Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 8th, ’05

[JackSpratts]

"eDonkey and other P2P networks can have the entire piracy market because we're not interested in it at all." – Ashwin Navin


"Lots of at least scared -- if not innocent -- people are dragged into an unpleasant, clunky process for something that may be illegal but is generally accepted by society as OK." – John Palfrey


"My impression is that the majority of those sued [by the RIAA] are innocent." – Ray Beckerman


"People are illegally downloading as much music as before." – Eric Garland


"We have absolutely no problem with digitization of public domain works." – Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild

































Time Share Available

There’s an argument floating around equating real property to copyrights, landlords to record execs. It’s old but it keeps creeping up on forums like mold on shower doors. I’m sure somebody somewhere thinks the comparison is valid, but my guess is most people using it are either simple c&p’ers trying to participate without bothering to be original or media company stooges. I was traveling with a TV producer to NYC, home of rent-stabilized apartments, and he dragged it out during a heated discussion (loves his artificially-low rent, hates P2P). This was a few years ago. I thought it was pretty much shot back then but I saw it around recently. Bad ideas don’t die, all that easily anyway. I thought I should drive another stake through its blackened little heart this week. Feel free to pass it on.

If you take away my real property – which btw the government does regularly, except they don’t refer to it as a “taking,” they call it “rent control” or “eminent domain” or some such - then yes, I won’t own it anymore and would sacrifice all potential income that future rents could generate. However, comparing real or physical property with intellectual property is disingenuous. To begin with, unlike real property, the income stream generated by Intellectual “Property” flows from units copied, advertising, ticket or transmission fees and not exclusive possession fees like apartment rentals. Like a legal marriage, apartment rentals are monogamous; you can only rent it once during any given period because all you have is one unit. Media rentals are by nature polygamous, you can rent out the same performance an infinite number of times during any given period because it’s reproducible. It’s the crucial difference. When someone asks “How would you like it if somebody took away your rental units, or rented them out for free”? they are missing the point, usually deliberately. Even if copyrights disappeared tomorrow, content creators would still be free to sell or rent their copies to the public, even while others were getting the same (or similar) content for “free.” Indeed, this is how things worked before the age of copyrights and it was one reason Thomas Jefferson was so ambivalent about intellectual policy in general. He seemed to think we didn’t really need it. He was probably right. On the other hand if these mysterious squatters used for the arguments sake take over the stately Jack Spratts’ Arms - I’m outa bidniz - immediately. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. All I had was the original. Choosing between the two is a no brainier. Take IP ownership over real property ownership any day; the law gives you a monopolistic privilege found nowhere else; it grants you the right to penalize normal behavior. Very important of course if the Bolsheviks are coming to take your stuff.

When they steal my crib, I ain’t got a home, but when they copy my crib, what care is it of mine? Hell, my architect probably riffed the plans for it anyway. If you like it so much go ahead, build some more. It might even make mine more valuable by increasing its familiarity.

So this IP vs. RP argument is moot. The differences are too extreme to manage.

Free at Last?

Although I’ll usually accept it as a moniker, I don’t actually consider file-sharing free since there are numerous primary costs associated with content acquisition like computers, bandwidth and storage fees, and with most people buying high speed burner media, high capacity hard drives and high speed Internet lines for swapping and storing, they’re now spending more on “content” - on average - then they did before peer-to-peer. There are also secondary costs, like encryption, education, anti-virus apps and questionable security programs requiring endless upgrades and various other time consuming activities, not to mention growing global political activism that now sucks up more hours than the anti-war movement. No, P2P is certainly not free. The cash is pouring out of our pockets and our time is draining away. We work very hard for our files. So hard in fact that going to the store is like taking a vacation. Any argument that uses the word free is immediately suspect. When I hear “How would you like it if everything you wrote was available for free?” my response invariably is “You’re not discussing P2P.” A more accurate approach would be to ask “How would you like it if everything you wrote was available but the money never went to you?” Ah, well, that’s different, and we might be getting somewhere if one presupposes two critical things, both of which are wrong: that (1) P2P will flatten artists who would otherwise be (2) doing fine under contract to conglomerates. The argument is that Jill’s file-sharing somehow magically stops Jack’s commerce, as if the simple act of trading freezes my hand and prevents me from selling my work. The Everyone else can trade but me! syndrome. I call it the “Myth of Voodoo P2P.” A program so powerful, so overwhelming it instantly crushes capitalism at the very first click. Would if it were true! But it’s not.

Judging by the way they bury the story the news editors working for the media conglomerates don’t seem to want you to know this but sales of media content continue to flourish even during this golden age of unbridled file-sharing. DVDs, CDs, books, digital files all moving along smartly, as if there’d never been anyone named Shawn Fanning or anything called Napster. Sales continue their typical all-around trends of up, down, flat and sideways, just like in any other industry, just like they did before the college kid from New England changed the ‘net forever with the first user friendly P2P program. But the important point is that things are selling while they are simultaneously being shared. So the Myth of Voodoo P2P is just that, a myth. P2P does not end commerce. The second critical thing is a bit more complex. Well, a lot more complex if half of what they say about Hollywood accounting is true. It presupposes artists are doing fine now, getting their fair payment from the major media companies they are contracted to work for, and I have a major issue with that. I don’t think they are, and I’m not alone in this belief. More than a little evidence suggests artists are being fleeced by their own media companies, yet are essentially powerless to do anything about it because of one-way contract laws pushed through congress by the same media companies ripping them off! So before I go down that rocky crag I ask do they know, for a fact, if artists are being served honestly by the commercial interests presently representing them. At this point there is a long pause, usually as they think about all those stories they’ve heard about number-one movies with no profits and singers going bankrupt after multi-platinum albums, and that as they say is that. This particular squabble typically ends there, as it should.

So we find ourselves in a situation where the arguments used to control our behavior are inaccurate at best and rather easily dismissed, yet deliberately used against us by our elected representatives in spite of their obvious fallaciousness. Nothing new there of course but it bears remembering, particularly as November 8th nears.

A few observations:

Free P2P does not destroy artists. There is no evidence sales are lost to free file-sharing. Artists can and do earn money with free file-sharing. There is evidence commercial media companies are stealing from artists. There is evidence artists can make more money with free file-sharing than with traditional media company arrangements.

And finally, my house and this essay are not the same. They are in fact incomparable. The only time they should appear together in an honest discussion about P2P is when their differences are being underlined.
















Enjoy,

Jack

















October 8th, 2005





RIAA Takes Shotgun to Traders
Bruce Gain

Hundreds of people are being wrongly sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for illegally trading music online, legal experts say.

Attorneys representing some of the 14,000 people targeted for illegal music trading say their clients are being bullied into settling as the cheapest way to get out of trouble. Collection agencies posing as "settlement centers" are harassing their clients to pay thousands of dollars for claims about which they know nothing, they say.

In May, a judge in Michigan dismissed a file-sharing case against Candy Chan, a mother who testified in court that the user name identified in the suit belonged to one of her children.

In the court report (.pdf), Judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff wrote: "Chan opposed the motion and asserted that the plaintiffs used a 'shotgun' approach to pursue this action, threatening to sue all of Chan's children and engaging in abusive behavior to attempt to utilize the court as a collection agency."

The case was dismissed but last week the record companies filed suit against Chan's child.

Now others say they are in the same boat as Chan.

"I don't even know how to download music," said Tanya Andersen, a disabled single mother from Oregon who lives on Social Security benefits. "The user names (they cite) I have never heard of."

Andersen is one of three single parents claiming to have been erroneously identified as an illegal music trader by a law firm representing RIAA interests, which is seeking more than $1 million in damages -- $750 for each of the 1,400 songs Andersen allegedly shared.

The RIAA began its litigation campaign in September 2003, resulting in more than 14,000 lawsuits. So far, more than 3,300 parties have settled, which the RIAA says proves the overwhelming majority of those summoned are guilty of stealing copyright files.

But attorneys representing many of the accused say that's not true. Estimates of how many people are being wrongly targeted for illegal file sharing vary, from hundreds to many more.

Ray Beckerman, a New York-based attorney with Beldock Levine & Hoffman, put the number in the thousands.

"My impression is that the majority of those sued are innocent," Beckerman said.

Andersen wrote to Rep. David Wu (D-Oregon) and offered to surrender her PC to the RIAA for inspection -- to no avail.

"(The RIAA) says 'We don't care enough about you that we are even going to check,'" said Lory R. Lybeck, Andersen's attorney from Lybeck Murphy of Mercer Island, Washington. "And if ... they have made a mistake, they are not going to apologize or investigate -- they are going to sue you again."

Dawnell Leadbetter, a Washington-based single mom whom Lybeck also represents, is suing Comcast, her ISP, for disclosing her name and other personal details to the RIAA, which then sued her. She also says the RIAA has confused her IP address with the wrong person.

Accurately tracking acts of piracy and matching names to IP addresses can be an error-prone process. Many things can go wrong when determining who is actually downloading and uploading copyright files over file-sharing networks, especially when attempting to identify users' names, IP addresses and actual PCs -- let alone the PC's user at the time.

However, the legal process set in motion by the recording industry is hard to stop -- unless you pay.

"What really rankled me is the bullying tactics they use, and I don't like bullies," said Beckerman, the New York attorney.

"Prior to retaining lawyers, when (defendants) talk to the settlement support center, they are threatened with criminal prosecution, ruin of their credit, publication of their names," he said.

Beckerman is defending Patricia Santangelo, a single mother with five children, against a complaint filed by Elektra Entertainment Group.

After an agency contacted her to settle claims for having allegedly uploaded at least 1,641 files, Santangelo proclaimed her innocence while representing herself in a federal District Court in New York in May.

Santangelo then swore under oath that she no longer owned the computer with the IP address allegedly used for illegal uploads and that the screen name corresponding to the Kazaa program used for the uploads belonged to a friend of one of her children and not to anyone in her family.

An RIAA spokeswoman would not comment on whether it had fairly summoned payments from Andersen or Santangelo or whether it had mistakenly connected them to an IP address used for illegal downloads or uploads.

However, an RIAA spokeswoman said in an e-mailed statement that the RIAA had "complete confidence in the litigations we have filed and in the judicial process to resolve the issues raised in those cases."

"The message of the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in the Grokster case is clear: Both the businesses that encourage theft and the individuals who download songs without permission can be held accountable," the spokeswoman said in an e-mailed statement.


John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said the targeting of the lawsuits was far from perfect.

"Lots of at least scared -- if not innocent -- people are dragged into an unpleasant, clunky process for something that may be illegal but is generally accepted by society as OK," Palfrey said.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,68951,00.html





RIAA Sues Another 750 For File Sharing

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) files another 757 lawsuits against people accused of illegally copying digital music.
Gregg Keizer

Even as some file-sharing networks wave the white flag, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) kept up the pressure Thursday by filing another 757 lawsuits against people accused of illegally copying digital music.

Sixty-four of the people targeted use the high-speed Internet2 network, the RIAA said, which named 17 universities, including Boston University, Columbia, Princeton, and UCLA, as among the offenders.

Coincidentally, the RIAA became a corporate member of Internet2 only two weeks ago. At that time, Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, said in a statement that "we look forward to collaborative work with a broad spectrum of Internet2’s members to develop new technologies that will enable us to produce and distribute digital content over next generation networks in ways that protect and enhance the value of creative works."

The remaining 693 "John Doe" lawsuits were filed against users of such peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks as eDonkey and LimeWire.

In its two-year legal campaign against file sharing, the RIAA has sued some 14,800 U.S. computer users. Nor are the actions against Internet 2 users new; this is the third wave of suits naming users of the high-speed network intended for academic researchers. In April and May 2005, the RIAA expanded its anti-copying efforts to include nearly 500 students at 38 different Internet2-equipped schools.

"As long as students continue to corrupt this specialized academic network for the flagrant theft of music, we will continue to make it clear that there are consequences for these unlawful actions," Sherman said in a May statement.
http://www.informationweek.com/story...leID=171202305





Record Labels Target 14 Year-Old Girl
Ed Oswald

A 14 year-old girl is in the middle of a dispute with the record labels that could have broad implications for future cases involving minors downloading illicit music files from peer- to-peer services.

An effort is underway by EMI, Warner, Universal and Sony BMG to force the courts to appoint an official legal guardian for Brittany Chan so they can move forward with their lawsuit against her.

As first reported by P2P news site p2pnet.net, the record labels latest actions stem from the refusal of the teen's mother, Candy Chan, to take responsibility for the alleged file sharing of her child.

According to the record labels, they were forced "to file this action directly against Brittany Chan even after they informed her she had left them with no alternative."

If the record companies are successful in court, it could potentially provide the RIAA with a new weapon in prosecuting minors for downloading music over P2P services: by appointing another legal guardian if parents fail to take responsibility for their children.

An investigation by the record companies found that a computer within the Chan household contained 829 illegally shared music files. Brittany Chan had already admitted to using the P2P account linked to these files, "Spicybrnweyedgirl."
http://www.betanews.com/article/prin...irl/1128618276





Eminem Sues To Stop Use Of Songs As Ringtones
AP

Grammy-winning rapper Eminem's publishing companies filed a lawsuit in an effort to stop his songs from being used as cell phone ring tones.

In the suit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Detroit, Michigan-based Eight Mile Style and Martin Affiliated are seeking a court order to prohibit five companies from
selling Eminem song ring tones on the Internet.

Lawyers for the rapper, whose real name is Marshall Mathers III, said they also plan to sue karaoke companies that sell Eminem songs without getting the proper licenses.

``This is a big business. We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a year,'' said Howard Hertz, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs.

The companies named in the suit are Colorado-based Cellus USA, Georgia-based FanMobile, New York-based Nextones.com, New Jersey-based MyPhoneFiles and New Jersey-based MatrixM LLC.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/12823447.htm





Man Pleads Guilty In Piracy Sting
AP

A 23-year-old man pleaded guilty to charges he illegally uploaded computer games, software and movies to a Web server set up as part of a federal sting to combat Internet piracy, authorities said.

Ryan Zeman, of Rohnert Park, entered the plea on one county of copyright infringement Monday as part of an agreement with the U.S. Attorney's Office that required him to surrender his laptop, a computer tower and several CD's and DVD's.

Zeman, who is scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 27, faces a maximum penalty of up to three years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Under the agreement, he admitted copying 14 titles over three months this year, including the movie, ``Austin Powers Goldmember.''

Zeman is the second person to plead guilty on charges stemming from ``Operation Copycat,'' an undercover FBI operation that has so far resulted in charges against six people.

A 19-year-old movie theater cashier from Missouri pleaded guilty to similar charges in September and faces eight years in prison on charges he bootlegged movies and posted them to the Web, prosecutors said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/12816184.htm





Delaware Supreme Court Declines to Unmask a Blogger
Rita K. Farrell

WILMINGTON, Del., Oct. 5 - The Delaware Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that if an elected official claims he has been defamed by an anonymous blogger, he cannot use a lawsuit to unmask the writer unless he has substantial evidence to prove his claim.

That standard, the court said, "will more appropriately protect against the chilling effect on anonymous First Amendment Internet speech that can arise when plaintiffs bring trivial defamation lawsuits primarily to harass or unmask their critics."

At issue was a defamation lawsuit filed last year by Patrick Cahill, a councilman in Smyrna, Del. Mr. Cahill said he needed the identity of a blogger who in a September 2004 posting praised the mayor but said Mr. Cahill was divisive and had "an obvious mental deterioration."

In a second posting, the blogger, named John Doe in the suit, wrote that Mr. Cahill "is as paranoid as everyone in the town thinks he is," according to court records.

Using a court order, Mr. Cahill learned from the publisher of the blog, Independent Newspapers, that the Web address of the blogger belonged to a customer of Comcast. When Mr. Cahill demanded the person's identity, Comcast notified the blogger, as required by law. The blogger filed for a protective order. A lower court judge denied the request, and the blogger appealed.

In a 33-page opinion, the five justices reversed the lower court, saying the judge used a standard that was incorrect because it was not stringent enough. The court said, "The Internet provides a means of communication where a person wronged by statements of an anonymous poster can respond instantly, can respond to the alleged defamatory statements on the same site or blog, and thus, can, almost contemporaneously, respond to the same audience that initially read the allegedly defamatory statements."

David Finger, the blogger's lawyer, said: "Statements on an electronic bulletin board with hyperbole and profanity are generally not considered as credible sources of facts. The court found that people who read these types of blogs cannot reasonably expect them to be anything more than the writer's opinion."

Mr. Cahill's lawyer, Robert Katzenstein, had no comment.

While acknowledging that "the Internet is a unique democratizing medium" that allows "more and diverse people to engage in public debate," the judges said they made no distinction between "communications made on the Internet and those made through other traditional forms of media in determining the standard to be applied."

The court said its decision was the first time any state or federal Supreme Court had ruled on the rights of anonymous bloggers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/te...gy/06blog.html





Movie Industry To Move Online To Beat Pirates
Adam Pasick

The film industry is working to launch online movie download services to avoid the same fate as the piracy-ridden music industry, NBC Universal Chairman and Chief Executive Bob Wright said on Tuesday.

"It's something we have to do, but it has to be done well," Wright said "These movies are so expensive we have to be careful ... We're pretty close. Hopefully by the end of this year we'll be able to do that."

Wright was speaking at the launch of an anti-piracy and counterfeiting initiative with senior executives from media, software, pharmaceutical and food industries known as "Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy" (BASCAP).

Other participants included Microsoft's Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, Nestle's Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Vivendi Universal's Jean-Rene Fourtou and EMI Group's Eric Nicoli.

"The problems are spreading and no one is immune," Wright said. "In my business we're just looking over the shoulder of the music industry, which has gone through a very difficult time."

The global music industry has been decimated by physical piracy and online file-trading networks. It has stemmed some of the losses by aggressively targeting illicit file-sharers with lawsuits while also offering legal online alternatives like Apple's iTunes Music Store.

Movies are increasingly vulnerable to online piracy due to the spread of high-speed Internet connections and file-sharing technologies like BitTorrent. Eight people were charged last week for stealing a copy of "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith" and posting it online before the movie appeared in theatres.

