejected copyright infringement claims against YouTube by the media company Viacom. Like the American court, the judge in Madrid said YouTube was not liable as long as it removed copyrighted material when notified by the rights holder.

“This win confirms what we have always said: YouTube operates within the law,” Google said in a statement.

That principle has not always prevailed in Europe. This month, in a case involving videos of the singer Sarah Brightman, a German court said YouTube must pay compensation to musical rights holders when their work is uploaded without their permission.

Google also faces copyright claims in other YouTube-related cases in Italy, France, Belgium and other European countries. Meanwhile, media companies, royalty collection agencies and other rights holders are negotiating with Google over the sale of advertisements next to their content on YouTube.

Telecinco, a subsidiary of Mediaset, the Italian media conglomerate controlled by the family of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said it would appeal the Madrid decision, noting that the judge had recognized the company’s need to protect its copyrighted material.

“Telecinco welcomes the contents of the court decision and reaffirms its commitment to defend itself against attacks on its intellectual property rights with all the resources at its disposal,” the broadcaster said.

YouTube has argued that it is merely a “host,” like an Internet service provider, rather than a media service, like a television broadcaster. The distinction is important, because under European Union rules, hosting services are granted some protection from liability for the content they deliver to users.

Google also has a system called Content ID, which alerts media owners when their content is uploaded to YouTube, so that they can ask YouTube to take it down or to sell ads alongside it. Screening material before it is posted is unfeasible, the company says, because of the volume of video uploaded.

While lawyers say the European protections for hosts are generally similar to America’s “safe harbor” provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which reduces a host’s liability, European courts have offered a range of interpretations.

In the recent decision involving Ms. Brightman’s music in Germany, for example, the judge said YouTube’s safeguards against copyright infringement were insufficient. Google has said it plans to appeal that ruling.

The question of whether video sites like YouTube are responsible for the content posted on them has also come up in cases not related to copyright issues. Last winter, three Google executives were found guilty of privacy violations in Italy, after videos of an autistic schoolboy being bullied by classmates were posted to a different Google video-sharing service.

“The issue of when a host was liable has been getting a bit vague, and some hosts in Europe have been getting a little bit nervous,” said Kim Walker, a partner at the law firm Pinsent Masons in London. “The Spanish case pushes things back a little bit in the direction of where they are across the Atlantic.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/te.../24google.html





Hatch attack

Bipartisan Bill Would Ramp Up Anti-Piracy Enforcement Online
Gautham Nagesh

A bipartisan bill unveiled Monday would make it easier for the Justice Department to shut down websites that traffic pirated music, movies and counterfeit goods.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee including chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduced the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which would create an expedited process for DoJ to shut down websites providing pirated materials.

“Each year, online piracy and the sale of counterfeit goods costs American businesses billions of dollars, and result in hundreds of thousands of lost jobs,” Leahy said in a statement. “Protecting intellectual property is not uniquely a Democratic or Republican priority — it is a bipartisan priority.”

The other sponsors are Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and George Voinovich (R-Ohio). The bill will be added to the agenda for the Committee's Thursday business meeting.

“This much-needed bill will help law enforcement keep pace in shutting down websites that illegally sell copyrighted goods," Kohl said. "By cracking down on online piracy of television shows and movies, we hope this bill will encourage copyright owners to develop innovative and competitive new choices for consumers to watch video over the Internet."

Specifically the bill would authorize Justice to file an in rem civil action against domain names used to traffic infringing material. In order to obtain a preliminary court order against the owner of the domain or website, Justice would have to show the site's "substantial and repeated role in online piracy and counterfeiting."

The bill would require the government to publish notice of the action promptly after filing in court. There are also safeguards to allow the site or domain owner to petition the court to have the order lifted. A federal court would have final say over whether support services to a website will be cut off.

“The sale of counterfeit and pirated goods online is rampant across the world, hindering our economic growth, killing our jobs and putting our consumers at risk. These sites are illegal, and the Senators have taken an important step towards remedying this growing problem," said David Hirschmann, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Global Intellectual Property Center, in a statement.

The Chamber estimates copyright piracy from movies, music, software and video games costs the U.S. economy $58 billion in total output every year. The Chamber's projected cost of that lost output is more than 370,000 domestic jobs, $16.3 billion in earnings, and $2.6 billion in tax revenue for state, local, and federal governments.

"Addressing this problem is a win-win — good for businesses that need to protect their IP online, good for the digital marketplace and good for consumers who will benefit from both,” Hirschmann added.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...rcement-online





MPAA Wants To Know If ACTA Can Be Used To Block Wikileaks?

The folks over at Open Acta Mexico sent over their report on an open information meeting at the Ministry of the Economy in Mexico about ACTA last week. There were two oddities that they called attention to. The first is that there was an MPAA representative at the meeting, who apparently asked whether or not ACTA could be used to block access to "damaging" sites like Wikileaks. As the Open Acta Mexico people asked, what does Wikileaks have to do with movies? It seems like an interesting question, though, and I'm assuming that the MPAA is using Wikileaks as an example of a site they deem "dangerous" to get the idea across, so that later when they designate other sites (say... The Pirate Bay....) as dangerous, they can use this to make the case it should be blocked. Nice to see the MPAA is so blatant about using copyright for censorship...

The other oddity in the meeting was that apparently the ACTA negotiator who was there leading the meeting, Gilda Gonzalez Camarena, claimed that the negotiators met every day with the relevant Senate commission to keep them updated on ACTA negotiations. Yet, Open Acta Mexico notes that the Senate recently requested a full debrief on ACTA negotiators later this month. If they're getting briefings every day, why do they need a debrief?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ikileaks.shtml





Not Just ACTA: Stop the Gallo Report
Glyn Moody

One of the slightly depressing aspects of fighting intellectual monopolists is that they have lots of money. This means that they can fund their lobbyists around the world in multiple forums and at multiple levels. So, for example, we have the global Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which is being negotiated behind closed doors by the representatives of rich and powerful nations. But we also have a threat at the European level that must be fought just as doggedly.

It goes by the harmless name of the Gallo report. Here's what La Quadrature du Net, the leading digital rights organisation in Europe, has to say about it:

The Gallo report, named after its French sarkozyst rapporteur, Marielle Gallo, is a non-legislative text dictated by the entertainment industry lobbies in their crusade against online file sharing. Based on bogus evidence, it calls for disproportionate repression that could lead to severe consequences for fundamental freedoms.

If adopted, the Gallo report will open the door for the European Commission to come up with new repressive legislation imposing criminal sanctions. It will also open the door to private copyright police of the Net, also encouraged by the ACTA agreement, whereby Internet service providers and entertainment industries would be allowed to circumvent the due process of law by deciding between themselves what an infringement is and how to sanction it. Hidden behind the benign name of "cooperation" between right holders and ISPs, what lies ahead in the Gallo report is de facto censorship, automatic sanctions, and a generalized surveillance of the Net. They would impact freedom of expression, harm privacy, bypass the judicial authority, and turn the presumption of innocence into a fiction.

Not good, at every level.

There's a big vote by the European Parliament tomorrow, which gives us just a day to contact our MEPs, asking them to reject the Gallo report, and the highly-similar alternative resolution from the ALDE group. Instead, the least-worst option is the resolution from the S&D, Greens and other MEPs, which is more balanced and open-ended.

As usual, I recommend using this resource to find your MEPs' contact details. Ideally, try to ring them on their Strasbourg numbers. You'll probably only get an assistant, but that's better than nothing. Failing that, at least send them a quick email to let them know your views. Here's what I've sent using WriteToThem:

I am asking you to vote against the Gallo report tomorrow, and to vote for the alternative resolution proposed by the S&D, Greens and other MEPs. This is because the Gallo report is based on two fundamental errors that vitiate its arguments.

First, it conflates counterfeiting of physical goods like medicines with the copying of digital goods like music files. These are completely different in nature and effect, and putting them together is completely inappropriate in legislative terms.

Nobody would argue in favour of counterfeit medicines or aircraft parts, say, because there are clear health risks involved. On the other hand, sharing files does not endanger anyone's lives, and so should not be treated in the same way in terms of the measures that are brought to bear upon it: it is a question of proportionality, and the efficient use of law enforcement agencies' limited resources.

But the contrast actually goes much further, which brings us to the Gallo report's second major flaw.

The Gallo report seeks to “combat” filesharing: but this assumes that filesharing always harms content producers. There are now literally half a dozen academic reports that suggest file-sharing by individuals - not by organised crime - far from damaging the content industries, actually leads to more sales. This is simply because the file sharing acts as a kind of marketing, and drives further sales.

The Gallo report does lean on one document in support of its arguments, the Tera/BASCAP studies about supposed job losses in EU due to "piracy". However, on closer analysis (here, for example: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/ope...ole/index.htm), nearly all of those claims turn out to be based on figures supplied by the industry: there is no independent research. They do not “prove” that piracy is damaging the content industries, they merely restate the content industries' belief that this is so. But as I have indicated, there is no ample evidence to the contrary. The Gallo report is thus asking European citizens to give up important freedoms for the sake of “combatting” piracy when there is no evidence such piracy by individuals is doing any harm.

For this reason, I urge you to vote against the Gallo report, and to support the more balanced one from the S&D and Greens, which addresses the real problems of counterfeiting of physical goods, and copyright infringement by organised crime.
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/ope...-gallo-report/





Rights Holder Should Foot Filesharing Bill, ISPs Claim
Kimberley Howson

Internet service providers (ISPs) are firmly against plans to make them pay to combat online piracy, it has been claimed.

Last week, it was announced that the costs resulting from the Digital Economy Act's measures to tackle online copyright infringement will be split between rights holders and ISPs at a ratio of 75:25.

But Mark Jackson, editor-in-chief at ISPreview.co.uk, said that since ISPs do not determine what the services they provide are used for, it is not their responsibility to foot the bill.

He commented that broadband providers "are mere conduits of data" and do not control its use.

While the majority of ISPs agree with the basic principal of warning customers about their activity, as outlined by communications regulator Ofcom, they disagree on some of the details and apportioning of costs, Mr Jackson said.

"Most ISPs have concerns with the prospect of punishment, i.e. technical measures, which will only follow if the notification process fails," he stated.
http://top10.com/broadband/news/2010...ll_isps_claim/





International Internet Treaty Proposed by Europe

Keeping politics at bay
Mark Ballard

Europe has proposed an Internet Treaty to protect the net from political interference which threatens to break it up.

The draft international law has been compared to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which sought to prevent space exploration being pursued for anything less than the benefit of all human kind. The Internet Treaty would similarly seek to preserve the Internet as a global system of free communication that transcends national borders.

An early draft of the Treaty has come into our possession as governments around the world pile pressure on the United Nations to bring the Internet under political control. Their various hare-brained schemes threaten to make communication on the Internet conditional on criteria set by narrow political interests.

Elvana Thaci, the legal expert overseeing the Treaty's introduction at the Council of Europe, told THINQ the internet could not be taken for granted any longer.

The Treaty would prevent states from blocking communications on the Internet and make them co-operate in protecting the web from being rent asunder by growing security threats.

William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute, said: "Everyone's worried about national governments asserting regulatory authority over the Internet."

Dutton cited the example of the UK's Digital Economy Bill, by which the British government had sought to regulate the Internet unilateraly, bypassing the international system of governance that has for 20 years seen the network managed by an open forum of techies, business people, civil groups and governments: the 'multi-stakeholder approach', as it is known.

"It is just one example where national governments see the Internet becoming too central and too significant for them to not get involved," he told us from the Internet Governance Forum in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Worrisome chills

Governments are putting pressure on ISPs to control the net and holding them to account for the information that passes across it. The same is true of the UK as it is in China, though the latter is more frequently criticised for its attempts at censoring people's communications.

Law agencies are meanwhile trying to create a universal internet ID scheme so they can have a foolproof way of identifying anyone on the net. This is regardless of the Internet being both a public and a private space, where people ought to be free to associate and communicate without being monitored and made to answer to the authorities.

It is a "worrisome" trend, said Dutton, and one that could have a "chilling effect" on the future of communications.

Bill Graham, head of global strategy at the Internet Society, said governments are pressing the United Nations to put the Internet under direct political control.

"We are concerned that the process will leave the mutli-stakeholder model and will go into the push and pull of international politics," he told us.

The multi-stakeholder system of control, conducted through the Internet Governance Forum and overseen operationally by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), means any new ideas for regulating the net are vetted by all interested parties, including governments. If governments are allowed to take sole control of the net, everyone else will barred from meetings where decisions that decide its future are made.

The United Nations decides next month whether to renew the IGF's mandate or whether questions of Internet governance should be for governments to decide alone. Governments are also asking whether they should assert more control over ICANN.

World government of the Internet

The Internet Treaty will attempt to set the Internet's multi-stakeholder government in international law. It will effectively create a world government of the Internet, and establish principles by which it must be governed "as a public asset for the Internet community as a whole".

The Treaty's General Principles of Internet Governance will protect the technical foundation on which the network was based, demanding that it operate using open standards - that all networks connected to the Internet remain interoperable with all other networks.

The principle of net neutrality will be established in international law, ensuring that the network will not discriminate against the traffic that passes across it. Any discrimination will be left to the end points, the clients, for people to decide for themselves what they censor, what communications they will or will not countenance.

"The end-to-end principle should be protected globally", says the draft law. Both these and other principles seek to prevent the Internet becoming fragmented and thus losing the inherent power on which it has thrived, commercially, culturally and politically.

The Treaty also proposes making the system of internet governance adhere to human rights law, protecting the principles of freedom of expression and association that have arisen naturally from the net's non-discriminatory technology.

It will also force governments to co-operate with one another to tackle the net's security vulnerabilities. It should force them to exchange data about security problems and work collaboratively to solve them and keep net criminals and military aggressors in their animal pens.

"Being a trans-national communication network, the challenges... of the Internet can be effectively addressed only on a multilateral basis," says the draft Treaty.

States co-operate to protect the global internet "mutually, in good faith" and in collaboration with all interested stakeholders, it says.
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/9/20/int...oposed-europe/





Supreme Court Eyeing RIAA ‘Innocent Infringer’ Case
David Kravets

The U.S. Supreme Court is weighing into the first RIAA file sharing case to reach its docket, requesting that the music labels’ litigation arm respond to a case testing the so-called “innocent infringer” defense to copyright infringement.

