P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Peer to Peer
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 02-04-14, 07:43 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 5th, '14

Since 2002


































"Users are spending an average of 2 hours and 42 minutes per day on their [mobile] devices. 22 minutes in the browser, with the balance of time focused on applications." – Flurry


"The reality shows that every time someone had tried to anonymise data, it's been a failure. As long as you can tie searches together and you keep any shred of the information, any personal information that can tie things back to you, then I think it's not truly private." – Gabriel Weinberg






































April 5th, 2014




UK ISPs Must Block File Sharing Sites, Says European Court of Justice
Thomas Newton

The European Court of Justice has ruled that that ISPs across Europe can be forced to block file sharing sites.

After Austrian ISP UPC Telekabel Wien challenged a blocking order from its national court, the ECJ ruled that rights holders can ask an ISP to block sites that provide free unlicensed access to copyrighted content.

In the UK, the High Court has issued orders to the biggest ISPs - BT, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and EE - legally forcing them to block access to file sharing sites like The Pirate Bay, EZTV and most recently Megashare.

Banhammer: The European Court of Justice has ruled that ISPs must block pirate sites if asked

The ECJ's decision was instigated when Constantin Film Verleih - which owns rights to films including Pandorum and The White Ribbon - sought an order from an Austrian court for UPC to block access to the file-sharing site kino.to.

UPC challenged the Austrian court's powers to make the orders under European copyright law and took the fight to the ECJ, which is Europe's highest court, claiming an ISP shouldn't be forced to intervene between a user and a website.

The ECJ's decision means that any ISP which does not respond to a court order is in effect breaking the law:

“The Court replies to the Oberster Gerichtshof [Austria’s Supreme Court] that a person who makes protected subject-matter available to the public on a website without the agreement of the right holder is using the services of the business which provides internet access to persons accessing that subject-matter.

“Thus, an ISP, such as UPC Telekabel, which allows its customers to access protected subject-matter made available to the public on the internet by a third party is an intermediary whose services are used to infringe a copyright.”

The ECJ also states that rights holders seeking court orders do not need to find proof that subscribers have been downloading protected content, merely that it's possible for an ISP's customers to access a pirate site.

The decision also rules that it is up to national courts have the right to interpret European copyright law and pass on orders like this.

UPC Telekabel argued that setting up site blocks were not only costly but ineffective - the UK’s Digital Economy Act rules that small ISPs with less than 400,000 customers are currently exempt from having to block pirate sites.
http://recombu.com/digital/news/uk-i...cj_M13007.html





Dropbox Clarifies its Policy on Reviewing Shared Files for DMCA Issues

Service matches publicly shared content against hashes of previously blocked files.
Kyle Orland

For years now, Internet users have gotten used to the risk of having files and content they share through various online services be subject to takedown requests based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and/or content-matching algorithms. But users have also gotten used to using services like Dropbox as their own private, cloud-based file storage and sharing systems, facilitating direct person-to-person file transfer without having to worry about such issues.

This weekend, though, a small corner of the Internet exploded with concern that Dropbox was going too far, actually scanning users' private and directly peer-shared files for potential copyright issues. What's actually going on is a little more complicated than that, but shows that sharing a file on Dropbox isn't always the same as sharing that file directly from your hard drive over something like e-mail or instant messenger.

The whole kerfuffle started yesterday evening, when one Darrell Whitelaw tweeted a picture of an error he received when trying to share a link to a Dropbox file with a friend via IM. The Dropbox web page warned him and his friend that "certain files in this folder can't be shared due to a takedown request in accordance with the DMCA."

Whitelaw freely admits that the content he was sharing was a copyrighted video but still expressed surprise that Dropbox was apparently watching what he shared for copyright issues. "I treat [Dropbox] like my hard drive," he tweeted. "This shows it's not private, nor mine, even though I pay for it."

In response to follow-up questions from Ars Technica, Whitelaw said the link he sent to his friend via IM was technically a public link, and theoretically could have been shared more widely than the simple IM between friends. That said, he noted that the DMCA notice appeared on the Dropbox web page "immediately" after the link was generated, suggesting that Dropbox was automatically checking shared files somehow to see if they were copyrighted material, rather than waiting for a specific DMCA takedown request.

Dropbox did confirm to Ars Technica that it checks publicly shared file links against hashes of other files that have been previously subject to successful DMCA requests. "We sometimes receive DMCA notices to remove links on copyright grounds," the company said in a statement provide to Ars Technica. "When we receive these, we process them according to the law and disable the identified link. We have an automated system that then prevents other users from sharing the identical material using another Dropbox link. This is done by comparing file hashes."

Dropbox added that this comparison happens when a public link to your file is created, and that "we don't look at the files in your private folders and are committed to keeping your stuff safe." The company wouldn't comment publicly on whether the same content-matching algorithm was run on files shared directly with other Dropbox users via the service's account-to-account sharing functions, but the wording of the statement suggests that this system only applies to publicly shared links.

We should be clear here that Dropbox hasn't removed the file from Whitelaw's account, but just closed off the option for him to share that file with others. Indeed, in a tweeted response to Whitelaw, Dropbox Support said that "content removed under DMCA only affects share-links." Dropbox explains its copyright policy on a Help Center page that lays out the boilerplate that "you do not have the right to share files unless you own the copyright in them or have been given permission by the copyright owner to share them," and directs users to its DMCA policy page.

Dropbox has also been making use of file hashing algorithms for a while now as a means of de-duplicating identical files stored across different users' accounts. That means that if I try to upload an identical copy of a 20GB movie file that has already been stored in someone else's Dropbox account, the service will simply give my account access to a version of that same file, rather than forcing me to upload an identical version. This not only saves bandwidth on the user's end, but significant storage space on Dropbox's end as well.

Some researchers have warned of security and privacy concerns based on these de-duplication efforts in the past, but the open source Dropship project attempted to bend the feature to users' advantage. By making use of the file hashing system, Dropship effectively tried to trick Dropbox into granting access to files on Dropbox's servers that the user didn't actually have access to. Dropbox has taken pains to stop this kind of "fake" file sharing through its service.

In any case, it seems a similar hashing effort is in place to make it easier for Dropbox to proactively check files shared through its servers for similarity to content previously blocked by a DMCA request. In this it's not too different from services like YouTube, which uses a robust ContentID system to automatically identify copyrighted material as soon as it's uploaded.

In this, both Dropbox and YouTube are simply responding to the legal environment they find themselves in. The DMCA requires companies running sharing services to take reasonable measures to make sure that re-posting of copyrighted content doesn't occur after a legitimate DMCA notice has been issued. Whitelaw himself doesn't blame the service for taking these proactive steps, in fact. "This isn't a Dropbox problem," he told Ars Technica via tweet. "They're just following the laws laid out for them. Was just surprised to see it."

Still, we feel this is important information for Dropbox users to know about the limitations on how they can use their account. Any Dropbox file shared via a "public link," even if it's a link that you only intend to share with a single person, is being compared against a database of previous material subject to the DMCA, and could be blocked on those grounds.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...r-dmca-issues/





Box IPO Could Bring More M&A In File Sharing
Chris Metinko

Box’s $250 million IPO filing earlier this week may serve as a harbinger of soon-to-be exits of others in the file sharing space.

The Los Altos, California company’s IPO seemed likely after it raised $100 million in a late-stage venture round late last year at a reported valuation of $2 billion — the round seemed like a typical mezzanine round companies undertake to shore up their balance sheets before going public.

Likely to follow in its footsteps is the more consumer-facing sharing company Dropbox, after its January $250 million funding round gave it a reported $10 billion valuation.

Meanwhile, competitors that have raised far less capital are likely to struggle to compete in a capital-intensive space. Instead of going public, these players are likely to be gobbled up by large tech players looking to grab their piece of the file sharing space.

“It’s hard to see the IT giants ceding this market to Box and other startups without trying to make a move themselves,” said one sector executive. “And as most of them have failed to build compelling products themselves, all the big IT players with the exception of Citrix and EMC are natural buyers of a company in this space.”

Box has raised more than $400 million in venture capital, while San Francisco-based Dropbox has pulled in more than $600 million. Those numbers almost seem reasonable considering these companies compete with tech titans like Google and its Drive offering, as well as Microsoft and its OneDrive and Office 365 products.

Box’s recent filing for its IPO reinforced just how much money may be needed to become a large independent in the space. According to the company’s S-1 filing, the company spent $46 million on R&D alone for the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2014. The company recorded a net loss of $168.6 million on revenues of $124.2 million for the past year. It has $108 million of cash on hand.

Companies such as Acronis, Watchdox, Accellion, Egnyte and Hightail have raised a fraction of the funding of their two Northern California competitors. The difference in financial backing, along with the sheer breadth of competition, leaves executives predicting a cloud of consolidation may soon rain down over many of the competitors.

“Between Box, Dropbox, Accellion and Egnyte all making noise about (going public), it’s hard to see even a massive market like this one supporting more than five public companies, so there would definitely be a race on,” the executive said.

Some consolidation already has occurred. In October 2011, Citrix acquired ShareFile for $54 million, followed by EMC acquiring Syncplicity in May 2012.

While it seems unlikely those two IT giants would make other buys in the sector, many others with solid M&A track records such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and Symantec could be logical buyers.

Microsoft may seem at first glance an unusual acquirer since it already has products in the space, but one executive pointed out that new CEO Satya Nadella comes from the company’s cloud and enterprise group. The consolidation of the file sharing space could give a company like Microsoft a chance to dominate a space Nadella knows well.

“Microsoft could do something,” the sector executive said. “Their inaction created this market in the first place.”

And it is that market — created around sharing — which may see one of the largest amounts of consolidation in 2014.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mergerma...-file-sharing/





Music Industry Pushes Unified Message on Compensation
Ben Sisario

When it comes to the music industry’s lobbying efforts in Washington, it is time for some harmony.

That message has gained momentum among music executives, who worry that squabbling among the various players — record labels, music publishers, artists, songwriters — will undermine broader initiatives to push for new legislation and regulatory reform.

On Wednesday, the head of the organization behind the Grammy Awards will host a dinner in Washington attended by some of Capitol Hill’s most powerful lawmakers and call for the industry to set aside its differences and lobby under a single message of fair compensation for all.

The speech, to be given by Neil Portnow, the president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, will suggest that disparate messages from the different constituencies have stymied previous campaigns and will argue that a single, all-purpose bill is needed, according to industry executives.

Music groups are pushing for a range of new laws and regulations that they believe are vital to help their businesses survive in the digital era. But the interests of these parties do not always align.

Record companies, for example, have long wanted to change the federal laws that require AM/FM radio broadcasters to pay royalties to the publishers that control songwriting copyrights but not to record labels. Yet publishers have feared that any gain by record companies could come at their expense. Radio broadcasters have fiercely opposed and successfully fought the record labels on this issue.