There are already at least two fledgling online movie stores: Movielink, which is a venture of five major Hollywood studios, and CinemaNow, which is jointly owned by Lions Gate Entertainment, Microsoft, Blockbuster and several private equity firms.

Wright also spoke about the battle over next-generation DVD technology. Universal Studios, a unit of NBC Universal, and Warner Bros Studios have endorsed the HD DVD format, while Paramount, Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Co. and Twentieth Century Fox have backed the rival Blu-ray format.

"You'd always rather have one standard -- that's going to happen eventually," he said. "Hopefully this won't go as far as (the) Betamax-VHS (video tape format battle)."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





Free Download Of Film Soundtrack Offered With Online Tickets
AP

Consumers who buy a ticket online to see ``The War Within'' will get an unexpected bonus -- a free digital copy of the soundtrack.

HDNet Films, the Dallas-based production company owned by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, will offer a free Internet download of the movie's soundtrack to everyone who buys a ticket at Moviefone or Movietickets.com.

Cuban and Wagner's company is behind another cinematic innovation, releasing a series of films in theaters, on television and on DVD simultaneously. The company has signed with director Steven Soderbergh to release a series of ``day and date'' release films beginning next January.

``The War Within'' is about a terrorist involved in a plot in New York City who has second thoughts. The small independent film opens in New York on Friday and will expand to other markets.

The score for the film was written and performed by Free Association, a collaboration of DJ and film composer David Holmes and Steve Hilton.

``As studios and exhibitors search for ways to retain audiences frustrated with the theater experience, we believe the competitive solution lies in increasing value for customers,'' Wagner said in a statement.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...printstory.jsp





Unattended PCs Security Risk Underestimated
Gregg Keizer

Lonesome PCs pose a security risk that enterprises underestimate, a research firm said this week. Making matters worse, corporations just don't pay attention to the major security hazard of unattended workstations, according to Gartner research vice president Jay Heiser.

"Organizations are protecting their systems and personnel against external security threats but failing to realize the very real risks that exist internally from something as basic as an unattended PC," said the U.K.-based Heiser in a statement. "Relatively simple solutions are available to address the problem but few organizations have implemented them."

From Gartner's perspective, a "significant number of unauthorized access events" happen in the workplace when someone sits in front of another's PC. The possible ramifications range from accessing sensitive data to sending e-mail or IM disguised as another employee. And the lack of protection makes it difficult to discipline workers for improper online activity when the excuse of 'someone else must have sat at my PC' can't be disproved.

"Unattended PCs represent the computer security equivalent of 'low-hanging fruit'," said Heiser.

The solution, said Heiser, would be to require workers to log out each time they leave their desk -- the 'timeout' could also be done automatically -- and log back in when they return. Then, the log-in password stands between seat-warmers and access to data and services they've no right to.

Trouble is, users hate logging off and on, and complain loudly to IT when such requirements are made. That could be mitigated, Heiser said, by making workers understand that they'll be held accountable for any computer mischief originating from their workstations or usernames.

"There's little point in implementing some sort of sophisticated identity and access management system unless you can ensure that when people are logged in to systems, they stay at their PCs," said Heiser. "Sloppy management of login sessions sends the wrong message, but tight management, including a degree of user inconvenience, sends the message 'user login sessions are important and must be protected'."

Heiser recommended that enterprises look at both technology and policy solutions, including "proximity" tokens, small devices worn around the neck that are also used for hands-off security door access. Used for PC security, proximity tokens automatically log off a user when he or she steps a defined distance from the computer.

"Tokens are appropriate wherever shared PCs are used to access critical applications, such as in hospitals and clinics," said Heiser. "Proximity tokens are convenient and particularly effective in preventing the 'someone else used my PC' defense common in call centers and on factory floors."

Although timeouts won't work in all situations -- fast reaction scenarios like stock trading would be among them -- Heiser believed that in most office situations, the practice would be "a simple and effective solution" to the security problem of unattended PCs.
http://www.informationweek.com/story...leID=171202296





IM Reaches Mainstream, But Insurers Play It Safe

Instant messaging may be a boon to productivity, but control issues still dog carriers.
Pat Speer

The evolution of real-time text communications technology, in which messages can be sent, received and viewed immediately-a.k.a. instant messaging (IM)-is a welcome one for most companies.

As IM moves from being a novelty for teens and college students to a viable communications vehicle for business, many organizations realize its potential: to improve collaboration and productivity.

But although analysts predict IM will soon be as commonplace as e-mail, its popularity among insurance companies is tempered with considerable caution.

Their concern revolves around security and compliance issues. Risk management is a hefty consideration, and carriers conducting an IM cost/benefit analysis have much to consider: reliability testing, the training involved, where and how IM will be used, whether formal directives are required to maintain control, and whether the software's security and archival functionality is strong enough to comply with SOX and other regulations.

For Arrowhead Group, a San Diego, Calif., managing general agency, the decision whether to implement IM has its roots in regulatory compliance.

"At this time we are blocking IM within the organization," notes Steve Boyd, Arrowhead vice president. "Sarbanes Oxley-related regulations are a major reason for this."

As part of a larger initiative that includes a move to a new location, Arrowhead is considering IM in the future, however, especially if the company splits its IS group across three buildings in the San Diego area, as planned.

"We are spending a great deal of time focusing on our internal development process and are concerned about the potential for disconnect between project team members at remote locations," Boyd says. "We feel IM can be a very useful and productive tool for our development teams, so we've begun an evaluation of different IM products to see which ones can meet our needs while at same time provide us with some kind of auditing function."

Internal comfort zone

As agents and carriers evaluate the potential benefits of IM, many are seeing obvious advantages for internal implementation, but few are venturing beyond the firewalls of their own systems to use it to communicate to the outside world.

Boyd confirms that his company "more or less agreed" that an IM implementation would only be used internally.

Encompass Insurance, a Barrington, Ill., P&C subsidiary of Allstate, uses instant messaging on a very limited basis, and only within the Allstate network, says Neil Nelson, senior manager of business relationship management, protection technology service, at Encompass.

"IMs cannot cross the firewall, so we do not use them to communicate with our agents," says Nelson.

For both carriers and agents, interest in the new technology is clouded with concern about security.

"While we are huge believers in leveraging the latest proven technologies and tools to make our business processes more efficient and to speed communication and decision-making, we have decided that for the foreseeable future, we will not allow the use of IM," says Kieran Sweeney, president and CEO of Align General Insurance Agency Inc., San Diego. "Significant security concerns were the driving force behind this decision," he says.

Sweeney points to the industry's highly regulated environment as another concern. "We routinely receive and store consumers' personal information," he says. "As a result, we need to emphasize security in at least equal measure with functionality when choosing our business tools."

Best case, IM can foster potentially poor and unmanageable communication habits within the business environment, he says. Worst case, it could place the enterprise systems at greater risk to external penetration. "We see no compelling reason at this time to facilitate the use of IM," he adds.

LifeCare Assurance, a Woodland Hills, Calif., long-term care reinsurer, has its own instant messaging system, restricted to employees within the organization.

With both regulatory requirements and security in focus, the company has a clear mandate. "Any outside contacts must be through e-mail," confirms Anna Abrams, director of financial reporting at LifeCare.

The awareness that IM security threats rival those of e-mail technology, however, are cause for yet more concern.

As IM and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking becomes increasingly more popular, hackers are finding it easier to break in through IM buddy lists, say analysts.

In a study conducted last year by Cupertino, Calif.-based security software firm Symantec Corp., 19 of the 50 top viruses and worms used IM and P2P applications. This represents an increase of almost 400% in only one year, reports Symantec.

IMlogic, a Waltham, Mass., provider of IM enterprise software, is warning customers that the Tixanbot Trojan and Guapim worm are using instant messaging to spread.

The Guapim worm uses MSN Messenger and another leading public IM network, as well as other P2P file sharing networks to distribute links to download a variant of the Spybot worm.

Due diligence quandary

Along with the threats mentioned above, the IMlogic Threat Center had detected more than 140 new threats in the two- week period before press time.

Regardless of whether the consideration is security or compliance, carriers that decide to implement IM for internal or external use face the same quandary: due diligence.

To stay on top of the potential downsides of IM implementation, the IT department must monitor IM systems daily, train employees, and enforce a formal policy for its use and misuse, according to two groups that recently studied the phenomenon.

According to a study of organizations' use of electronic communications tools, risk management issues and compliance failures exist because "there is a gap between the implementation of new technologies (such as IM) and organizations' management of them through formal directives and training."

The "Electronic Communication Policies and Procedures" study, conducted by AIIM, a Silver Spring, Md., enterprise content management association, and Kahn Consulting Inc., a Highland Park, Ill., compliance and records management consulting firm, queried companies on the tools they use.

Formal policies needed

Nearly half of the 1,000 organizations surveyed (19% of which are in the insurance industry) allow employees to use instant messaging, nearly 20% more than 18 months ago.

Since the organizations' first study in 2003, 33% more respondents reported they had implemented formal policies for electronic communication. Yet, that figure still only represents 28% of the total that provide formal directives regarding its use.

Similar to LifeCare, Encompass, and Arrowhead, Align has evaluated the merits of formal policies that spell out usage requirements.

"Align's e-mail usage policy is well understood by our staff and allows us to achieve a speed of business that differentiates the company without creating new and unnecessary downside risks and exposures," says Align's Sweeney.

Sweeney says his agency does not plan to use IM until it can ensure that no one can bypass the corporate authentication systems, that it can safeguard and track the flow of confidential information, and that it can document its corporate communications."
http://www.insurancenetworking.com/p...Id=3626&pb=ros





Yahoo To Digitize Public Domain Books
Elinor Mills

Yahoo is launching a library-digitization project to rival Google's controversial program.

Yahoo is working with the Internet Archive, the University of California and others on a project to digitize books in archives around the world and make them searchable through any Web search engine and downloadable for free, the group was set to announce Monday.

"If we get this right so enough people want to participate in droves, we can have an interoperable, circulating library that is not only searchable on Yahoo but other search engines and downloadable on handhelds, even iPods," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.

The project, to be run by the newly formed Open Content Alliance (OCA), was designed to skirt copyright concerns that have plagued Google's Print Library Project since it was begun last year.

The Authors Guild sued Google last week, alleging its scanning and digitizing of copyright protected books infringes copyright, even if only small excerpts are displayed in search results as Google plans. Google argues that the project adheres to the fair use doctrine under U.S. copyright law, which allows excerpts in book reviews and the like.

Unlike Google, Yahoo will scan and digitize only texts in the public domain, except where the copyright holder has expressly given permission. The OCA project also will make the index of digitized works searchable by any Web search engine. Because Google is restricting public access to excerpts of copyright protected books, it is maintaining control over the searching of all the digitized texts in its program.

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit formed to offer access to historical collections that exist in digital format, will host the digitized material. Hewlett-Packard Labs is providing technology for scanning books, and Adobe Systems is providing software licenses for its Acrobat and Photoshop software.

The University of California system, The University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives in the United Kingdom, O'Reilly Media and Prelinger Archives are all providing content, which will include books, speeches, spoken word audio, video and music, Yahoo said.

The University of California's 10 campus libraries have about 33 million volumes, of which an estimated 15 percent are in the public domain, said Daniel Greenstein, associate vice provost and University Librarian of the California Digital Library.

Greenstein said that contrary to publisher concerns that people will choose not to buy books if they can read or download them free online, the ability to easily find books on the Internet will broaden the public's exposure to them and is likely to increase, not decrease, sales.

"There is good evidence to suggest that if people see (that a book) is (out) there, they will buy it. Print sales either increase or are unchanged," he said. "We haven't once seen data to suggest that open access, at least to published printed works, decreases sales."

The University of California Press is likely to participate in the project, said Lynne Withey, director of the UC Press. "I'm all in favor of extending the availability of both books and journals in digital formats," she said. "So anything that does that in a way that respects authors' copyrights and also allows publishers to stay in business is a good thing."

By exposing more people to scholarly works, the OCA project could contribute to improved research and help reverse the trend among publishers of cutting back the number and print runs of books, said Lawrence Pitts, chairman of the University of California Academic Counsel Special Committee on Scholarly Communication.

Rising prices on books from academic publishers has meant fewer purchases by universities, he said. For example, academic presses that used to print 12,000 copies of a book a few years ago are now printing as few as 250 copies, he said.

"It is a terrible problem in the liberal arts, in particular, of getting a first book published, and that is often the ticket to being hired by a good university and getting tenure," Pitts said. "Data show that if you can put the material in an open access arena, the mention of the work doubles or quadruples because people out there in the world can find it better."

The OCA is appealing to publishers and other libraries, universities and archives worldwide to offer materials as well. "This is an international effort, not just domestic," said Dave Mandelbrot, Yahoo's vice president of search content. For example, "we would be very eager to integrate French content into the Open Content Alliance and are working with people in France to make that happen."

After Google announced its effort, the French government said it would embark on its own book digitization project, complaining that the Google plan would only accelerate the domination of the English language over other languages.

The OCA effort was applauded by publisher and author groups who have been critical of Google's effort, including the Association of Learned and professional Society Publishers, the Text and Academic Authors Association, or TAAA, and the Authors Guild.

"It is a wonderful idea. It does all the good things that the Google project was represented as doing, but it respects the copyright," said Richard Hull, executive director of the TAAA.

"Sounds fine, but we would want to see the details, of course," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. "We have absolutely no problem with digitization of public domain works. With copyright works, we want to make sure the people who actually have the rights are the ones granting the licenses. In most cases it would be the authors."

The OCA also is looking for ways to help publishers be compensated for offering copyright protected books to the repository, said Mandelbrot. "We are working directly with publishers to come up with business models to encourage them to come up with ways to make works publicly available," he said.

O'Reilly will make some copyright works available, initially without compensation, to encourage others to participate, Yahoo said.

When asked to comment on the Yahoo project, Google spokesman Nate Tyler said, "We welcome efforts to make information accessible to the world."
http://news.com.com/Yahoo+to+digitiz...3-5887374.html





EU Unveils Plans For European Digital Libraries
Press Release

The European Commission today unveiled its strategy to make Europe’s written and audiovisual heritage available on the Internet. Turning Europe’s historic and cultural heritage into digital content will make it usable for European citizens for their studies, work or leisure and will give innovators, artists and entrepreneurs the raw material that they need. The Commission proposes a concerted drive by EU Member States to digitise, preserve, and make this heritage available to all. It presents a first set of actions at European level and invites comments on a series of issues in an online consultation (deadline for replies 20 January 2006). The replies will feed into a proposal for a Recommendation on digitisation and digital preservation, to be presented in June 2006.

“Without a collective memory, we are nothing, and can achieve nothing. It defines our identity and we use it continuously for education, work and leisure”, commented Information Society and Media Commissioner Reding. “The Internet is the most powerful new tool we have had for storing and sharing information since the Gutenberg press, so let’s use it to make the material in Europe’s libraries and archives accessible to all”. Ján Figel’, Commissioner for Education and Culture, added: “European cooperation is an obvious necessity in this field: it is about ensuring preservation and access to our common cultural heritage for the future generations”.

Making the resources in Europe’s libraries and archives available on the Internet is not straightforward. On one hand, we are talking about very different materials – books, film fragments, photographs, manuscripts, speeches and music. On the other, we have to select from very large volumes – for example, 2.5 billion books and bound periodicals in European libraries and millions of hours of film and video in broadcasting archives.

The Commission communication sets out three key areas for action: digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation. At present, several initiatives exist in the Member States, but they are fragmented. To avoid creating systems that are mutually incompatible and duplicate work, the Commission proposes that Member States and major cultural institutions join EU efforts to make digital libraries a reality throughout Europe. Private involvement and public/private partnerships are a key element in achieving this goal.

For its part the Commission will step up coordination work and contribute funding through its research programmes and through the eContentplus programme:

the results of an online consultation on digitisation and digital preservation issues (2005) will feed into Commission Proposal for a Recommendation ( 2006). The results will also be an input for other relevant initiatives such as the review of EU copyright rules (2006) and the implementation of the Community R&D programmes (2007). A High Level Group on digital libraries will advise the Commission on how to best address the identified challenges at European level,
collaboration among Member States will be facilitated by an update of the Lund action plan, providing operational guidelines on digitisation (2005), backed up by quantitative indicators to measure progress. The Commission will work together with cultural institutions, such as the national and deposit libraries, to ensure co-ordinated action at European level,
the Commission has made €36 million available for research on advanced access to our cultural heritage and digital preservation in the fifth call for proposals under the sixth research framework programme for R&D (2005). Under the seventh framework programme (FP7), the research on digitisation, digital preservation and access to cultural content will be considerably stepped up, inter alia through a network of Centres of Competence in the fields of digitisation and preservation (2007), and between 2005 and 2008, the eContentplus programme will contribute €60 million towards making national digital collections and services interoperable and facilitating multilingual access and use of cultural material.
http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressRele...guiLanguage=en





Finnish Parliament Passes New Controversial Copyright Law
TankGirl

After a heated debate yesterday the Finnish Parliament unsurprisingly passed a new copyright law intended to 'harmonize' the national copyright laws with EU directives. The voting result was 121–34 for the new law. The law will make it illegal for the consumers to break copy protections on digital media even for their own fair use, and this particular point initiated an unforeseen active e-mail campaign from citizens to the members of the parliament plus a 300-strong demonstration in front of the parliament house yesterday. The new law does not criminalize downloading of copyrighted material from Internet for private use but as many p2p clients automatically share further what you are downloading, this is a rather meaningless detail.