The case pending before the justices concerns a federal appeals court’s February decision ordering a university student to pay the Recording Industry Association of America $27,750 — $750 a track — for file-sharing 37 songs when she was a high school cheerleader. The appeals court decision reversed a Texas federal judge who, after concluding the youngster was an innocent infringer, ordered defendant Whitney Harper to pay $7,400 — or $200 per song. That’s an amount well below the standard $750 fine required under the Copyright act.

Harper is among the estimated 20,000 individuals the RIAA has sued for file-sharing music. The RIAA has decried Harper as “vexatious,” because of her relentless legal jockeying.

The justices, without comment, asked the RIAA to respond to Harper’s petition to review the appellate court’s ruling. Harper’s challenge weighs whether the innocent-infringer defense to the Copyright Act’s minimum $750-per-music-track fine may apply to online file sharing. Generally, an innocent infringer is someone who does not know she or he is committing copyright infringement.

The justices have not granted review of Harper’s case, but Wednesday’s action by the high court substantially increases the chances that an RIAA file sharing case targeting an individual will be heard for the first time, sometime in the upcoming term that begins Oct. 4.

The high court usually grants less than 1 percent of petitions sent to it. According to a recent study, if the court requests briefing on a petition, as it did on the Harper case, the odds increase to 34 percent. The RIAA had originally waived its right to respond to the petition.

A Texas federal judge had granted Harper the innocent-infringer exemption to the Copyright Act’s minimum fine, because the teen claimed she did not know she was violating copyrights. She said she thought file sharing was akin to internet radio streaming.

The appeals court, however, said she was not eligible for such a defense, even though she was between 14 and 16 years old when the infringing activity occurred on LimeWire. The reason, the appeals court concluded, is that the Copyright Act precludes such a defense if the legitimate CDs of the music in question carry copyright notices.

“Harper cannot rely on her purported legal naivety,” the New Orleans–based 5th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, 3-0.

Attorneys for Harper told the justices that she should get the benefit of the $200 innocent-infringer fine, because the digital files in question contained no copyright notice.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...me-court-riaa/





Senior Judge Warns of End To File-Sharing Cash Demands
enigmax

A senior judge has given the clearest indications so far that patience could be running out with “pay up or else” letters currently being sent out in their thousands to alleged file-sharers. At a hearing to authorize yet more, the judge called the schemes “a huge sledgehammer to crack a nut” adding that once the Digital Economy Act is in force, further applications may not be successful.

After tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of letters sent out to alleged file-sharers demanding cash settlements, there are some early signs that the practice is starting to grind gears in the UK.

On Monday, lawyers Gallant Macmillan were in court on behalf of their client Ministry of Sound, a huge independent music label, to extract yet more identities of alleged file-sharers from UK ISPs.

The hearing, Ministry of Sound Recordings Ltd v Plusnet Plc, went ahead at 2:30pm in London before judge Chief Master Winegarten (CMW). Other ISPs detailed were BT, Sky and O2/Be Unlimited.

Among those who have been tirelessly campaigning against these actions, it’s long been hoped that CMW, a senior high court judge with a wealth of experience in this area, would take a more critical approach with these cases than he has done in the past. On Monday, for once, things didn’t go quite to plan for the applicants.

Although it’s thought that more than 100,000 identities have been handed over to lawyers like Gallant Macmillan and ACS:Law, worryingly CMW confirmed during the hearing that he didn’t possess the technical expertise to assess the nature or reliability of the evidence being used in the cases.

Not only that, CMW also told the court that he had been surprised at the amount of mail he had received from concerned individuals and remarked that this wouldn’t happen if there wasn’t a large degree of misaccusation.

“There wouldn’t be this hue and cry unless you were pursuing people who were innocent,” he told the applicants.

Condemning the actions as a “huge sledgehammer to crack a nut”, CMW pondered, “I can’t understand why in these thousands – hundreds of thousands – [of letters sent out] no-one has been sued.”

Of course, anyone following these cases knows why. This is all about money and one successfully contested case means the whole scheme comes to an end and these companies aren’t going to risk that.

However, there could be a light at the end of the tunnel. Chief Master Winegarten told the court Monday that once the Digital Economy Act is fully in force, further applications for court orders of this nature may not be successful.

CMW also refused to grant Ministry of Sound’s (MoS) application for a court order. He explained that he had received by letter “concerns from the public” that must be addressed before he could agree to it. The applicant (MoS) must respond on that by 27th September. The hearing itself was adjourned to be concluded 4th October 2010.

This decision to delay by CMW is particularly unusual and suggests that he is becoming more concerned by these actions. It is, however, commendable that he is doing so because without him trying to at least offer some protection to the public, these court orders would simply be granted.

The reason? Almost universally the UK’s ISPs have shown absolutely no desire to protect their customers, despite being well aware that people are being wrongfully accused. As an example, let’s look at Plusnet, the ISP shown as the primary target in this application by Ministry of Sound.

For months now there has been a storm brewing among Plusnet’s customer base. Dissent against the company’s approach to its handling of these court orders and particularly its relationship with ACS:Law has generated a near 40 page and often heated discussion on its customer service forums.

TorrentFreak has been in contact with Richard Fletcher of Plusnet previously but it seems that for legal reasons, whatever they might be, he hasn’t really been able to answer either our questions or those posed by Plusnet customers. Today there will be many more.

Despite promising that a member of their group’s legal team would be present in court to hear this Ministry of Sound application Monday, no one with any legal ability was sent, just a single observer who sat at the back in silence. On Monday evening, Richard Fletcher posted the following response:

I know a number of you have expressed disappointment at our approach, and that we are co-operating wholly with ACS:Law – I wish to be clear that Plusnet consider each application for Norwich Pharmacal Relief [court orders to reveal customer identities], however the decision as to whether a Norwich Pharamcal Order should be made, or not is a decision for the Court and Plusnet only disclose information when it is compelled to do so by the Court.

However, as TorrentFreak pointed out to Richard in an email yesterday morning (we also asked several questions and provided a summary of what happened in court Monday but have yet to receive a reply), this statement is missing the point somewhat.

The facts are that the judge hearing this case cannot find against the applicant (Ministry of Sound) because the ISP (Plusnet) is the defendant and Plusnet as a company are privately agreeing not to contest these court orders even before they are formally asked for in court. This type of agreement was illustrated very clearly when Plusnet didn’t even bother to send a lawyer.

While we all know that an ISP must comply with a court order once it’s issued, Plusnet and virtually every other ISP in the UK are giving the likes of Gallant Macmillan and ACS:Law a free ride by agreeing not to contest in advance.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. ISP TalkTalk have told TorrentFreak time and again that they refuse to cooperate with these companies and – surprise, surprise – TalkTalk are never required to hand over the details of their customers since they are never included on a court order application. All this despite being one of the country’s largest ISPs.

While the dawning of the Digital Economy Act may put an end to the schemes of ACS:Law and Gallant Macmillan, that time is still a while off and in the meantime many more thousands of people will receive letters and untold numbers of those will be wrongly accused as has been the case up to now.

It is clear. The country’s ISPs, Plusnet included, have the power to do something about this. Do the ISPs share the reservations of Chief Master Winegarten? Will they have the courage to add momentum to his concerns?

Will any UK ISP have the courage to oppose the next court order application based on Chief Master Winegarten’s concerns? If you are one such ISP, tell us. We’ll be happy to let the world know about it.
http://torrentfreak.com/judge-warns-...emands-100922/





TalkTalk Seeks Judicial Review of Digital Economy Act
Joseph Andrews

TalkTalk has stepped up its protest against the Digital Economy Act by launching a judicial review, it has been announced.

The internet service provider - an outspoken critic of the controversial filesharing legislation from the start - wants the courts to overrule the statute on grounds of insufficient MP scrutiny.

Andrew Heaney, Executive Director of Strategy and Regulation at TalkTalk, said the haste with which the act was passed before the general election meant that many of its provisions were not fully debated.

The Conservative Party, as the main opposition, voted in favour of the digital economy bill during the parliamentary wash-up period, seemingly to ensure Labour dropped its plans for a 50p per month broadband tax.

Mr Heaney explained that new Liberal Democrat MP Julian Huppert has become the latest politician to raise doubts over the legitimacy of the act.

"We hope that more MPs raise their concerns - in spring next year the Code of Practice that Ofcom is currently finalising will come before parliament for approval," he added.

This presents an opportunity for MPs and Lords "to correct the errors of the previous parliament", Mr Heaney said.
http://top10.com/broadband/news/2010...l_economy_act/





France Starts Reporting ‘Millions’ of File-Sharers
Ernesto

This week the controversial French three-strikes anti-piracy law Hadopi went live. Copyright holders are currently in the process of sending out tens of thousands of IP-addresses of alleged infringers to Internet service providers, and this will increase to over a million in a few weeks. The ISPs have to hand over the identities of the associated accounts to the authorities within a week, or face a fine of 1500 euros per unidentified IP-address.

Under France’s new Hadopi law, alleged copyright infringers will be hunted down systematically in an attempt to decrease piracy. Alleged offenders have to be identified by their Internet providers and they will be reported to a judge once they have received three warnings.

A judge will then review the case and hand down any one of a range of penalties, from fines through to disconnecting the Internet connection of the infringer.

The French anti-piracy outfit Trident Media Guard has been chosen by the entertainment industry to monitor and report illegal uploaders in France. The company, known globally for its pollution of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks with fake data, recently started tracking down thousands of illicit file-sharers.

According to a report from PCINpact one of the major ISPs confirmed that the first batch of IP-addresses was submitted just a few days ago. This is the final step before alleged file-sharers receive warning letters.

The scope of the operation is mind boggling. The copyright holders will start relatively ‘slowly’ with 10,000 IP-addresses a day, but within weeks this number is expected to go up to 150,000 IP-addresses per day according to official reports.

The Internet providers will be tasked with identifying the alleged infringers’ names, addresses, emails and phone numbers. If they fail to do so within 8 days they risk a fine of 1,500 euros per day for every unidentified IP-address.

To put this into perspective, a United States judge ruled recently that the ISP Time Warner only has to give up 28 IP-addresses a month (< 1 per day) to copyright holders because of the immense workload the identifications would cause.

All the major French ISPs have to cooperate with the identification process, and the first 'victims' are expected to be disconnected or fined in a few months when they receive their third warning. At this point it is doubtful whether Hadopi will in fact decrease the piracy rate.

There are quite a few options for BitTorrent users to file-share anonymously, and other download options such as Usenet are not monitored at all.
http://torrentfreak.com/france-start...harers-100921/





US ISP Disconnects Alleged Pirates for 6 Months
Ernesto

The United States Internet Service provider Suddenlink has effectively implemented a three-strikes policy for repeated copyright infringers. After three DMCA notices, alleged copyright infringers are disconnected from the Internet for six months, without a refund. According to a company representative, the DMCA requires them to take such drastic measures.

Just a few days ago France started warning thousands of file-sharers as part of the controversial Hadopi anti-piracy law that was introduced there earlier this year. Upon receiving their third warning, alleged copyright infringers will lose their internet connection for several weeks.

Across the pond in the United States, there is an Internet provider that has single-handedly implemented a similar scheme. Suddenlink, one of the top 10 cable companies in the country, disconnects subscribers for six months after they have received three DMCA notices. According to a company representative, Suddenlink is required to take this action under the DMCA.

TorrentFreak has been in contact with one of the customers who had his Internet connection disconnected for three alleged copyright violations. The affected subscriber provided detailed chatlogs with Suddenlink where the following explanation for the drastic measure is given.

Customer: I want to reconnect my internet service. They said I got 3 DMCA letters and they said that by law I had to be disconnected. Is that true?

Suddenlink rep: Yes, your internet was disconnected due to DMCA. When the internet is disconnected due to DMCA, it can not be reconnected for a minimum of 6 months.

Customer: The DMCA makes that requirement?

Suddenlink rep: Yes.

Customer: So you’re stating, for the record, that by law, the DMCA law, that you have to disconnect users for receiving 3 DMCA letters?

Suddenlink rep: You have no choice in the matter.

Suddenlink rep: It is the DMCA policy that it can not be reconnected for 6 months.

Suddenlink rep: It may be the DMCA policy or it may be the way we go about following the DMCA guidelines.

Customer: The law states that?

Suddenlink rep: Once the 3rd offense occurs, it can not be reconnected for 6 months.

Suddenlink Rep: The information I have on the DMCA states: This law was enacted in 1998 to protect against illegal downloading of copyrighted material like movies, music, etc. As an Internet Service Provider (ISP), Suddenlink , and other ISPs, must implement a policy of terminating internet service of customers who repeatedly share copyrighted files.

The explanation given above is pure nonsense of course. The DMCA does not and never has required ISPs to disconnect users. For some reason Suddenlink customer support was told to communicate this lie to its users. What is true, however, is that Suddenlink will disconnect subscribers after three alleged warnings.

TorrentFreak contacted the company and we were told that this measure is hidden in their Terms of Service. Although there is no word about a three-strikes policy, we did find the following sentence that could be used to justify the disconnections.

“If you continue to transfer Copyrighted Material illegally, you are violating Suddenlink’s policies and Suddenlink may take further action, including limiting your Internet download capacity, suspending or terminating your account, or a range of other measures.”

In reality, this means that subscribers will be disconnected from the Internet for 6 months without a refund. The subscriber we talked to was informed about the penalty over the phone and never received any documents to back it up.

Although Suddenlink’s three-strikes policy is the most extreme, the company is not the only US Internet provider that has implemented it. Cox is using a similar scheme, but with the major difference that the disconnection is limited to a few hours, not six months.

Disconnecting users based on claims of copyright holders and without any form of trial seems to be an extreme measure for a company that provides such an essential service as Internet access. Suddenlink told TorrentFreak that they are within their rights, just like Comcast said two years ago when they started blocking BitTorrent traffic.
http://torrentfreak.com/us-isp-disco...months-100924/





ACS:Law Anti-Piracy Law Firm Torn Apart By Leaked Emails
enigmax

Earlier this week, anti-piracy lawyers ACS:Law had their website taken down by a 4chan DDoS attack. Adding insult to injury, owner Andrew Crossley was harassed at home in the middle of the night by prank phone calls. Now, through a fault with his website, hundreds of megabytes of private emails have been exposed to the public and uploaded to The Pirate Bay. To those hoping that this is a MediaDefender-type fiasco all over again, trust us – it is.

After coordinating DDoS attacks against the MPAA, RIAA and anti-piracy company AiPlex Software this week, 4chan turned to a new target.