The industry’s different groups have also butted heads over compensation paid out by popular streaming services like Pandora and Spotify. Federal courts oversee the royalty rates paid out by those services, and the publishers complain that the record labels earn far more than they do. According to Pandora’s financial statements, the company pays about 4 percent of its annual revenue to publishers and more than 50 percent to record labels.

“While we and record labels may agree that Pandora should pay a maximum amount possible of their revenue for music, it doesn’t mean that we agree that the money should be split 13 to one,” said David Israelite, the president of the National Music Publishers’ Association.

In February, publishers backed a new bill, the Songwriter Equity Act, which would allow rate-court judges to consider the royalties that record companies receive when setting rates for publishers. The publishing world, frustrated by recent court decisions, is also trying to get the Justice Department to change the 73-year-old regulatory agreements governing Ascap and BMI, the two large organizations that handle performing-rights licensing.

In addition to those efforts, music groups are hopeful for a broad review of copyright law that is being led by Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

While record labels and publishers have been in conflict before, the disputes have grown more urgent with the shift to digital media, which has led to steep declines in sales and sometimes bitter disagreements over what constitutes fair royalty rates.

“To a degree it’s always been this way, but it’s been exasperated by the decline in revenues,” said Jay L. Cooper, a veteran music lawyer who recently gave a speech at the law school of the University of California, Los Angeles called “The Music Industry at War With Itself.”

Past failures have burned painful memories into the minds of lobbyists and music executives, like an effort in 2006 to streamline music licensing. Distrust between songwriters and publishers divided support among music groups, and the bill expired.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, or Sopa, introduced in 2011, was supported by Hollywood movie studios and music industry groups, but the huge opposition to it — bolstered by Internet giants like Google and Wikipedia — beat back the legislation and left the Washington media-industry lobby stunned.

Now, with the increasing influence that technology companies like Pandora, Spotify and Google are having on the music business, its leaders are making a renewed call for cooperation.

“Generally speaking, most people are on the same side,” said Chris Castle, a music lawyer who frequently comments on technology issues. “The main concern is that we don’t allow the people who want to divide us from coming in and manipulating both sides against each other.”

Wednesday’s dinner is a prelude to Grammys on the Hill, an annual advocacy day in which music industry executives and lobbyists mingle with lawmakers, usually with the help of some musical star power. This year Lady Antebellum, a Grammy-winning country-pop trio, will be on hand for the event.

The Grammys lobbying day has traditionally been more of a hobnobbing event than one for gritty policy debates. And with the music industry fighting for every dollar, there is no guarantee that Mr. Portnow’s call for unity will be heeded. But the academy hopes its message will be strengthened by its position as an inclusive organization for all kinds of musicians.

“The Recording Academy,” said Daryl P. Friedman, its top official in Washington, “is the only industry group that speaks for all music creators.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/bu...of-accord.html





RZA Says Wu-Tang Clan Offered $5 Million for New Album That's Only Available as One Copy

"The main theme is music being accepted and respected as art and being treated as such."
Jeremy Gordon

Last week, Wu-Tang Clan announced the existence of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, a double album recorded in secret over the last several years. The announcement came with a twist: Only one physical copy will be produced, and it won't be made commercially available. Instead, the plan is to tour the 31 song album through galleries, museums, and other listening spaces, where audiences will pay a fee to listen to it in one go. After that tour is over, the album will be made available for purchase for a price "in the millions."

It might not be wishful thinking. In an interview with Billboard, RZA claims that the group has already received an offer of $5 million for the album. "I've been getting a lot of emails: some from people I know, some from people I don't know, and they're also emailing other members of my organization," he said. "So far, $5 million is the biggest number."

He continued: "I don't know how to measure it, but it gives us an idea that what we're doing is being understood by some. And there are some good peers of mine also, who are very high-ranking in the film business and the music business, sending me a lot of good will. It's been real positive.

"The main theme is music being accepted and respected as art and being treated as such. If something is rare, it's rare. You cannot get another."

You can read more of the mindset behind the album's production at its website. It mentions that players from the soccer team FC Barcelona will make an appearance, which I can't even imagine.

Wu-Tang are releasing a commercially available album, A Better Tomorrow, in July. They've already released the first single, "Keep Watch".
http://pitchfork.com/news/54627-rza-...e-as-one-copy/





Nature Publishing Group Requires Faculty Authors to Waive ‘Moral Rights’
Megan O’Neil

Faculty authors who contract to write for the publisher of Nature, Scientific American, and many other journals should know that they could be signing away more than just the economic rights to their work, according to the director of the Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communication at Duke University.

Kevin Smith, the Duke official, said he stumbled across a clause in the Nature Publishing Group’s license agreement last week that states that authors waive or agree not to assert "any and all moral rights they may now or in the future hold" related to their work. In the context of scholarly publishing, "moral rights" include the right of the author always to have his or her name associated with the work and the right to have the integrity of the work protected such that it is not changed in a way that could result in reputational harm.

"In many countries, you can’t waive them as an author," Mr. Smith said. "But in the Nature publishing agreement you are required to waive them, and if you are in a country where a waiver is not allowed, you have to assert in the contract you won’t insist on those rights."

Grace Baynes, a spokeswoman for the Nature Publishing Group, declined to say how long the language on moral rights had been included in its license agreement. In comments posted on Friday on the company’s website, Ms. Baynes said that the publisher always attributes articles to authors.

"The ‘moral rights’ language included in our license to publish is there to ensure that the journal and its publisher are free to publish formal corrections or retractions of articles where the integrity of the scientific record may be compromised by the disagreement of authors," Ms. Baynes wrote. "This is not our preferred approach to dealing with corrections and retractions, and we work with authors and institutions to seek consensus first." The Nature Publishing Group will listen to all feedback on its license to publish and has invited Mr. Smith to "have a discussion with us," Ms. Baynes said.

‘Core Academic Values’

Mr. Smith first questioned the details of the Nature Publishing Group’s license agreement on his blog on Thursday.

Calling the moral-rights stipulation "bizarre" and an attack "on core academic values," he wrote that in some countries authors are forbidden to waive those rights. "The United States is something of an outlier in that we do not have a formal recognition of moral rights in our copyright law, although we always assert that these values are protected by other laws," he wrote.

His comments were part of a longer post noting that the powerful scholarly publisher has apparently begun enforcing at Duke a requirement that authors at institutions with open-access policies secure waivers exempting their work from those policies.

About a half dozen faculty members contacted him last week to ask him about waivers after receiving emails from the Nature Publishing Group, Mr. Smith said. Duke’s open-access policy was adopted in March 2010, Mr. Smith said, and the archiving of published work has always been done in compliance with publishers’ policies so as not to unduly burden faculty authors. He has added a note to his office’s website telling faculty members to contact him for a waiver.

While the timing of the publisher’s enforcement of its waiver requirement is "odd," Mr. Smith said, he is most concerned about faculty authors’ signing away their moral rights. He intends to suggest to Duke faculty members that they seek to have the language stricken from their agreements. It could be replaced with a sentence stating that the Nature Publishing Group retains the right to correct or retract an article if the need arises.

"I raise the question ‘Why?’" said Mr. Smith. "Obviously the most fundamental thing authors get when they publish is credit, reputation. If their name isn’t associated with the work, that is completely lost."
https://chronicle.com/article/Nature...-Group/145637/





The Digital Paradox: How Copyright Laws Keep E-Books Locked Up
Hilmar Schmundt

E-books are great. As long as you buy them. Borrowing is more difficult.

Many publishing houses don't allow their products to be lent out by digital libraries for fear of piracy. Articles and books by researchers are also affected. Readers are the ones who have to pay the price.

When the German author Johann Gottfried Seume took his famous "Stroll to Syracuse," as he entitled his book about his nine-month walk to Sicily in 1802, he made sure to visit a number of local libraries along the way. At the time, it was often impossible to check out books. If you wanted to read them, you had to be mobile.

Today, the situation has come full circle. If a student in Freiburg wants to read the hard-copy version of a book from the university library in Basel, he or she can simply order it via an interlibrary loan. But if only an electronic version is available, interlibrary loans are generally not an option. The student has no choice but to climb into a train and head to Switzerland to read the book on a university computer.

It is a paradox: Books that traveled around the world via interlibrary loan in the 20th century paper era are safeguarded locally in the Internet age. Indeed, it is the sheer ease with which electronic publications can be sent around the world that is now resulting in their being locked up behind digital bars. The book doesn't go to the reader, the reader comes to the book -- just like in the 19th century.

Interlibrary loans were formalized in Prussia in 1893 with the "edict pertaining to lending." But it doesn't apply to the new electronic world. Today, publishing houses dictate their conditions to libraries, motivated by their justifiable fear of pirated copies. Unfortunately, it is honest readers who have to pay the price.

Many publishing houses don't issue licenses for loaning out e-books: Influential German publishers such as Droemer Knaur, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, S. Fischer and Rowohlt, for example, are nowhere to be found on the German-language online lending library Onleihe. That means that important works such as the new definitive World War I study by Berlin-based political scientist Herfried Münkler cannot be checked out electronically. It is a situation that would be unimaginable in the world of paper.

'Delightful Absurdities'

Indeed, many electronic books only exist on closed platforms such as Apple's iBooks or Amazon's Kindle. And protection software used by many publishers make access to their products even more difficult. Adobe, whose system provides the foundation for the majority of all e-books, is currently revising its software. Many older readers may no longer be able to display newer e-books as a result.

The issue isn't just the latest crime novel bestseller. The issue is the core of the knowledge economy: essays, articles and books from researchers. "We have thousands of e-books that we could make available to our users via the Internet," says Harald Müller, head librarian at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. "Be we often aren't allowed to because licenses are so restrictive."

Copyright laws often lead to "delightful absurdities," says Müller. If, for example, he wants to read an essay from an American library via interlibrary loan, "they will print it out on paper and send it over by fax -- and I will then scan it into our computers here." Sending it as an email attachement is forbidden.

It is, of course, legitimate for publishing houses to try to defend themselves from copyright violations. But for the moment, the strategies they employ almost exclusively inconvenience well-meaning readers. Library users, for example, often are "not allowed to print out e-books or to save them on USB sticks," says Oliver Hinte, head of the legal commission at the Association of German Libraries. But what is one supposed to do instead? Copy out passages by hand?

"Appropriate technical solutions to prevent piracy have been around for a long time," says Gerald Schleiwies of the city library system in Salzgitter near Hanover. "Digital watermarks allow documents to be personified. My name is prominently displayed on every page and can't be as easily removed as so-called copy protection."

Schleiwies is currently writing his Ph.D. thesis and travels across Germany for his research. He has five separate library cards. "The scanning and mailing of excerpts is no longer allowed," he says.

The Specter of Copyright

There are plenty of absurd examples. Franco Moretti, for example, an English professor at Stanford University, achieved renown with his study "Atlas of the European Novel." But his research ends at the point when rigid copyright laws, which protect works for up to 70 years after the death of the author, present a roadblock. It is dangerous to scan more current works of literature, Moretti says. "The specter of copyright keeps (them) too protected for us to make inroads. Too bad!"