The lively parliamentary debate revealed some interesting details about the legislation process. A parliamentary committee responsible for the preparation of the law - which has been admitted to be obscure and problematic even by its supporters - defended its actions to the parliament by telling it had heard 66 specialists during the preparation of the law. It turned out that over 20 of these specialists represented copyright industries and organizations while the consumers had no representation at all. The Finnish cultural minister Tanja Karpela, who had a leading role in pushing the new law through, defended her own actions with the pressure from EU commission. In closer scrutiny it turned out that official communications had been limited to verbal communications between one EU clerk and one Finnish ministery clerk. Overall, Karpela showed remarkable cluelessness throughout the debate while her main challenger, tech-savvy Jyrki Kasvi from Green Party, made a good case for rejecting the obscure and lopsided law and demanding a full rewrite of it. When the Finnish MP:s started to get hundreds of e-mails from worried citizens minister Karpela was quick to criticize the e-mails as a rogue campaign organized by a small activist clique. Many parliament members corrected this false claim in the debate and expressed their satisfaction of this newborn citizen activity and interest in parliamentary work. Large numbers of Finns have expressed their opinions on the issue on various public discussion boards, and over 100 websites have joined a spontaneously born "Am I A Criminal?" banner campaign.

DigiToday, a well-established Finnish online news publication focusing on IT, media and business topics, organized an online poll about the new law. 98 % of 4542 voters opposed it. The magazine also set up quickly special pages to do live reporting from the Parliament, publishing both the entire parliamentary debate verbatim and the detailed voting records of the MPs. The magazine seemed clearly to side with the consumers on the issue.

Perhaps the most significant result of the debate was the politicization of the copyright issue in Finland. A day before the decisive vote two small opposition parties and all political youth organizations associated with the Finnish parties ended up officially opposing the new law. A somewhat similar development happened earlier in the summer in Sweden when a corresponding law was passed in the Swedish parliament. Another positive outcome of this unexpected burst of citizen activity is the heightened public awareness of copyright issues - both among people and among the MPs - which will put the parliament under a much closer public scrutiny in the future when new copyright legislation will be worked on.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22041





International Business Leaders Form Anti-Piracy Coalition
AP

LONDON (AP) - Business leaders representing industries ranging from pharmaceutical to software agreed at a meeting here Tuesday to form a coalition to lobby governments around the world to step up the fight against international piracy and counterfeiting.

Executives including Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer, EMI Group PLC Chairman Eric Nicoli and NBC Universal Chief Executive Officer Bob Wright said many governments had not done enough to legislate against -- or enforce existing legislation against -- the theft of intellectual property. NBC Universal is , a unit of General Electric Co.

``We need an adequate legal framework and enforcement capacity,'' said Vivendi Universal Chairman Jean-Rene Fourtou after the meeting. ``We are very far from that even in the U.S., and Europe is quite worse.''

Nicoli warned governments that the companies forming the coalition under the banner ``Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy'' were worth around $1,000 billion, with a work force of 1 million and served more than a billion people.

``These aren't statistics, we respectfully suggest, that governments can afford to ignore,'' he said.

Nicoli declined to name countries that were dragging their heels on the fight against piracy, but said that the coalition would draw up a series of indices and publish them within the year.

He said the executives had decided to tackle the problem in the same way the pirates operate, by forming a coalition across industries and countries.

Nicoli on Tuesday dismissed suggestions by Apple Computer Inc. that a single price for songs sold over the Internet would help prevent piracy in the music industry.

``I'm not persuaded by the argument that a single price deters piracy,'' Nicoli said at a news conference in London.

Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs last month called music companies greedy for seeking higher prices for music downloaded from the Internet, saying such moves would increase piracy.

While the music industry has so far borne the brunt of copyright theft, with its easily reproducible and distributable products, the executives pointed out that almost every other industry is vulnerable.

Ballmer told the conference that the software industry is losing up to $32 billion annually to piracy. In the pharmaceuticals sector, up to 10 percent of products worldwide are counterfeit, rising to as much as 50 percent to 60 percent in the developing world.

``Nobody is immune,'' said Wright. ``There are elements that are very bad and the reputations of countries and citizens are at stake.''

Nicoli said there would be no ``overnight success'' in tackling piracy and counterfeiting but pointed to improvements in the music industry, which has waged a campaign against digital piracy over the past few years. The multi-pronged approach by the music industry has included a public education campaign and a series of lawsuits against individual file-sharers around the world.

``We are seeing progress and we are at least containing piracy,'' Nicoli said of the music industry.

The executives agreed to combine their current efforts to fight piracy and create the first global cross-sector stock-take of the size of the problem. They will also lobby other businesses to join the coalition.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/12815813.htm





Australian High Court Rules In Favour Of Modders

The High Court of Australia has ruled that Australian consumers and overseas travellers can buy cheaper computer games and hardware offshore and modify them locally.

Gadens Lawyers, who represented appellant Eddy Stevens in the High Court suit, released a statement today following the ruling, calling the win a "landmark copyright case" championing the rights of consumers.

Stevens ran a business that modified and repaired PlayStation games console equipment. Mod chips let gamers ignore vendors' regional coding systems to buy cheaper games designed for markets outside of Australia.

Stevens had been fighting PlayStation maker Sony in the High Court of Australia for four years to establish the right of consumers and businesses such as his to do so, Gadens said.

"All six judges of the High Court held that widely used 'mod-chips' were legal, with far reaching implications for the manufacturers of computer games -- Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft - and consumers," the law firm said.

The High Court also ruled that playing a game on a consumer machine does not constitute making an illegal copy of that game, Gadens said.

Michaell Bradley, managing partner at Gadens and counsel for Stevens, said the win was excellent news for Australian consumers.

"The judiciary and the consumer watchdog categorically upheld the rights of the little guy against the might of a multinational," Bradley said.

Gadens added in its statement that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) had stepped in as a friend of the court at Federal Court level to argue that regional coding was detrimental to consumer choice.

Nathan Mattock, senior associate for Gadens and part of Stevens' legal team on the High Court case, said the legal issues involved in the case had been complex.

"The court has had to interpret copyright law within the ever-changing technical environment in which we live. Fortunately for the consumer, the court has prevented a multinational corporation from further eroding consumer rights," Mattock said.

Gadens litigation team had handled several other landmark copyright and technology cases, including a Federal Court case for the Australian Video Retailers Association (AVRA) against Warner Home Video.

"Also a test case, it was comparable to Stevens versus Sony because it dealt with the issue of copying and explored the nature of the technology used for playing DVDs. Gadens Lawyers’ client was successful against Warner," the law firm said.
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=20369





China Shuts Down Two More Web Sites In Crackdown
AP

In a widening Internet crackdown, Chinese authorities have shut down an online discussion forum that reported on anti-corruption protests in a southern village and a Web site serving ethnic Mongolians, overseas monitors said Tuesday.

China routinely shuts down or blocks Web sites that operate outside of government control, but the issue has received heightened international attention in recent weeks with the publication of new rules aimed at stifling online dissent.

Radio Free Asia, a U.S.-based broadcaster, said an online forum that covered protests in the village of Taishi has been closed. The site had been popular among academics, journalists and rights activists, the broadcaster said.

Residents of Taishi, which is near the manufacturing hub of Guangzhou, had demanded that their village chief be removed from office and investigated for allegations of embezzlement and fraud.

Several villagers were reportedly injured in a clash with police last month as they tried to prevent police from seizing accounting ledgers that they said contained evidence of corruption.

Police and local authorities have refused comment.

The Taishi protest came amid a series of increasingly bold actions in China's impoverished countryside to bring attention to grievances from industrial pollution to corruption and illegal land seizures.

The group Reporters Without Borders said China also had shut down an online forum for ethnic Mongolian students, called www.ehoron.com, for allegedly hosting separatist content. Attempts to view the page Tuesday called up a message that said: ``You are not authorized to view this page.''

The Paris-based press group said Beijing's controls on ethnic minorities were more restrictive than for the rest of China's population.

The government also temporarily closed the Web site of a law firm in China's Inner Mongolia region, called www.monhgal.com, the press group said. That site could be accessed Tuesday.

China last month issued rules banning Internet news services from inciting illegal assemblies, marches and demonstrations and prohibiting activities on behalf of unauthorized civil groups.
http://mymail01.mail.lycos.com/scrip...ext=1128627936





Send In The Skype Clones
Nathan Willis

Over the past couple of months, public opinion of Skype has shifted from "media darling" to "when will their 15 minutes of fame be up?" Judging from forum and blog chatter, it would appear that the novelty of the product is wearing off and early adopters are feeling restless. Luckily, Internet telephony aficionados have standards- based alternatives to choose from.

This is a dangerous time for Skype, which recently announced it would be sold to eBay. Once users begin to see shortcomings, the door is wide open for a competitor to swoop in and take them all away -- particularly when (like Skype), your service is free or pay-as-you-go.

That is not to say Skype is resting on its laurels. It is offering beta-test programs for SkypeIn and SkypeZones, selling ringtones and avatars, and offering other new wrinkles to keep customers interested.

Nevertheless, Skype's core product is a commodity communications platform, and if a similar one comes along with a better user experience and improved features, Skype could be in serious trouble.

Many are of the opinion that Skype's Achilles' heel is its closed, proprietary network, and that a competitor that builds an equally good product based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) will displace Skype.

While most would agree that open standards are better for Internet users as a whole, closed networks based on proprietary protocols and codecs are not quick to die. We won't need to wonder much longer, though. The first generation of SIP-speaking Skype doppelgangers have hit the ground running.

Open and closed case

Let's start with the Gizmo Project. Gizmo, like Skype, is cross-platform, offering clients for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux on x86 -- though Gizmo doesn't offer a client for Pocket PC. The user interface is virtually identical to Skype's -- tabs for contact list, status, and call logs, and icons that look like they were designed for Playskool toys.

As with Skype, users can call into the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and receive calls from the public telephone network by purchasing add-on services from Gizmo's corporate parent SIPphone.

For users, the most significant difference between the services offered is that Gizmo uses the SIP protocol stack to locate, initiate, and tear down calls. This means a Gizmo user can call anyone on any competing SIP system.

Gizmo, like Skype, uses the proprietary iSAC and iLBC codecs from GlobalIPSound. It also supports GSM, g711U/A, enhanced G711, and iPCM-wb -- which makes sense when interoperability with other services is desired. Skype only needs to support the codecs it ships. Both clients auto-select codecs when negotiating call setup.

SIP support and interoperability are good to have, but I have seen numerous references to Gizmo as "the open source Skype." Unfortunately, Gizmo's license isn't open source. SIPphone provides the dial-in and dial-out services to make money, and they openly assert their support of and commitment to open standards -- but you still can't have the source.

Linux users get an "alpha" version of the Gizmo client. The current version for Linux is available only as .deb packages and to Linspire users through the "click and run" (CNR) service. That complicated my initial tests of the application; I wanted to try connecting to people on all three supported operating systems, but my friends encountered serious stumbling blocks installing the app on other flavors of Linux.

When I did get Mac, Windows, and Linux users online, the audio quality was comparable to Skype's. Basic calling works with the Linux client, but critical UI elements are non-functional: most of the buttons do nothing, the View menu is empty and the File menu has only one entry, Quit.

Furthermore, I experienced symptoms widely reported on the Gizmo forums: CPU usage sits at 100% until the first call is made, frequent segfaults, etc. There is still, shall we say, a lot of room for growth in the Linux client.

Is Gizmo a worthy replacement for Skype? I have to say no. Both are proprietary applications. The sole point in Gizmo's favor is using a recognized standard for call management, but if you are under the impression that this equates to open standards support, then you have overlooked the audio codec issue.

SIP is codec-agnostic, and open platforms have dozens of codecs to choose from, including several open source and patent-unencumbered. If the "commitment to open standards" trumpeted at the Gizmo Project site extends only to SIP (as it seems) then it is skin-deep. SIP is but one piece of the overall puzzle.

If you build it, they will come

But as you might expect, there are several GPLed projects interested in chasing down Skype. For brevity's sake, let's take a look at just one of them.

Wengophone is similar in interface design to Skype and Gizmo, and like those offerings, Wengophone is the progeny of a VoIP-to-PSTN service provider -- in this case, France's Neuf Telecom. Neuf Telecom obviously intends to give the product away as a loss-leader for selling its SIP-to-PSTN gateway services much as Skype and SIPphone do for their softphones. A stable release of the Wengophone client is available for Windows, and there's a beta for Linux on x86. Mac OS X and Pocket PC clients are in development.

Wengophone's Linux client is available in .deb and .rpm binary packages, and you can download the source for all platforms from a Subversion repository.

I had no trouble installing the Debian package, but the RPM was a different story. It suffered from sloppy version-checking and bad linking, and required some manual intervention to get it working. The developers did respond quickly to questions on the mailing list and forum. They assure users that the next release will fix those problems. And, of course, you can always compile it yourself.

Wengophone uses the AMR, AMR-WB, PCMA, PCMU, and GSM codecs. Thus when I test-called a Gizmo user from Wengophone, the only codec we had in common was GSM. Sound quality is appreciably nicer with iSAC in Gizmo-to-Gizmo or Skype-to-Skype calls. The GSM codec is not fault-tolerant, meaning that network traffic can introduce jitter, and it uses 8kHz sampling, capping the sound quality below the 16kHz used by other "wide-band" codecs.

The Wengophone configuration panel has a codec tab, which suggested to me that perhaps additional codecs were or would soon be available. I inquired about it on the forums and learned that user-installable codecs are tapped for the next release. The current release also lacks the ability to specify which audio devices to use for sound, microphone, and ringing, but the defaults worked fine on my machine. It should be noted that Wengophone is very young, so perhaps it is too early to be demanding of it in a review.

Despite its shortcomings, I believe that the GPLed status of the project makes it a safer bet for the future than Gizmo, for several reasons. The app can be modified to work with any SIP gateway (present or future -- you never know how long the parent company will survive in this field). Third parties can add support for additional audio codecs (even non-free ones) and new protocols (say, IAX or XMPP integration). Finally, anyone could port Wengophone to other operating systems and new devices -- unlike Skype and Gizmo.

These constitute clear advantages for Wengophone, given that Skype's commodity pricing leaves customers apt to jump ship. That said, for the time being the audio codec issue is the largest hurdle for Wengophone and all other open-source softphones to overcome.

Hanging up

I don't think that Skype's days are numbered by any means. If anything, there is so much growth potential in VoIP that even the smallest player five years from now will probably have more customers than Skype does today. Nevertheless, the horde of Skype lookalikes has a leg up on them due to SIP support.

But a half-open, half-closed solution is not worth supporting. To those who want to see VoIP softphones become widespread, a SIP client supporting only patent- encumbered, royalty-licensed audio (and video) codecs is one step forward and one step back.

If your commercial OS friends start asking you about Skype, I would suggest steering them away from Gizmo and toward a nice cross-platform, GPLed client. And, in the meantime, I would start looking for a way to speed up support for free voice codecs in open source and proprietary clients.
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?.../09/22/2039237





Skype Refreshes P2P Voice Chat Software

Skype has released a refresh of its popular voice chat software, adding features that it hopes will solidify its position as the market leader. Improvements to sound quality, increased personalization, and new mobility options are just a few of the additions included in the release. The company claims some 56 million registered users, with 170,000 new registrations per day. Skype was recently acquired by eBay in a USD 2.6 billion deal announced September 12.

Skype 1.4 incorporates two premium features into the client. Call forwarding will allow a user to forward calls to another Skype user for free, or to a traditional phone line for a fee using the company's SkypeOut service. Personalization is also now possible, working much like a mobile phone. Customers will pay a small fee of 1 euro, or about USD 1.20 USD to personalize the client with pictures, sounds and ringtones. Three companies have partnered with Skype to enable such options: American Greetings, Qpass, and Wee World.

A new wizard will also help to simplify the Skype registration and initial use of the product. The company says that as a result, it will take users about three minutes to get started with version 1.4. Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom says his company has always worked to give their users what they want.

"Today, we are thrilled to be delivering on this promise by offering a new version of Skype which both new and existing callers will find adds powerful and innovative new features like call forwarding and personalization, as well as offering our best ever sound quality on our simplest product to install and use," he said.
http://www.sda-india.com/sda/news/ps...age,India.html





Free the Cell Phone!
Jennifer Granick

Last week, I was contacted by a small company that I'll call Unlocko. Unlocko sells software that "unlocks" mobile phones so owners can select different cellular providers on the same handset. The company had received a cease-and-desist letter from a large mobile phone provider, which I'll call CellPhoneCo.

Like most U.S. cellular providers, CellPhoneCo electronically locks the handsets it sells so the phones can only be used with CellPhoneCo's service. CellPhoneCo claims that the sale of unlocking software is illegal.

The financial motive behind this claim is obvious. Companies have been using the razor blade business model to guarantee a steady stream of revenue ever since, well, the razor blade. Cell phone companies sell you a phone at a discount, and then make up the difference by requiring you to sign a multi-year contract promising to pay monthly fees for mobile phone service or to fork over a hefty termination penalty if you break the deal.

But many customers, particularly those who travel internationally, want more choice. They may be perfectly happy paying their service provider the usual monthly fee to use their GSM phone in the United States, but in Europe they want to use the same phone with a European carrier that won't charge for roaming or long distance. Or they might find that their usual carrier doesn't have reliable service at their summer house, and they want to use a different provider while vacationing. Or customers might want to take the same phone to a different carrier after their service contract ends.

As a result, a burgeoning market has developed for unlocking software that allows customers to modify their phones to accept signals from the service provider of their choice.

Here, CellPhoneCo is making a novel argument: that it can stop a business with which it has no contractual relationship from selling software that customers might use for these purposes. Does CellPhoneCo have a legal right to squelch unlocking software?

To lock out the unlockers, CellPhoneCo is turning to a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act intended to prevent people from disabling technology that protects games, songs and movies from illegal duplication. The DMCA says that you can't distribute tools that break -- or circumvent -- technological measures that control access to copyright works.

But CellPhoneCo isn't asserting that Unlocko's program copies any copyright-protected software or content. Its claim is more subtle.

Unlocko's software reprograms your mobile phone so it bypasses the "secret handshake" CellPhoneCo's locking software requires before the phone will operate. After "circumventing" the handshake requirement, the phone -- like virtually any modern piece of electronics -- runs software installed on its internal chip.

Therefore, CellPhoneCo claims, Unlocko's program unlawfully circumvents a technological measure controlling access to the phone's copyright-protected software.

But other resourceful manufacturers have tried similar tactics to lock customers into aftermarket goods and services, and failed in the end.