Anti-piracy lawyers ACS:Law, who send out tens of thousands of letters demanding cash-settlements from often innocent Internet subscribers, became the new target. The company, which is headed up by lone principal Andrew Crossley, is widely hated among file-sharers and innocents alike and with 4chan’s Operation Payback now in full swing, payback is the operative word.

After prank telephone calling Crossley in the middle of the night during the week, it now seems that 4chan are aiming to tear his professional life apart, as they have obtained and are distributing a 350mb file of the company’s website which includes countless company emails.

So how were they obtained?

“Their site came back online [after the DDoS attack] – and on their frontpage was accidentally a backup file of the whole website (default directory listing, their site was empty), including emails and passwords,” a leader of the attacking group told TorrentFreak. “The email contains billing passwords and some information that ACS:Law is having financial problems.”

Financial problems? Interesting. Many tens of thousands of people who received letters from ACS:Law are also experiencing the same problem, having already paid up several hundred pounds each to make non-existent lawsuits go away.

“We’re still sorting through it. There’s a lot of stuff here to go through. But, basically, we were told we were less important than a 10 minute late train, or a queue for coffee by Andrew,” the attackers’ spokesman told us, adding:

“Payback is a bitch, isn’t it Andrew?”

The file is currently seeding on The Pirate Bay but most leechers are stuck with less than 60%. It is, however, available publicly on the web already. We have managed to secure one of those copies and are examining it now.

A little taster from emails read so far:

– ACS:Law and USCG (of Hurt Locker fame) appear to be cooperating
– Crossley boasts that his retained lawyer “literally wrote the SRA rules!”
– Crossley accuses Which? of ‘defamation’ and articles designed to “demean” and “denigrate”
– Crossley gives veiled warnings to Which? that he could sue them for libel
– Internal documents reveal intentions to take down Slyck.com
– Email from ACS:Law client which states the following:

Andrew,

Thank you for your email.

Our client remains concerned over the accuracy of the data that you provide and the methods used to obtain such data. It has been closely monitoring the recent press that your Firm has attracted regarding complaints to Which, in relation to demand letters that have incorrectly been sent to innocent internet subscribers, accused of copyright infringement. Your letter of 30 October 2009 was not satisfactory, in that it did not fully deal with the concerns raised in our letter of 21 July 2009, save as to state that you and your client disagree. Clearly there are flaws in your data gathering process. These are important and valid concerns that need to be satisfactorily addressed, so as to protect the rights of our client and innocent customers.

- Crossley brags about his financial status:

Spent much of the weekend looking for a new car. Finances are much better so can put £20-30k down. May go for a Lambo or Ferrari. I am so predictable!

(later emails reveal he bought a Jeep Compass 2.4CVT)

– Email evidence that ACS:Law deliberately does not target two UK ISPs, TalkTalk and Virgin Media
– Crossley writes to monitoring company NG3Sys and says the following:

You are going to receive on average about £1,000.00 per 150 letters sent. This can be seen from the first tiny batch. Because we have good quality product being monitored and captures are high on the data we have, when the letters get sent out the figures therefore equate as follows:-

Phase 1: 2,500 letters, estimated revenue to you: £16,666.00
Phase 2: est. 4,000 letters, estimated revenue to: £26,666.00
Phase 3: est. 18,000 letters, estimated revenue to you: £120,000.00
That is data collated to date! I have more titles to give you, more data will be captured.

Please stay with this.

After falling out with NG3Sys, ACS:Law sent this out to other potential monitoring company:

Dear Sirs,

I own and operate the most prominent law firm in the UK that carries out file sharing litigation. We are one of only two law firms in the UK currently carrying out this work.

We have a number of copyright clients and we have one client in particular,with a large number of copyright titles that have been collecting good numbrs of IP addresses. We have two phases run through and the latest phase has been collecting circa 20,000 IP addresses a month for UK alone. Germany also is gathering good figures.

Our current UK-based data monitoring company has let us down and we need to find another monitoring company to supply our IP data from now. There are currently 300 titles (all adult film titles – all legal and UK certificated) that were being actively monitored.

If you are interested in monitoring for us and to do so quickly, please let us know and we can talk further. We will be able to supply much more data if this works and would like to push the data into Germany also.

We are proposing to pay 10% of net revenues (after ISP costs and postage costs of letter=) to the data monitoring company. On current figures that equates to circa £8,800.00 (€9,750.00) to the monitoring company per 1,000 letters sent. Our next phase we anticipate 10,000 letters to be sent in the UK alone. These are estimates only, but based on current collections are accurate.

I look forward to hearing from you.

- Series of highly abusive emails from Crossley to his ex-wife, where in part he tells her to “Fuck off and keep out of my life” and accuses her of being with a “drug addled hermit”.

- Crossley tells his assistant Terence Tsang to “be more discreet with this stuff” when referring to our article where we revealed ACS:Law looked to buy anti-piracy tracking software on the cheap.

Of course, as with our coverage of the MediaDefender leaked emails back in 2007, TorrentFreak’s coverage of this debacle will be extensive.
http://torrentfreak.com/acslaw-anti-...emails-100925/





Music Streaming Service Rejects Canada
Steve Lambert

Millions of people in the United States and Europe are using these and other services to stream music to their mobile devices. For monthly fees ranging from free to $15 (U.S.) (usually depending on whether you're willing to pay to avoid embedded advertisements), users can choose from millions of songs — simply type in the name of a tune and enjoy it anywhere there's a decent cell signal.

But in Canada, the idea is barely getting off the ground, and one of the biggest players in the industry is blaming royalties sought by major record labels.

“These rates ... are astronomical,” Tim Westergren, founder of California-based Pandora wrote in an email to The Canadian Press.

“As long as rights societies take this approach, they will prevent Pandora from launching to Canadian users.”

Re:Sound, the agency that collects music royalties in Canada on behalf of record companies and performing artists, has filed a request with federal regulators. Starting next year, it wants to charge web-based music sites that stream to mobile devices the greater of two figures: 45 per cent of the site's gross revenues in Canada or 7.5-tenths of a cent for every song streamed. That's on top of other royalties music services must pay to SOCAN, a separate agency that represents songwriters and music publishing companies.

The proposal, which needs approval from the Copyright Board of Canada, has prompted Pandora to abandon any short-term plans to come to Canada. Canadians who visit the company's website are told that, due to licensing restrictions, they cannot sign up for the service.

“Radio delivered over AM/FM in Canada pays a rate of 2.1 per cent of revenue,” Westergren writes. “In other words, the Canadian music labels are demanding that radio delivered over a mobile phone via the Internet pay over 20 times what radio delivered over AM/FM pays.”

Pandora officials also say rates are much lower in the U.S. and United Kingdom. Each country uses a different formula and classifies music services differently, so an apples-to-apples comparison can be difficult.

In the U.S., commercial webcasters pay just under two-tenths of a cent per song streamed and a minimum of $25,000 per year. For some categories, U.S. regulators also stipulate that the total cannot be less than 25 per cent of gross revenues.

In the United Kingdom, the rate for streaming music is just under 0.0796 pence — roughly 1.2-tenths of a cent Canadian — per song with an additional 15 per cent added for dubbing rights on some licences.

While Pandora is turning its back on Canada, other services are willing to pay the fees.

“I don't think that would hold us back. It would just end up making the price to the consumer more expensive,” David Hyman, CEO of California-based MOG, said in an interview.

“The consumer would suffer. Adoption would be lower because the price would be higher. But that's not surprising, you know. That's the music industry. They charge too much for everything.”

MOG plans to come to Canada in the not-too-distant future, but has balked so far because of the country's relatively small population.

“There's a lot of additional engineering work that's required ... so we're going to another large country over in Europe (first),” Hyman said.

One service is already in Canada. Rdio started up in the summer with a relatively small but growing library, and CEO Drew Larner said the numbers look good. Rdio worked out licensing deals with SOCAN and Re:Sound last year.

“I believe there's money to be made in Canada. There's a desire to consume this kind of service, presumably, in Canada,” Larner said from Los Angeles.

Re:Sound says its proposed 2011 fee structure is based on what exists in other countries, and says anyone who feels it is too high can make their case to the copyright board.

“I would encourage them and any other services to come forward to the hearing before the copyright board,” said Re:Sound president Ian MacKay.

“Ultimately, it's up to the copyright board to determine what is effectively the fair market value of these rights.”

MacKay also says Re:Sound is willing to negotiate. He says the agency recently lowered its proposed rates for gyms and other fitness clubs that play music. That issue is also still being considered by the copyright board.

“We looked at it and said, ‘OK, actually, we agree. We need to restructure the way this rate is,“’ MacKay said.

The music industry, meanwhile, says its fees are not the problem. It says music-related businesses are reluctant to enter Canada because of the country's reputation as a file-sharing haven where music fans can download songs illicitly without fear of penalty.

“Why would you spend a lot of money trying to build a service in Canada when Canadians take so much without paying for it?” said Graham Henderson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, which represents major record labels.

“(Canadians) just seem to have no appetite for a legal marketplace.”

Henderson feels streaming-to-mobile services can have a future in Canada, however, and he would like to see deals worked out.

“Any service that involves remuneration for artists is something we're interested in,” he said.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1720247/





Forget Digital Tunes; Analog Music on the Upswing

Vinyl record sales are at the top of a four-year sales trend
Lucas Mearian

Seventy-two years ago last week, the 33-1/3 long-playing vinyl record was invented. And while most music fans have moved on to streaming Bluetooth audio, MP3s and other digital music formats, LP sales are higher today than at any time in recent history.

According to Nielsen Entertainment, vinyl record sales have been booming over the past four years. In 2009, 2.5 million albums were sold in the U.S., up from 1.88 million in 2008.

In other words, digital music dominates, but analog isn't dead yet.

"As surprising as it may sound, LP sales are up again this year, and 2009 had the highest number of LP sales ever since we started tracking them," said David Bakula, senior vice president of analytics at Nielsen Entertainment.

From 2006 to 2007, vinyl record sales rose 14%, from 858,000 to 990,000.

The same can't be said for CDs, sales of which have continued on a downward spiral that began after a peak in 2001. In the first half of this year, CD album sales were down about 18% to 110.3 million units from 134.6 million units during that same time last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

During that same period, vinyl albums represented just 1.2% of all physical album sales, but that's up significantly from last year when they represented only two-thirds of a percentage point between January and June, Bakula said.

And, while CDs still make up the lion's share physical album sales, their decline seems likely to continue. Earlier this month, at an event announcing Version 10 of iTunes, Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted that Apple had removed the image of a CD from the app's icon. It replaced the CD image with a music note inside of a circle to indicate, as Jobs put it, the future of music: Apple's new Ping social networking music service.

Like Twitter and Facebook, iTunes' Ping lets people follow online friends as well as musical artists by building top-10 lists.

Overall, record company revenues fell by 7.2% to $17 billion in 2009. At the same time, sales of digital music formats -- such as MP3s -- rose by 9.2% to $4.3 billion, which is 10 times what they were in 2004, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). Physical album sales -- made up of CDs, tapes and vinyl albums -- fell by 12.7% globally.

Digital music sales now account for 25.3% of all trade revenues to record companies. In the U.S., digital sales account for nearly half -- 43% -- of the recorded music market, according to the IFPI.

So why, in the midst of a continuing boom in digital music sales, are vinyl record sales growing? Older audiophiles, who've long maintained that vinyl albums more accurately reproduce an artist's music, make up a large portion of the buyers shelling out money for LPs, Bakula said.

In addition, a younger generation of music fans is also buying vinyl albums because of the medium's historical significance and because they appreciate the album cover artwork and the extensive liner notes available with LPs.

Record companies are also making it easier for younger consumers to listen to their artists even when mobile. For example, many new vinyl albums come with digital download cards that have a code that customers can redeem online to get the digital version of a record at no additional cost, Bakula said.

"The trend sure does seem sustainable," Bakula said. "And the record industry is really doing a lot of cool things to not only make the format come alive but to make it more exciting for consumers."
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...on_the_upswing





Stevie Wonder to UN: Ease Copyrights for the Blind
Bradley S. Klapper

Stevie Wonder pressed global copyright overseers on Monday to help blind and visually impaired people access millions of science, history and other audiobooks, which they cannot read in electronic form.

The blind singer told the U.N.'s 184-nation World Intellectual Property Organization that more than 300 million people who "live in the dark" want to "read their way into light," and the current copyright system denies them an equal opportunity.

The current legal framework means that institutes for the blind in different countries may be required to make multiple audiobook versions of the same work, said Richard Owens, WIPO's director of copyright and electronic commerce.

Owens said this leads to higher costs that are passed on to the listeners. It also limits access to blind and partially blind people in poor countries, which cannot afford to make their own versions of everything from science textbooks to best-sellers, he said.

The U.N. agency has been trying for six years to revamp its global copyright framework so that it better accounts for new media, such as audiobooks. For the blind and visually impaired, the goal is to create a clearinghouse so that published material can be traded around the world and translated into new, readable formats.

But the problem of access for such copyrighted material goes to the heart of a growing crisis in the world of copyright protection, as the Internet increasingly muddies laws that were created for traditional media. Whereas wide exceptions exist for books in Braille, WIPO officials say there is confusion over how these benefits can be translated into the digital age.

Proponents of a new agreement say the same benefits that digital books provide most consumers — lower costs and better storage and accessibility — should be extended to those with disabilities. The United States and European nations that export large amounts of published material are somewhat hesitant because of concerns over an erosion of intellectual property rights, and want to avoid a binding treaty.

Wonder called for a compromise and teased the diplomats.

"Please work it out. Or I'll have to write a song about what you didn't do," said the 60-year-old singer known for such hits as "Superstition" and "I Just Called to Say I Love You."

Complicating the talks are the demands of African countries, which are seeking even larger copyright loopholes. They want their libraries and academic institutions to be able to skip licensing agreements so that they can provide audiobook access for larger communities.

Wonder, who has sold tens of million of albums, said any agreement should respect the authors "who labor to create the great works that enlighten and nourish our minds, hearts and souls." He insisted on a practical solution so that blind and visually impaired people get "the tools to think their way out of poverty."
http://www.newstimes.com/default/art...ind-666075.php





Why Bricks and Clicks Don’t Always Mix
Randall Stross

NOT so long ago, in 2005, Blockbuster seemed invincible. However you preferred to rent movies — in stores or online — the company was ready to accommodate you.

At the time, Netflix could offer only one way of obtaining a movie (the mail) and one way of returning it (the mail). It was clicks, with no bricks.

Of course, we now know that Netflix has done just fine. In January 2005, its shares traded in the $11 range. On Friday, they closed at $140.46, giving the company a market capitalization of $7.35 billion.