"Currently, copyright owners are often in a unique position of power," says Hinte. "A reform and simplification of copyright laws is long overdue."

In many cases, it is the readers themselves who, through their taxes, pay the university authors whose studies they are then unable to access. It is also likely that many professors themselves cannot even afford a subscription to the journal in which their work is published. Subscription rates of up to €15,000 ($20,633) per year are hardly a rarity. The Journal of Comparative Neurology, for example, comes with a price tag of more than €20,000 annually. Authors who publish their works in such a journal usually don't see a single cent for their labors. Publishing companies such as Reed Elsevier, by contrast, regularly achieve pre-tax profit margins of over 25 percent.

"Publishers of scientific journals make so much money because they collect their product for free from taxpayers and then sell it back at inflated prices," says Günter M. Ziegler, a distinguished mathematician at Berlin's Free University.

Until two years ago, Ziegler was the co-publisher of two mathematics journals at Reed Elsevier. Then he joined a boycott that has since attracted the support of 14,000 others. He is now working for an academic journal that is available to everyone on the Internet according to open access principles. Elsevier says that the conflict has more to do with a misunderstanding than a conflict of interests.

Back to the Future

Initial compromises have been made. In January, institutions such as the Geneva-based CERN nuclear research center began paying Elsevier a flat fee for the publication of physics journals which are then made available free of charge.

Adjustments to copyright law are often tiny, but effective. That is the case with older works whose authors can no longer be determined. Heretofore, for example, old, yellowing newspapers couldn't be digitized until all of the writers involved were contacted. Works of cultural value were being sacrificed at the altar of copyright. As of the beginning of this year, new rules pertaining to limitations and exceptions to copyright now make it easier to scan orphaned works.

The mini-change could also make it possible for researchers to post their work on the Internet -- but only one year after they are published in an academic journal. The first are expected to do so in 2015.

Until then, though, people in search of specific articles or publications will be forced to chase down the artificially limited supply of e-books for the privilege of reading them on library monitors and taking notes by hand, much as monks used to do. Or like the man of letters Seume during his journey to Syracuse over 200 years ago. Back to the future.

Translated from the German by Charles Hawley
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-961333.html





Ad Blockers Get Ad-Group Exec's Blood Boiling (Q&A)

The Interactive Advertising Bureau doesn't like how tens of millions of people use ad-blocking software. IAB's general counsel has a counterattack: block the blockers.
Stephen Shankland

Mike Zaneis says he's generally a relaxed guy.

But when the subject of online ad-blocking technology comes up, calmness vanishes from the voice of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's general counsel and executive vice president for public policy.

"Ad blocking to me is so fundamentally wrong, it just boils my blood," he seethed in an interview, predicting a coming showdown in which publishers start blocking people who block ads.

Of course, plenty of consumers loathe online advertising, which can inflict flashing gaudiness and subject people to behavioral targeting. That's why Adblock Plus, AdBlock, and other browser add-ons exist to strip ads off Web pages and, increasingly, mobile apps. It's also why Adblock Plus' acceptable ads manifesto is getting attention. Adblock Plus developer Eyeo encourages a relatively unobtrusive style of ads that it doesn't block -- but publishers must apply to get on its whitelist, and big ones such as Google also have to pay.

Zaneis called the approach a "ransom note." Ad blockers are a mortal enemy for the IAB, which represents more than 600 companies that are responsible for showing 86 percent of ads in the US.

He might speak grandly of the threat to the advertising-supported businesses, but he's not wrong about ads fueling the Internet. eMarketer forecasts worldwide digital ad spending to grow 14.8 percent to $137.5 billion in 2014. Ads have generated fortunes for Facebook and Google, and Apple is trying to follow suit with mobile ads. How many people would use Facebook social networking or Google search if, like a Sunday New York Times subscription, it cost $4.30 per week? Probably not 1.23 billion people.

Zaneis talked to CNET's Stephen Shankland on Thursday. (Disclosure: CBS Interactive, publisher of CNET, is a general member of IAB.) The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Shankland: How does the IAB see ad blocking?
Mike Zaneis: It's a huge economic problem for the industry, one the industry is just coming to grips with and to see as the fundamental threat that it is.

How big a problem are ad blockers for publishers?
Zaneis: It varies wildly. For some publishers, it's a blip on the radar screen -- less than 5 percent of users or ads are being blocked. That's what we in the business call a discrepancy: it's not that big a differential. But one gamer site, Destructoid, has a young, tech-savvy audience, and 40 to 50 percent of its users are running ad blockers. That's putting extreme pressure on his [Destructoid's publisher] ability to stay in business.

So will publishers start building paywalls or charging for subscriptions to content?
Zaneis: Part of it is basic economics. To date, the growth in industry has been so robust, with double-digit expansion, so the industry has been able to handle this free-rider problem, with X percent not consuming advertising yet having access to the content and services.

If growth begins to level off, there will be further pressure to monetize every eyeball -- and to keep costs down. It costs something to deliver these services. Bandwidth is not free, server capacity is not free.

There is only one endpoint: an unsustainable economic situation that ad blockers create. The industry will have to rise up and answer it. You see some sites beginning to block users with ad blockers. Maybe you'll see paywall offerings to users that are using ad blockers, but you're not going to see a mass migration off ad-supported content, the economic engine that drives the Internet.

You mean publishers will show an error message to those with blockers that says, "Sorry, we're not going to show you our content"?
Zaneis: Yes.

How hard is it for Web sites to detect ad blockers?
Zaneis: It's not difficult at all.

Do you know of publishers doing that?
Zaneis: Destructoid began to do that. He decided he didn't want to be in an all-out war with his users, so he took it down. He ran it on a trial basis.

Ad blockers use use different technology for blocking. Sometimes the ad blocker just won't send the call from the Web site to the ad network. Sometimes it will allow the call to go through, but block incoming delivery of the ad. Sometimes the ad will render on the page [in the browser], but then the ad blocker will obfuscate the ad itself. If you're a publisher, there are different ways of detecting and resolving that, and there are different harms. If the call was never made, then the publisher is never able to make any money, because it wouldn't show as an [advertising] impression. If the call went out and and back in, the marketer is being essentially defrauded -- it paid for an impression that was not showed to a consumer.

You can see why publishers and marketers have an incentive to figure this out.

What do you think of Adblock Plus' acceptable ads manifesto, which Eyeo says is an attempt at compromise between obnoxious ads and no ads?
Zaneis: It's a ransom note. These people are no better than Internet pirates facilitating the theft of content. To do it under the guise of "these ads aren't acceptable" is a complete facade. It's a sham. They block all ads by default.

Well, to be clear, by default, Adblock Plus shows ads from whitelisted advertisers.
Zaneis: They allow ads to come through for those who pay the ransom. Tens of millions of people have downloaded this. The default is Adblock Plus blocks all ads, then they allow ads to get through if you pay them money. They don't review all those ads. It's a complete sham to say they only whitelist acceptable ads.

You sound pretty worried. When is this really going to be a problem for publishers?
Zaneis: It's major already a problem for some publishers.

But you think it'll be a big problem for everybody at some point?
Absolutely. There is only one end point to this challenge: over time more ads will be blocked, and it will become such an important economic issue for our industry that we will have to act very aggressively. It's Economics 101.

What response is more likely? Paywalls, ad-block blocking, or something else?
Zaneis: I predict publishers will not provide for content and services for free. People who don't participate in the economic exchange of digital advertising are unlikely to partake in the benefits of it. That doesn't compute from an economic standpoint.

But what's the most likely response?
Zaneis: The paywall option is not viable for the vast majority of the Internet. Consumers don't want that. The next logical solution is that people won't give away content and services to folks who aren't part of the value chain [those using ad blockers].

When will this come a head?
Zaneis: I can't predict that. I'm not privy to publishers' economic numbers. I think you'll see it on an individual company basis as they make the decision. Once you get a handful of publishers committed to resolving the problem, I think you'll see a cascading effect throughout the industry.

Won't it be pretty unpleasant for them to go to war with their audience?
Zaneis: Absolutely. Some companies will make the decision not to pay the ransom, but a lot of folks will. When you're sitting there and somebody has a knife to your throat, a lot of people will pay that ransom.

I do know one thing. Adblock Plus -- these people don't understand advertising and the economic model of the Internet. They talk about acceptable ads, but they're way behind the curve of where the Internet is progressing. They don't want disruptive ads, and they don't want things that come over the content on the page. Maybe they've never seen ads on mobile page, maybe they have no idea about interstitial ads [which appear between transitions from one page or screen to the next] and rich-media ads and digital-video ads and prerolls that take over the screen for a predetermined amount of time. That is the here and now, and the future.

How big a problem is it really? Most people don't install ad blockers. Earlier you were talking about 5 percent, which is about one in twenty people. Could publishers offer more moderate ads so people aren't as likely to install ad blockers?
Zaneis: It's a tragedy of the commons problem. It only takes one Web site to do something bad, for a person to say, "I don't want that advertising," and install an ad blocker.

You can have more and more people installing ad blockers and undermining the economic model of the Internet. So that puts pressure on to monetize the other people, so they'll see more ads.

And ad blocking applies to mobile developers as well as Web sites.
Zaneis: Mobile is becoming the Internet when you look at time spent. This concept that Adblock Plus is going to dictate to our industry what ads are acceptable and what aren't, but they have no concept of how a mobile ad works...They say we wouldn't accept [intrusive ads] in the offline world? Bullshit. What do you think a TV commercial is? It's a preroll ad or a midroll ad. On mobile, the predominant ad is interstitial. When I open an app, I get an ad. Adblock Plus says that's disruptive and not acceptable. There we are at loggerheads, and we won't be held ransom. In reality, this is not a moral imperative for them, this is for-profit company that wants to make money, which is why you pay them off and ads get shown. The hypocrisy is outrageous.

Do publishers and advertisers have a publicity problem, though? Lots of people object that with advertising, the user becomes the product that a publisher is selling to the advertiser, and people don't like being treated like something to be sold, as a source of revenue to be mined.
Zaneis: There's not a single study that supports that. People understand being marketing to. My grandparents were marketed to their entire lives. The oldest form of advertising in this country is the Sears catalog. People are OK with that. The Internet is the greatest revolution of our time, and it's supported by ad revenue. So there's a consumer revolt against it? The exact opposite has happened. It's a wild success.

We need to be respectful. There are bad ads. Nobody likes the belly-fat ads. We're working at making advertising a more positive experience for users. We're doing that because we want the experience to be better. Adblock Plus is doing this because they just want people to pay them off.
http://www.cnet.com/news/ad-blockers...d-boiling-q-a/





Cable’s Next Big Threat: Loss of Ad Dollars To YouTube, AOL
Mike Shields

It turns out that cord-cutting isn’t the only threat facing cable channels.