For example, printer company Lexmark wanted its customers to buy its brand name refill cartridges instead of cheaper generic ones. It programmed the printer software to require a "secret handshake" from the cartridge before it would operate. When competitors figured out how to make their cartridges work in Lexmark printers regardless, the company sued, claiming that the competitors violated the DMCA because software on the generic cartridge chip was circumventing the secret handshake and accessing the copyright-protected software in the printer.

In the trial court, Lexmark won, perhaps inspiring the Chamberlain Group, a garage door company, to file a similar case against a competitor that sold universal garage door openers. In that case, however, the trial court rejected Chamberlain's DMCA argument. The court decided that Chamberlain had no legal right to control how its customers open their own garage doors.

This view probably influenced the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which reviewed the Lexmark decision, because it later reversed the trial court, explaining that printer owners had an unfettered right to run software installed on their printers.

A court should view CellPhoneCo's DMCA argument the same way. It's true that by tying customers into CellPhoneCo's service, the company can provide cheaper phones. But CellPhoneCo is legally entitled to receive its expected future revenue under its service contract with the customer, regardless of what service the customer uses. Meanwhile, customer choice means mobile users can select the best service now, while breeding competition that will improve both price and quality for all users.

Most importantly, CellPhoneCo shouldn't be able to stop Unlocko, a company with which it has no contractual relationship, from making a product that fosters consumer choice and competition.

In the physical world, we instinctively understand that the law doesn't forbid you from installing generic parts in your Honda, and that the Maytag repairman isn't the only person allowed to service your washing machine. CellPhoneCo hopes to use the law to create an unbreakable bond between selling phones and selling wireless service. If courts protect anti-competitive business practices, customers won't simply be making contractual promises not to buy from other vendors -- other vendors won't even exist. We literally won't know what we're missing.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68989,00.html





Google, Sun in Challenge to Microsoft
Matthew Fordahl

Google Inc. took a step toward challenging Microsoft Corp.'s dominance of computer software with the announcement Tuesday of a collaboration agreement with Sun Microsystems Inc.

The move could lead to Google offering next-generation word processing, spreadsheet and collaboration tools that would take on Microsoft's industry-leading Office suite of software.

But for now its significance may be mostly as a symbolic shot across Microsoft's bow, signaling Google's intention of attacking the world's biggest software company head on.

Aside from a plan to offer Google's toolbar program with downloads of Java software, details of the agreement were scant. Though it could lead to a new pipeline for Sun software to millions of computers, there was no firm commitment.

Some downplayed the announcement as a publicity stunt that probably would not have occurred had Google CEO Eric Schmidt not spent 14 years of his career working at Sun under CEO Scott McNealy.

The alliance would be a boon for Sun if Google had promised to buy some of the company's sophisticated computers, but no ironclad commitments were announced.

"There really isn't much depth to this partnership," said industry analyst Rob Enderle.

"I think Eric is doing this as personal favor for Scott," he said. "It provides a certain amount of press and visibility to Sun when there hasn't been very many positive things going on at the company."

Sun's shares edged up a penny Tuesday to close at $4.20 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, where Google's shares fell $7.68 to finish at $311. Microsoft's shares lost 52 cents, or 2.04 percent, to close at $24.98.

As part of the agreement, Sun will offer Google's search toolbar with downloads of its free Java software, which is required to run a variety of Web-based applications and works with multiple operating systems.

The two companies, which did not disclose terms of the deal, said they also agreed "to explore opportunities to promote" other Sun technologies, including the freely available OpenOffice.

OpenOffice, an offshoot of Sun's StarOffice, is a leading challenger to the ubiquitous Office suite, a major cash cow for Microsoft. Both offer a word processor and spreadsheet among other applications.

"OpenOffice is already an alternative, but if Google gets involved in supporting it, that could be the thing that puts it over the top," said Forrester Research analyst John R. Rymer.

Neither McNealy nor Schmidt would say when or how Google might distribute Sun's software. Both said the Google toolbar option for Java downloads - the toolbar provides quick access to Google search, spell checking and a popup-ad blocker - is just a first step in a significant agreement.

"We only want to talk about what we're talking about here now ... we expect more," McNealy said.

Microsoft did not immediately comment.

OpenOffice could provide a vehicle for Google to diversify its sales, which are driven almost exclusively by online advertising. So-called office productivity software generates more than $10 billion in annual sales, estimated Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney.

"We believe this creates a potentially interesting new revenue opportunity for Google," Mahaney wrote in a research note Tuesday.

The deal could eventually boost the fortunes of programs that work on multiple operating systems, eating into Microsoft's profits from its dominant Windows computing environments.

Increasingly, many of the applications that computer users value most - such as news and weather tickers - run as Web services independent of the operating systems on their computers.

Java is a backbone of those Web services, along with Microsoft's .NET architecture.

Since it was launched a decade ago, Java has been used to power Web-based applications, standalone programs, cell phones and other gadgets across a variety of computer operating systems.

A key component of Sun's decade-old Java, its application-running platform, was the source of one of many rifts between Microsoft and Sun over the years.

Sun first sued the world's top software maker in 1997, claiming the Redmond, Wash., company rewrote elements of Java specific to Windows. Later, Microsoft said it would yank Java entirely from its ubiquitous software.

The wrangling ended in spring 2004, when the companies surprised the world with a $1.95 billion settlement and 10-year collaboration agreement.

Both Sun and Google share the common root of Stanford University. Sun - short for Stanford University Network - was founded there in the 1980s, while Google got its start there in the 1990s. And one of Sun's co-founders, Andy Bechtolsheim, gave Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin $100,000 in 1998 to incorporate their young search company.

Sun has lost $4.5 billion since June 2001, although the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has recently started to show signs of recovery.

While Sun has been struggling, Google's fortunes have steadily risen. Though best known as a search engine, it now offers free e-mail, maps, instant messaging, video and last week announced it wants to provide free Wi-Fi to San Francisco.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...100401428.html





Review: OpenOffice 2.0

OpenOffice Is Great Alternative To Microsoft
Andy Ihnatko

The biggest coup of open-source software isn't that it's (usually) free for the downloading. No, it's one of the few remaining incubators for truly great apps. Freed from commercial expectations, it starts with a good idea and steadily keeps on evolving as hundreds of developers keep adding features and improvements until, after years of commitment, the good idea finally emerges as a great app.

Witness the success of the Firefox browser. Many companies had the guts to challenge Internet Explorer, but did any of them have the resources and the commitment to stick with it for five or six years? No, not even as a tax dodge. Saying "We spent $740,000 trying to unseat a product with 83 percent market share" is a rocketship to an audit. But years of steady, relentless progress led inevitably to the debut of Firefox as a real, honest-to-goodness app and a browser that makes Explorer seem pointless and silly.

Now it's OpenOffice's turn. An official, "stable" release of OpenOffice 2.0 will be available for download in a few days from www.openoffice.org. And with this ambitious new edition of the venerable alternative to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice has officially been FireFoxed. That is, you won't use it because you hate Microsoft or because you don't like tying your whole office's (or your government's) ability to function to the proprietary whims of one single company. Maybe you won't even use it just because it'll cost you $0 to Microsoft Office's $365. You'll use it because OpenOffice 2.0 is an attractive and compelling suite of office apps in its own right.

The individual improvements to its apps are many and fundamental, but head-and-shoulders above them all is the simple fact that OpenOffice now has a clean and simple user interface that doesn't get in the way of what you're trying to accomplish. Working with 1.x was a bit like having a long conversation with a smart, witty person who desperately needed a breath mint: You stuck with it, though at a cost. 2.0 is actually a slight improvement over MS Office's standard configuration. Its file-handling has also been tweaked to make working with MS Office docs a more transparent experience.

Which brings us to the central question: For all of its improvements, is OpenOffice 2.0 a credible replacement for MS Office? You know, after a few weeks of using the suite and trying to settle on an answer, I've concluded that it's an unsophisticated question to begin with. OpenOffice is mature and ambitious enough in its design to be thought of as its own product, not as some sort of counterfeit Gucci bag.

But OK: (just this once, mind you) Let's be unsophisticated. OpenOffice consists of Write, Calc, Impress, Draw (a simple graphics app) and Base, analogues for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access.

Each app can natively read and write files created by its Microsoft counterpart, though the deeper the document reaches into MS Office's top-drawer features, the greater the chance that you'll have to massage the results after importing it into OpenOffice.

But let's not gloss over Open-Office's choice of native file format, either. OpenDocument is itself an open standard, meaning that it's 100 percent non-proprietary and any developer (including Microsoft) can write apps that support the format.

Potentially that's a revolutionary feature; with all of your docs based on an open standard, you're free to switch to a different office suite without converting any of your old data.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts feels so strongly about this sort of freedom and accessibility that it's chosen OpenDocument as its official office format for both internal use and for public documents.

Feature-wise, I'd guesstimate that OpenOffice 2.0 is only missing about 5 percent of MS Office's feature set, and nearly every missing feature is a power tool. Which is sort of an all-or-nothing thing: either it's a feature that you've never used and never will, or it's something you absolutely rely on each and every day.

Write allows you to track changes, for example, but it could never keep up with the hundreds of notes and changes that four different editors added to the 600- page book I've just finished writing. In other cases, such as the suite's macro language and Calc's DataPilot feature, the basic abilities are there, yes, but they're not directly compatible with Microsoft's macros or with Excel's Pivot Tables, so you'd have to re-create them.

Who cares? There's no risk involved. Download OpenOffice 2.0, throw your MS Office files at it, and see what happens. Or try Sun Microsystems' StarOffice 8, which is based on OpenOffice 2.0's code base and includes (among many enhancements) cleaner importing and exporting. StarOffice (from www.sun.com) costs $99 boxed or $69 as a download.

OpenOffice 2.0 really ought to be the first choice for all students, nearly every user and even many small businesses. It's definitely not a replacement for Microsoft Office 2003, but it's an utterly credible alternative. And for most people, it's all the Office they'll ever need.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/workt...in-andy22.html





Red Hat To Seek Trusted OS Status

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, due at the end of 2006, is expected to become the first "trusted" Linux, a security designation that could accelerate partners’ Linux business with the government.
Paula Rooney

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, due at the end of 2006, is expected to become the first “trusted” Linux, a security designation that could accelerate partners’ Linux business with the government.

Last week, Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat said it is working with IBM and Trusted Computer Solutions, Herndon, Va., to make its enterprise Linux distribution compliant with the Common Criteria of the Evaluation Assurance Level 4 (EAL4), the government’s highest security rating. To achieve trusted operating-system status, technology must support three additional levels: the labeled security protection profile (LSPP), the controlled access protection profile (CAPP) and role-based access control security capabilities.

Sun Microsystems, Novell and Microsoft have earned the EAL4 rating, but only Sun Solaris 9 has full trusted OS status. Sun is expected to release Solaris 10 Trusted Extensions during the first half of 2006, a Sun spokeswoman said.

Red Hat rival Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 4 has an EAL4+ rating, which signifies it supports CAPP requirements. Novell may add support for LSPP in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, due next spring, but has not decided whether to pursue the full trusted OS designation, a company spokesman said.

One open-source consultant was skeptical of the Red Hat effort, saying the requirements to become a trusted OS can’t be met by an out-of-the-box solution. “Technically, a trusted OS is one that has achieved EAL compliance, although most security agencies consider EAL4 a minimum,” said Chris Maresca, senior partner at Olliance Group, Palo Alto, Calif.

What gives Red Hat a technical advantage over Novell is its support for SELinux, a Security-Enhanced Linux derivative developed by the National Security Agency, said Ed Hammersla, COO of Trusted Computer, whose TCS Trusted Linux will be merged with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in late 2006.
http://www.informationweek.com/story...leID=171202290





Open Internet, We Hardly Knew Ye
Jennifer Granick

Hurricane Katrina tore families away from their homes and from each other. And with the Gulf Coast in chaos, electricity out and cell-phone towers down, people in far-flung places across the United States turned to the robust, decentralized internet to find their loved ones.

While some evacuees posted their whereabouts on existing sites like craigslist, others turned to a variety of new message boards created specially for evacuees.

Almost immediately, there were too many sites to choose from. A grandchild looking for her grandmother, or a father for his son and wife, had literally dozens of online databases to search. The internet offered a solution here as well. An international, ad hoc group of self- described geeks built a system that automatically combined information from the dozens of refugee listing sites into a single, searchable database that family members could use to find each other.
That database, at Katrinalist.net, is tangible evidence of the beauty and power of internet technology in the hands of well-meaning citizens.

It's also an endangered species. In a few years, legal doctrines being aggressively pushed by corporations and law enforcement officials might prevent something cool and useful like this from ever happening again.

In a variety of cases, courts are holding that people can't access internet computers without first getting authorization from the computer's owner. Judges are assuming that the public has no right to use unsecured computers connected to the internet, and are requiring the public to get permission first.

For example, many ISPs and some prosecutors are arguing that it's a crime to use unsecured wireless access points without the explicit permission of the owner. Antispam crusaders advocate blocking any e-mails that haven't been whitelisted first. Airlines like American and auction sites like eBay -- which want customers to visit their websites, view their ads and "join the community" -- have won court injunctions against companies that collect price information on plane fares or auctions to help consumers comparison shop.

Under ancient legal theories like "trespass to chattels" and ill-advised modern laws like the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and state computer crime statutes, courts are holding that if you don't have authorization, you can't access computers.

And if you can't access computers, you can't collect data about airfares, auctions or evacuees.

The better world is one in which we don't need to seek permission or risk punishment to do cool stuff that makes the world a better place. In the early days of the internet, a lot of people felt that we'd found that better world. Thanks to the internet's open protocols, many of the most useful innovations, from the web to instant messaging to internet telephony, emerged without developers needing anyone's permission to run their cool new code.

But under a permission-only legal regime, the Katrinalist.net volunteers would have had to contact every site with listing data and ask for authorization to use the information first. With dozens of sites popping up in the days following the storm, getting permission would have taken a lot of time -- if the site owners could even be reached and convinced of the merit of the idea in the first place.

On the internet, having to ask permission first can kill the creation of a useful new tool.

The law should treat the internet as open by default -- a public resource rather than a gated community. This doesn't mean that we can't protect our networked computers or data with copyright law, passwords, firewalls or perhaps even terms-of-service agreements. But rather than asking whether a user obtained permission to access computers connected to the internet, the law should ask whether the owner did anything to prevent public access.

In the absence of intellectual property protection or technological barriers to information access, courts and legislatures must allow free, unfettered use of data and machines that owners place online and leave publicly accessible.

It's an accident of technology that data published on the internet must be contained on computer servers. By giving owners too many rights to control whether and when the public accesses those servers, we will lose the very openness that makes the internet particularly cool. We'll also lose the rights that we already have in the real world, to comparison shop, to search, to collect information or even to help hurricane victims find each other.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,68850,00.html





Microsoft, Film Studios Tap Jackson For 'Halo'
Lisa Baertlein

The Oscar-winning creative team behind the "The Lord of the Rings" films, including director Peter Jackson, has been named to run the production of the upcoming film based on Microsoft Corp.'s blockbuster "Halo" video game, the company said on Tuesday.

Jackson and his wife, Fran Walsh, will serve as the executive producers for "Halo," which is targeted for worldwide release in mid-2007 by Universal Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox film studios.

Universal will oversee the film's production and domestic distribution. Fox will handle international distribution.

Donna Langley, Universal's production president, told Reuters it is impossible at this early stage to give specific details about the film.

"The game is a good template," hinted Langley, who added that "Halo" will have a bigger budget than "Doom," the video game-inspired Universal film due in theaters later this month.

Langley described "Doom" as a monster chase movie that moves from Point A to Point B. The "Halo" games have a more complex mythology, characters, environments and worlds, Langley said.

"Halo," the best-selling franchise for Microsoft's Xbox game console, follows the adventures of the futuristic super-soldier "Master Chief" as he battles an alien onslaught.

Eradicating Cynicism

The "Halo" movie will be shot in Wellington, New Zealand, and will use Jackson's production and post-production facilities there.

"He eradicates any cynicism that might exist with core fans (of the game). At the same time, he makes a movie like this appealing to a mainstream audience," Langley said of the director, who is an avid video game player and fan of "Halo."

The executive producers will collaborate with Universal, Fox and Microsoft's Bungie Studios, which created the game.

Screenwriter and novelist Alex Garland wrote the original feature film adaptation of Halo. A director will be named in coming weeks, and the cast has yet to be announced.

Jackson and Walsh are currently in post-production on Universal's "King Kong," slated for release in December. "Halo" marks the first time that the duo are acting as executive producers on a major film that Jackson is not directing.

The video game industry -- whose sales rival those of U.S. box offices -- is gaining status, taming its maverick image and moving closer to Hollywood. By the time of its release, "Halo" will join such other video game-inspired films as "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," "Resident Evil," and "Doom." But the industry's Hollywood inroads have not been without bumps.

Hollywood's major film studios gave Microsoft a cool reception last spring when the company came to them with an initially high asking price for "Halo." The script was delivered by costumed, laser gun-toting messengers.

As part of their deal with the global software giant and No. 2 video game console maker, Universal and Fox will pay Microsoft $5 million plus a percentage of movie ticket sales. The price is capped at 10 percent of domestic box office receipts.

Universal Pictures is operated by the NBC Universal media division of General Electric Co., and is co-owned by Vivendi Universal. Fox is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp Ltd.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False

[JackSpratts]

What's With Them Young Whippersnappers?
Terry Pedwell

Canadians illegally download 14 music CDs or other files from the Internet for every file they take from the web legally, a new recording-industry poll suggests.

The illegal downloading has cost retail music stores more than half a billion dollars in lost sales since 1999, a study by Pollara for the recording industry estimates.

While some observers believe Internet piracy is a widespread phenomenon, most illegal file swapping is done by younger Canadians, the Pollara report sys.

Canadians between 12 and 24 years of age are responsible for 78 per cent of illegal music downloading, even though they make up only 21 per cent of the population, it says.

The effect of the piracy, however, does not stop at just music or movies, suggests a study from another polling firm.