As for Blockbuster, which was spun off from Viacom in 2004, it’s now a penny stock, and its woes are as visible as the “Closing” banner in the window of a store in your neighborhood. The company recently warned that it might file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Last week, its chief financial officer resigned. (A spokeswoman for Blockbuster declined a request for an interview with a company representative.)

Blockbuster’s experience shows that executing a bricks-and-clicks strategy entails a high degree of difficulty, managing not just two very different kinds of businesses, with dissimilar domains of expertise, but also a third challenge: integrating two separate systems. An online-only service can remain a best-in-class operation because its executives focus, focus, focus on just the online business.

In the handicapping of likely winners and losers in 2005, Netflix seemed unlikely to survive, let alone thrive. Netflix is “not a sustainable business,” Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities, told SmartMoney that year. In his view, successful Internet businesses tended to “have a bricks-and-mortar component.” That is, retail stores.

Mr. Pachter made an eminently reasonable point: that adding an online store to the market-leading retail chain should make for a strategically unassailable position of strength, at least on paper.

I called Mr. Pachter, who is now managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities. “Blockbuster should have won — and didn’t. I was wrong,” he said. He ticked off the ways that Netflix executed flawlessly and Blockbuster stumbled when it tried to replicate Netflix’s online service.

“I honestly believe most consumers would like a bricks-and-clicks solution,” Mr. Pachter said. “The reality is, they do have it. It’s just two different companies: Netflix and Redbox.” With video-rental vending machines that sit within grocery stores, drugstores and other retail hosts, Redbox uses the bricks of its partners.

Steve Swasey, vice president for corporate communications at Netflix, joined the company in March 2005, and he recalls that in his job interview he voiced concerns about Netflix trying to compete head-on with Blockbuster. There were plenty of other concerns, too: Wal-Mart, which also offered video subscriptions by mail (and would later abandon the service); rumors that Amazon.com would enter the business at any moment; and cable companies’ video on demand. Working at Netflix then “was not for the faint of heart,” he said.

Yet from Netflix’s vantage point, he says, Blockbuster’s decision to delay its entry into mail delivery put the giant at an enormous competitive disadvantage. Doing so postponed learning how to bring operating costs down. For example, several years earlier, Netflix’s engineers modified industry-standard bar-code sorting machines to handle the odd-shaped envelopes used for DVDs. The machines read the DVD bar code that peeks through the window on the envelope, print the address, then send the envelope to the appropriate ZIP code bin for bulk mailing — dashing through 5,000 envelopes an hour. The modifications of the machines were done secretly, Mr. Swasey says: “The outside world didn’t know.”

It took Blockbuster almost three years after introducing its online store to get around to integrating its bricks with its clicks, with its “Total Access” program started in 2006. The plan initially delighted Blockbuster’s most profitable customers — its high-volume renters, who now could rent and return to the store as many movies as they wanted for one low, flat rate. But it would be a financial disaster for the company. Subscription prices for unlimited-exchange plans had to be raised sharply, alienating many of those same high-volume users.

Today, with broadband widely available, Netflix offers a streaming option to its members for many titles and now has that second distribution channel it was lacking. Or hundredth channel, depending on how you count the various devices, like the iPad, that can stream Netflix movies.

While Netflix has added digital distribution channels, so, too, have rivals, and it’s not clear that the subscription model will always do as well against the à la carte offerings of video on demand. Amazon never introduced a mail subscription service for video, as was once expected, but instead offers video on demand. And Redbox’s ever-spreading machines are another version of à la carte rentals.

THE allure of bricks and clicks has misled industry watchers in other cases. When Barnes & Noble started its online store in 1997, it, too, seemed a giant capable of sweeping aside an online-only company like Amazon with an effortless swat. But that giant had to compete against the world’s most highly evolved, easiest-to-use e-commerce Web site, with the most abundant customer reviews and all the other features that Amazon had developed early because its executives, from the top down, were focused on nothing but that Web site.

I bet that the author of an article titled “Why Barnes & Noble May Crush Amazon,” which appeared in Fortune magazine in September 1997, now feels no small embarrassment about underestimating Amazon.com’s chances at the time.

Actually, I’m certain that the author feels embarrassed: he was I.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/business/19digi.html





Turn on, Tune in to a Trippy Afterlife
Dennis Lim

FEW filmmakers are as invested in the physical experience of film viewing as Gaspar Noé. Hailed by some as a visionary provocateur, dismissed by others as a gimmicky sensationalist, this 46-year-old Argentine-born Frenchman calibrates his films for a physiological response. He doesn’t stop at getting inside the heads of his viewers; he wants to affect their bodies and toy with their nervous systems.

His first feature, “I Stand Alone” (1998), about a sociopathic butcher in provincial France, is interrupted throughout by shock cuts and the sounds of gunshots, effects that Mr. Noé likened to an epileptic seizure. (Borrowing a trick from William Castle, the film also pauses for a preclimax “fright break,” allowing squeamish viewers to evacuate the theater.) “Irrevérsible” (2002), notorious for a nine-minute rape scene in a Paris underpass, induces nausea through strobe lighting, a motion-sick camera and a low-frequency background hum of the sort used by riot police for crowd control.

There was also his television experiment in mass hypnosis. Inspired by an old B-movie called “The Hypnotic Eye” and by American television evangelists, it was broadcast in France in the wee hours of New Year’s Day in 1995, causing a minor panic among some drunken revelers who turned on their TV sets to find a sinister hypnotist attempting to talk them into a stupor.

“It’s funny to shock people, play with them, make them cry, get them horny,” Mr. Noé said matter of factly in a recent telephone interview. “You’re just playing with very simple emotions.”

With their emphasis on cattle-prod manipulation and brute sensation, Mr. Noé’s films can be assaultive — which, if you ask the filmmaker Harmony Korine, a friend of Mr. Noé’s and something of a kindred spirit, is precisely their appeal. “He wants to kick you around a little bit,” Mr. Korine said in an e-mail. “It is nice to be pummeled every once in a while. He wants the films to change you —to make you sick and love it.”

But Mr. Noé’s latest and mellowest film, “Enter the Void,” which had its premiere at Cannes last year and opens in New York on Friday, is less apt to sicken than to stimulate a trance state. Loosely adapting its ideas about post-mortem consciousness from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the film imagines death as “the ultimate trip,” as one of the characters puts it, echoing the slogan for Stanley Kubrick’s quintessential head movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

This time Mr. Noé’s chief attention grabber is the sustained use of a first-person point of view. The camera assumes the perspective of its protagonist, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a young American drug dealer in Tokyo. When he blinks, the image fades briefly to black. When he takes a hit of a powerful hallucinogen, the screen turns into a pulsing kaleidoscope of Day-Glo shapes and patterns.

Not long into the movie Oscar is fatally shot in a police raid, at which point the camera becomes one with his levitating spirit, which relives key moments in his life, watches over his grieving sister (Paz de la Huerta) and embarks on a woozy aerial tour of neon-lighted Tokyo.

“Enter the Void” fulfills a longtime ambition of Mr. Noé’s to make a movie that is a trip from start to finish, less a narrative than a space to turn on, tune in and drop out. “Since I was 20, 21, I’ve wanted to do a movie about altered states of consciousness and astral projection,” Mr. Noé said. He recalls exactly when he came up with the idea for “Enter the Void.” He was high on mushrooms and, while channel-surfing, came upon the 1947 film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s “Lady in the Lake,” which is told through the eyes of its detective hero, Philip Marlowe.

The device has been used in other films, including “Dark Passage,” another 1940s noir, and Kathryn Bigelow’s “Strange Days,” but rarely to the extent that it was deployed in “Lady in the Lake.” The subjective-perspective gimmick is usually constraining, but in “Enter the Void” it becomes a pretext for some highly fanciful (and digitally abetted) maneuvers, since the camera is standing in for a ghostly presence unimpeded by physical laws. Mr. Noé’s gliding, lunging camera passes through walls, soars into the clouds and even worms its way into the occasional bodily orifice.

Mr. Noé said his youthful drug taking greatly informed the film’s psychedelic visions, in particular an experience in Peru with ayahuasca, a psychoactive potion that brought on what he described as “visions which looked like the movie ‘Tron.’ ” (The Ken Russell film “Altered States” depicts an ayahuasca ceremony.) “You’re in the middle of the jungle with Indians screaming around you,” Mr. Noé said, “and then you have visions of flying saucers, and you see Mayan temples that look like Las Vegas.” (He considered Las Vegas as a location for “Enter the Void,” but opted for Tokyo, which has a more vibrant club culture and resembles, he said, “a huge pinball machine.”)

Not that Mr. Noé recommends mixing trippy cinema with actual drugs. “The worst thing when you watch movies on drugs is that everything is interesting,” he said. “You can end up liking the worst movie.”

Mr. Noé’s sensationalist bent remains evident in “Enter the Void,” which features a head-on car crash (repeated several times) and an abortion procedure complete with bloody fetus, but it appears to have been tempered by an almost warm and fuzzy New Age sensibility. The movie never approaches the nihilism and brutality of “I Stand Alone,” whose antihero keeps up a running monologue of racist and misogynist invective, or “Irrevérsible,” which, besides the scandalous rape scene, shows someone’s skull being smashed with a fire extinguisher.

The theme of regression in “Enter the Void” — a literal journey back to the womb — dovetails with the childlike wonder that seems to be the common denominator linking Mr. Noé’s formative movie experiences. The first film he saw, at the age of 4, was “Jason and the Argonauts,” with its magical Ray Harryhausen special effects. He was not much older when “The Ten Commandments” nearly made a believer out of him. (“I thought, oh, maybe I should be a Christian because the guy opened the sea.”) His teenage mind was blown by seminal psychedelia like “2001” and Kenneth Anger’s “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.” More recently “Avatar” moved him to tears.

Despite being comparatively benign, “Enter the Void” has proved as polarizing as Mr. Noé’s other films. “Some people don’t like to be brainwashed with the eyes for two hours and a half,” he said.

For his part Mr. Noé is relieved finally to be done with a movie that he has wanted to make for more than half his life. Even his last film, “Irrevérsible,” with its vertiginous, long-take cinematography, was conceived largely as a trial run for “Enter the Void.” Mr. Korine, who visited the Tokyo set, recalled an atmosphere of daredevil, anything-goes experimentation. “He was hanging cameras off of rooftops that were attached to bungee cords; the cameramen looked more like puppeteers,” Mr. Korine said. “It was obvious he was going after a different type of film.”

Since almost every shot required digital manipulation, the postproduction process was no less strenuous than the shoot. (Mr. Noé worked with the effects company BUF, whose credits include “Fight Club” and two “Matrix” movies.) “The hallucinogenic scenes were done by people who have never done acid,” Mr. Noé said, so he had to provide ample reference material: paintings, photographs, excerpts from films and music videos.

After the complicated logistics of “Enter the Void” Mr. Noé is scaling back. He had been invited to make a 3-D pornographic film, and was tempted by the offer. (“I was a big porn-film consumer as a teenager,” he said.) But he said that he had decided to keep the next film small and bare bones, even though it would still be about sex. “An erotic movie that is close to my own life,” he said, “where sex is portrayed as it happens in real life.”

The erotic film “is the only dream I have clear in my mind now,” Mr. Noé said. “I don’t have a career. I just have dreams that I want to accomplish.” Filmmaking is the act of “trying to put your dreams on a flat screen outside of your brain,” he added. “I think cinema is meant to replace the need of dreaming.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/movies/19void.html





John Goeken, Who Led MCI and Splintered AT&T, Is Dead at 80
Graham Bowley

John D. Goeken, a tenacious entrepreneur who founded the long-distance carrier MCI, which changed the shape of the nation’s telephone industry by challenging the monopoly of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, died Thursday night in Joliet, Ill. He was 80. Mr. Goeken, who died at Provena St. Joseph Medical Center, had been treated for esophageal cancer for five years, said Patricia A. Schneider, executive vice president for the Goeken Group Corporation. He lived in Plainfield, Ill., near Chicago.
Mr. Goeken, known as Jack, had a long track record of creating communications companies, often in the face of stubborn opposition and heavy skepticism. His ventures include Airfone and In-Flight Phone, which are credited with establishing air-to-ground telephones, and the digital network used by FTD florists.

But probably his most important achievement was MCI, which he began in the early 1960s to sell more two-way radios. The company would eventually lead to a transformation in the telephone industry, bringing lower-cost long-distance service to millions of American households and businesses.

In 1974, Mr. Goeken helped start the process that broke up AT&T. An antitrust suit against AT&T that year, in which MCI was joined by the Justice Department, led to a settlement in which AT&T agreed to break itself apart a decade later. This allowed AT&T, nicknamed Ma Bell, to supply long-distance service and seven regional companies, known as the Baby Bells, to provide local phone service.

Mr. Goeken (pronounced GOH-ken) started his company, originally called Microwave Communications Inc., after being discharged from the Army, where he had learned about microwave technology.

At the time, truckers who traveled between Chicago and St. Louis could not use two-way radios to speak with their home offices because their radio signals covered only shorter distances. Mr. Goeken’s answer was to construct a network of microwave towers following the routes between the two cities to relay the radio signals from one tower to the next.

However, Mr. Goeken’s business was challenged by other communications companies. They filed briefs with the Federal Communications Commission opposing Mr. Goeken’s company, beginning MCI’s long battle to establish itself.

In 1971, the F.C.C. granted MCI the right to compete with AT&T for long-distance service throughout the United States. In 1974, MCI filed its antitrust suit against AT&T, accusing it of unfairly thwarting the expansion of competition in the long-distance market.

Mr. Goeken left MCI that same year after disagreement over the direction of the company with William G. McGowan, whom he had brought in to help raise money when MCI became a long-distance phone company for consumers. Mr. Goeken had wanted MCI to focus on businesses. Mr. McGowan went on to become the longtime chairman of MCI Communications, as the company was later known. Mr. Goeken kept an ownership stake when he left.

He soon went on to new projects. Mr. Goeken established the computer network, known as FTD Mercury, that florists used to wire flower orders.

In spite of industry skepticism that executives would not want to make calls from the air, he founded Airfone. He sold an interest to the GTE Corporation to raise cash, but eventually left after disagreement over how GTE wanted to run the operation.

While not all of his businesses were profitable while he was at the helm, Mr. Goeken was considered a brilliant entrepreneur, a man with vision and dogged determination who created companies that changed industries.