Several of the big ad-supported online video outlets, including Google’s YouTube, AOL and others, plan this upfront season to target some of the ad dollars that currently flow to cable channels, industry executives say.

The web video outlets see a vulnerability in second tier cable networks, and to a lesser extend in the local TV-station market, executives say.

According to multiple media buyers and ad sellers in the Web video industry, digital media companies are looking to draw direct comparisons between their audiences and cable TV networks, a match-up Web video outlets think they can win.

Buyers say Google is likely to be the most aggressive on this front, given YouTube’s massive size and its young demographics that don’t necessarily watch a lot of TV. The company has been selling directly against cable networks, with pitches like “X YouTube net reaches more women than E! or Awesomeness TV reaches more tweens than ABC Family.”

In one pitch, for instance, YouTube cited Nielsen data from November showing that it reached 49% of all 18 to 34 year olds, versus 45% for FX, 44% for TBS’ comedies, 41% for Comedy Central and 40% for AMC.

YouTube also thinks it can capture more local broadcast and cable ad dollars from national advertisers looking to boost spending in certain markets. The company is targeting automotive and wireless advertisers in particularly, said executives with direct knowledge of YouTube’s plans.

TV executives are putting up a brave front, pointing to TV’s reputation for quality and its massive reach. “We’ve had 10 pre-upfront meetings and YouTube hasn’t come up once,” said one.

“I think they’re competitive,” said another cable executive. “But Web video is probably more complementary at this point.”

What’s making online video’s strategy possible this year is the fact that all the big digital outlets, including after a long holdout YouTube, are now able to sell ad inventory using TV-like Nielsen data. That allows them to speak the language of advertisers and marketers, which have long histories of using and trusting television for their ads.

Colleen Whitney, Digitas’ media director for North American video, said her team has already begun previewing presentations planned by most big digital companies for this year’s online ad version of the upfronts, the NewFront, planned at the end of April.

“You are absolutely seeing them sell aggressively against cable more than ever before,” Ms. Whitney said, adding that the YouTubes of the world are creating packages of shows centered around verticals like comedy “and then making the argument that they reach more of a certain demographic than Comedy Central.

Buying ad time on cable channels is cheaper than online video outlets, media buyers note. In 2013, the average cost of reaching a thousand viewers on cable channels is $15.63, while the equivalent price for online video was $23.03, according to advertising cost analysis firm SQAD. Amanda Richman, president of investment and activation at Publicis Groupe’s Starcom, said cable’s lower prices helps them.

Still, she said, “there’s been a steady drumbeat toward Web video, which offers more fluidity.”

Ms. Richman noted that major broadcast TV networks have moved aggressively in putting their content on the Web, both on their own sites and platforms like Hulu, allowing them to capture some of the Web video ad dollars. But, she noted, cable has been more cautious online, because it must protect its relationships with pay TV distributors.

The cable versus Web video conversations actually started quietly last year. Some online video outlets said they received requests from agencies to put together potential ad packages at much larger spending levels than they were used to seeing—with the implication that the outlets were being given a shot to steal dollars that otherwise would go to cable networks. The Web video companies didn’t land many of these deals, but it meant that agencies were ready to pit the Web versus cable in negotiations. Industry insiders expect more such negotiations this year.

Another issue, insiders say, is the way that ad agencies are structured. TV buyers are naturally inclined to favor TV. And even when considering web outlets, many prefer those showing traditional TV content. And by the time some TV buyers receive orders from their planning departments, they don’t always have the flexibility to move dollars from TV to the Web, since they’re required to get a certain price or audience level, as measured by gross ratings points.

However, one issue is whether online outlets have enough quality content to satisfy advertisers. TV networks often have an inherent advantage with some of their high profile programs.

“TV offers borrowed equity,” said Andrea Kerr Redniss, executive director, chief activation officer at Media Storm, referring to the halo effect brands are said to receive by appearing alongside ‘cool’ or ‘big’ shows like “The Walking Dead” or “The Good Wife.”

“There’s a lot of tonnage in web video, and not much borrowed equity,” Ms. Redniss said.

Web video outlets, while optimistic, are trying to remain realistic, given the fact that cable networks own so many buzzy hits, and will be formidable.

“Where the numbers match up well, you’ll absolutely see the Web against cable,” said Jason Krebs, head of sales at Maker Studios, which represents thousands of YouTube creators. “But it’s a case by case thing. To say video is just video no matter what screen you’re on is just an easy thing to say. I don’t yet see a dramatic change.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/...o-youtube-aol/





The Mobile Browser Is Dead, Long Live The App
Ewan Spence

Analytics firm Flurry has published data on mobile usage by US consumers during Q1 2014. While users are spending more time on their devices (an average of 2 hours and 42 minutes per day, up four minutes on the same period last year), how they use that time has changed as well. Only 22 minutes per day are spent in the browser, with the balance of time focused on applications.

Looking at breakdown of that time, users are living in their smartphone’s applications. That gaming requires apps is a given, but almost every other area provides the user with a choice – go for an app to access the data or go to the web.

Users are turning away from the browser and relying on applications. Anyone who relies on reaching out to users should be paying attention to these numbers, and have a strategy to deal with the app issue.

It’s also an area that the disruptors in the mobile market should be paying attention to. New platforms that are putting an emphasis on the web and web based services will find themselves at a disadvantage both in presentation to users and in development by web services. if the focus is on building apps rather than mobile friendly HTML5 sites and services, then the advantages of choosing iOS and Android over another mobile platform are clear.

One of the goals of Firefox OS is to give developers a simple and cost-effective tool set that is readily available, without the need for app store support or complicated SDK’s. HTML5 is their chosen route. While the vision of being able to search online, run apps directly from the cloud, and essentially have ‘web pages as apps’ does lower the cost of entry for all, it is not as flexible as a pure app play, and as people move towards apps the environment on an Firefox OS powered device will become less attractive.

Jolla, with their Sailfish OS, is also looking at the web as a driver of apps and information on their platform. Speaking previously to co-founder Marc Dillon he explained Jolla’s view on apps vs the web to me:

Dillon believes in ‘the internet’ and a web-based approach, “but I understand the utility of having applications. But they contribute to a tunnel vision of what a smartphone can do. They provide a good user experience, but poor integration. A smartphone is smart if it helps users day to day.

Which is all very admirable, but the almost overwhelming viewpoint today is that information comes to a mobile user through applications. As Flurry’s details show, use of the mobile web is dropping. The methodology of Android and iOS is the dominant viewpoint.

Where a mobile web promotes access for everyone to everyone, the app model hands the gatekeepers the power of access and discovery, leaving the service providers beholden to their policies, their platform tools, and their rules, which can change with little notice.

If you follow the principle that you need to be where users are, then you need to be building and distributing apps, which leaves you no choice but to accept that Google and Apple will always be the third party in any relationship with your customers.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspen...-live-the-app/





Apple’s War on Samsung Has Google in Crossfire
Brian X. Chen

Officially, it’s Apple versus Samsung Electronics in another tech patent face-off in a San Jose courtroom this week. But there is another company with a lot at stake in the case — Google.

In a lawsuit, Apple is seeking about $2 billion in damages from Samsung for selling phones and tablets that Apple says violate five of its mobile software patents. Samsung, meanwhile, says Apple violated two of its patents.

Some features in Samsung devices that Apple objects to are part of Google’s Android operating system, by far the most popular mobile operating system worldwide, running on more than a billion devices made by many manufacturers. That means that if Apple wins, Google could have to make changes to critical Android features, and Samsung and other Android phone makers might have to modify the software on their phones.

“Google’s been lurking in the background of all these cases because of the Android system,” said Mark P. McKenna, a professor who teaches intellectual property law at Notre Dame. “Several people have described the initial battle between Samsung and Apple as really one between Apple and Google.”

Representatives for Apple, Samsung and Google declined to comment.

The current case, which begins on Monday with jury selection, is the second major court battle over patents between Apple and Samsung, which rode the success of Android to become the biggest handset maker in the world. Samsung lost the first case in 2012, and it was ordered to pay $930 million in damages.

That amount is pocket change for Apple, one of the richest companies in the world. And it hardly interfered with Samsung’s ability to sell phones: The company, which is based in South Korea, shipped 314 million handsets last year, according to the research firm IDC.

So this second fight has to be about more than money, said James Bessen, a law lecturer at Boston University. He said that if Apple just wanted money, it would have already agreed to settle.

Still, going after Google by attacking Samsung is difficult, Mr. Bessen said. Both Google and Samsung could alter features to avoid infringing on patents. And by the time the trial and appeals are finished, newer devices will have supplanted the products in question.

“To kill Android with a half-dozen patents,” Mr. Bessen said, “just seems like a long shot.”

Long shot or not, combating Google’s Android system was a cherished goal of Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and chief executive, who died in 2011. He called Android a knockoff of the iPhone and told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he was willing to go to “thermonuclear war” just to kill Android.

He also told Mr. Isaacson that Apple’s past patent lawsuit against HTC, another Android handset maker, was about Google all along.

“I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product,” Mr. Jobs was quoted as saying in Mr. Isaacson’s book “Steve Jobs.”

In the case set to open this week, Apple’s legal complaint aims at some of the features that Google, not Samsung, put in Android, like the ability to tap on a phone number inside a text message to dial the number. And although Google is not a defendant in this case, some of its executives are expected to testify as witnesses.

Apple has a long history of choosing battles against what it views as copycats. In 1988, the company sued Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, claiming that software programs sold by the two companies, including Windows, infringed on Apple’s copyrights on how information was presented on the Macintosh operating system. After a four-year legal struggle, Apple lost on nearly all its claims.

Apple filed its latest complaint against Samsung over two years ago in the Federal District Court in San Jose, accusing Samsung of infringing on software patents involving both the iPhone and iPad, including the “slide-to-unlock” feature for logging in, and universal search, the ability to look up items across the device and on the Internet at the same time.

For those patents, Apple wants $40 per infringing Samsung device sold in the United States. Apple lists several Samsung products that it says violated its patents, including the popular Galaxy S III, which at one point surpassed the iPhone in sales, and the Galaxy Note II.

“Instead of pursuing independent product development, Samsung slavishly copied Apple’s innovative technology,” Apple said in its complaint.

Samsung says Apple has infringed on patents covering how a photo album is organized, as well as a method for transmitting video over a wireless network. It bought these patents from Hitachi and a group of American inventors.

The case will be tried by a jury of four and is expected to last a month. Apple’s lawyers plan to argue that by copying the features of Apple’s devices and then selling millions of phones, Samsung harmed Apple, because people who bought Samsung phones presumably would have otherwise bought iPhones. Apple will probably try to illustrate that Samsung is a copy machine, not an innovator, by pointing out that the two patents Samsung says were infringed on are not based on Samsung’s own ideas because they were acquired from other inventors.