Canadians between the ages of 18 and 29 are much more willing than other age groups to make illegal copies of software programs, cheat on exams or even shoplift, an Environics poll suggests.

Nearly 27 per cent of younger people surveyed said they would consider cheating on a test or exam, compared with 10 per cent of the general population.

Of those asked, 6 per cent of younger Canadians said they would leave a store without paying for a piece of clothing, compared with 2 per cent of the population at large.

“Not only does music file-swapping harm artists, but it also points to an erosion of respect for intellectual property that threatens Canada's economy and values at the core of our society,” said Graham Henderson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, which commissioned the polls.

“The ‘if it's there, it's free' thinking extends far beyond entertainment products and software to ideas themselves,” Mr. Henderson added, noting a rise in plagiarism in schools and universities.

The association launched a national campaign Thursday to protect and promote so-called “products of the mind.”

The campaign comes in advance of public hearings this fall on new federal copyright legislation, Bill C-60.

A number of legal experts have criticized the legislation, warning that it fails to protect the public interest and is primarily geared toward satisfying special-interest groups.

The University of Ottawa hosted a summit Thursday on Bill C-60, with representatives of both Industry Canada and Canadian Heritage, the two departments jointly responsible for the legislation.

Among the Pollara findings:

– 12 to 17 year olds are the most likely to strongly agree that “artists are too rich already so downloading won't hurt them.”

– 37 per cent of respondents used a CD burner to record music within the last six months, up from 18 per cent in 2001.

The Environics findings suggest:

– 60 per cent of Canadians aged 18-29 are willing to download music from the Internet without paying for it, compared with 29 per cent of the general population.

– Half of young people believe it's all right to illegally download music because others do it too.

Pollara's findings are based on a national telephone survey of more than 1,200 Canadians aged 12 and over between June 24 and July 12.

The firm says the results are accurate to within plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, 19 out of 20 times.

Environics polled just over 1,000 Canadians aged 18 or over by telephone, and another 1,043 Canadians on-line in May, 2005.

It says the findings are accurate to within plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 out of 20 times.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...ry/Technology/


Latest Comments in the Conversation

Andrew White from Toronto, Canada writes: This is a terrible "article," it simply parrots the assertions of the CRIA with no fact checking.The CRIA is hardly a disinterested body.

Just a few points:

"The illegal downloading has cost retail music stores more than half a
billion dollars in lost sales since 1999, a study by Pollara for the
recording industry estimates."

There have been countless studies that question these kinds of assertions. One study done at the Harvard Business School concluded "Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales."

"Canadians between the ages of 18 and 29 are much more willing than
other age groups to make illegal copies of software programs, cheat on
exams or even shoplift, an Environics poll suggests."

Two things about this quote bother me. First, while not explicitly stated, there is a suggestion of a causal relationship between filesharing and these bahviours, which is absurd. Secondly, wouldn't this group represent the number of people actually taking exams? I'm not surprised that they are therefore more likely to cheat on exams, than, say, seniors.

"37 per cent of respondents used a CD burner to record music within the last six months, up from 18 per cent in 2001."

I shouldn't have to point out that using a CD to burn music does not correspond with copyright infringement. The internet has plenty of free or public domain mp3 available. Other uses are legitimate fair use, protected by Canadian law.

Its very disappointing to see an article of questionable legitimacy appear in a respected national newspaper.


Jason Prini from Ottawa, Canada writes: "Nearly 27 per cent of younger people surveyed said they would consider cheating on a test or exam, compared with 10 per cent of the general population."

Um... could that be because a higher number of young people are in school as opposed to the general population?

CORRELATION IS NOT THE SAME AS CAUSALITY.

This report seems to be an attempt to mislead the public.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...ry/Technology/





Breaking the Standards
Russell McOrmond

In the past, when customers purchased music, they knew they'd have no problems enjoying the music on any audio device of their choice. With records, you only had to worry about the speed, all 8-tracks would play in any 8-track player, all the way up to audio CDs which conformed to the Red Book standard (Compact Disc Digital Audio system, or CDDA), which would work in any brand of CD player.

But this has changed. Today, more and more audio CDs fail conform to Red Book standards. Instead, they're encoded in a so-called "copy control" format and because these don't conform to universally recognized standards, no one knows exactly how well, or otherwise, these CDs will perform on a wider variety of CD players.

Even if you can listen to a CD today, you don't know if it'll work at all in any player you might try to use at a later date. Whether a CD has scratches or deliberate defects, the effect is the same in that the media is less valuable.

It should be obvious that this technique can only harm sales in the longer term: many potential customers have decided to not buy CDs with this level of uncertainty, which itself will account for part of the decline in CD sales.

The market for downloaded music is worse than with the defective CD market. Online music 'services' marketed by lobby groups only work with very specific brands of audio playing software. This is achieved through the deliberate use of access controls where content is "locked" behind a technical protection measure, and the digital "key" is contained in specific brands of software. With iTunes, the keys are owned by Apple, meaning it can, and does, exclude competitors from creating devices able to play iTunes music. Puretracks, Archambaultzik and Napster use Microsoft Media formats, meaning Microsoft controls the market of devices which can play these songs.

The harm of tying the enjoyment of legally purchased music to specifically branded audio players has been lost on the industry.

Hilary Rosen, the ex-head of the RIAA, complained about the fact that music bought from iTunes wouldn't play on competing audio players. This is the intended purpose of the DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) she'd spent years lobbying the US government to protect under the DMCA, which p2pnet editor Jon Newton believes she may also have had a hand in crafting. And it's understood that was included in the copyright act she helped author for Iraq. As with the recent laughing at the activities of the recording industry, Hillary's unintended humour lost her considerable credibility.

I've written in the past how DRM won't deter people who want to infringe copyright, and how it's hard to understand how DRM is considered to be related to copyright at all. I won't repeat these arguments here. Suffice it to say that DRM only regulates the activities of law abiding citizens and can't achieve the claimed goal of reducing copyright infringement.

While the "Canadian" Recording Industry Association (CRIA) is lobbying Canada to import the same laws into this country, those who understand how the technology works have a hard time understanding why.

The recording industry cartel currently makes its money through a stronghold on the methods of distribution and marketing for recorded music. DRM technology providers will be able to easily replace that traditional roll, given the amount of market domination they'll achieve by controlling the keys to the digital locks. This means DRM vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Matsushita, or Toshiba will eventually replace CRIA owners such as EMI (UK), Universal Music Group (France), Warner Music Group (WMG - US), or Sony BMG Music (US). (We should always remember how little "Canadian" content there is in the self-called "Canadian" recording industry association).

New Right of Access Control?

We need to be very clear about what's being lobbied for through the policy laundered 1996 WIPO treaties, and legal protection for "technical measures" which claim to protect copyright.

Legacy copyright holders are asking a massive expansion of the regulation of copyright to include a sui-generis right of access control (see also: In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law, chapter 7: Anti- Circumvention Legislation and Competition Policy: Defining A Canadian Way? , Michael Geist, page 224).

Never before has the limited monopoly of copyright extended to issues of access.

When someone bought a book, most uses were entirely unregulated, including any method of access (with or without contacts or eye glasses, no matter what brand of light bulbs were used to light the room, etc) as well as other uses (books used to hold up furniture, etc).

Now the incumbent copyright holders want to, at least in the digital world, have the legally protected right to control all of these things, down to mandating the specific brands of tools which audiences would use to access works.

Equal copyright for young creators!

As a creator, I've been frustrated by the arguments used to justify expansions of the scope and term of copyright. As all creativity builds on the past, the limited scope and term of copyright needs to be understood as not being a limitation of the rights of creators, but as a recognition that the rights of future creators are protected by limiting the control of the past. Those who like to throw the term "theft" around should remember it applies far more correctly to expansions of the scope and term of copyright to the detriment of new creators than it does infringing the copyright of past creators.

The idea that "if some copyright is good for creators, more is better" is entirely false. It's far more correct statement is to suggest that copyright is to creativity like water is to humans; too little and you dehydrate and die, too much and you drown and die.

The idea that the limits of copyright are an expression of creators' rights isn't new. On September 27, I attended a Torys LLP Technology Law Speakers Series with special guest speaker Abraham Drassinower (Torys LLP). The lecture was entitled "Taking User Rights Seriously", and discussed how limits such as "fair dealings" and the limited term of copyright were necessary to equally recognize the rights of future creators.

Drassinower also discusses this theme in chapter 16 of In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law.

I'd like to expand this theme, suggesting a prohibition on the use of technical measures which limit access to specific tools would also be an expression of creators' rights.

I'm primarily the author of software, specifically communications software. For my software to be commercially valuable, obviously, it must be compatible with other software, allowing potential customers to substitute my software for that of my competitors.

I consider any technology or law which stops me from creating compatible software to be an infringement of my rights, and it's this direct attack on my creative rights which caused me to get involved in copyright reform to begin with. And it's this fight to protect my creative rights which led to my strong opposition to the 1996 WIPO treaties and Bill C-60.

Existing groups that claim to work to protect creators' rights such as the Creators' Rights Alliance aren't yet advanced enough in their thinking to recognize this attack against their rights. Not only are they not fighting against legal protection for technical measures, they're lobbying in support of it. This has meant independent creators who recognize these problems are not only not supported by these groups, we're forced to lobby against them.

An example of the type of dialogue was seen at Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival. I was a participant in an industry panel on digital distribution. For various reasons the panel ended up composed of independents including musicians, film and myself representing independent software authors. As independents we mostly agreed, except where it came to technical measures.

I expressed how I, as someone who was a competitor to and not a customer of either Microsoft or Apple, could not legally purchase content encoded in these file formats and enjoy them without circumventing a technical measure. I was bluntly told it was my choice to not be a customer of these companies, and that they believed they had a right to control what tools audience members used to access their works.

This isn't a valid choice. I believe their choice to be an independent creator should be protected, rather than being forced into becoming a passive audience member of the works of others, or an employee of the majors where employees do not enjoy copyright related rights at all. They were effectively saying I shouldn't be allowed to be an independent software creator.

How can it be that at least one member of this panel of independent creators thought that it was appropriate to entirely lock out independent software authors from being able to access his works? You would think that independents would support each other, not directly promote the existing monopolies in each market. While I was hit with one of the most offensive things that can be said to a creator, a complete rejection of his/her creativity, I realize that far too many people simply don't realize the consequences of what they are asking for.

In the current political debate we have photographers claiming they want "equal copyright" with other authors, picking the most expansive scope and term of copyright from the variety of different terms and scope of copyright offered. While I disagree that what they're asking for is "equal copyright" given photography (where the photographer is most often unknown) is very different than books (where author information is contained in the book), I have to wonder if the rhetoric of "equal copyright" can be used by independent creators.

As an independent software and non-software author I believe that our equal rights are expressed in the following ways:

· The public domain is critical for the rights of follow-on creators and must be protected at least as much as the private interests of past creators. The cultural recycling date, also known as the end of the term of copyright, must be clear. There are many cases where the author is not easily determined. In these cases, it 's inappropriate to start the term of copyright from the death of the author. The most easily determined date should start the countdown, such as the date a photograph is taken, music is recorded, or the date of publication for other types of works. Photography and software are clearly examples that should have a fixed term. Because of the confusion around who the "author" of a motion picture is, movies should also have a fixed term. I've personally gone as far as to suggest that for greatest clarity that all works should have a well documented fixed recycling date, and that the date of the death of an author should only be applicable to the copyright in unpublished works.

· The term of copyright should be reduced, including having different types of works having different terms. While books may have commercial value for 50 years, software often only has commercial value for five years, or even less. Newspaper articles should be recycled into culture quickly, allowing for follow-on creativity that uses these snapshots in time to explore our history. (See also: In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law, Chapter 17, "Coming to Terms with Copyright" by David Lametti)

· The works of the government of Canada, paid for by the Canadian public, should be used to immediately enhance the public domain. Canada should abolish crown copyright, joining some of our trade partners such as the United States which does not have copyright on government created works.

· There should be a protected right for software authors to reverse engineer existing software to create compatible software. Copyright and patents should be excluded from interfaces, whether they be programming interfaces, user interfaces, communications protocols or interfaces with hardware.

· There should be an explicit prohibition against the use of technical measures to limit access to copyright works to specific tools. There should be a positive right to circumvent DRM for non-infringing purposes. This right must include the right to create, distribute and sell software (sometimes called a "device", a "product" or a "service" depending on context) to help other people to express these rights, and for these authors of multi-purpose tools to not be liable for any potentially infringing uses by third parties.

· "Fair dealings" should be expanded to more fully protect follow-on creators. Canada's "fair dealing" has been too narrowly interpreted by the courts, making it too hard for young creators to make fair use of the existing works that define their culture.

· Authors and audiences should have a protected choice within a full spectrum of options for the production, distribution and funding of creativity. What choices are successful should be decided by a free market, not by the government. One way to protect this choice is to ensure that collective societies can only be repertoire collectives, collecting royalties for authors who wish them to and from audiences who wish access to that repertoire. Collective societies should not be imposed on entire classes of works, effectively having the government dictate this narrow business model on all creators and audiences of a class of work.

http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/1095





Eye-Popping Streaming Film Debuts
Xeni Jardin

What do high-definition video of seafloor volcanoes and avant-garde Japanese digital cinema have in common? They're both examples of the kinds of bandwidth-intensive information that can be streamed live from remote locations, over ultra-fast optical networks.

And both were demonstrated this week at iGrid 2005. The week-long computing conference, which showcases research in high-performance, multi-gigabit networks, was held at UC San Diego's new Calit2 (California Institute of Technology and Information Technology) facility.

"When you can stream content this high-resolution, you can start thinking about movie theaters as a place where live events can be displayed -- sports, fashion, politics, anything," said Laurin Herr of Pacific Interface, an Oakland-based tech consulting firm that produced the demonstration. "What color film did to audiences used to viewing black and white, what stereo sound did to audiences used to hearing mono, high-definition digital cinema will do to us."

Jaw-dropping demos abounded, promising just as much for scientists as for Hollywood.

One experiment on Tuesday featured the first-ever live, IP-based transmission of high-definition video from the bottom of the sea.

HD video cameras nearly two miles below the ocean surface and 200 miles off the Washington/Canada coastline relayed impossibly crisp live footage of sea life near 700-degree Fahrenheit volcanic thermal vents known as "black smokers" on the Pacific floor.

Back at iGrid, that 20-mbps MPEG2 video stream was projected in such high resolution that close-ups of tiny, translucent tubeworms the size of quarters filled the entire wall-sized screen. It was as if the theater itself became a gigantic microscope.

During a subsequent demo session, the cameras were aimed in the opposite direction -- at the scientists on board the ship above the ocean's surface. This time, high def proved to be a little too real for comfort when powerful ocean storms pitched and rocked the research vessel Thomas Thompson. The ship's crew were visibly woozy, but audience members more than a thousand miles away reflexively turned from the screen to avoid seasickness.

The ocean research expedition was a collaborative effort between the National Science Foundation, the University of Washington and other tech and research entities. The live, high-def IP-cast was distributed by way of NEPTUNE, an oceanographic observatory project that links undersea sites with fiber-optic/power cable, so that research video from the sea can be transmitted continuously to scientists, students or science television networks back on land.

IGrid included other "firsts" over fiber-optic links this week, including live international collaborations with streamed 4K (4,096-by-2,160-pixel) digital cinema content.

Technicians in Japan and the United States demonstrated live transmission of ultra-high-def digital movie workflow, using Silicon Graphics storage and visualization devices and prototype 4K digital projectors from Sony.

The 4K footage was compressed with a prototype JPEG 2000 encoder from NTT, then transmitted 9,000 miles from Keio University in Japan to the Calit2 facility over 1-GB optical-fiber networks.

The digital cinema experiments at iGrid demonstrated how filmmaking teams in multiple locations worldwide could receive, edit and mix sound with freshly shot 2K or 4K footage. A movie director might be seated behind his laptop in a Hollywood screening room, the cinematographer might be on location in Malta, and a sound production team might be in London; but by way of high-speed optical networks, video, sound and time-code data can move instantly to whoever needs it.

The movie industry in America is moving toward 2K digital cinema for theaters around the country. Earlier this year, a consortium of Hollywood studios and tech providers called Digital Cinema Initiatives released a long- awaited set of digital cinema specifications for both 2K and 4K, which remains in prototype. While 2K equipment manufacturers and some in Hollywood argue that the 2K standard is a large-enough leap forward in quality from 35mm film to make the cost of converting theaters to digital worthwhile, the iGrid demos left little doubt for many participants that 4K provides even greater possibilities -- including new forms of stereoscopic 3-D.

Another digital cinema demo featured the premiere of an avant-garde film that incorporated elements of traditional Japanese Noh theater. Actor/director Naohiku Umewaka's Birthday Cake was shot on 4K Olympus digital cinema cameras in Japan, then streamed live from Keio University's Tokyo campus to the Calit2 facility. The 4K video that filled the 20-foot-by-30-foot screen felt so lifelike that figures on screen sometimes seemed more vivid and real than those in the audience.

As the demos ended and the house lights again lit the theater, Calit2 director Larry Smarr smiled.

"This is the hardest thing to explain to people who haven't experienced it firsthand," he said, waving one hand toward a pile of cables that connected the digital cinema gear to fiber-optic links.

An early pioneer in internet infrastructure, Smarr served as director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 15 years, and fought for the construction of the first National Science Foundation backbone, which linked five NSF supercomputer centers in 1986 and eventually evolved into today's public internet.

"As amazing as all of this might look to us now, it's like Mosaic, or blink tag, or those first coffeepot webcams," said Smarr.

"If live 4K digital cinema from Japan is a clumsy first step for optical networks, I can't wait to see what the real applications will look like."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology..._top5#comments





Surveillance

Report: Government Needs to Get Air Traveler Screening Right
Leslie Miller

The government has spent millions since Sept. 11, 2001, to develop a system to ensure terrorists don't board planes. But they still can't get it right - and shouldn't do any more work on it until they do, an oversight panel said Friday.

The project, called Secure Flight, sounds simple: Match passenger names against terrorist watch lists.