In 1995, he started the Goeken Group, a holding company to foster new ventures. His most important current new business was PolyBrite International, an LED lighting company developing energy-efficient technology to replace traditional bulbs, Ms. Schneider said.

Ms. Schneider, who knew Mr. Goeken for 35 years, said that the company was destined to have a big impact on the lighting industry and was typical of his way of doing business.

“He found an area and went for it in a big way,” she said. “He could change the world.”

She remembered he was called “Jack the Giant Killer” for his business battles. But she added that he had not changed throughout his life and that he and his wife had lived in the same house in Plainfield for more than 40 years.

John D. Goeken was born on Aug. 22, 1930, in Joliet, where his father was a Lutheran minister. He stayed close to Joliet all his life, Ms. Schneider said, and developed a passion for flying, becoming a pilot.

Mr. Goeken is survived by Mona Lisa Goeken, his wife of 59 years, whom he had met in high school; his daughter, Sandra Goeken Miles, who worked closely with Mr. Goeken in his business ventures; a son, John, and seven grandchildren.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/bu.../19goeken.html





Code That Tracks Users’ Browsing Prompts Lawsuits
Tanzina Vega

Sandra Person Burns used to love browsing and shopping online. Until she realized she was being tracked by software on her computer that she thought she had erased.

Ms. Person Burns, 67, a retired health care executive who lives in Jackson, Miss., said she is wary of online shopping: “Instead of going to Amazon, I’m going to the local bookstore.”

Ms. Person Burns is one of a growing number of consumers who are taking legal action against companies that track computer users’ activity on the Internet. At issue is a little-known piece of computer code placed on hard drives by the Flash program from Adobe when users watch videos on popular Web sites like YouTube and Hulu.

The technology, so-called Flash cookies, is bringing an increasing number of federal lawsuits against media and technology companies and growing criticism from some privacy advocates who say the software may also allow the companies to create detailed profiles of consumers without their knowledge.

Unlike other so-called HTML cookies, which store Web site preferences and can be managed by changing privacy settings in a Web browser, Flash cookies are stored in a separate directory that many users are unaware of and may not know how to control.

Ms. Person Burns, a claimant who is to be represented by KamberLaw, said she knew cookies existed but did not know about Flash cookies.

“I thought that in all the instructions that I followed to purge my system of cookies, I thought I had done that, and I discovered I had not,” she said. “My information is now being bartered like a product without my knowledge or understanding.”

Since July, at least five class-action lawsuits filed in California have accused media companies like the Fox Entertainment Group and NBC Universal, and technology companies like Specific Media and Quantcast of surreptitiously using Flash cookies. More filings are expected as early as this week.

The suits contend that the companies collected information on the Web sites that users visited and from the videos they watched, even though the users had set their Web browser privacy settings to reject cookies that could track them.

“What these cases are about is the right of a computer user to dictate the terms by which their personal information is harvested and shared. This is all about user control,” said Scott A. Kamber, 44, a privacy and technology lawyer with KamberLaw who is involved with some of the cases. The suits have been filed by firms including Parisi & Havens and the law office of Joseph H. Malley.

One lawsuit contends that Clearspring Technologies and media companies including the Walt Disney Internet Group “knowingly authorized” the use of online tracking devices that would “allow access to and disclosure of Internet users’ online activities as well as personal information.” Others say that the information was gathered to sell to online advertisers.

In August, Clearspring and Quantcast issued statements on their company blogs addressing the suits. Clearspring clarified its use of Flash cookies and said the legal filings were “factually inaccurate.” The company said it used Flash cookies, also known as Flash local storage, “to deliver standard Web analytics to publishers.” The post also stated that data was collected at the aggregate level including unique users and interaction time, but did not include personally identifiable information.

Quantcast’s blog post said that the company “uses Flash cookies for measurement purposes only and not for any form of targeted content delivery.”

Specific Media did not respond to requests for comment. Counsel for the media companies in the cases declined to comment; representatives of companies that had not yet been served with the suits also declined to comment.

Some privacy advocates said that despite the companies’ claims, if enough data is collected over time, advertisers can create detailed profiles of users including personally identifiable data like race and age in addition to data about what Web sites a user visits. They also take issue with the fact that Flash cookies can be used to restore HTML cookies that have been deleted from a user’s computer, circumventing a user’s privacy settings.

“The core function of the cookie is to link what you do on Web site A to what you do on Web site B,” said Peter Eckersley, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The Flash cookie makes it harder for people to stop that from happening.”

According to Adobe, more than 75 percent of online videos are delivered using Flash technology, with media companies also using it to serve games and animation to users. The company says that Flash cookies are intended to be used for basic Web functions like saving a user’s volume and language preferences or remembering where a user left off on a video game.

In a public letter to the Federal Trade Commission in January, Adobe condemned the practice of restoring cookies after they had been deleted by a user. The company provides an online tool on its Web site to erase Flash cookies and manage Flash player settings. At least one suit, however, claims that the controls are not easy to reach and are not obvious to most Web users.

Chris Jay Hoofnagle, 36, one of the authors of a University of California, Berkeley, study about Internet privacy and Flash cookies that has been used in several of the legal filings, said the recent spate of suits pointed to a weakness in federal rules governing online privacy.

“Consumer privacy actions have largely failed,” Mr. Hoofnagle said. The lawsuits, he added, “actually are moving the policy ball forward in the ways that activists are not.”

Complaints about online privacy are now migrating to mobile technology. Last week, a lawsuit was filed by three California residents against a technology company called Ringleader Digital saying that the company used a product called Media Stamp that “acquired information from plaintiff’s phone and assigned a unique ID to their mobile device.”

The suit says that the information collected by the unique ID, using a technology called HTML 5, allowed Web site operators “to track the mobile devices’ Internet activities over multiple Web sites.”

In a statement, Bob Walczak Jr., Ringleader’s chief executive, said, “Our intent since the inception of the company has been to build a mobile advertising platform that users can control.” He added that Ringleader was working on “new ways for consumers to be able to verify for themselves that their opt-outs have taken effect.”

John Verdi, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, faulted the Federal Trade Commission for not being more aggressive on privacy issues, focusing largely, instead, on self-regulation.

“The F.T.C. has been inactive on this front and has failed to present meaningful regulation on this,” he said. “There’s wide evidence that online tracking is not being controlled by self-regulation.”

Christopher Olsen, an assistant director in the division of privacy and identity protection at the agency, said it had hosted a series of roundtable discussions about online and offline privacy challenges from December to March and planned to issue a report in the next few months to address those issues.

The agency is investigating several companies, but Mr. Olson declined to comment on the specifics.

Other efforts to address online privacy are taking place at the Congressional level. In July, Representative Bobby L. Rush, Democrat of Illinois, introduced an online privacy bill that would, among other things, require companies to disclose how they collect, use and maintain the personal information on users and to make those disclosures easy for users to understand.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/te.../21cookie.html





On the Web, Children Face Intensive Tracking
Steve Stecklow

A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children's websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults.

The Journal examined 50 sites popular with U.S. teens and children to see what tracking tools they installed on a test computer. As a group, the sites placed 4,123 "cookies," "beacons" and other pieces of tracking technology. That is 30% more than were found in an analysis of the 50 most popular U.S. sites overall, which are generally aimed at adults.

The most prolific site: Snazzyspace.com, which helps teens customize their social-networking pages, installed 248 tracking tools. Its operator described the site as a "hobby" and said the tracking tools come from advertisers.

Starfall.com, an education site for young children, installed the fewest, five.

The research is part of a Journal investigation into the expanding business of tracking people's activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.

The tiny tracking tools are used by data-collection companies to follow people as they surf the Internet and to build profiles detailing their online activities, which advertisers and others buy. The profiles don't include names, but can include age, tastes, hobbies, shopping habits, race, likelihood to post comments and general location, such as city.

Selling the data is legal, but controversial, especially when it involves young people. Two companies identified by the Journal as selling teen data initially denied doing so. Only when shown evidence that they were offering data for sale—in one case, it was labeled "teeny boppers"—did they confirm it.

The Journal found that many popular children's sites are run by small companies or mom-and-pops, and privacy practices vary widely. Among the sites studied, the Journal identified one, y8.com—featuring kids' games with names like "Crush the Castle 2" and "Dreamy Nails Makeover"—that has had ties to a pornography site, xnxx.com, according to Internet registration records. Y8 installed 69 tracking files on the Journal's test computer. It also asks users to provide an email address to register.

"Children are safe on y8," a site employee named Olivier G. said in response to emailed questions. "We are *strongly against* the exposure of children to any adult content." Asked twice about y8.com's apparent ties to a pornography site, he didn't respond.

The Journal's study focused on sites popular with young people according to comScore Media Metrix. (Full methodology, as well as previous privacy investigations in this series, at wsj.com/WTK.)

It's rarely a coincidence when you see Web ads for products that match your interests. WSJ's Christina Tsuei explains how advertisers use cookies to track your online habits.

Companies placing the tracking tools say the information they collect is anonymous and mainly used to deliver targeted ads or to gauge ads' effectiveness. They also say they don't collect "personally identifiable information" like names or email addresses and generally don't specifically target children.

Collecting data on minors is regulated, albeit lightly. The only federal restrictions require parental consent to collect names and other personal information of children under 13 in most circumstances. Currently, the Federal Trade Commission is considering whether changes to the law are warranted. No changes are expected before next year.

Many kids' sites are heavily dependent on advertising, which likely explains the presence of so many tracking tools. Research has shown children influence hundreds of billions of dollars in annual family purchases.

Google Inc. placed the most tracking files overall on the 50 sites examined. A Google spokesman said "a small proportion" of the files may be used to determine computer users' interests. He also said Google doesn't include "topics solely of interest to children" in its profiles.

Still, Google's "Ads Preferences" page (google.com/ads/preferences) displays what Google has determined about web users' interests. There, Google accurately identified a dozen pastimes of 10-year-old Jenna Maas—including pets, photography, "virtual worlds" and "online goodies" such as little animated graphics to decorate a website.

"It is a real eye opener," said Jenna's mother, Kate Maas, a schoolteacher in Charleston, S.C., viewing that data.

Jenna, now in fifth grade, said: "I don't like everyone knowing what I'm doing and stuff."

A Google spokesman said its preference lists are "based on anonymous browser activity. We don't know if it's one user or four using a particular browser, or who those users are." He said users can adjust the privacy settings on their browser or use the Ads Preferences page to limit data collection.

As part of the project, the Journal calculated an "exposure index" for each site, taking into account the number of trackers on the site and data-handling practices of those trackers. Snazzyspace.com ranked highest in exposing users to potentially aggressive tracking. A site owned by Viacom Inc., neopets.com, where kids can create make-believe "pets," had the highest exposure index of sites popular with children under 12.

How to Protect Yourself and Your Children

Almost every major website you visit is tracking your online activity. See what you can do to protect your child's privacy . Plus, below, a step-by-step guide to fending off trackers on all sites.

Viacom's Nickelodeon TV network accounted for eight of the 50 sites in the survey. On average, the eight installed 81 tracking tools, close to the 82 average for all 50 sites. One, a games site called Shockwave.com, installed 146; another game-and-video site, nick.com, installed 92.

The vast majority of tracking files on Nickelodeon sites were installed by other firms, such as ad networks. A Nickelodeon official said those services "are collecting data on what users like to see and do based on their web behaviors and activities."

Many tools raise no privacy concerns. They might merely remember, say, where users pause in a game, so they aren't forced to start every time they visit.

But other tools are used to develop profiles of web-surfing behavior. Those can be used to deliver targeted ads that home in on children's concerns—say, dieting ads aimed at youngsters worried about their weight.

The number of tracking files installed by any specific site can vary from visit to visit. In the Journal's examination, the math-games site coolmath4kids.com installed 60 on a test computer.

However, when Angela La Fon, a teacher in Big Island, Va., checked her own computer with a tracker-detection tool called Abine, she found the site had installed 89 "cookies" on her machine. (Cookies are little text files that can give a computer a unique identity, which data-collection companies can use to track people's activities).

"That's creepy," says Ms. La Fon, who encouraged her six-year-old son, Lee, to use the site. "I wouldn't have thought I would have had 89 cookies, period. Much less than from one site."

Karen Davis, chief executive of coolmath4kids.com, declined to be interviewed, citing concern for her own privacy. In an email she wrote, "We are assured by our service providers that all data gathered is anonymous and compliant with all laws and privacy policies."

Several sites, including coolmath4kids.com, modified their privacy policies after being contacted by the Journal with its findings. For example, the math-games site no longer states that using cookies to collect anonymous data is "no big deal." Ms. Davis said she made the changes "to provide as much transparency as possible for our users."

A spokeswoman for weeworld.com, where kids can create a WeeMee avatar and chat with friends, said that as a result of a Journal analysis, it changed its privacy policy to provide a clearer explanation of how to disable cookies. Weeworld.com installed 144 tracking tools in the Journal's test.

Of the 50 sites examined by the Journal, only one had no posted privacy policy, the gaming site y8.com. Records at archive.org, a library of previous versions of websites, indicate that y8.com launched in the late 1990s as a sex site for adults at least 21 years old.

Y8.com became a game site aimed at a younger audience in 2006. ComScore reports that 12.2% of its users are 2 to 11 years old, and 22.8% are 12 to 17.

Internet registration records from December 2006 show that y8.com and a hard-core sex site, xnxx.com, shared the same mailing address in France, plus the same email address. Later, the sites changed their contact information and no longer share the same addresses. On the website games.xnxx.com, which bills itself as offering "fun sex games," there is a prominent link at the top and bottom of the page to "non-adult" games on y8.com.

The y8.com employee, Olivier G., didn't respond to questions about who owns the site or its apparent relationship with xnxx.com. He wrote in an email that y8.com is "strongly against the collection and use of personal information." He also said "we don't do anything" with email addresses provided by users.

Parents hoping to let their kids use the Internet, while protecting them from snooping, are in a bind. That's because many sites put the onus on visitors to figure out how data companies use the information they collect.

Gaiaonline.com—where teens hang out together in a virtual world—says in its privacy policy that it "cannot control the activities" of other companies that install tracking files on its users' computers. It suggests that users consult the privacy policies of 11 different companies.

In a statement, gaiaonline.com said, "It is standard industry practice that advertisers and ad networks are bound by their own privacy policy, which is why we recommend that our users review those." The Journal's examination found that gaiaonline.com installed 131 tracking files from third parties, such as ad networks.