Samsung’s lawyers will try to argue that Apple’s patents are invalid by demonstrating that similar software features were being developed by Google and others before the iPhone was released. They will also probably argue that Apple’s complaint poses a threat to competition because the patents Apple says were infringed on broadly cover Android, meaning other phone manufacturers could be dragged in to the dispute.

Expected witnesses include Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing; Todd Pendleton, chief marketing officer of Samsung’s American division; and Hiroshi Lockheimer, a vice president for engineering in Google’s Android division.

Apple has some advantages entering the trial. It won the last fight with Samsung, which might carry weight with jurors trying to decide if Samsung again infringed on patents. And the judge, Lucy H. Koh, who also oversaw the last trial, has already decided that Samsung infringed on one of Apple’s patents covering a method for automatically correcting incomplete or misspelled words while a person is typing. So Samsung is already down one.

That does not necessarily make this an easy fight. To streamline the trial, Judge Koh limited the number of patents each company could assert were infringed on. Apple must argue that just a few patented features are worth a great deal of money, when there are thousands of other patented inventions that make a smartphone tick.

“When you have a case where a party comes in with a handful of patents and says, these are the really important ones, these are the patents that are worth several dollars apiece per phone — from a simple economic standpoint, that doesn’t make a lot of sense,” said Brian J. Love, a law professor at Santa Clara University who teaches patent law.

In January, the companies’ top executives met with a mediator to discuss a possible settlement, but to no avail. Settling would be difficult for either company, in any case, given their clashing business strategies.

Apple’s approach is to develop software that runs exclusively on its hardware, and the company generally does not license its patents because it hopes that may prevent others from reproducing its products.

Samsung has found success in making all kinds of products, like washing machines and refrigerators, or smartphones and television sets. It is unlikely it would tear features out of its best-selling smartphones without putting up a fight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/te...crossfire.html





U.S. Top Court Considers Patent Protections for Software
Lawrence Hurley

The U.S. Supreme Court will on Monday delve into the hotly contested question of when software is eligible for patent protection.

The nine justices will hear a one-hour oral argument in a case of interest not just to software companies but also to a wide range of businesses that sell products containing computer-implemented features. The ruling, expected by the end of June, will affect companies involved in such industries as healthcare, IT, communications and high-tech engineering.

Google Inc, Dell Inc, Verizon Communications Inc, Microsoft Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and engine manufacturer Cummins Inc, are among the companies that have filed legal papers weighing in on the issue.

Companies vary over what kind of eligibility threshold they would prefer. Those that often get sued for patent infringement, such as Google, favor a tighter definition. Those that want to protect their own patents, such as IBM Corp, would prefer that most software be patent eligible.

With the rise of computer-based products, courts have struggled to apply patent law. Some legal experts, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group, say that too many patents are issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and courts are too keen to uphold them. In 2011, almost 125,000 software patents were granted by the patent office, up from about 25,000 in 1991, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in an August 2013 report.

Tech companies are especially concerned about litigation brought by so-called "patent trolls," defined as companies that hold patents only for the purpose of suing other companies that are seeking to develop new products. The resulting litigation stifles innovation, the companies say. Congress is considering legislation aimed at reining in patent trolls.

Between 2007 and 2011, trolls accounted for an estimated 19 percent of all patent infringement lawsuits, according to the GAO report.

Patent owners that do not manufacture products are much likelier than ones that do to bring lawsuits based on software inventions, according to a study released last week by RPX, a publicly traded patent clearinghouse.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., which has primary responsibility for interpreting patent law, has struggled to adopt a test that judges can use to review software patent claims, with various judges reaching different conclusions.

RECORD PROPORTION OF IP CASES

The case before the high court involves Alice Corporation Pty Ltd, which holds patents for a computer system that facilitates financial transactions. The patents are challenged by CLS Bank International, which says they are not patent eligible. In May 2013, the federal appeals court ruled for CLS but the judges were split 5-5 on which legal test to adopt.

The issue comes before the Supreme Court at a time when the court is hearing the highest proportion of intellectual property cases in its history, including eight during the nine-month term that ends in June.

The legal question boils down to how innovative an invention should be to receive legal protection. The U.S. Patent Act states that anyone who "invents or discovers a new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter," or an improvement of an existing one, can get a patent. An invention related to an abstract idea can be patented, but it must include a way of applying the idea.

Trading Technologies International Inc, which sells software for use in derivatives trading, is one of the companies that favors broad patent eligibility.

Steven Borsand, the company's executive vice president for intellectual property, said his company relies heavily on its patents. It successfully sued a unit of Cantor Fitzgerald LP for infringement and has settled other cases, he said.

Borsand said he was concerned that in seeking to target patent trolls the high court also would hurt businesses that are making legitimate use of their patents.

"We spend a lot of money developing stuff. Once it's out there, it's pretty easy to copy," he said. "That's what happened."

Daniel Nazer, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that restrictions on patent eligibility would lead to greater innovation because companies would be forced to come up with new products instead of relying on patent protections.

"That's how people get cheaper, better products," he said. "You stay a step ahead."

The case is Alice Corp v. CLS Bank, U.S. Supreme Court, 13-298.

(Additional reporting by Dan Levine; Editing by Howard Goller and Grant McCool)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A2U05X20140331





Justices Seem Wary of Software Patent Case
Adam Liptak

In a case with the potential to reshape the software industry, the Supreme Court on Monday seemed poised to issue fresh limits on patents for computer-based business methods.

Though the case originated far from Silicon Valley, it has been closely watched as an indicator of how specific or abstract technical ideas can be to become eligible for patent protection. Patent claims over the way such ideas are incorporated into computers, cellphones and other devices have become a challenge for many high-tech companies.

Those companies often have interests that tug in opposite directions. They tend to hold large portfolios of valuable patents and want to protect them. But they must also contend with “patent trolls,” companies that have obtained patents on sometimes vague concepts and which are more active in the courthouse than on the production line.

Most of the justices seemed skeptical about extending patent protection to the claimed invention at issue, a sort of computerized escrow mechanism that helps ensure that both sides in a transaction do what they have promised to do.

But given the importance of the software industry in the information economy, the court also appeared wary of a misstep in announcing a general legal principle. The court’s task, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said, was “to go between Scylla and Charybdis.”

On the one hand, Justice Breyer said, the court should not allow the patent system to stifle innovation. “There is a risk,” he said, that “instead of having competition on price, service and better production methods, we’ll have competition on who has the best patent lawyer.

“And if you go the other way and say never” allow software patents, he went on, “then what you do is you rule out real inventions with computers.”

The patents in question, owned by the Alice Corporation, outlined steps for mitigating settlement risks among multiple parties. The company’s lawyer, Carter G. Phillips, pointed the justices to a flow chart in one of the briefs to explain how the method worked.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. inspected it. “Just looking at it,” he said, “it looks pretty complicated. There are a lot of arrows.”

But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asked whether “a second-year college class in engineering” or “any computer group of people sitting around a coffee shop in Silicon Valley” could convert the idea into computer code “over a weekend.” Mr. Phillips said yes, adding “that’s true of almost any software.”

The patents were challenged by CLS Bank International, which says it clears $5 trillion in foreign exchange transactions a day using methods to ensure that both sides performed. The Alice Corporation’s patents, the bank said, merely recited “the fundamental economic concept of intermediated settlement of escrow.”

Several justices appeared to agree. Justice Breyer said the method had been around since the abacus and was used by his mother to keep him from overdrawing his checking account.“There is an abstract idea here,” he said. “It’s called solvency.”

The justices considered only the threshold question of whether the Alice Corporation’s ideas were eligible to be patented. The court has said that laws of nature, natural phenomena and abstract ideas do not qualify.

Were Alice’s ideas to make it over that hurdle, they would still be subject to challenges for obviousness, lack of novelty or indefiniteness. The initial step of patent eligibility, Mr. Phillips said, should be “a very coarse filter.”

In recent decisions, the court has been skeptical of protecting discoveries and ideas even at that threshold stage if doing so would hamper innovation. In 2010, the court ruled that a method of hedging risk was not eligible to be patented. In 2012, it said the same thing about correlations between drug dosages and treatment.

Mark A. Perry, a lawyer for the bank, said Monday’s case, the Alice Corporation v. CLS Bank International, No. 13-298, was similar to the 2010 case, Bilski v. Kappos. “It is hedging against credit default rather than price fluctuation, but it is simply hedging,” he said.

A trial court invalidated the Alice Corporation’s patents, saying they recited only abstract concepts. That decision was effectively affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a specialized court in Washington that hears patent disputes. But the decision was badly fractured, with seven opinions, none of which commanded a majority.

The Supreme Court also seemed likely to rule for the bank, though it was not clear how broadly. The justices did not seem inclined to adopt the aggressive approach urged by Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who argued in support of the bank and said that only a limited number of software patents should be recognized.

Mr. Phillips said the government’s approach would declare “in one fell swoop hundreds of thousands of patents invalid.”

Mr. Perry said the court needed only to apply its earlier decisions to find in his client’s favor.

“This is not the death of software patents,” he said, citing supportive briefs filed in the case from prominent companies. “The software industry is all before this court saying, ‘This is fine with us.’ Every company in the United States practically, except for IBM, is saying go ahead. This will not affect software patents.”

Justice Kennedy asked Mr. Perry what sorts of business processes would remain eligible for patents under his theory. He rattled off a few: data compression, streaming video, encryption.

Mr. Verrilli had a harder time providing an example, though he said “a process for additional security point-of-sale credit card transactions using particular encryption technology — that might well be patent-eligible.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/bu...tent-case.html





Hey, Robot: Which Cat Is Cuter?
Annie Lowrey

One recent morning, while contemplating writing this column, I scrolled through thousands and thousands of listings for mundane microgigs on Mechanical Turk, or Mturk, a decade-old platform created by Amazon. On Mturk, which advertises paid “human intelligence tasks,” I could review and correct transcriptions. I could tag images, perform a Google search, write a few sentences on a given topic, rate jokes or list items found on a receipt. For each, I would make a nickel or a quarter.

Computers are great at rote, simple tasks. This, of course, has wreaked havoc on all sorts of jobs throughout our economy. Robots have replaced countless machinists and garment workers. Kayak and Priceline, among others, have all but crowded out travel agents. Automated scanning systems are slowly phasing out the checkout clerk, while Tesla is hoping to sell its zippy plug-in cars straight to customers, eliminating the salesman. (And soon those cars might drive themselves.) Mturk and its competitors, like CrowdSource, are intended for the menial jobs that still require a flicker of human intelligence and that computers can’t replicate, like deciding whether a photograph is safe for work or understanding a thick, slang-laden accent.

Deep Thoughts This Week:

1. There are few things that robots cannot yet do.

2. But we’re inadvertently teaching them those skills.

3. That includes my job.

The platform has prompted much consternation for being a sort of outsourcing service that drives down wages. Estimates of hourly earnings generally come out to $5 or less, or around two-thirds of the current federal minimum wage — a good-enough sum, perhaps, for the India-based workers who supply about half the labor on the site but not so much for the other half who are based in the United States. More than one commentator has described Mturk as a “digital sweatshop.”