But it isn't so simple. Secure Flight and its predecessor, CAPPS II, ran into repeated trouble since the Transportation Security Administration started work on them shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Government auditors gave the project failing grades - twice - and rebuked its authors for secretly obtaining personal information about airline passengers and then not telling the truth about it.

"They didn't know what they were doing," said James Dempsey, a member of the oversight panel and executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

A big part of the problem is that many people have the same or similar names. For example, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., was told he couldn't board a plane because his name matched that of a member of the Irish Republican Army.

The TSA hoped to remedy that problem by getting more information about passengers to verify their identities.

Critics who viewed Secure Flight as a secret project to spy on Americans stalled its progress, but the authors of Friday's report said the project's problems run deeper than that.

"It's not a privacy problem," Dempsey said. "It's a mission, goals and methods problem."

The oversight panel said it wasn't sure Secure Flight could ever work.

"We cannot assess whether even the general goal of evaluating passengers for the risk they represent to aviation security is a realistic or feasible one or how TSA proposes to achieve it," the report said.

The TSA appointed security and privacy experts to the oversight panel.

"We asked for the criticism, we welcome it, and we'll take it under consideration as we move towards implementation," said TSA spokeswoman Amy von Walter. "We think that's good government, and we're confident the public will agree."

The TSA has decided not to include one of the program's most controversial elements: using commercial data to help verify passengers' identity before they're matched against the lists.

Von Walter said the Secure Flight oversight panel had nothing to do with that decision.

"We recognize there were privacy concerns about its use so we decided against it for this initial program phase," she said.

But Dempsey said commercial data wasn't even useful in verifying peoples' identity.

The report noted that the TSA frequently shifted its definition of what information it was collecting for what reason.

Over the course of its development, the TSA said the system would only look for terrorists, then said it would also look for violent criminals. The TSA also said it would only be used to match names against terrorist watch lists, then that it would be used for the far broader purpose of identifying terrorist sleeper cells.

The report also noted that the oversight panel wasn't told what kind of hardware and software would be used or how airlines would transfer passenger information to the government.
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBDBZPGZDE.html





Torrent Gets US$8.75 Million In VC Money
Elle Cayabyab

BitTorrent, one of the world's most popular P2P clients, gained notoriety as a way for users to quickly download large files via the Web. Though the application has found legitimate uses, the company wants to distance itself from any association with piracy. Enter venture capital firm DCM Doll, who announced that they would be providing BitTorrent with US$8.75 million in funding in a bid for commercial respectability.

"We believe BitTorrent's cooperative distribution technology will become the leading platform for the legal and secure distribution of large-file content for a wide range of commercial purposes around the globe," said David Chao. "By substantially reducing technology costs, the BitTorrent model will enable organizations across many industries to quickly and efficiently distribute value- added digital content to their stakeholders and consumers in volumes that, until now, have not been realized."

Though BitTorrent reportedly claims up to 33 percent of all P2P traffic, its supremacy was hotly contested by the growing popularity of eDonkey, which recently closed its New York office, and could see competition from Microsoft Research's own P2P application, called Avalanche, if it ever sees the light of day.

BitTorrent COO Ashwin Navin notes that: "eDonkey and other P2P networks can have the entire piracy market because we're not interested in it at all," and defends BitTorrent as "inherently a bad tool for piracy, but it is an extremely elegant tool to make great content available on the Web." Despite the fact that the application was originally developed as a way to efficiently distribute Linux releases, file sharers quickly jumped on the technology as a way to improve the economics of sharing large files. Navin is also a bit off. BitTorrent is a favorite for those that engage in piracy, and furthermore, BitTorrent's recent addition of a built-in search for torrents only enhances that.

Neither BitTorrent nor DCM have publicly stated how a legitimate service would work, but industry insiders have been busy speculating on how the distributed peer-to-peer service could help movie studios and filmmakers make for-pay content available. For example, movies, music, games, and software would be gathered into one central portal and then distributed to consumers. Revenue could be generated either through ads or by charging a fee for the files. Google and Yahoo are also trying to provide entertainment content via the Web, with Google promoting its four-day online webcast of the sitcom "Everybody Hates Chris." DCM Doll is betting consumers would rather download than stream content, and with 45 million BitTorrent users worldwide, traffic will mean revenue. The entertainment industry has long been wary at the thought of using file trading to share content, and consumers may not be willing to use their limited upstream to help distribute something that costs money. It remains to be seen if DCM Doll's ploy will pan out; Hollywood doesn't necessarily subscribe to the old adage: if you can't beat them, join them.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050929-5363.html





Donnelley Agrees to Purchase Dex Media
Andrew Ross Sorkin and Vikas Bajaj

The R.H. Donnelley Corporation, the yellow pages company, said this morning that it would acquire a rival, Dex Media Inc., for $4.2 billion in cash and stock.

The deal would make R.H. Donnelley the nation's third-largest publisher of telephone directories behind Verizon and SBC with over 600 directories that have a combined circulation of 73 million and serve more than 650,000 advertisers.

R.H. Donnelley, based in Cary, N.C., publishes telephone directories in 19 states, in some areas under the Sprint and SBC brand names. Dex Media publishes directories in 14 states under the Qwest brand name.

The yellow pages industry has undergone an enormous amount of change in the last several years. Many telephone companies, which had long produced their own yellow pages, have sold them to pay down debt taken on during the telecom boom of the 1990's.

The businesses were bought primarily by private equity firms, which were attracted by their stable, and large, cash flows. Two such firms, Carlyle Group and Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, led the acquisition of Dex from Qwest Communications International in 2003 and the firms have agreed to vote in favor of the acquisition by R.H. Donnelley. The deal with Qwest has paid handsome rewards. The firms, which each paid about $775 million in cash as part that deal, have recouped all of their money, and today their combined stake is worth about $2.2 billion.

Still, the business is not without risks. Publishers face increasing competition from Yahoo, Google and other Internet companies that focus on directory and classified advertising. Both R. H. Donnelley and Dex have growing Internet operations, and the merger is expected to give them more scale to compete nationally.

"This combination will create a company with the scale, innovative products and services and proven business processes to lead our industry into the era of integrated local commercial search, encompassing both print and digital platforms," David C. Swanson, R.H. Donnelley's chairman and chief executive said.

Under the terms of the deal, R. H. Donnelley will pay $12.30 in cash and 0.24154 of its shares for each share of Dex. That equates to $27.58 a share based on R. H. Donnelley's closing share price on Friday. The sale price is slightly below Dex's share price on Friday of $27.79. The stock rose more than 15 percent last month. R.H. Donnelley will also assume $5.3 billion in Dex's debt.

After the acquisition, which the companies expect to close in the first three months of 2006, former shareholders of Dex will own 53 percent and owners of R.H. Donnelley will own the rest. Dex will have six directors on the new board and R.H. Donnelley will have seven. The deal has to be approved by regulators.

Mr. Swanson will be chief executive of the new company and George Burnett, who is now the president and chief executive of Dex, will be chairman of the board.

R. H. Donnelley was advised in the deal by J. P. Morgan Chase and Bear Stearns; its legal counsel was Jones Day. Dex Media was advised by Lehman Brothers; Merrill Lynch provided a fairness opinion. Latham & Watkins provided Dex with legal counsel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/bu...donnelley.html





In DVD Format Split, Paramount Goes 2 Ways
Ken Belson

Recognizing that a split over the format of the next generation of digital video discs is deepening, Paramount Pictures said yesterday that it will make DVD movies in the Blu-ray format as well as in the HD DVD standard.

Paramount is the first major studio to say publicly that it will produce DVD's in each of the two formats, which both promise high-definition pictures, enhanced audio and five or more times the storage space on a disc. Until now, the big Hollywood studios have supported one format or the other.

However, the chance for an agreement to use one format dimmed earlier this year when negotiations stalled between Toshiba, which makes the HD DVD standard, and Sony, Panasonic and others in the Blu-ray group. Since then, companies on both sides have promised to start selling DVD players that use their respective formats as early as this winter.

The studios, retailers and others had hoped to avoid a showdown between the competing formats because it is costly to make and sell two sets of discs.

Other studios may follow in Paramount's path. In addition to Paramount, Warner Brothers and Universal have backed the HD DVD format, while Sony Pictures, Disney, 20th Century Fox and Lion's Gate have come out in favor of Blu-ray.

The plans to produce two types of machines and movies for both formats suggests that there may not be a clear resolution to the battle anytime soon, according to industry executives.

The president of Paramount Pictures, Thomas Lesinski, said in a statement that Sony's inclusion of Blu-ray technology in its PlayStation 3 videogame console when it is released next spring was an important factor in his studio's decision. With that technology inside, the game machine will effectively double as a Blu-ray DVD player.

Mr. Lesinski called this a "key advantage" for the Blu-ray group.

He added that the studio made its decision to produce Blu-ray DVDs based on "new data on cost, manufacturability and copy protection solutions." Paramount, Warner and Universal, as well as Microsoft, Intel and disc manufacturers, have said that the HD DVD discs can be produced more cheaply and more reliably than Blu-ray discs. Disc manufacturers have also said privately that the HD DVD format discs are far closer to being ready for mass production than Blu-ray discs.

In response to Paramount's announcement, Toshiba said it remained committed to bringing HD DVD to market.

In a statement, the company said that the Blu-ray group "still needs to answer the tough questions about how they plan to deliver on their promises." This includes whether it will allow all manufacturers to make Blu-ray players and whether the Blu-ray group will set a date for delivering their high-capacity discs.

Paramount did not say how many movies it initially plans to release in the Blu-ray format, or which titles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/bu...Qfl8hv86//Q8qQ





By Tearing Open That Cardboard Box, Are You Also Signing on the Dotted Line?
J. D. Biersdorfer

Pay attention next time you rip open a cardboard box - you may be entering into a contract without realizing it.

A recent decision in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reinforced the right of companies, in this case Lexmark International, the printer maker, to legally limit what customers can do with a patented product, given that the company spells out conditions and restrictions on a package label known as a box-top license.

Clickable license agreements are common practice in software, where the buyer agrees not to tamper with the code or copy the program. But slapping postsale regulations on patented goods could deny buyers the ability to make modifications or seek repairs on other products as well. Box-top licenses could also theoretically hinder third parties from offering replacement parts or supplies for fear of a patent-infringement lawsuit (meaning, for example, that a lighter might have to be refueled only with the manufacturer's brand of butane).

In the lawsuit, the Arizona Cartridge Remanufacturers Association, a trade group of companies that sell refilled printer cartridges, claimed that Lexmark was engaging in unfair and deceptive business practices by promising price discounts on its laser cartridges if the customer promised to return the empty cartridge to Lexmark.

Lexmark's packaging for laser cartridges sold under this system (called the Lexmark Cartridge Rebate, or the Prebate program) includes a label on the outside of the box stating: "Opening this package or using the patented cartridge inside confirms your acceptance of the following license agreement." Cartridges that are not part of the Prebate program and not subject to the restriction are available to customers as well, but without the discount. At the time of the case, Lexmark estimated that cartridge returns had increased 300 percent since the Prebate program began.

Lawyers for the remanufacturers' association argued that Lexmark deceptively suggested that the notice on the outside of the package created an enforceable agreement with consumers to return the used cartridges, and that the promise of a price discount was false because Lexmark could not control prices charged by retailers. Lexmark also uses an electronic chip on the cartridges to communicate with the printer, which refuses to operate with cartridges that lack the chip; the association cited that as an unfair business practice.

The court ruled in Lexmark's favor on Aug. 30, citing the previous case of Mallinckrodt Inc. v. Medipart Inc., a 1992 Circuit Court decision in a medical equipment case that allowed patent owners to limit the use of their products after sale. The court also concluded that Lexmark's pricing claims were accurate and that ACRA failed to establish that Lexmark's cartridge chip amounted to unfair competition.

Some frugal printer owners wondered if the decision would make it illegal to refill their inkjet cartridges at home, a concern that a Lexmark spokesman dismissed.

"Lexmark's cartridge return program deals exclusively with laser printer toner cartridges. It does not involve any inkjet products," said Tim Fitzpatrick, the vice president of corporate communications for Lexmark, who said that the program almost entirely involved business customers. "The court's decision was very specifically about this program," he said.

Fred von Lohmann, a senior attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of a 2004 amicus brief supporting ACRA, said he was more concerned about future implications of the decision.

"This certainly sent a very strong message to patent holders generally, and Lexmark in particular, that you can use these labels in order to restrict what your customers can do with the product after they buy it," he said.

Mr. von Lohmann gave several hypothetical examples of how box-top licenses could be used, including automobile manufacturers who might put a label on a new car stating that by opening the door for the first time, the new owner agreed to use only the manufacturer's replacement parts and to avoid modifying the car. "Owners of patents would love to be able to control what you can do with a product after you buy it," he said. "That's new. The rule for most of a century has been, 'You buy it, you own it.' "

Lexmark was recently involved in another lawsuit against a North Carolina-based company, Static Control Components. In the case, Lexmark sued under provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to keep Static Control from reverse-engineering Lexmark's cartridge chips so that remanufactured cartridges from other vendors would work in Lexmark printers. Static Control ultimately won the copyright fight after the United States Supreme Court declined Lexmark's petition in June.

Ronald S. Katz, a lawyer for Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, which represented ACRA in the suit, said that while the continuation of Lexmark's return program would not put companies that reclaim and refill laser printer cartridges out of business, "it basically makes it harder for them to compete." The trade association, he added, is not pursuing the case further.

Although legal analysts who followed both lawsuits expressed concerns that Lexmark was trying to create a cartridge monopoly for its printers, the ruling in the Static Control case does allow that company to keep making chips that communicate with Lexmark's printers.

"This is about customer choice," said Mr. Fitzpatrick of Lexmark. "The court has ruled in favor of customer choice." A footnote in the court's written opinion stated that the decision would not preclude a consumer from raising challenges to the box-top contract.

In his supporting brief, Mr. von Lohmann argued that the decision in the medical equipment case, which was cited in the Lexmark case, was wrongly decided. "The courts started saying, 'Well, you bought it, you own it - unless they put a condition on it that you agreed to when you bought it,' " said Mr. von Lohmann.

He cited the 1873 case of Adams v. Burke, in which a coffin-lid manufacturer attempted to restrict where its patented product could be used. "The courts correctly said that's ridiculous," Mr. von Lohmann said. "When you buy a coffin, you can plant the guy wherever you want. It's none of the patent owners' business once you bought that coffin and where you put it in the ground."

But would the coffin case have come out differently if the manufacturer had put a label on the outside? "That's the concern," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/bu.../03inkjet.html





Propaganda

Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal
Robert Pear

Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.

Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, "The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education."

The auditors declared: "We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds."

The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush's education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

When that arrangement became public, it set off widespread criticism. At a news conference in January, Mr. Bush said: "We will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet."

But the Education Department has since defended its payments to Mr. Williams, saying his commentaries were "no more than the legitimate dissemination of information to the public."

The G.A.O. said the Education Department had no money or authority to "procure favorable commentary in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition" in federal law.

The ruling comes with no penalty, but under federal law the department is supposed to report the violations to the White House and Congress.

In the course of its work, the accountability office discovered a previously undisclosed instance in which the Education Department had commissioned a newspaper article. The article, on the "declining science literacy of students," was distributed by the North American Precis Syndicate and appeared in numerous small newspapers around the country. Readers were not informed of the government's role in the writing of the article, which praised the department's role in promoting science education.

The auditors denounced a prepackaged television story disseminated by the Education Department. The segment, a "video news release" narrated by a woman named Karen Ryan, said that President Bush's program for providing remedial instruction and tutoring to children "gets an A-plus."

Ms. Ryan also narrated two videos praising the new Medicare drug benefit last year. In those segments, as in the education video, the narrator ended by saying, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."

The television news segments on education and on Medicare did not state that they had been prepared and distributed by the government. The G.A.O. did not say how many stations carried the reports.

The public relations efforts came to light weeks before Margaret Spellings became education secretary in January. Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for the secretary, said on Friday that Ms. Spellings regarded the efforts as "stupid, wrong and ill-advised." She said Ms. Spellings had taken steps "to ensure these types of missteps don't happen again."

The investigation by the accountability office was requested by Senators Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats. Mr. Lautenberg expressed concern about a section of the report in which investigators said they could not find records to confirm that Mr. Williams had performed all the activities for which he billed the government.

The Education Department said it had paid Ketchum $186,000 for services performed by Mr. Williams's company. But it could not provide transcripts of speeches, articles or records of other services invoiced by Mr. Williams, the report said.

In March, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel said that federal agencies did not have to acknowledge their role in producing television news segments if they were factual. The inspector general of the Education Department recently reiterated that position.

But the accountability office said on Friday: "The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual. The essential fact of attribution is missing."

The office said Mr. Williams's work for the government resulted from a written proposal that he submitted to the Education Department in March 2003. The department directed Ketchum to use Mr. Williams as a regular commentator on Mr. Bush's education policies. Ketchum had a federal contract to help publicize those policies, signed by Mr. Bush in 2002.

The Education Department flouted the law by telling Ketchum to use Mr. Williams to "convey a message to the public on behalf of the government, without disclosing to the public that the messengers were acting on the government's behalf and in return for the payment of public funds," the G.A.O. said.

The Education Department spent $38,421 for production and distribution of the video news release and $96,850 for the evaluation of newspaper articles and radio and television programs. Ketchum assigned a score to each article, indicating how often and favorably it mentioned features of the new education law.

Congress tried to clarify the ban on "covert propaganda" in a bill signed by Mr. Bush in May. The law says that no federal money may be used to produce or distribute a news story unless the government's role is openly acknowledged.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/po...rticle_popular





To Surf Web While Aloft, Fly Foreign (for Now)
Alexei Barrionuevo

On nonstop flights from Copenhagen to Seattle, as many as 50 passengers are using their laptops to check e-mail, surf the Internet, even send pictures - all at 35,000 feet.

The 261-seat planes belong to Scandinavian Airlines, one of several non-American carriers using an in-flight, high-speed Internet service called Connexion, developed by Boeing for its own commercial jetliners. The high use on the trans-Atlantic Scandinavian flights is somewhat unusual because they tend to be filled with tech-savvy Microsoft employees, who are even carting special noise-canceling headsets onto the planes to use Boeing's satellite-based system to make free voice-over-Internet phone calls.