An executive at a company that installed several of those 131 files, eXelate Media Ltd., said in an email that his firm wasn't collecting or selling teen-related data. "We currently are not specifically capturing or promoting any 'teen' oriented segments for marketing purposes," wrote Mark S. Zagorski, eXelate's chief revenue officer.

But the Journal found that eXelate was offering data for sale on 5.9 million people it described as "Age: 13-17." In a later interview, Mr. Zagorski confirmed eXelate was selling teen data. He said it was a small part of its business and didn't include personal details such as names.

BlueKai Inc., which auctions data on Internet users, also said it wasn't offering for sale data on minors. "We are not selling data on kids," chief executive Omar Tawakol wrote in an email. "Let there be no doubt on what we do."

However, another data-collecting company, Lotame Solutions Inc., told the Journal that it was selling what it labeled "teeny bopper" data on kids age 13 to 19 via BlueKai's auctions. "If you log into BlueKai, you'll see 'teeny boppers' available for sale," said Eric L. Porres, Lotame's chief marketing officer.

Mr. Tawakol of BlueKai later confirmed the "teeny bopper" data had been for sale on BlueKai's exchange but no one had ever bought it. He said as a result of the Journal's inquiries, BlueKai had removed it.

The FTC is reviewing the only federal law that limits data collection about kids, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or Coppa. That law requires sites aimed at children under 13 to obtain parental permission before collecting, using or disclosing a child's "personal information" such as name, home or email address, and phone and Social Security number. The law also applies to general-audience sites that knowingly collect personal information from kids.

The FTC is considering, among other things, whether to broaden "personal information" to include data "collected in connection with online behavioral advertising."

To try to avoid having to comply with Coppa, some sites state they prohibit kids under 13 from visiting. But that's easy for children to circumvent. Jenna Maas, the Charleston 10-year-old, opened an account on weeworld.com (which prohibits kids under 13 from registering) simply by fibbing about her age.

In Jenna's case, she got her mother's permission first. Ms. Maas says she lets Jenna visit sites for older kids "as long as I can monitor it."

Claire Quinn, weeworld.com's chief of safety, says the site has "tools in place" to prevent underage kids from joining, but "there is obviously no great age verification system out there."

FTC officials said website operators can't be held responsible if children lie about their age unless they glean from other information that a child is under 13.

Some experts believe the federal law also should apply to collecting data on teens, though not necessarily by requiring parental consent.

"We need clearer explanations of what's happening to their data online, that they can understand—not the kind of legalese in a privacy policy that basically obscures what's really going on," says Kathryn C. Montgomery, a professor of communication at American University.

—Tom McGinty contributed to this report
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...523187146.html





evercookie -- never forget.

DESCRIPTION

evercookie is a javascript API available that produces
extremely persistent cookies in a browser. Its goal
is to identify a client even after they've removed standard
cookies, Flash cookies (Local Shared Objects or LSOs), and
others.

evercookie accomplishes this by storing the cookie data in
several types of storage mechanisms that are available on
the local browser. Additionally, if evercookie has found the
user has removed any of the types of cookies in question, it
recreates them using each mechanism available.

Specifically, when creating a new cookie, it uses the
following storage mechanisms when available:
- Standard HTTP Cookies
- Local Shared Objects (Flash Cookies)
- Storing cookies in RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached
PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out
- Storing cookies in Web History (seriously. see FAQ)
- HTML5 Session Storage
- HTML5 Local Storage
- HTML5 Global Storage
- HTML5 Database Storage via SQLite

TODO: adding support for Silverlight Isolated Storage, and using
Java to produce a unique key based off of NIC info (thanks Arshan).

Got a crazy idea to improve this? Email me!

http://samy.pl/evercookie/





Texts From the Lifeguard Chair Are Raising Concerns Over Safety
Bob Tedeschi

The summer of 2010 will be remembered for its record heat. But it has provided a different memory for Bernard J. Fisher II, the director of health and safety at the American Lifeguard Association.

This was the year he heard a sharp rise in complaints about lifeguards who were texting on the job.

“This issue has really come out for us this year,” Mr. Fisher said, adding that he had heard several dozen complaints about the practice this summer, compared with none in 2008. “Lives are being endangered, if not already lost, because of text messaging.”

The threat is not hypothetical. At a public pool this summer in Duncan, Ariz., a child panicked in the water and was rescued by an adult visitor. Others at the pool said the lifeguard had been texting, and he was fired, said John Basteen Jr., the town manager.

Last summer, a 45-year-old Illinois man drowned at a beach where the guard was texting, according to witnesses deposed in a civil suit against the residential community where the drowning happened.

And two years ago in Ireland, a 10-year-old boy drowned in a pool that was guarded by a young man who had been texting. The guard admitted at a public hearing to texting before the drowning.

The explanations seem clear. Lifeguarding positions are commonly filled by college students who may not want to feel disconnected from their gadgets, even if their job is to devote full attention to watching for signs of trouble.

Mr. Fisher of the lifeguard association said pools and waterfront associations often could not afford to hire well-qualified guards or to supervise guards as closely as they might have in past years.

Organizations have cut lifeguard wages, he said, to the point where many earn minimum wage and pay for their own training and certification, which can cost hundreds of dollars.

“Because of the lack of pay, you can’t pick and choose the caliber of guard you need,” Mr. Fisher said. “Plus, the current generation is a generation of texting.”

Paul Atchley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kansas who has extensively researched the technology habits of teenagers and young adults, said such behavior was not surprising, even among lifeguards.

“It kind of takes my breath away, but younger people have the capacity and the expectation to be able to communicate all the time,” he said. “When they are excluded from texting networks, their self-esteem declines. I don’t think it’s compulsion to multitask as much as it is a compulsion to belong.”

Even texting in short bursts breaks standard rules for lifeguarding. They are trained to scan their areas in 10-second cycles, because a person can drown in as little as 20 seconds.

Many pools and waterfronts have procedures to prevent guards from using cellphones while on duty. Mary O’Donaghue, the aquatic specialist for the Y.M.C.A. of Greater New York, said the organization’s roughly 200 guards cannot bring electronic devices onto the chair.

In past years, Ms. O’Donaghue said, if guards were caught with cellphones while on duty, they were immediately removed from duty and given another round of training. “Sometimes they continued working with us, sometimes not,” she said.

Starting last year, the organization placed greater emphasis on the issue in its monthly training sessions where lifeguards must acknowledge in writing that they can be fired for carrying electronic devices. Since then, no guards have been found violating the policy.

Clemente Rivera, of Rockaway Beach, Queens, who has been a lifeguard and waterfront supervisor in the New York City area since 1989, said that he often sees guards using their phones. “It’s just rampant,” he said.

Mr. Rivera said he tried an unconventional approach to solving the problem. In 2008, as a regional pool manager for a chain of sports clubs, he saw a lifeguard texting while people were swimming. “I was annoyed,” he said.

The guard quickly slipped the phone in his pocket when he spotted Mr. Rivera, who walked to the edge of the pool. He then called the guard over, asked him to look at something in the water and then gave the guard “a little shove.”

Mr. Rivera’s managers asked him to explain his actions, but he was not reprimanded, and the pool’s guards were never seen texting again.

“Even if the pool’s empty, it’s unconscionable,” Mr. Rivera said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/us/20lifeguard.html





Talking to Death: Texts, Phones Kill 16,000: Study
Maggie Fox

Drivers distracted by talking or texting on cell phones killed an estimated 16,000 people from 2001 to 2007, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

The estimate, one of the first scientific attempts to quantify how many people have died in accidents caused specifically by mobile telephone distractions, also suggests a growing number of these drivers are under 30.

"Our results suggested that recent and rapid increases in texting volumes have resulted in thousands of additional road fatalities in the United States," Fernando Wilson and Jim Stimpson of the University of North Texas Health Science Center wrote in the American Journal of Public Health.

Wilson and Stimpson used details on road deaths from each state, on cell phone ownership and data on text message volume from the Federal Communications Commission.

They got reports from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on deaths attributable to distracted driving.

"Since roughly 2001-2002, texting volumes have increased by several hundred percent," Wilson said in a telephone interview. In 2002, 1 million texts were sent every month; this rose to 110 million in 2008.

"Since 2001 our model predicts that about 16,000 people have died since then that we attribute to the increase in texting volume in the United States."

Just talking on a cell phone can distract a driver, and several studies have demonstrated that, even with a hands-free device. But Wilson said texting and using so-called smart phones that provide e-mail access and other distracting applications take the problem to a new level.

U.S. traffic deaths are down -- in 2009 the Transportation Department said they hit their lowest level since the mid-1950s in 2009 at 33,963.

But for every 1 million new cell phone subscribers, Wilson and Stimpson estimate a 19-percent rise in deaths due to distracted driving.

"Distracted deaths as a share of all road fatalities increased from 10.9 percent to 15.8 percent from 1999 to 2008, and much of the increase occurred after 2005," they wrote.

Deaths Track Cellphone Use

"In 2008, approximately 1 in 6 fatal vehicle collisions resulted from a driver being distracted while driving," the report said. It found 5,870 people died in accidents attributed to distracted driving.

Cellphone ownership and the number of text messages sent rose sharply over the same time, Wilson and Stimpson found.

Wilson said 30 states ban texting while driving, and some cities and states require hands-free devices for drivers using mobile telephones.

This week Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the U.S. Department of Transportation would work to fight distractions, encouraging employers to find ways to prevent workers from texting while driving for work.

Wilson said better enforcement is needed but he cannot see an easy way to do it.

"I guess a perfect solution would be installing cell phone jammers in every car but that is not going to happen," said Wilson, who himself answered a telephone call to be interviewed while driving, but who pulled over to talk.

"Unlike drunk driving, where you have effective enforcement mechanisms you don't have that with texting," he said. "The cop just has to get lucky and see you texting while driving."

(Editing by Xavier Briand)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68M53K20100923





Twitter Closes Web Hole After Attack Hits Up to 500,000
Paul Roberts

UPDATE: Engineers at social network Twitter.com plugged a vulnerability in the company's main Web page after attacks that exploited the hole may have hit more than 500,000 users.

The security hole was patched at about 9:45 AM ET, according to a post by Del Harvey (@delbius), the head of Twitter's Trust and Safety Team. In a blog post Bob Lord on the Twitter Security Team said that the company first learned of the exploit at 5:54 AM Eastern Daylight Time. The hole in question had been patched internally by the company last month, but was inadvertently reintroduced with a Web site update, Lord wrote.

Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab started noticing a cross site scripting attack affecting the Twitter.com site about two hours earlier, just after 7:30 AM Eastern Time, USA. In the intervening two hours, the attacks spread like wildfire across the social network, with up to 100 users per second falling victim at its height, according to data from TwitScoop.com. Based on that figure, and given the length of the attack, it may have hit as many as half a million Twitter users, according to an estimate by George Wicherski, an analyst at Kaspersky Lab that was among the first to identify the attack.

Victims included high profile Twitter users including White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who was perplexed by the balky javascript tweeted to more than 97,000 followers.

"My Twitter went haywire - absolutely no clue why it sent that message or even what it is...paging the tech guys..." Gibbs posted from the @PressSec Twitter account just after 8:30 AM Eastern Time.

The attacks leveraged a common javascript feature, onmouseover, which allows Web developers to program discrete actions when visitors move their mouse cursor over a designated area of a Web page. The attacks were mostly harmless, "proof of concept" attacks that simply reposted the javascript from the user's session as a Tweet, said Costin Raiu at Chief Security Expert at Kaspersky Lab.

Exploits of the hole were, for the most point, harmless and appear to have been ad hoc rather than planned, as users learned of the cross site scripting hole, and developed novel ways of exploiting it.

"First, someone created an account that exploited the issue by turning tweets different colors and causing a pop-up box with text to appear when someone hovered over the link in the Tweet," Lord wrote on the Twitter blog. "Other users took this one step further and added code that caused people to retweet the original Tweet without their knowledge."

Tweets from infected accounts (in posts per second): Courtesy of TwitScoopTweets from infected accounts (in posts per second): Courtesy of TwitScoopKaspersky researchers identified at least two worms that also launched on Tuesday morning, leveraging the same hole. Worm code was circulating on IRC within minutes of the discovery of the cross site scripting hole, Kaspersky Lab researcher Wicherski said in a blog post on the bug.

The worms allowed attackers to infect a user's account and those of his or her followers, as well. However, neither worm carried malicious payloads and neither appears to have spread as rapidly, Wicherski said.

Attack traffic began to taper off around by 10:00 AM Eastern time, with compromises at that time down to around 40 per minute as Twitter's patch took hold. However, lingering compromises continued even after the patch from users accessing older, cached and unpatched versions of the page, Raiu said.

Cross site scripting attacks are among the most common types of Web vulnerabilities and the easiest to exploit. However, they've been more common on complex social networking Web sites like Facebook than on Twitter, which had instituted a Web of different checks and filters to prevent cross site scripting attacks, said Raiu.

Researchers were unclear how the latest hole slipped through that Web, but Raiu noted a recent overhaul of the Twitter.com site, unveiled on September 14, that may have inadvertently introduced the cross site scripting vulnerability.

The hole raises issues for Web based users of Twitter. Third party client applications to manage Twitter feeds, such as Twhirl and TweetDeck were not susceptible to the cross site scripting attack, Raiu noted. Twitter users concerned about future attacks might consider shifting to one of those applications, he said.
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/tw...-500000-092110





¬¬Stuxnet Malware is 'Weapon' Out to Destroy ... Iran's Bushehr Nuclear Plant?
Mark Clayton

Cyber security experts say they have identified the world's first known cyber super weapon designed specifically to destroy a real-world target – a factory, a refinery, or just maybe a nuclear power plant.

The cyber worm, called Stuxnet, has been the object of intense study since its detection in June. As more has become known about it, alarm about its capabilities and purpose have grown. Some top cyber security experts now say Stuxnet's arrival heralds something blindingly new: a cyber weapon created to cross from the digital realm to the physical world – to destroy something.

At least one expert who has extensively studied the malicious software, or malware, suggests Stuxnet may have already attacked its target – and that it may have been Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant, which much of the world condemns as a nuclear weapons threat.

The appearance of Stuxnet created a ripple of amazement among computer security experts. Too large, too encrypted, too complex to be immediately understood, it employed amazing new tricks, like taking control of a computer system without the user taking any action or clicking any button other than inserting an infected memory stick. Experts say it took a massive expenditure of time, money, and software engineering talent to identify and exploit such vulnerabilities in industrial control software systems.