But even more troubling is the fact that crowdsourcing platforms are hurrying along the automation of more and more of these tasks. Erik Brynjolfsson, a co-author of the popular book “Race Against the Machine,” cites image recognition as one obvious place where humans have helped robots replace them. Crowdworkers can collect pennies for identifying adorable cats in photographs, and then companies take that data and improve software that identifies adorable cats with a marginal cost that approaches zero. “We’re at a real inflection point in terms of artificial intelligence and machine learning,” Brynjolfsson said. “Things are speeding up.”

Indeed, many Turkers are actively helping to put themselves out of jobs. “Yesterday it was spam moderation,” said Panos Ipeirotis, a professor of business at New York University. “And today it’s transcriptions and translation. Once we help computers solve the problem of today, we move on to more challenging tasks. Maybe in 10 years, it’s something we think of as completely out of the range of computers right now. I see it happening, all the time.”

This is, of course, the latest iteration of a process that has been going on at least since the evolution of the ax and the plow: Man invents a machine to make life easier, and then that machine reduces the need for man’s work. Ultimately, it’s a virtuous cycle, because it frees humans up to work on higher-value tasks. But technological change can also cause huge economic dislocations. And right now, the great fear is that robots are taking over jobs faster than humans can adjust. High-tech firms may be the most vibrant part of the economy, but they just don’t require the manpower of former blue-chip companies. “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion,” writes the computer scientist Jaron Lanier in “Who Owns the Future?” “But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people.” Lanier describes the future of automation as big-data “puppetry,” where the actions of humans are replicated once the set of data is big enough.

White-collar jobs were once deemed mostly immune to such automation, but that is no longer true, either. Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist, and Michael Osborne, a professor of machine learning, at Oxford University estimate that about half of American jobs — sailors, paralegals, you name it — are susceptible to automation. “Software substitution, whether it’s for drivers or waiters or nurses” is coming, Bill Gates said recently at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “Twenty years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. I don’t think people have that in their mental model.”

Journalists have often thought of themselves as impervious to automation, but there are creeping signs that the robots have come for our gigs too. Last month, after an earthquake woke up Los Angeles, the first post on the temblor at The Los Angeles Times gave the basic information and carried one Ken Schwencke’s byline. “This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author,” it noted at the end.

Yet that does not necessarily mean that half of all journalists — or half of all Americans, for that matter — will lose their jobs to the robots, never to reclaim them. Economists refer to this fear as the “lump of labor” fallacy, the incorrect assumption that there is a finite amount of work to be done, and that the more robots do, the less there will be for the rest of us. In the past, after all, humans have proved remarkably adept at thinking up new things to do when plows, cows, steam trains and dishwashers arrived to help free up some of our time.

This time around, however, there is a notable difference. With computers getting so much better, faster and faster and faster, there might be a rough period of transition as median wages keep falling for American families. Workers — especially those without college degrees — will continue to find themselves less and less valuable in the marketplace. “The big challenge for us as individuals, and as a society, is to race with machines, rather than racing against machines,” Brynjolfsson said. “We’ve had some catastrophic failure of imagination, failing to think of more ways to put that vast middle class of people to work and to employ them more productively.”

The challenge, in other words, is for humans to allow software, algorithms, robots and the like to propel them into higher-and-higher-value work. For journalists like me, that might mean letting computers take over on earnings reports, weather, earthquake warnings and flash sports scores — and doubling down on narratives, investigations and analytical pieces. This very column, for example. I distilled my thoughts down to four bullet points and offered two Turkers a rather handsome sum of $2 to write four sentences. In half an hour, I had my responses back: “Writing projects derived from crowdsourcing are best used for blogs, backlinking, nonexpert informational articles and other needs that do not require 100 percent accuracy. The major downside to crowdsourced work is the vast variability of skills and work ethic. . . .”

For now, at least, I think my job is safe.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/ma...-is-cuter.html





DuckDuckGo: the Plucky Upstart Taking on Google with Secure Searches

Gabriel Weinberg launched DuckDuckGo as a search engine that puts privacy first, rather than collecting data for advertisers and security agencies
Alex Hern

DuckDuckGo bills itself as "the search engine that doesn't track you". After the revelations in the US National Security Agency files, that sounds tempting.

Named after the playground game duck duck goose, the site is not just banking on the support of people paranoid about GCHQ and the NSA. Its founder, Gabriel Weinberg, argues that privacy makes the web search better, not worse. Since it doesn't store your previous searches, it does not and cannot present personalised search results. That frees users from the filter bubble – the fear that, as search results are increasingly personalised, they are less likely to be presented with information that challenges their existing ideas.

It also means that DuckDuckGo is forced to keep its focus purely on search. With no stores or data to tap, it cannot become an advertising behemoth, it has no motivation to start trying to build a social network and it doesn't get anything out of scanning your emails to create a personal profile.

Having answered one billion queries in 2013 alone, DuckDuckGo is on the rise. We asked Weinberg about his website's journey.

Why did you set up DuckDuckGo in 2008?

DuckDuckGo didn't come out of any real direct motivation to start a search engine. I had come off my last company in 2006, [The Names Database, a social network that Weinberg sold for $10m], and I was focused on a bunch of personal projects.

One was fighting spam in search results. There were a lot of sites that were just obviously spam in Google at the time, but they seemed pretty easy to identify. Another was crowdsourced data. I found myself going to Wikipedia and IMDB a lot, sites that used crowdsourced data, where you just get answers. The third leg was that I went to this stained-glass class, where they handed out a list of links that were the best places to go for more information on stained-glass production. They didn't match the Google search results. So I started a third project about getting the links out of people's heads, to find out where the best stuff was.

DuckDuckGo is based in the small town of Paoli, Pennsylvania. How much do you think that the location puts you outside the general Silicon Valley milieu?

Yeah, we don't feel connected to that scene. I'm not actually from here, interestingly enough. My wife and I picked here together to move to because we thought it would be a good place to raise a family and for other, deeper reasons that don't make sense to people outside the US. I think anyone in a similar position in Silicon Valley would have raised a ton more money a ton earlier. But that hasn't been our focus. And also, just look at how we've got 75% remote workers. That's a very non-Silicon Valley thing to do. Normally you hire the best engineers that you can out of Ivy League schools and bring them all in one place so you can get them in the company.

After all these years, it seems as if people are finally talking about privacy …

Yes, I do think that's fair. I don't think it's a fad. One of the big things people have noticed in the last year is the ads that follow them around the internet and that's perhaps the most visible notion of this new tracking mindset that most companies are adopting. Those trends are not disappearing. More tracking on the internet, more surveillance, so I think as people find out about it they're going to be wanting to opt out in some percentage.

When you started, your sole aim was to build a better search engine. When did you decide that privacy was crucial to that?

Instant answers and spam filtering were really the initial focus there and still are in terms of product differentiation. But very quickly after that – I would have done it from the beginning had I actually thought about it, but I hadn't – was privacy.

The data that you share with your search engine is the most personal data. Because you don't hold back with your search engine. You don't think about it in that context. You think "oh, I've got a financial problem … just type it in!" And so, that search history is really personal.

It has [also] increasingly been used for marketing, it is available to subpoena and, as we know from the last year, it's also available through other hidden means for surveillance. Most money a search engine makes comes from showing an ad for something commercial like a car or shoes when users search for them, and it doesn't impact that business model to not track.

Why not just anonymise the data you collect, rather than offer totally incognito searches?

The reality shows that every time someone had tried to anonymise data, it's been a failure. As long as you can tie searches together and you keep any shred of the information, any personal information that can tie things back to you, then I think it's not truly private.

Are you against tracking on a personal level, or is this just business?

No, I do have a philosophical opposition. I think of it as more privacy policy than general. I think they should be set up to be the minimal collection as needed, as opposed to the maximal collection possible.

The other way to look at that is I think they should have a quid pro quo, which is "you're giving up this particular piece of personal information and you're getting this benefit in return", as opposed to the current status quo, which is "we will collect anything we can and not tell you what the benefits are", just say, in general, "sure, you'll benefit from this".

I think that is the key difference. And you've seen some companies start to move to this direction, but very slowly.

Is it possible to make a good search engine without collecting Google levels of data?

I believe you can switch to us today, and you'll be fine. And people are. And you can have a better experience! But also, if you look at your Google searches and what's coming up, really the amount that they're using your search history to change the search results is minimal. They are not really using that data currently to improve your search results in any significant way – as far as we can tell. They're using it for other things. They're using it to track you across the ad network.

Does that mean you've backed off a bit in your fight against personalised searches?

We've not backed off! I guess to restate my case I don't think that personal data, that personalisation, has been very useful.The case that everyone mentions is when, say, you type in the weather or you type in pizza and you want local weather or a local pizza place.

Do people eat pizza in the UK?

Yeah.

I figured so. So, we can do that in our instant answer box – using your location on the fly, and not store it – and not change the actual link results. So I think most of what people want that they call personalisation is really localisation and we can do that without tracking people.

You've said before that tracking might be used to charge people more if their profiles reveal they have a lot of money. Is that something you can really see happening, or is it a worst-case scenario?

It's real, and it already is happening, and will be increased. My general view is that if information is out there that can lead companies to improve their profits, then they will do so unless it's regulated against.

So I definitely think it's out there, I think people just don't know that it exists yet.
http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...ecure-searches





How Russians Are Outsmarting Internet Censorship
Andrey Tselikov

Mere days after several opposition websites were blocked [Global Voices report] by Russia's mass communications regulatory agency, Roskomnadzor, free speech proponents have created a unique system for circumventing censorship — and imposing counter-attacks. This approach could create problems both for censors and pro-Kremlin websites. Indeed, it seems that Russian Internet activists have taken the adage “the best defense is a good offence” to heart.

The system gained popularity when blogger Ruslan Leviev [ru] implemented the approach in order to access opposition leader Alexey Navalny's blog, which was blacklisted and blocked last year. A programmer identified as alexkbs, who first developed the system, explained in a blog post [ru] that he wanted to create a way for average users to access blocked material — a method for those who might not have the technological aptitude to use specialized services like Tor, i2p, VPN and proxy servers [ru]. This is why his approach is centered on allowing users to access blocked sites through plain old World Wide Web.

The method consists of a network of mirrors, or exact copies, of the blocked site, combined with an “active defense” mechanism. Because Roskomnadzor requires ISPs to constantly check if a resource is trying to circumvent a ban by changing its IP address, blocked resources can introduce code that redirects some of these IP queries to a different website. Eventually, goes the theory, ISPs will pick up on this redirect and block the secondary website as well. So if a blocked site is savvy enough to redirect to a government site, say Kremlin.ru, ISPs will ultimately block Kremlin.ru, a block that obviously can't stay in place for long.