But SAS's experience highlights a stark reality for American business travelers: to make an office in the sky these days you have to fly a foreign airline. After five years of intense marketing, Boeing is still struggling to bring the Internet to domestic airlines, whose financial woes and concerns about added weight on planes are making them reluctant to invest in hot spots in the sky. That is limiting potential productivity, perhaps, but it is also providing at least a few hours of escape for business managers from their 24/7 connection to the home office.

For Boeing, which once appeared poised to make its satellite-based Internet system a big business, time is running out to win over the American airlines.

It decided recently to cut 100 positions at Connexion, or about 15 percent of its work force, by early next year. And new competitors, including Verizon Wireless, are refining less-ambitious technologies that some airlines find more palatable investments amid surging fuel prices and the constant threat of bankruptcy.

While American carriers continue to be hesitant, European, Asian, even Middle Eastern airlines - which rely heavily on business travelers, particularly on long-haul flights - are taking the plunge in increasing numbers. Boeing has signed up 13 foreign airlines since 2003, with 9 already offering the service to customers on 84 planes, soon to be 100. Boeing has also signed 630 corporate agreements to make it easier for companies' employees to use the service.

"The U.S. carriers are feeling a lot of competitive pressures from our customers," said Laurette T. Koellner, president of the Connexion division at Boeing.

But thus far, domestic and foreign carriers have viewed the potential for Internet service much differently. While the American airlines, with their much greater concentration of leisure travelers, have focused on cutting costs on domestic routes, "a lot of foreign carriers see this as a way of increasing the appeal of their premium international service," said Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group. "U.S. carriers are just starting to think about that strategy."

For the Chicago-based Boeing, the hesitancy in its home market has hindered the growth of Connexion, once central to Boeing's push to diversify from its near total dependence on commercial jets and military systems. The number of planes that foreign carriers are willing to outfit with Connexion, which costs an estimated $500,000 to $600,000 a plane, is relatively small compared with what Boeing expected back in 2001, when it landed commitments from three American carriers to outfit a total of 1,500 planes.

Even with the recent progress, Ms. Koellner acknowledged that Boeing's current commitments, officially published at around 250, were "nowhere near" what was envisioned in 2001. The business has yet to turn a profit for Boeing, and probably will not until at least 2008, she said.

If American carriers cannot be won over, Ms. Koellner said the company believes that Connexion could still succeed by focusing on more of the 2,200 long-haul planes based outside the United States. Boeing is hedging its bets further by trying to bring high-speed Internet service to ships as well. Teekay Shipping, which transports over 10 percent of the world's seagoing oil, began using the Connexion service in June.

The tanker industry, with some 40,000 ships crisscrossing the globe, could make up as much as one-third of Connexion's business in the future, Ms. Koellner said.

Four years ago, oceangoing vessels were the last thing on Connexion planners' minds. Steered by Scott E. Carson, the Boeing sales guru who currently leads its resurgent commercial division, Connexion signed up United, Delta and American Airlines in June 2001. They agreed to outfit 500 planes each - a total of 1,500 planes, or 11 percent of the world's fleet - and take small equity stakes in the business. Airbus, Boeing's European rival, quickly countered by buying a 30 percent stake in Tenzing, a Seattle maker of in-flight Internet systems, thinking it would enable it to provide onboard e-mail in 500 planes by 2003.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks delivered a body blow to the domestic airline industry and ended lofty plans for Internet use in the sky. That November, the domestic partners all withdrew from Connexion, citing cost concerns. Boeing announced plans to cut Connexion's work force by a third; Tenzing, a month earlier, said it would lay off nearly half its staff.

Connexion had a single customer still committed: Lufthansa. Rather than pull the plug, Boeing did an about-face in its strategy, focusing instead on the international market.

Some of the American airlines are concerned that Boeing's satellite-based system will add too much weight to the plane at a time when jet fuel prices have tripled since 2003, to about $2.40 a gallon. Boeing's system adds 600 to 800 pounds to the plane. To save on fuel, United States airlines are doing everything from toting less water to replacing glass mirrors with plastic ones.

Jeff Green, a United Airlines spokesman, said weight was a chief reason United decided to form a partnership with Verizon instead. Verizon's ground-based system, while offering slower connection speeds, makes use of existing components in the seat-back air phone and adds a little under 100 pounds to the plane, said James R. Pilcher, director of marketing for Verizon Airfone.

Verizon's system, which has not yet received a license from the Federal Communications Commission, will not be available on flights until about 2007, and it will not work more than 200 miles from land.

Meanwhile, American, Continental and Delta have no plans to add connectivity to any of their planes. "We are still reviewing it but it has not been on the front burner," said Benet Wilson, a spokeswoman for Delta Air Lines, which sought bankruptcy protection last month.

But some foreign carriers are finding that business travelers are hungry for the service, even at prices ranging from $9.95 for 30 minutes to $29.95 for the whole flight.

A survey by the Innovation Analysis Group in San Diego recently found that more than half of all frequent fliers say they are willing to pay for an in-flight Internet connection, even if their company will not reimburse them.

"We are seeing," said Addison Schonland, a principal at Innovation Analysis, "that this technology will probably pay for itself faster than anything else on board."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/bu.../04boeing.html





Musicians Tell How To Beat System

Web sites instruct fans on how to beat copy-protected CDs

Major labels Sony BMG and EMI are releasing more and more new CDs that block fans from dragging their tunes to iPods.

Now, in the most bizarre turn yet in the record industry's piracy struggles, stars Dave Matthews Band, Foo Fighters and Switchfoot -- and even Sony BMG, when the label gets complaints -- are telling fans how they can beat the system.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment now regularly releases its new U.S. titles on CDs protected with digital rights management (DRM) that dictates which file formats consumers can use to digitally copy the music. MP3 is not one of those formats. The DRM also limits how many copies of the files consumers can make.

EMI Music is testing a similar initiative for wide-scale use by 2006.

But these decisions are not sitting well with some of the artists whose CDs have been secured. A number of leading acts are using their Web sites to instruct fans on how to work around the technology. (Others, including Jermaine Dupri, have expressed support for anti-copying efforts.)

For now, the copy-protected discs work only with software and devices compatible with Microsoft Windows Media technology. Apple -- the dominant player in digital music -- has resisted appeals from the labels to license its FairPlay DRM for use on the copy-protected discs.

The DRM initiatives are generating complaints from fans, many of whom own iPods. The message boards of artist fan sites and online retailers are filled with complaints from angry consumers who did not realize they were buying a copy-protected title until they tried to create music files on their home computers.

One solution artists offer to iPod users is to rip the CD into a Windows Media file, burn the tracks onto a blank CD (without copy protection) and then rip that CD back into iTunes.

Columbia Records act Switchfoot, whose latest album, "Nothing Is Sound," is copy- protected -- and debuted at No. 3 on The Billboard 200 last week -- recently took copy-protection defiance one step further. Band guitarist Tim Foreman posted on a Sony Music-hosted fan site a link to the software program CDEX, which disables the technology. The post has since been removed.

"We were horrified when we first heard about the new copy-protection policy," Foreman wrote in the September 14 post. "It is heartbreaking to see our blood, sweat and tears over the past two years blurred by the confusion and frustration surrounding new technology."

To add some minor injury to insult, EMI Christian Music Group had to recall copies of "Nothing Is Sound" that were shipped to Christian retailers. Under an agreement with Sony BMG, the EMI imprint handles manufacturing and distribution of Switchfoot to the Christian market. The EMI discs have incorrect DRM settings that do not allow consumers to rip or burn secure tracks.

Switchfoot is not the only band upset by copy protection.

"I'm completely frustrated," says Jason Brown, president of Philadelphonic, a management company that represents Tristan Prettyman. The artist's Virgin Records debut, "Twentythree," is among the albums in the EMI copy-protection trial. "Copy control as it stands right now is in its 1.0 phase. It was rushed through and into a system that wasn't prepared for it."

Sony BMG says it is not trying to prevent consumers from getting music onto iPods. Fans who complain to Sony BMG about iPod incompatibility are directed to a Web site (http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp) that provides information on how to work around the technology.

The company, which has sold more than 13 million copy-protected discs to date, is urging people who buy copy-protected titles to write to Apple and demand that the company license its FairPlay DRM for use with secure CDs.

EMI is not quite so helpful. A source says the company will not instruct consumers on how to work around copy-protected discs.

Sony BMG, EMI and Apple officials all declined comment. However, both majors have said that increased CD burning has forced their hands on copy protection.

But artists and consumers are bristling at the notion of being caught in the middle of this test of wills. Some managers express doubt about the Sony BMG and EMI strategy in dealing with Apple.

"Anything that smacks of corporatism, people don't like," says Jamie Kitman, president of the Hornblow Group USA, manager for Capitol Records act OK Go, which was considered for, but ultimately left out of the EMI trial. "There's no doubt this has the whiff of punitive activity."

What is more, artist managers are upset that the security is so easily beaten -- in the case of Sony BMG, with the company's assistance -- that it makes a mockery of content protection.

Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group are taking a wait-and-see approach to copy protection. Neither has announced plans for secured U.S. commercial releases.

"The bad thing is that you are almost promoting what you are trying to protect against," Brown says. "You are upsetting the fan that went out and purchased the record."
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/ptech/1...eut/index.html





Hackers Could Cripple Mobile Phone Networks, Study Says

Hackers could clog and cripple mobile phone service in U.S. cities by inundating networks with text messages, a study found.

New methods of sending text messages to cellphones using the Web and e-mail, while facilitating communication, also have made it easier to overload mobile networks, the study said.

Hackers, who infiltrate computer networks, could flood Manhattan's mobile phone system by sending 165 messages a second. Although cellular-phone service has failed in disasters such as the Sept. 11 attacks, text messaging has largely been reliable and an important part of communicating, the study said.

"Sophisticated users using a complicated apparatus might be able to exploit this," Patrick D. McDaniel, one of the Pennsylvania State University computer scientists who led the study, said Wednesday.

Text messages and mobile calls travel over the same channels, so separating them on different channels would help, the study said. Carriers also could limit the rate at which messages are transmitted and limit the number of recipients for any one message sent from the Web.

The study "states what we in the industry have known for years," said Nancy Stark, a spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless, the second-largest U.S. mobile phone service provider. "We deal with this issue all the time with spam and thwarting that threat on the network." Spam is a term for unwanted e-mail, typically sent by commercial interests.

Sprint Nextel Corp., the third-largest U.S. wireless and local-telephone company, has safeguards that flag unusual activity, a spokesman said..

Hackers would have to use multiple computers to attempt such an attack, the scientists said. A large-scale assault could come if hackers take over a moderate-size collection of computers, according to the study.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...ck=1&cset=true





The Piracy Arms Race: File-Sharing Networks Battle Content Creators For Survival
Jon Healey

Although Val Thomas and Jed McCaleb have never met, their careers have been locked in a hostile embrace for much of the last two years.

From his office in midtown Manhattan, Thomas commands a virtual army of more than 4 million simulated humans that feed a steady diet of fake songs, films and other digital goods to unsuspecting downloaders. One of his prime targets has been the eDonkey file-sharing network, a hotbed of online piracy.

Just a few miles away in lower Manhattan, Jed McCaleb and his colleagues at MetaMachine Inc. defended eDonkey against attack, making it a more efficient and reliable file-sharing tool. In effect, they created markets that were hard for Thomas' cyber army to overrun.

Thomas and McCaleb have been central figures in a race pitting far-flung crews of youthful engineers against the multibillion-dollar entertainment and software industries. That tussle is an important part of the entertainment industry's crusade to convince people that digitized movies and music have value too and shouldn't be enjoyed free.

The outcome of that fight could transform the entertainment industry because "peer-to-peer" systems such as eDonkey enable perfect copies of songs and movies to be shared with millions of people around the world.

"This is unlike traditional analog piracy," said P.J. McNealy, an analyst at American Technology Research. "The scale is so much more massive. It's not like historical piracy levels, where it's a threat to 15 percent of their sales. It's more like a 75 percent to 99 percent threat."

Big money is at stake. Record labels say file sharing was partly to blame for a prolonged slide in compact disc sales, and studio executives have grown accustomed to finding their movies online soon after they open in theaters. Although users of file-sharing networks don't pay to swap music or movies, the companies that distribute the software can make millions by selling advertising on their programs.

The entertainment industry has been making inroads against file sharing in court. Most recently, the Supreme Court ruled in June that companies could be sued for copyright infringement if they encouraged people to bootleg.

That decision has prodded a growing number of companies in the file-sharing field, including eDonkey, to yield to the industry's threats of lawsuits. Last week, Sam Yagan, MetaMachine's chief executive, told a Senate committee that the company would change its software to stop users from downloading illegally.

But the industry's courtroom victories might not reduce online piracy. Instead, downloaders simply might switch to services that are more difficult for the industry to sue, just as they did after the pioneering Napster file-sharing service started filtering out pirated hits.

Hence the labels and studios' need to leaven their legal assault on file sharing with a technological one. And that's where Thomas comes in.

The beefy 42-year-old is chief technical officer of Overpeer Inc., a subsidiary of Loudeye Corp. that is paid by the entertainment industry to combat illegal downloading with an army of computerized drones. From an office overlooking the New York Public Library, Thomas unleashes millions of fake files into popular networks such as eDonkey, Kazaa and Gnutella every hour.

The fakes look real enough, but they're nothing but dead air or song fragments. Thomas aims to drain the fun out of file sharing by forcing users to wade through megabytes of junk before finding an honest-to-goodness pirated file -- if they ever do. It's like trying to find a needle in a virtual haystack.

"We are not attempting in any way, shape or form to shut down a peer-to-peer network," Thomas said. "What we try to do with our technology is prevent the copyrighted material from being distributed over those networks, and only the copyrighted material."

McCaleb, 30, is the lead programmer at MetaMachine, the company behind the immensely popular eDonkey file-sharing software. He and his programming team work on makeshift desks in a one-room office on West 21st Street, in a row of aging commercial buildings.

Fascinated by the power and potential of peer-to-peer technology, McCaleb and his crew designed their software to help users find and download what they're looking for, without tangling with bogus or broken files.

McCaleb wasn't motivated by a zeal for free goods, a grudge against Hollywood or a chip on his shoulder about copyright law. Instead, he was enchanted by the thought of uniting millions of people's computers into a giant, shared resource.

"Napster was just such an awesome idea," McCaleb said in an interview last year. When asked what made Napster so appealing, he said, "It wasn't free music at all. It was the fact that you were essentially summing up all these people's hard drives and making this massive, massive hard drive. That was cool."

Many file sharers don't accept that they're breaking the law, no matter what the courts say. They say they're just sampling things before buying them, or taking a flier on a song or movie that isn't worth owning. And numerous file-sharing advocates contend that free downloading is boosting sales -- particularly for lesser-known musicians.

Thomas shares some of McCaleb's sentiments, saying that peer-to-peer computing is "a sweet technology. It really is. But it's being misused." Both men are eager to see the entertainment industry use programs like eDonkey to distribute legitimate copies of their works and build businesses around file sharing.

They just don't agree on how to get there from here.

EDonkey lets users search for and download files in a way that's fundamentally different from earlier efforts such as the original Napster and Kazaa. The software verifies each segment of a file as it downloads, and it has built-in safeguards against files whose contents don't match their names.

That difference kept Overpeer and its competitors -- most notably ArtistDirect Inc. subsidiary MediaDefender of Los Angeles, Macrovision Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., and SafeNet Inc. subsidiary MediaSentry Services of New York -- from launching attacks on eDonkey. As a consequence, the spoof-free landscape of eDonkey contrasted sharply with the choking overgrowth of bogus files on Kazaa, helping the former grow at the latter's expense.

The situation changed in early 2004. After about three months of work, Overpeer's programmers came up with a way to throw its virtual army and bogus files at eDonkey users. Company executives declined to describe their techniques, saying they did not want to tip their hand to pirates.

Over time, though, it became clear that the spoofs were not as effective against eDonkey as they had been against Kazaa. Anti-piracy firms say that eDonkey remains the most popular file-sharing network on the planet, with millions of people running it and related programs at any given moment.

In the summer of 2005, eDonkey programmers noticed something weird happening as they checked the software's search function. When they typed random words into the search box, McCaleb said, they would occasionally get a strange mishmash of files -- all coming from the same set of eDonkey users.

"They've somehow poisoned the network a bit," effectively hijacking the program's search function, McCaleb said.

The attack, whose source is unknown, was evidently designed to stop eDonkey users from finding certain copyrighted works. The problem, McCaleb said, was that it also disrupted searches for legal files whose names included some of the same words as the protected ones.

Within a few days, McCaleb's team circumvented the problem. Overpeer executives declined to discuss the company's techniques or say whether their outfit was behind the attack.

Despite the technical challenges, Overpeer executives say they're making a measurable dent in piracy, at least for the items they're hired to protect. But they think it's better to give people the chance to buy what they want on file-sharing networks than to rely exclusively on anti-piracy technology.

The idea of trying to convert pirates to buyers is gaining momentum, Morgenstern said, with the company conducting several trials with curious copyright owners.

The major record labels are backing two copyright-friendly approaches to file sharing, Mashboxx and a new version of iMesh, that substitute authorized versions of songs for pirated MP3s.

In an interview last year, McCaleb contended that those efforts would not be able to compete with file-sharing networks that continue to allow free, unfettered downloading.

"All the filtered networks in the world won't address the problem of copyright violation if no one is using them and everyone just migrates to the nonfiltered networks," McCaleb said.

Still, MetaMachine's Yagan said in a recent interview that his company had no choice but to embrace filtering after it received a cease-and-desist letter from the Recording Industry Association of America last month.

To both Yagan and Morgenstern, the key for the entertainment industry is to find a way to use file-sharing networks effectively, rather than just to neuter them.
As Morgenstern put it, "All you have to do is hang out with teenagers to realize the revolution is upon us."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology





Calling The Tune

Music firms are emboldened, but risk strangling the golden goose

THE music business has long wailed that internet piracy is destroying its business.