Unlike most malware, Stuxnet is not intended to help someone make money or steal proprietary data. Industrial control systems experts now have concluded, after nearly four months spent reverse engineering Stuxnet, that the world faces a new breed of malware that could become a template for attackers wishing to launch digital strikes at physical targets worldwide. Internet link not required.

"Until a few days ago, people did not believe a directed attack like this was possible," Ralph Langner, a German cyber-security researcher, told the Monitor in an interview. He was slated to present his findings at a conference of industrial control system security experts Tuesday in Rockville, Md. "What Stuxnet represents is a future in which people with the funds will be able to buy an attack like this on the black market. This is now a valid concern."

A gradual dawning of Stuxnet's purpose

It is a realization that has emerged only gradually.

Stuxnet surfaced in June and, by July, was identified as a hypersophisticated piece of malware probably created by a team working for a nation state, say cyber security experts. Its name is derived from some of the filenames in the malware. It is the first malware known to target and infiltrate industrial supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software used to run chemical plants and factories as well as electric power plants and transmission systems worldwide. That much the experts discovered right away.

But what was the motive of the people who created it? Was Stuxnet intended to steal industrial secrets – pressure, temperature, valve, or other settings –and communicate that proprietary data over the Internet to cyber thieves?

By August, researchers had found something more disturbing: Stuxnet appeared to be able to take control of the automated factory control systems it had infected – and do whatever it was programmed to do with them. That was mischievous and dangerous.

But it gets worse. Since reverse engineering chunks of Stuxnet's massive code, senior US cyber security experts confirm what Mr. Langner, the German researcher, told the Monitor: Stuxnet is essentially a precision, military-grade cyber missile deployed early last year to seek out and destroy one real-world target of high importance – a target still unknown.

"Stuxnet is a 100-percent-directed cyber attack aimed at destroying an industrial process in the physical world," says Langner, who last week became the first to publicly detail Stuxnet's destructive purpose and its authors' malicious intent. "This is not about espionage, as some have said. This is a 100 percent sabotage attack."

A guided cyber missile

On his website, Langner lays out the Stuxnet code he has dissected. He shows step by step how Stuxnet operates as a guided cyber missile. Three top US industrial control system security experts, each of whom has also independently reverse-engineered portions of Stuxnet, confirmed his findings to the Monitor.

"His technical analysis is good," says a senior US researcher who has analyzed Stuxnet, who asked for anonymity because he is not allowed to speak to the press. "We're also tearing [Stuxnet] apart and are seeing some of the same things."

Other experts who have not themselves reverse-engineered Stuxnet but are familiar with the findings of those who have concur with Langner's analysis.

"What we're seeing with Stuxnet is the first view of something new that doesn't need outside guidance by a human – but can still take control of your infrastructure," says Michael Assante, former chief of industrial control systems cyber security research at the US Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory. "This is the first direct example of weaponized software, highly customized and designed to find a particular target."

"I'd agree with the classification of this as a weapon," Jonathan Pollet, CEO of Red Tiger Security and an industrial control system security expert, says in an e-mail.

One researcher's findingsLangner's research, outlined on his website Monday, reveals a key step in the Stuxnet attack that other researchers agree illustrates its destructive purpose. That step, which Langner calls "fingerprinting," qualifies Stuxnet as a targeted weapon, he says.

Langner zeroes in on Stuxnet's ability to "fingerprint" the computer system it infiltrates to determine whether it is the precise machine the attack-ware is looking to destroy. If not, it leaves the industrial computer alone. It is this digital fingerprinting of the control systems that shows Stuxnet to be not spyware, but rather attackware meant to destroy, Langner says.

Stuxnet's ability to autonomously and without human assistance discriminate among industrial computer systems is telling. It means, says Langner, that it is looking for one specific place and time to attack one specific factory or power plant in the entire world.

"Stuxnet is the key for a very specific lock – in fact, there is only one lock in the world that it will open," Langner says in an interview. "The whole attack is not at all about stealing data but about manipulation of a specific industrial process at a specific moment in time. This is not generic. It is about destroying that process."

So far, Stuxnet has infected at least 45,000 industrial control systems around the world, without blowing them up – although some victims in North America have experienced some serious computer problems, Eric Byres, a Canadian expert, told the Monitor. Most of the victim computers, however, are in Iran, Pakistan, India, and Indonesia. Some systems have been hit in Germany, Canada, and the US, too. Once a system is infected, Stuxnet simply sits and waits – checking every five seconds to see if its exact parameters are met on the system. When they are, Stuxnet is programmed to activate a sequence that will cause the industrial process to self-destruct, Langner says.

Langner's analysis also shows, step by step, what happens after Stuxnet finds its target. Once Stuxnet identifies the critical function running on a programmable logic controller, or PLC, made by Siemens, the giant industrial controls company, the malware takes control. One of the last codes Stuxnet sends is an enigmatic “DEADF007.” Then the fireworks begin, although the precise function being overridden is not known, Langner says. It may be that the maximum safety setting for RPMs on a turbine is overridden, or that lubrication is shut off, or some other vital function shut down. Whatever it is, Stuxnet overrides it, Langner’s analysis shows.

"After the original code [on the PLC] is no longer executed, we can expect that something will blow up soon," Langner writes in his analysis. "Something big."

For those worried about a future cyber attack that takes control of critical computerized infrastructure – in a nuclear power plant, for instance – Stuxnet is a big, loud warning shot across the bow, especially for the utility industry and government overseers of the US power grid.

"The implications of Stuxnet are very large, a lot larger than some thought at first," says Mr. Assante, who until recently was security chief for the North American Electric Reliability Corp. "Stuxnet is a directed attack. It's the type of threat we've been worried about for a long time. It means we have to move more quickly with our defenses – much more quickly."

Has Stuxnet already hit its target?It might be too late for Stuxnet's target, Langner says. He suggests it has already been hit – and destroyed or heavily damaged. But Stuxnet reveals no overt clues within its code to what it is after.

A geographical distribution of computers hit by Stuxnet, which Microsoft produced in July, found Iran to be the apparent epicenter of the Stuxnet infections. That suggests that any enemy of Iran with advanced cyber war capability might be involved, Langner says. The US is acknowledged to have that ability, and Israel is also reported to have a formidable offensive cyber-war-fighting capability.

Could Stuxnet's target be Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant, a facility much of the world condemns as a nuclear weapons threat?

Langner is quick to note that his views on Stuxnet's target is speculation based on suggestive threads he has seen in the media. Still, he suspects that the Bushehr plant may already have been wrecked by Stuxnet. Bushehr's expected startup in late August has been delayed, he notes, for unknown reasons. (One Iranian official blamed the delay on hot weather.)

But if Stuxnet is so targeted, why did it spread to all those countries? Stuxnet might have been spread by the USB memory sticks used by a Russian contractor while building the Bushehr nuclear plant, Langner offers. The same contractor has jobs in several countries where the attackware has been uncovered.

"This will all eventually come out and Stuxnet's target will be known," Langner says. "If Bushehr wasn't the target and it starts up in a few months, well, I was wrong. But somewhere out there, Stuxnet has found its target. We can be fairly certain of that."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100921/ts_csm/327178





Working from Home and Online Shopping Can Increase Carbon Emissions

Shopping on the internet or working from home could be increasing carbon emissions rather than helping to reduce them, a new report claims today.

The research reveals that people who shop online must order more than 25 items otherwise the impact on the environment is likely to be worse than traditional shopping.

It also highlights that working from home can increase home energy use by as much as 30 per cent, and can lead to people moving further from the workplace, stretching urban sprawl and increasing pollution.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) report looks at the ‘rebound’ effects of activities that are commonly thought to be green. Rebound effects are the unintended consequences of policies that are designed to reduce emissions, but on closer analysis can move the emission’s production elsewhere or lessen the positive impact.

Professor Phil Blythe, Chair of the IET Transport Policy Panel and Professor of Intelligent Transport Systems at Newcastle University, which produced the report, said: “We hear a lot about the environmental benefits achieved as a result of working from home. However, on closer inspection it does appear that any environmental benefits are marginal.”

The report highlights that buying goods online can provide carbon savings, but only if the conditions are right. The study found that environmental savings can be achieved if online shopping replaces 3.5 traditional shopping trips, or if 25 orders are delivered at the same time, or, if the distance travelled to where the purchase is made is more than 50km. Shopping online does not offer net environmental benefits unless these criteria are met.

The report also highlights that the top 20 per cent of British households spend almost nine times as much on transport costs (such as air travel) as the bottom 20 per cent.

Professor Phil Blythe says: “Our report highlights two important messages for policy makers. Firstly, climate change is a real threat to our planet, so we must not get overwhelmed by the task and use rebound effects as an excuse not to act.

“Secondly, policy makers must do their homework to ensure that rebound effects do not negate the positive benefits of their policy initiatives and simply move carbon emissions from one sector to another.”
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/pr...rbon-emissions





Millions of Friends, but Not Very Popular
Manohla Dargis

What makes Mark Zuckerberg run? In “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s fleet, weirdly funny, exhilarating, alarming and fictionalized look at the man behind the social-media phenomenon Facebook — 500 million active users, oops, friends, and counting — Mark runs and he runs, sometimes in flip-flops and a hoodie, across Harvard Yard and straight at his first billion. Quick as a rabbit, sly as a fox, he is the geek who would be king or just Bill Gates. He’s also the smartest guy in the room, and don’t you forget it.

The first time you see Mark (Jesse Eisenberg, firing on all cylinders), he’s 19 and wearing a hoodie stamped with the word Gap, as in the clothing giant, but, you know, also not. Eyes darting, he is yammering at his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), whose backhand has grown weary. As they swat the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s words at each other, the two partners quickly shift from offline friends to foes, a foreshadowing of the emotional storms to come. Soon Mark is back in his dorm, pounding on his keyboard and inadvertently sowing the seeds of Facebook, first by blogging about Erica and then by taking his anger out on the rest of Harvard’s women, whose photos he downloads for cruel public sport: is she hot or not.

(“The Social Network” opens the 48th New York Film Festival on Friday and opens in theaters next Friday.)

Although the names have remained the same, “The Social Network” is less of a biopic of the real Mr. Zuckerberg than a gloss on the boot-up, log-on, plug-in generation. You don’t learn much about him other than the headlines, beginning with Facebook’s less-than-humble start in 2003. Despite its insistently unsexy moving parts (software, algorithms), the movie is paced like a thriller, if one in which ideas, words and bank books blow up rather than cars. It’s a resonant contemporary story about the new power elite and an older, familiar narrative of ambition, except instead of discovering his authentic self, Mark builds a database, turning his life — and ours — into zeroes and ones, which is what makes it also a story about the human soul.

The price of that ambition, at least as dramatized here, is borne by those around Mark, who remains a strategic cipher throughout: a Facebook page without a profile photo. Charmless and awkward in groups larger than one, he rarely breaks into a smile and, if memory serves, never says thank you. He seems wary at some moments, coolly calculating at others: when his eyes haven’t gone dead, you can see him working all the angles. One of those angles, according to Mr. Sorkin’s script, which follows the outline of “The Accidental Billionaires,” Ben Mezrich’s book about Facebook, was one of the site’s co-founders, Eduardo Saverin (a very good Andrew Garfield), a fellow student of Mark’s as well as his first big check writer and personal chump.

Eduardo strides in early, his collar turned up against the Cambridge winter, and quickly moves in on our sympathies, which Mr. Eisenberg, guided by his supremely confident director, never does. Mr. Garfield can sometimes wilt on screen as if in surrender, but here his character merely sways, held up by an essential decency that makes Eduardo so appealing and such a contrast to the sometimes appalling Mark. (When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark’s face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it’s a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.) Mark might be the brains in this unlikely friendship, but Eduardo is its conscience and slowly bleeding heart. Though he knows better, he hangs on even after he’s been cut loose.

The plot thickens after Erica dumps Mark, and he meets a pair of near-comically-perfect supermen, the identical twins and future Olympic rowers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. (An amusing Armie Hammer plays both brothers with wit and the aid of different hairstyles, special effects and a body double.) The Winklevosses emerge as unlikely objects of Mark’s interest and, much like Erica, his eventual contempt. The twins and their friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), have a Web site idea and need Mark’s programming help. They’ll pay (and how!), but the gig, they grandly explain, will also rehabilitate Mark’s reputation on campus after the hot/not scandal, a patronizing moment that echoes Mark’s breakup with Erica. “You’d do that for me?” he asks the twins flatly, recycling a line Erica once used on him.

The conspicuous paradox that “The Social Network” plays with is that the world’s most popular social networking Web site was created by a man with excruciatingly, almost pathologically poor, people skills. The benign view of Facebook is that it creates “a community,” a sense of intimacy, which is of course one reason it also creeps out some of its critics. As the virtual-reality visionary Jaron Lanier puts it bluntly in his manifesto “You Are Not a Gadget,” Facebook also reduces life to a database. In “The Social Network,” a character lashes out at both Mark and “the angry” who haunt the Internet, but Mr. Lanier takes the view that it’s fear that drives the idolizers of what he calls the “new strain of gadget fetishism.”

Beyond the obvious (money, sex, fame) it’s hard to know what truly pushes Mark, whose personality emerges in furtive smiles, gushes of words and painful pauses. Eventually everyone does pay: the Winklevosses, Eduardo, even Mark. The filmmakers have their ideas about who did what to whom, but they don’t try to fill in all the blanks or, worse, soften Mark’s edges with a Psych 101 back story. You see what turns him on: software, revenge and, in several lightly comic and darkly foreboding scenes, Sean Parker, the flamboyant co-creator of Napster, who’s played by Justin Timberlake as a jittery seducer. Sean oozes into Mark’s life for a piece of the action and instantly dazzles the younger man with his bad-boy ways (coke and Champagne for everyone!), sexy dates and big, brash talk of riches.

Shooting in digital and working with the cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, Mr. Fincher turns down the lights and tamps down his visual style, deploying fewer special-effects sleights of hand than he did in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” with its wizened and baby Brad Pitt, while also maintaining the familiar Fincher atmosphere of dread. Harvard has rarely been represented to such dolorous effect as in “The Social Network,” where even the colors seem leached of joy. A restrained, somber palette and the shallow depth of field express the limits of Mark’s world, while the rapid, seamless cutting among different times and spaces — scenes of him creating Facebook are woven together with scenes of him in separate depositions — evokes the speed of his success, giving the narrative terrific momentum.