This idea was put to the test on March 17, when the popular pro-government website LifeNews was banned by many ISPs [ru] through this redirection trick. The website responsible for the block was one of the mirrors of Navalny's blog. LifeNews later appealed the block to Roskomnadzor, and the mirror was unblocked as a result, proving the exploit successful at actively forcing a reversal of censorship. Leviev tweeted news of his success, posting a screenshot of the mirror removed from the Roskomnadzor registry:

Learn how to screw the system ;)

Of course, like all weapons, the redirect exploit can be used for evil as well as good — literally any website could be blocked in this way, including the website of a business competitor, for example. Roskomnadzor can also combat the exploit by creating “whitelists,” i.e. websites that should under no circumstances be blocked.

A different way to actively “screw” the system was proposed by Twitter user @unkn0wnerror, who suggested reverse blacklisting Roskomnadzor. Under this method, when regulators attempt to view one of the mirrors to Navalny's website, all they see [ru] is a full screen photo of a kitten:

Leviev and company continue to think of new ways to circumvent online censorship — for example, on March 24, Leviev announced [ru] on his blog that his team of volunteers had created a Google Chrome extension that automates the process of accessing Navalny's blog mirrors. One might question Leviev's zeal at circumventing censorship specifically for Navalny's blog. After all, Navalny's texts are also published on his Facebook account, which is easily accessible from Russia. Another extremely simple solution, suggested [ru] by Anton Nosik, is to read any blocked website through an RSS feed. One explanation is that this project is a proof of concept — a way to prepare for a grim and probable future when any opposition voice on the RuNet is in danger of being stifled.
http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.o...et-censorship/





U.S. Knocks Plans for European Communication Network

The United States on Friday criticized proposals to build a European communication network to avoid emails and other data passing through the United States, warning that such rules could breach international trade laws.

In its annual review of telecommunications trade barriers, the office of the U.S. Trade Representative said impediments to cross-border data flows were a serious and growing concern.

It was closely watching new laws in Turkey that led to the blocking of websites and restrictions on personal data, as well as calls in Europe for a local communications network following revelations last year about U.S. digital eavesdropping and surveillance.

"Recent proposals from countries within the European Union to create a Europe-only electronic network (dubbed a 'Schengen cloud' by advocates) or to create national-only electronic networks could potentially lead to effective exclusion or discrimination against foreign service suppliers that are directly offering network services, or dependent on them," the USTR said in the report.

Germany and France have been discussing ways to build a European network to keep data secure after the U.S. spying scandal. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone was reportedly monitored by American spies.

The USTR said proposals by Germany's state-backed Deutsche Telekom to bypass the United States were "draconian" and likely aimed at giving European companies an advantage over their U.S. counterparts.

Deutsche Telekom has suggested laws to stop data traveling within continental Europe being routed via Asia or the United States and scrapping the Safe Harbor agreement that allows U.S. companies with European-level privacy standards access to European data. (www.telekom.com/dataprotection)

"Any mandatory intra-EU routing may raise questions with respect to compliance with the EU's trade obligations with respect to Internet-enabled services," the USTR said. "Accordingly, USTR will be carefully monitoring the development of any such proposals."

U.S. tech companies, the leaders in an e-commerce marketplace estimated to be worth up to $8 trillion a year, have urged the White House to undertake reforms to calm privacy concerns and fend off digital protectionism.

In the report, the USTR also criticized restrictions on Internet telephony in India and China, foreign investment limits in countries, including China, and efforts to increase the rates U.S. telecommunications operators must pay in order to connect long-distance calls in Pakistan, Fiji, Tonga and Uganda.

(Reporting by Krista Hughes; Editing by Dan Grebler)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A331W820140404





European Lawmakers Prepare to Vote on ‘Net Neutrality’
Mark Scott

Vodafone gave Chris Herbert a package deal he found too tempting to turn down.

To persuade Mr. Herbert, a 27-year-old conference organizer, to pay 50 percent more for his monthly cellphone contract, the British telecom giant threw in a free subscription to Spotify, the music streaming service.

The bundled deal, giving Mr. Herbert access to both a high-speed digital network and consumer content, is the type of packaging at the core of a raging public policy debate in Europe over what types of services will be widely available and how much they will cost.

“I talked myself into this,” said Mr. Herbert, a London resident who now pays the equivalent of $75 for his monthly cellphone subscription. In his case, he considers the much higher monthly rate an acceptable trade-off: He canceled his existing Spotify contract that had cost him an additional $16 a month. “With my new data plan, I’m streaming a lot more music than I ever did before.”

The online habits of customers like Mr. Herbert, and their ability to pay, are the focus of digital policy legislation on which lawmakers from the European Union’s 28 member countries plan to vote Thursday in Brussels. A key part of the legislation is so-called net neutrality. The rules are meant to ensure equitable access to Internet’s pipelines for services like streaming music, on-demand television and cloud computing. The big questions are who pays for them, and how much.

The proposed rules have drawn furious lobbying from telecommunications companies like Vodafone, Internet giants like Google and smaller players like Spotify, and advocacy groups on behalf of the European Union’s 500 million consumers.

The battle is akin to a struggle playing out in the United States but with its own European twists.

The outcome could help determine whether the financial incentives are in place to pay for the multibillion-euro investments needed to upgrade Europe’s patchy mobile and landline Internet infrastructure, which in the absence of Continentwide rules has slipped ever farther behind the more advanced data networks of North America and Asia.

Few parties were happy with the set of compromises that a committee of the European Parliament approved in mid-March. And even if the full parliament adopts the legislation this week — passage is no sure bet — further wrangling among member countries over how to implement the law would be expected to drag on for months. Because that process would extend past parliamentary elections in May, it would be up to the next parliament, later this year, to either carry forward the current legislation or reopen the debate.

The wrangling has pitted some of the biggest companies in Europe against one another.

The telecom carriers want to charge content providers like Google, with its YouTube video service, higher rates for premium, high-speed access to the Internet. The carriers say such extra costs are necessary because of the amount of network capacity — or bandwidth — such services require.

The legislation provides some pricing leeway in that regard. But the carriers say the flexibility is not sufficient, while content providers counter that any premiums at all would be unreasonable. Although the richest players, like Google and the movies-on-demand provider Netflix, might be able to afford premium access, some midsize or smaller players worry that they could be priced out of the Internet fast lines and relegated to network side roads.

Consumer advocacy groups, meanwhile, say their main concern is that the new rules would make Internet access unaffordable for many Europeans. And they warn that the network economics could end up favoring American juggernauts like Google, Netflix or Amazon, to the detriment of providers of European content and services.

The vote “will either mark an unprecedented advance toward the protection of our fundamental rights, or mark the final days of the open Internet as we know it,” said Félix Tréguer, co-founder of the La Quadrature du Net, an advocacy group in Paris.

Representatives for Google and Microsoft, like many of the other big American companies, declined to comment, citing the sensitivity of the debate.

A similar debate continues in the United States. The Federal Communications Commission is still trying to map out net neutrality rules, after two of the biggest American providers of broadband access, Verizon and Comcast, successfully challenged the commission in court.

“Net neutrality is starting to bleed into a bigger debate about whether the Internet has become a public utility,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia University in New York who coined the phrase net neutrality in the early 2000s. “It has become about who controls access to online content.”

Unlike United States regulations, in which mobile Internet services have mostly been excluded from net neutrality policy, the European legislation does not differentiate between mobile and fixed data networks.

As people increasingly use smartphones and tablets to access online content, mobile data traffic jumped 57 percent in Western Europe and 77 percent in North America in 2013 compared with the previous year, according to the network equipment company Cisco Systems. Internet usage on cable networks has had similar increases over the same period.

To keep pace with that demand, European telecom companies are gearing up to spend billions of dollars to upgrade their networks.

Vodafone, for example, has announced plans to invest almost $12 billion in network improvements. Telefónica of Spain has agreed to buy E-Plus, a German carrier, for $10.7 billion to expand Telefónica’s operations in Europe’s largest economy.

To justify such outlays, many European carriers say they should be able to charge companies extra for transporting data-intensive services like Internet TV.

“Data volumes are growing exponentially,” said Tom Phillips, chief regulatory officer of GSMA, a telecommunications industry body. “At a point, someone has to pay for the necessary investments in the network.”

Not surprisingly, Internet giants like Google and European content providers like Spotify and Rovio, the Finnish gaming company behind the Angry Birds franchise, don’t agree. Many companies argue that Internet access providers are simply trying to greedily exploit the rising consumer demand for online media.

The Finnish national broadcaster YLE, for example, says it has had a threefold increase in monthly visits, to 14.5 million, for its online TV and radio services since 2010.

The growth has been fueled by major events like the recent Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. During the games, 8 percent of the Finnish population, or around 420,000 viewers, downloaded the broadcaster’s mobile application to watch live sports on their smartphones and tablets.

While YLE’s on-demand and streaming services have yet to put significant strain on Finland’s data networks, Lauri Kivinen, the broadcaster’s chief executive, worries that carriers will eventually give priority to content providers willing to pay for premium access to broadband networks.

“The tollkeeper shouldn’t be able to define what content is available,” Mr. Kivinen said.

Others worry that the European legislation would allow telecom companies to discriminate against services like Internet messaging and video streaming that compete with the carriers’ own offerings.

A few years ago Dutch lawmakers opposed efforts by the country’s big telecom company KPN and the local units of Vodafone and T-Mobile to block, or charge extra for, Internet communication services like Skype and WhatsApp. In response, in 2011 the Netherlands became the first European country to enshrine the concept of net neutrality into national law.

And a German court overturned efforts by Deutsche Telekom last year to reduce the speed of consumers’ Internet services after they reached certain download limits. The company’s opponents, noting that the limits did not apply to Deutsche Telekom’s own online content, argued that the approach would have given the carrier an advantage over other Internet companies looking to offer rival online services like video on demand.

Even as such arguments continue to be made during the debate over the European Parliament’s legislation, some carriers and content providers are hashing out their own deals.

To woo prospective customers as Vodafone did with Mr. Herbert, many of Europe’s telecom companies are starting to forge agreements with Spotify, Facebook and other content providers to give consumers unlimited access to the services as part of their monthly contracts.

Such arrangements enable carriers to distinguish themselves from their rivals. And for content providers, particularly small start-ups in search of customers, a packaging deal with one of Europe’s telecom giants could be crucial to staying in business.

“Interest is high for partnerships,” said Mattias Hjelmstedt, founder of Magine, a Swedish online TV start-up that is working on deals with a number of European mobile and Internet service providers. “Instead of making it a war, make it about working together.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/bu...eutrality.html





E.U. Lawmakers Approve Tough ‘Net Neutrality’ Rules
Mark Scott and James Kanter

European lawmakers approved new rules on Thursday aimed at guaranteeing equal access to the Internet and cutting cellphone charges across the 28-member European Union.