Now, it is fighting back on two fronts—first, by driving illegal operators out of business; then by driving as hard a bargain as possible with those firms selling legal downloads. Indeed talks between Microsoft and the major music firms have just broken down because the software company thinks the music business is demanding unreasonable levels of royalties.

Things are going better for the major record labels on other fronts. Last week the founder of a popular “peer-to-peer” (P2P) file-sharing program, Sam Yagan, told a Senate committee that his company will soon stop operating in its current form. He explained that eDonkey—which accounts for around half of all P2P traffic—can no longer afford to fight the music industry in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling in June against two other P2P firms, Grokster and StreamCast, which declared that such applications are illegal if they induce users to violate copyright.

As expected, the music industry is now using its legal victory to hound commercial P2P operators out of business. Last month the music industry's trade body sent them threatening letters. WinMx, another P2P network, appears to have shut down, while eDonkey says it plans to start making its users pay for music. Grokster is reportedly on the verge of selling itself to a company called Mashboxx, which has a similar strategy to go legitimate. In Australia last month, a court ruled against Kazaa, another popular file-sharing service, and ordered it to use filters to stop the trading of copyrighted content.

Nobody, however, including executives at the major labels, believes that file- sharing is defeated. When the industry forced Napster, the first big file-sharing network, to shut down in 2001—it has since relaunched as a fee-based service—a host of free alternatives sprang up immediately, and that is what will now happen again. Because of the Supreme Court's ruling, says Mr Yagan, the new P2P services will simply move offshore and underground, and will offer more anonymity. In fact, the Supreme Court's decision is likely to encourage a move towards free, “open- source” P2P applications. Since they do not make money from advertising or bundling software, they are less vulnerable to the accusation that they are illegally inducing piracy for their own benefit.

In the first half of this year, digital-music sales from mobile-phone “ringtunes” and legal download services such as Apple's iTunes more than tripled compared with last year, and now represent 6% of total music revenues, according to industry estimates released this week. That rapid growth has restored confidence to the music industry, as have its victories in court.

So much confidence, indeed, that some of the major labels are urging Apple's iTunes service—the epitome of success in online music sales so far—to shift to variable (ie, higher) prices from the consistent $0.99 per track it currently charges in America. That would be a mistake. Despite its rapid growth, the legal market for music on the internet is still in its infancy. Apple's boss, Steve Jobs, believes that higher prices would stifle legal sales and encourage P2P-based piracy. Microsoft might even deserve better treatment, too. Since the major labels' legal stick will never be completely effective against P2P, it is vital that they also offer an attractive carrot.
http://www.economist.com/business/di...ory_id=4492917





FTC Seeks to Halt Alleged Spyware Site

Agency says Kazanon file-sharing software packs hidden programs that can't be removed with standard utilities.
Grant Gross

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has asked a U.S. District Court judge to halt the operations of a Web site that allegedly installed spyware and adware on customers' computers while promising free software to allow anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing, the agency has announced.

The FTC, in a complaint filed in September, asked the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire to permanently halt downloads from Odysseusmarketing.com, saying that the company's "stealthy" downloads constitute spyware and violate federal law. Odysseus Marketing is based in Stratham, New Hampshire.

Head to Head

The FTC's complaint alleges that Odysseus Marketing's Kazanon software, which claimed to allow users to "download music without fear," did not make file sharing anonymous, as it advertised that it would. The software was bundled with spyware called Clientman, which secretly downloads dozens of other software programs, the FTC said.

The "secretly" downloaded software could degrade computer performance and memory and could replace search-engine results at sites such as Google and Yahoo with those from copycat sites, the FTC said. Some of the downloaded software generated pop-up ads and transmitted data from users' computers to Odysseus Marketing servers, the agency said.

Odysseus Marketing operator Walter Rines disputes the FTC's allegations. Computer users who downloaded his software had to agree to terms and conditions that told them adware came bundled with the free peer-to-peer product, he said. The adware did generate pop-up ads, but his company did not distribute spyware, he said.

"It was harmless software," he said. "I'm aware of the [FTC] filing, but what they're alleging is absolutely wrong, top to bottom."

Hidden Threat?

Clientman can crash the Internet Explorer Web browser, and it attempts to collect personal information, such as user names and passwords, from several Web applications, according to Computer Associates International, a computer security software vendor.

The FTC accused Rines and his company of hiding its adware notice in the middle of a two-page end-user license agreement buried on the Odysseus Web site. The FTC also alleged that the defendants deliberately make their software difficult to detect and impossible to remove using standard software utilities. Though the defendants purport to offer their own "uninstall" tool, it does not work as an uninstaller but instead installs additional software, according to the FTC's complaint.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group, applauded the FTC's action against Odysseus Marketing. CDT had complained about Odysseus Marketing in a spyware report to the FTC in February 2004, CDT said. The FTC has filed complaints against three companies identified in the CDT complaint.

"The FTC has been going after companies that defraud consumers by installing unwanted and dangerous spyware on their computers," CDT Deputy Director Ari Schwartz said in a statement. "We applaud the commission for its continued efforts to crack down on spyware distributors. Unfortunately, they still have a lot of work to do."
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,122868,00.asp





File-sharing crackdown

University Network To Block Outside Peer-To-Peer File-Sharing
Ashley Zaleski with reporting by Katherine Foutch

On Monday morning, the Information Technology Services Web site reported that in order to preserve communications bandwidth for use by other applications, the university network would stop transporting the inbound and outbound Internet traffic of three peer-to-peer file-sharing programs. Intra- campus transport for these applications would not be affected.

ITS news states that the network is now reconfigured to identify and “drop” information packets created by Gnutella, E-Donkey and DirectConnect.

Once identified, packets from the three applications will simply be dropped rather than being forwarded as usual.

ITS Assistant Vice Chancellor Matthew Hall said that from an operations and financial perspective, file sharing programs affect the rate of bandwidth growth and the security of our network as viruses may be injected.

Hall said that through June and July this summer, the ITS department informally tested to see how people used the network connections. It let people use the network freely and came to the conclusion that something had to be done.

“I’m not trying to facilitate morality, but it was just getting out of hand,” Hall said. “Sometimes one-third of the network facilities were used for illegal file sharing. Why would we permit that?”

According to ITS news, network traffic analyses indicate that communication from Gnutella, E-Donkey, and DirectConnect programs are consuming as much as 37 percent of the capacity of Vanderbilt’s connection with the Internet.

Since early Tuesday morning, after only eight hours of monitoring, the ITS department blocked 1.1 million in and outbound attempts to use the Gnutella program.

Hall indicated that the file sharing issue goes beyond broadband width and security.

“Musicians work hard to get themselves into mainstream culture,” Hall said. “If people enjoy their music without compensation, what’s in it for them to continue their work?”

Student Frank Cioppettini had a lawsuit brought against him by the Recording Industry Asscociation of America.

“One file was uploaded for people to take music from and someone downloaded one of my songs. RIAA saw this and they contacted Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt then turned off my internet.” Cioppettini said. “I stopped using file sharing. Vanderbilt had to prove to the RIAA that they contacted me and I contacted them back through e-mail.”

Students reported mixed reactions to the changes. However, many were unaware any changes had been made.

“Changes like these that affect most of the student body need to be better publicized. I know a lot of students will have strong opinions on an issue that could affect students daily,” sophomore Ashley Paschall said.

Hall and ITS representatives do not overlook the face that students will react to these changes. From their perspective, these actions will move to preserve the music industry and the integrity of Vanderbilt students as consumers.

“It’s a non-issue to me,” Hall said. “A core group will respond angrily, but I think the majority will go on with their lives unaffected.”
http://www.vanderbilthustler.com/vne.../43434dc82e614





U. of Ga.: Hacker May Have Student Info
AP

University of Georgia said a computer hacker may have accessed the names and Social Security numbers of at least 1,600 current and former employees.

The university was working with state and federal authorities to investigate the breach, which was discovered Sept. 19.

"To this point there has been no evidence, direct or indirect, that any of this information has actually been misused," said Arnett C. Mace Jr., the school's provost.

University officials say 2,429 Social Security numbers were exposed, but there was some repetition and the number of affected people is expected to be smaller.

Last year, a hacker broke into a UGA computer and may have accessed credit card information for about 32,000 students. The university never caught the hacker, but was not aware of any misuse of that information, said Tom Jackson, a UGA spokesman.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...092900392.html





Der Wormens!

Art:
Worm

Alias-Namen:
No Alias Found

In-the-wild:
Ja

Zerstörerisch:
Nein

Sprache:
English

Plattform:
Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Server 2003

Verschlüsselt:
Nein

Merkmale:
C4X
Allgemeine Risikoeinstufung

This memory-resident worm propagates by dropping copies of its component file BASE.EXE to shared folders used by popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing applications, thus making the worm copy available for download to unsuspecting users. It saves its dropped copies using several file names. Note that this worm can drop several copies of BASE.EXE to the said folders.

It is composed of two (2) .EXE files: BASE.EXE and WINLASS.EXE. Upon executing BASE.EXE, it creates a folder named System in the system root folder. It then connects to a Web site to download and execute WINLASS.EXE.
http://de.trendmicro-europe.com/cons...ame=WORM_BAS.A





Digital Music Sales Soar; Industry Hopes Downloads Eventually Offset CDs' Decline
Charles Duhigg

Could digital music sales be the recording industry's salvation? Not yet, not by a longshot. But legal downloads are way up, according to domestic and international numbers released Monday.

Over the last six months, sales of music over the Internet and via mobile phone downloads have tripled internationally and grown by 169% in the United States compared with the same period a year earlier, the Recording Industry Assn. of America and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry reported.

But those sales were not enough to offset a declining music market. The value of music shipped or downloaded in the U.S. in the first half of 2005 fell by 2.7% to $4.98 billion from $5.12 billion in the previous year, according to the recording industry association. Internationally, phonographic federation tallies show that sales of recorded music fell 1.9% to a retail value of $13.2 billion.

Legal music downloads still account for only a tiny fraction of music sales. In the first half of 2005, legal digital sales constituted 3.9% of the U.S. music market and 6% of the international market.

Still, some music executives and analysts are bullish on digital downloads, which they predict will eventually offset declines in CD and cassette sales.

Record company executives point to Japan, where mobile phone users spent $128 million on music-related downloads during the last six months, according to the federation. Representatives of the four major music companies have all said they expect mobile downloads of songs and videos to increase in the U.S. and Europe.

"Music is becoming more and more important worldwide," said Larry Haverty, who oversees a media portfolio at Gabelli Asset Management Inc. "Sales of physical formats are still falling, but within the next two to three years I think you'll see downloads push the market to new heights."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology





Digital Music Wholesaler Plans Public Offering
Charles Duhigg

Digital Music Group Inc. has registered to raise as much as $36 million in an initial public offering that would make it one of the first independent digital music wholesalers to sell stock.

But the financials of the fledgling company, which provides digital music to Apple's iTunes Music Store, Wal-Mart Music and Yahoo Music, didn't strike much of a chord with some analysts. In the six months ended June 30, the firm lost $866,172 on revenue of $223,672, according to the Thursday filings.

"It appears to me there is a kernel of opportunity here, but it is premature to go public," said Phil Leigh, president of Inside Digital Media Inc. "They are running some serious risks."

Others agree, pointing to data compiled by Jupiter Research showing that sales of digital music only make up about 2% of the U.S. musical market. Observers note that Digital Music Group faces well-funded competitors, and that the major record labels, which own licenses for most of the music sold in the U.S., work directly with online stores rather than through wholesale distributors.

"Digital distribution is a very low-margin business," said David Pakman, managing director of a group that owns the Orchard, a competitor to Digital Music Group. "This market is growing quickly, but it certainly isn't mature. It's best to have repeated profitable quarters and to demonstrate real growth before taking anything to public investors."

Representatives of Sacramento-based Digital Music Group declined to comment.

Although the company said in filings that it had secured rights to sell more than 200,000 recordings in digital format, it also disclosed that thus far large retailers had agreed to sell only 17,000 of those.

According to Digital Music Group's filing, I-Bankers Securities Inc. is underwriting the company's offering, which is planned to trade on Nasdaq under the symbol DMGI. A representative of I-Bankers said the firm's entire sales staff was based in Italy.

Digital Music Group was created in April when executives from Digital Musicworks International and Rio Bravo Entertainment agreed to merge some assets. Neither company is well known in the digital marketplace. Digital Musicworks is headed by Mitchell Koulouris, a 13-year veteran of Tower Records who previously headed a company publishing computer magazines.

Others agree that the digital boom will continue to be pushed by increasing awareness of legal download services, innovative online search tools that let users find new music and, in some markets, greater demand for mobile phone downloads and ring tones, which allow consumers to change their ring to a song.

But even increased legal downloads may not be enough to buoy the industry. Some music companies have bickered with Apple Computer Inc. over the company's rigid iTunes pricing policy: 99 cents a song. In the United States, iTunes accounts for 82% of legal downloads.

"Record companies were built by charging $12 for a CD," said Mike McGuire, a researcher with Gartner Media Industries. "Now people can just buy one track for 99 cents. Even if you sell more songs, the revenues are smaller. Music labels will need to become smaller and flatter to survive."

Music executives also have pointed to the upsurge in legal downloads as evidence that anti-piracy efforts are working. The recording association and record companies have sued more than 14,800 computer users in the United States since 2003.

Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne Online Media Measurement, isn't so sure.

The major record companies "want anti-piracy efforts to be like speed traps: You might not get caught, but they'll slow you down," Garland said. "But most people don't know anyone who has been sued. People are illegally downloading as much music as before."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology





Microsoft Breaks Off Talks With Record Labels
AP

After weeks of negotiations, Microsoft Corp. has suspended talks with the four major record companies over the licensing terms for a new online music subscription service, according to people familiar with the talks.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant broke off the discussions on Friday, citing an impasse with the record companies over royalty rates, these people said Tuesday.

One of the sources, who works closely with Microsoft and has been involved in company discussions on the possible venture with the labels, confirmed the negotiations had ended, but said Microsoft remains committed to the idea of a subscription service.

Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn declined to comment.

Microsoft already sells song downloads on its MSN Music Internet site but had been seeking to develop a subscription service. Such services typically offer users unlimited number of tracks for download, and in some cases, for use on compatible portable music players, for a monthly fee.

Several online retailers already offer online music subscription, including Yahoo Inc., Napster Inc., RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody and MusicNet. Their fees vary, but range between roughly $5 to $15 a month, with some charging users extra to move songs to portable players.

The collapse of the talks between Microsoft and the major record labels, reported by The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, represents the latest skirmish between retailers and record labels over pricing in the developing digital music market.

Last month, Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs publicly criticized the recording industry, saying some major labels were ``greedy'' for pushing Apple to hike prices on the iTunes Music Store.

Record label executives have scoffed at the suggestion they're being greedy. Last month, Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. said at an investors' conference that Apple's 99-cent price for single tracks -- the service charges variable prices for some of album downloads -- ignores the issue that not all songs are the same commercially and, like any other commodity, shouldn't be priced the same.

``The labels have complained basically that they're not making enough money on downloads, that they prefer subscription services,'' said Phil Leigh, a digital music analyst in Tampa, Fla.

``Microsoft is saying on behalf of themselves and, indirectly, on behalf of the rest of the subscription (services), `If you want a subscription offering, if you want the better recurring revenue from subscription pricing, then give us a better price.'''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/12816707.htm





Trade ya

Army Investigating Web Postings of Grisly War Photos
Josh White

U.S. Army officials are looking into allegations that soldiers have been trading gruesome digital pictures of war victims in Iraq and Afghanistan for access to an amateur pornography Web site, but officials said yesterday that there is insufficient evidence to pursue criminal charges.

The allegations surfaced last week, when the East Bay Express, a weekly newspaper in the San Francisco Bay area, published a story about graphic photographs that appeared on one section of the Web site. The photographs, which show the bodies of several people killed in shootings, explosions, or fires, include crude captions, some of which mock the dead.

Pentagon and Army officials yesterday issued strong statements condemning the taking and posting of such photographs, but said there is little evidence to authenticate them and few ways to pursue a criminal investigation. While some of the photos appear to show U.S. soldiers in uniform near mutilated bodies, it is unclear where or when the pictures were taken.

The Web site's creator said yesterday that about 30,000 members of the military are registered on his site, several thousand of whom have sent him photographs or comments from their official military Web addresses. Many of the photographs depict life in Iraq, while only a few are extremely graphic, he said.

"It's an uncensored view of the war, from their perspective," said Chris Wilson, 27, of Florida, who began accepting the photographs from soldiers overseas as payment for access to pornography on his Web site. "It's a place where the soldiers can express themselves without being filtered by the Bush administration," he added.

Those who submit photos of war casualties could be breaking military rules against "unbecoming" conduct and also could be in violation of government regulations regarding use of the Internet. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have access to the Internet, largely at Internet cafes, and many have digital cameras.

Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said investigators have been examining the photos for clues to their origin, adding that commanders in the field are emphasizing that taking and posting such photos is unacceptable.

"If accurate, these are gruesome depictions of deceased people in Iraq, and that violates the standards of our values, training and procedures that we ask military personnel to observe and obey," Boyce said. "It is very difficult to establish they are in fact being submitted by soldiers, where they were taken, who they were taken by, and the circumstances surrounding them."

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has decried the photographs and called for a Pentagon investigation. An official said the images could inflame insurgents and give other nations the mistaken impression that many Americans are gloating over casualties of the Iraq war.

"What we're most concerned about is the safety of our own soldiers," said Arsalan Iftikhar, CAIR's legal director. "It only tarnishes our image even further and serves as fodder for the insurgents and terrorists."

Wilson, who said he supports the soldiers and the war, said users must search out the corpse photos, which are not displayed prominently on the site.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...092802254.html





I'd like to know where the riverboat sails tonight
To New Orleans well that's just fine alright
`Cause there's fighting there and the company needs men
So slip us a rope and sail on round the bend

Bernie Taupin

















Until next week,

- js.


















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