Mr. Fincher pointedly abandons his smudged browns for a gauzily lighted sequence of the twins rowing at a tony British club that, with the edges of the image blurred and movements slowed, looks like a dream. This is a world of rarefied privilege in which men still wear straw boaters, and royalty blathers within earshot. Mark isn’t invited, not because he’s poor (he isn’t), but because this is a closed, self-reproducing system built on exclusivity and other entitlements, including privacy. (The movie refers to Mark’s being Jewish, and the twins look as if they crewed for the Hitler Youth, but that’s just part of the mix.) Mark doesn’t breach this citadel, he sidesteps it entirely by becoming one of the new information elite for whom data is power and who, depending on your view of the Internet, rallies the online mob behind him.

“The Social Network” takes place in the recognizable here and now, though there are moments when it has the flavor of science fiction (it would make a nice double bill with “The Matrix”) even as it evokes 19th-century narratives of ambition. (“To be young, to have a thirst for society, to be hungry for a woman,” Balzac writes in “Le Père Goriot.”) The movie opens with a couple in a crowded college bar and ends with a man alone in a room repeatedly hitting refresh on his laptop. In between, Mr. Fincher and Mr. Sorkin offer up a creation story for the digital age and something of a morality tale, one driven by desire, marked by triumph, tainted by betrayal and inspired by the new gospel: the geek shall inherit the earth.

“The Social Network” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The usual college high jinks, drugs, drinking and semi-naked women.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

The film, to be shown on Friday on the opening night of the 48th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, opens nationally next Friday.

Directed by David Fincher; written by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book “The Accidental Billionaires,” by Ben Mezrich; director of photography, Jeff Cronenweth; edited by Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter; music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross; production designer, Donald Graham Burt; costumes by Jacqueline West; produced by Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca and Cean Chaffin; released by Columbia Pictures. At 6 and 9 p.m. at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center. Running time: 2 hours.

WITH: Jesse Eisenberg (Mark Zuckerberg), Andrew Garfield (Eduardo Saverin), Justin Timberlake (Sean Parker), Armie Hammer (Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss), Max Minghella (Divya Narendra), Josh Pence (Tyler Winklevoss), Rooney Mara (Erica Albright), Brenda Song (Christy), Rashida Jones (Marylin Delpy), John Getz (Sy), David Selby (Gage), Denise Grayson (Gretchen), Douglas Urbanski (Larry Summers), Aaron Sorkin (Ad Executive) and James Shanklin (Prince Albert).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/09/24...yffsocial.html





Cyberwar Chief Calls for Secure Computer Network
Thom Shanker

The new commander of the military’s cyberwarfare operations is advocating the creation of a separate, secure computer network to protect civilian government agencies and critical industries like the nation’s power grid against attacks mounted over the Internet.

The officer, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, suggested that such a heavily restricted network would allow the government to impose greater protections for the nation’s vital, official on-line operations. General Alexander labeled the new network “a secure zone, a protected zone.” Others have nicknamed it “dot-secure.”

It would provide to essential networks like those that tie together the banking, aviation, and public utility systems the kind of protection that the military has built around secret military and diplomatic communications networks — although even these are not completely invulnerable.

For years, experts have warned of the risks of Internet attacks on civilian networks. An article published a few months ago by the National Academy of Engineering said that “cyber systems are the ‘weakest link’ in the electricity system,” and that “security must be designed into the system from the start, not glued on as an afterthought.”

General Alexander, an Army officer who leads the military’s new Cyber Command, did not explain just where the fence should be built between the conventional Internet and his proposed secure zone, or how the gates would be opened to allow appropriate access to information they need every day. General Alexander said the White House hopes to complete a policy review on cyber issues in time for Congress to debate updated or new legislation when it convenes in January.

General Alexander’s new command is responsible for defending Defense Department computer networks and, if directed by the president, carrying out computer-network attacks overseas.

But the military is broadly prohibited from engaging in law enforcement operations on American soil without a presidential order, so the command’s potential role in assisting the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Department of Energy in the event of a major attack inside the United States has not been set down in law or policy.

“There is a real probability that in the future, this country will get hit with a destructive attack, and we need to be ready for it,” General Alexander said in a roundtable with reporters at the National Cryptologic Museum here at Fort Meade in advance of his Congressional testimony on Thursday morning.

“I believe this is one of the most critical problems our country faces,” he said. “We need to get that right. I think we have to have a discussion about roles and responsibilities: What’s the role of Cyber Command? What’s the role of the ‘intel’ community? What’s the role of the rest of the Defense Department? What’s the role of D.H.S.? And how do you make that team work? That’s going to take time.”

Some critics have questioned whether the Defense Department can step up protection of vital computer networks without crashing against the public’s ability to live and work with confidence on the Internet. General Alexander said, “We can protect civil liberties and privacy and still do our mission. We’ve got to do that.”

Speaking of the civilian networks that are at risk, he said: “If one of those destructive attacks comes right now, I’m focused on the Defense Department. What are the responsibilities — and I think this is part of the discussion — for the power grid, for financial networks, for other critical infrastructure? How do you protect the country when it comes to that kind of attack, and who is responsible for it?”

As General Alexander prepared for his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, the ranking Republican on the panel, Howard P. McKeon of California, noted the Pentagon’s progress in expanding its cyber capabilities.

But he said that “many questions remain as to how Cyber Command will meet such a broad mandate” given the clear “vulnerabilities in cyberspace.”

The committee chairman, Rep. Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri, said that “cyberspace is an environment where distinctions and divisions between public and private, government and commercial, military and nonmilitary are blurred.” He said that it is important “that we engage in this discussion in a very direct way and include the public.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/us/24cyber.html





Feds: Privacy Does Not Exist in ‘Public Places’
David Kravets

The Obama administration has urged a federal appeals court to allow the government, without a court warrant, to affix GPS devices on suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.

The Justice Department is demanding a federal appeals court rehear a case in which it reversed the conviction and life sentence of a cocaine dealer whose vehicle was tracked via GPS for a month, without a court warrant. The authorities then obtained warrants to search and find drugs in the locations where defendant Antoine Jones had travelled.

The administration, in urging the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to reverse a three-judge panel’s August ruling from the same court, said Monday that Americans should expect no privacy while in public.

“The panel’s conclusion that Jones had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the public movements of his Jeep rested on the premise that an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of his or her movements in public places, ” Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Smith wrote the court in a petition for rehearing.

The case is an important test of privacy rights as GPS devices have become a common tool in crime fighting, and can be affixed to moving vehicles by an officer shooting a dart. Three other circuit courts have already said the authorities do not need a warrant for GPS vehicle tracking, Smith pointed out.

The circuit’s ruling means that, in the District of Columbia area, the authorities need a warrant to install a GPS-tracking device on a vehicle. But in much of the United States, including the West, a warrant is not required. Unless the circuit changes it mind, only the Supreme Court can mandate a uniform rule.

The government said the appellate panel’s August decision is “vague and unworkable” and undermines a law enforcement practice used “with great frequency.”

The legal dispute centers on a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court decision concerning a tracking beacon affixed to a container, without a court warrant, to follow a motorist to a secluded cabin. The appeals court said that decision did not apply to today’s GPS monitoring of a suspect, which lasted a month.

The beacon tracked a person, “from one place to another,” whereas the GPS device monitored Jones’ “movements 24 hours a day for 28 days.”

The government argued Monday that the appellate court’s decision “offers no guidance as to when monitoring becomes so efficient or ‘prolonged’ as to constitute a search triggering the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.”

The appeals court ruled the case “illustrates how the sequence of a person’s movements may reveal more than the individual movements of which it is composed.”

The court said that a person “who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ublic-privacy/





Report Says F.B.I. Gave Inaccurate Information on Surveillance at Rally
AP

The FBI gave inaccurate information to Congress and the public when it claimed a possible terrorism link to justify surveilling an anti-war rally in Pittsburgh, the Justice Department's inspector general said Monday in a report on the bureau's scrutiny of domestic activist groups.

Inspector General Glenn Fine said the FBI had no reason to expect that anyone of interest in a terrorism investigation would be present at the 2002 event sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center, a nonviolent anti-war and anti-discrimination group.

The surveillance was ''an ill-conceived project on a slow work day,'' the IG stated in a study of several FBI domestic terrorism probes of people affiliated with organizations such as Greenpeace and the Catholic Worker.

Earlier, in statements to Congress and in a press release, the FBI had described the Pittsburgh rally surveillance by one agent as related to a terrorism investigation.

In a letter to the IG, FBI Deputy Director Timothy Murphy said the FBI regrets that inaccurate information was provided to the FBI director and Congress regarding the basis for the agent's presence at the rally.

Speaking generally of the FBI probes it studied, the IG said a domestic terrorism classification has far-reaching impact because people who are subjects of such investigations are normally placed on watchlists and their travels and interactions with law enforcement may be tracked.

The FBI has broad definitions that enable it to classify matters as domestic terrorism that actually are trespassing or vandalism, the inspector general said.

The IG said the evidence did not indicate that the FBI targeted individuals involved with the groups on the basis of their free-speech activities protected by the Constitution's First Amendment, but rather due to concerns about potential criminal acts.

The IG also concluded that the factual basis for opening some investigations was factually weak and that in several instances there was little indication of any possible federal crime, as opposed to state crimes. In some cases, the IG found that the FBI extended the duration of probes without adequate basis and in a few cases the FBI improperly retained information about the groups in its files, classifying some probes relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its ''Acts of Terrorism'' classification.

Regarding the Pittsburgh rally, controversy erupted in 2006 over whether the FBI had spied on protesters at the event several years earlier because of their anti-war views.

At the time, the FBI issued a news release saying the surveillance had been based on an ongoing investigation.

FBI Director Robert Mueller told a Senate hearing that the bureau had been trying to identify a particular individual believed to be in attendance.

The FBI's statements to Congress and the public were not true, said the IG, who found no evidence that the FBI had any information at the time of the event that any terrorism subject would be present.

According to the IG, the Office of the Chief Division Counsel in the FBI Pittsburgh Field Division created a document that said the surveillance was supposedly directed at an individual living in Pittsburgh who was of interest to the FBI based on evidence developed in a terrorism probe.

''We determined this version of events was not true,'' said the IG.

The inaccurate statements may have been inadvertent, but the IG said it is more likely that the document reflected an effort to state a stronger justification for the surveillance.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010...veillance.html





17 Year Old Girl Scores $33,000 after Suing Her School for Searching Her Mobile Phone
Stefan

A 17 year old girl, who is going by the name “N.N.” to protect her privacy, has just been awarded $33,000 after suing her High School in northeast Pennsylvania. It all started one cold January day in 2009 when N.N. was using her mobile phone in the classroom which admittedly she shouldn’t have been doing in the first, and then her teacher confiscated it. Things got messy when the principal of the school decided to go through her private text messages, emails and photos. In the photo gallery he found pictures of her naked and of course American being the land of prudes he contacted law enforcement and issued N.N. a 3 day suspension. The images were not sent to anyone, they were just captured for later viewing by both N.N. and her boyfriend. Anyone who has ever had experience with photography as a form of foreplay knows that just using the camera with your partner is erotic.

We saw something similar happen earlier this year, albeit without the naked pictures, in Texas when a teacher searched the mobile phone of a student in hopes of finding information that would lead to school officials finding out who committed several acts of vandalism. The lesson here is that as an adult you would never, ever, let anyone search your mobile phone, so why do you think a kid would be any different? Children deserve to have a private life and today that means storing everything that means everything to them in a smartphone or laptop. Sad, but whatever, diaries were the big thing back in the day and still are to some people.

And one more thing: talk about over reaction! One summer I worked retail for Helio, the MVNO that got lumped into Virgin. We had a recycling program where we’d take customers old devices in and send them in for processing at a special location that melted said devices to extract all the precious metals. My workmates would constantly go through the devices people turned in and it made me sick, but I wouldn’t have called the police. My heart would stop beating however if I knew someone had access to my gallery or text message history. Congratulations N.N.!
http://www.intomobile.com/2010/09/20...-mobile-phone/





Judge Indicates LVRJ May Have Offered An 'Implied License' To Copy In Righthaven Lawsuits
from the setback-for-righthaven dept

It's been interesting to watch people's reactions to the Righthaven lawsuits. Plenty of people find it to be an abuse of copyright law, clearly for purposes outside of what the law is intended to handle. However, some copyright system supporters seem to think it's wonderful, and they've been mocking the various defenses that defendants have been trying out. While not all of the defenses seem to have merit, at least one judge seems quite open to the idea that the Las Vegas Review Journal did, in fact, grant an implied license on its website. In a ruling setting aside a default judgment against a website owner who had not responded to one of the lawsuits, the judge clearly seems to suggest that the implied license idea isn't so crazy:

The ruling first runs through a quick version of the four factor "test" for fair use, and suggests that the defendant might actually have a case for fair use -- noting that, in the court's analysis, the only factor that goes against the defendant is the fact that an entire article from the LVRJ was used. However, the other three factors appear to weigh in favor of finding fair use. This doesn't mean that it is, definitely, fair use, but that there's at least an argument there worth exploring in court.

Much more interesting, however, is the discussion on the "implied license." A few of the defendants sued by Righthaven have claimed that the LVRJ grants an "implied license," via putting its content up for free and urging that people share the content, including 19 separate "sharing" services connected to each article. Supporters of Righthaven have mocked this defense claim mercilessly, but the court seems to think it's worth considering:

Defendant argues that the original copyright holder offered the article to the world for free, encouraged people to save and share the article with others without restrictions, and permitted users to "right-click" and copy the article from its website. Plaintiff argues that it gave no such license to the Defendant, or anyone else. Plaintiff instead claims that allowing users to hyperlink to its page is demonstratively different than allowing users to copy the entire article. Plaintiff argues that allowing a user to copy an entire article and post it to the user's website is similar to allowing a user to copy a library book and distribute the copies; a practice that it notes is illegal under current copyright laws. Even though Plaintiff is correct in regard to the redistribution of complete hard copies derived from a copyrighted library book in physical form, Defendant has still made a plausible argument based on the recent cases addressing the copying of works taken from the internet. The Defendant has reasonably asserted that the Plaintiff's conduct may have constituted an implied license and that the Defendant may have properly inferred that the owner consented to the use, especially in light of the established and accepted custom of users freely and openly sharing certain information posted on the internet.

I'm still not entirely convinced the implied license holds up in a full trial, but this has to make Righthaven (and some other companies...) a bit worried. If this case does move forward, and the court does find an implied license, I would expect quite a fight from lots of copyright-reliant companies to get such a ruling overturned.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...lawsuits.shtml


















Until next week,

- js.



















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