The proposals, which had been subject to intense lobbying by industry groups and consumer advocates, mirror similar efforts in the United States to allow access by all companies and individuals to the Internet’s pipelines for services like streaming music, on-demand television and cloud computing.

A final endorsement of the rules would be left to the next European Parliament, which will be elected next month. Individual countries also still would need to reach agreement with the Parliament and the European Commission on a reconciled version of the law, which may still be changed in response to feedback from domestic politicians and regulators.

Under the proposals, European politicians are trying to create a single market for electronic communications across the bloc.

That included last-minute amendments intended to provide a strict definition of so-called net neutrality, which means that telecommunications companies and other Internet service providers cannot discriminate between different services that run on their data networks.

The lawmakers also made it mandatory for mobile phone companies to comply with rules to phase out roaming costs when consumers use cellphones in other European Union countries by the end of next year.

“This vote is the E.U. delivering for citizens,” Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner responsible for telecommunications, said Thursday in a statement. “This is what the E.U. is all about — getting rid of barriers to make life easier and less expensive.”

The outcome of the legislation is part of a continuing debate in Europe over how to pay for the multibillion-euro investments needed to upgrade the Continent’s mobile and landline Internet infrastructure. In the absence of clear rules, Europe has slipped increasingly behind the more advanced data networks of North America and Asia.

Operators like Vodafone of Britain and Deutsche Telekom of Germany want to charge Internet companies like Google, Netflix and smaller start-ups for use of their networks because services like online-television streaming occupy a large percentage of the Internet pipelines.

In contrast, Internet companies and consumer advocacy groups warn that the telecom companies could reduce consumer choice if they force companies to pay extra for access to data networks. Companies say only those with deep pockets, which are mostly American Internet giants like Microsoft, which owns the video messaging service Skype, would be able to pay for greater access to Europe’s Internet infrastructure.

The vote on Thursday provided extra protection for equal access to Europe’s mobile and fixed line data networks, and was welcomed by advocacy groups.

“The E.U. seized the opportunity to secure users’ rights and protect innovation and freedom of expression online,” Raegan MacDonald, European policy manager at the consumer group Access, said in a statement.

The telecom industry, however, warned that the legislation could hamper innovation in Europe’s technology sector, as companies would not have the right financial incentives to invest in their networks.

Telecom carriers, which have plans to put billions of euros into the Continent’s mobile and landline Internet infrastructure over the next 10 years, are concerned that they will not be able to recoup their investment from consumers’ growing appetite for online services like the online streaming of music and TV programs.

“Today’s vote risks derailing the original objectives of the Connected Continent regulation,” Luigi Gambardella, chairman of the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association, said in a statement on Thursday. “The access of European citizens and businesses to innovative and high-quality services will be negatively affected.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/bu...ity-rules.html





FCC Shoots Down Netflix's Call to Expand the Scope of Net Neutrality

The government says it won't seek to regulate the infrastructure that moves data across the internet
Ben Popper

The Federal Communications Commission made clear today that it won't heed Netflix CEO Reed Hastings' call to expand the scope of net neutrality to regulate the way companies connect across the physical infrastructure of the internet. This system, which includes internet companies like Netflix, middlemen like Cogent, and internet service providers like Comcast, is the backbone that moves data across the country from Netflix servers into consumers' homes.

Netflix wants an end to internet "tolls"

Hastings had called on the FCC to create a system in which companies like Netflix would not have to pay "tolls" to companies like Comcast for special connections that help ensure its video gets to customers without problems. Netflix agreed last month to begin paying Comcast for exactly this privilege, but said this was a one-time arrangement while it pushed for new rules.

"Peering and interconnection are not under consideration in the Open Internet proceeding, but we are monitoring the issues involved to see if any action is needed in any other context," an FCC spokesperson told the National Journal. Confusingly, at the same time, the agency also said that it was considering new rules to regulate the paid arrangements between companies like Comcast and Netflix.

According to sources familiar with the deal, Netflix scored an attractive and long-term bargain with Comcast. But Hastings knows that he may soon have to strike deals with Verizon and AT&T as well. Paying each ISP for improved connection to their networks could end up becoming a big drag on Netflix's bottom line down the road as its customer base swells and the quality of video it's sending increases.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/1/557...net-neutrality





F.C.C. to Free Airwaves for Wi-Fi and Wireless Broadband
Edward Wyatt

The Federal Communications Commission approved measures on Monday that will free up more airwaves for Wi-Fi and wireless broadband. The agency also moved to help curb increasing cable rates for consumers, but in doing so cracked down hard on the ability of broadcast stations to negotiate jointly in competition with cable systems.

Perhaps the most significant move by the commission was to allow a broad swath of airwaves to be used for outdoor unlicensed broadband, clearing the way for a new generation of Wi-Fi networks and other uses of freely available airwaves.

Unlike the airwaves used for mobile phone traffic, which are licensed to a specific company, unlicensed spectrum can be used by anyone. Previous establishments of unlicensed airwaves led to innovations like garage-door openers, baby monitors, wireless microphones and Wi-Fi networks.

“This will make it easier for all of us to consume a wide range of content on our mobile devices, most notably high-definition video, without frustrating lags or delays,” Mary L. Brown, director of technology and spectrum policy at Cisco Systems, said in a post on the company’s blog.

The commission freed up 100 megahertz of airwaves in a very high frequency band of the electromagnetic spectrum, known as the 5 gigahertz band, where another unlicensed band of similar size already exists.

The commission also approved rules to allow it to sell a separate band of licensed high-frequency spectrum to the highest bidder in an auction this year. A total of 65 megahertz of airwaves in three segments across what is known as the Advanced Wireless Services bands will be put up for sale under new technical rules that make the segments more compatible.

Last month, the commission wrapped up one auction of recently cleared airwaves and it is now preparing for at least two more. Together, the auctions will make large amounts of spectrum — the airwaves on which mobile phones and wireless broadband operate — available to consumers.

That, the commission hopes, will help ease the congestion that leads to dropped calls and slow loading of online material. The proceeds of the auctions will go to help build a nationwide emergency radio network for police, fire and other public safety workers.

“It was 2008 the last time the commission conducted an auction this significant,” said Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, “when the iPhone was in its infancy.”

In a third action, the five-member commission approved new rules that prohibit the top four broadcast stations in a single market from acting together to negotiate fees with cable networks, a process that can result in higher consumer prices.

Cable networks generally pay local affiliates of the major broadcast networks for the right to distribute the broadcast signals in their cable service area. The commission said that the increasingly common practice of unaffiliated broadcasters’ banding together to negotiate the deals has raised fee levels, which ultimately raise consumer prices.

But the National Association of Broadcasters said that the rules were unneeded or at least too restrictive. F.C.C. rules require broadcasters and cable companies to negotiate “in good faith,” and the association noted that no local broadcaster had ever been found in violation.

“We would also note that broadcasters are not responsible for higher pay-TV bills,” Dennis Wharton, an executive vice president of the association, said in a statement. “Pay-TV companies have been raising rates more than twice the rate of inflation for the last 20 years, according to Consumer Reports. The notion that a punitive crackdown on local TV stations will lead to lower cable rates is simply not credible.”

While the retransmission measure was approved unanimously, the commission split 3-2, along party lines, on another proposal that directly affects broadcasters. The commission voted to close a loophole in television station ownership rules by clamping down on a practice known as joint sales agreements.

Those agreements allow one station to sell advertising time on another station in the same market even though the two broadcasters have different owners. Stations use the agreements to cut operating expenses, but the F.C.C. chairman, Tom Wheeler, said that it appeared that companies were using the agreements to get around rules that limit the number of stations a single owner can control in a given market.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/bu...less-data.html





Qualcomm's New Standard Takes Gigabit Wireless From Pipe Dream To Deployment
Joel Hruska

Today, Qualcomm is announcing full support for a new wireless transmission method that could significantly boost performance on crowded networks. The new standard, MU-MIMO (Multiple User - Multiple Input and Multiple Output) has a clunky name -- but could make a significant difference to home network speeds and make gigabit WiFi a practical reality. MU-MIMO is part of the 802.11ac Release 2 standard, so this isn't just a custom, Qualcomm-only feature -- though we don't know exactly what other implementations will look like, or the degree of cross-compatibility we'll see in market.

In order to explain what makes MIMO special, let's first talk about the current system, dubbed SU (Single User) MIMO. In SU-MIMO mode, a wireless router creates time slices for every device it detects on the network. Every active device on the network slows down the total system bandwidth -- the router has to pay attention to every device, and it can only pay attention to one phone, tablet, or laptop at a time.

The difference between single-user and multi-user configurations is that where SU can only serve one client at a time and can therefore only allocate a fraction of total bandwidth to any given device, MU can create groups of devices and communicate with all three simultaneously.

The benefits accrue at medium range as well, Qualcomm claims that SU-MIMO would top out at 57Mbps for single-link connections to these types of clients, whereas three MU-MIMO clients could still hit 150Mbps at the same range. Furthermore, by addressing the needs of MU-MIMO devices more efficiently, the router can dedicate more time to devices that don't support the newer standard -- improving their performance on crowded networks as well.

Who Needs MU-MIMO?

If you've used wireless for any length of time, you're aware that the gap between what wireless products claim they can deliver and what they actually deliver is often enormous. Granted, Qualcomm can't do much if you've got a cat that loves nothing more than sleeping on the router, but the point is, getting full performance out of a wireless network is tricky -- and it only becomes more so when you consider that these days, the average home has 5-7 wireless devices.

According to Qualcomm, the home of the future could have as many as 20 devices on a single network, and while we're a bit dubious of that claim, there's no arguing that a connected home puts a great deal more stress on the wireless ecosystem. Qualcomm's MU-MIMO can deploy up to four 160MHz channels (though present-day hardware only uses 80MHz), which means the bandwidth capacity over 802.11ac is truly formidable.

New Hardware Deploying Late This Year

According to Qualcomm, actual hardware that supports this type of bandwidth sharing will hit the market late in Q4 or early Q1 of 2015. It plans to roll out hardware support in its own platforms across a full range of enterprise, consumer, and home appliances, further enabling the so-called Internet of Things. (IoT).

If you've been considering an upgrade to an older home router, it may be worth holding off until this next refresh cycle. No word yet on pricing or specific models, but Qualcomm noted that it's working with multiple industry partners to bring these products to market.
http://hothardware.com/News/Qualcomm...#ixzz2xqwpq0Vu





Is Google Really Mulling Building a US Cellphone Network? Allegedly, Yes

Web king seeking to build mobile service around Fiber network, says a report
Shaun Nichols

Google is in the early stages of planning to roll out its own cellphone network, an upstart tech news wire is claiming.

The Information cited a pair of sources who had spoken to Google to discuss providing wireless services, including voice calls and mobile data, where the web giant has built up its US fiber broadband network.

"Google executives in recent months discussed their hope to offer a full-fledged wireless service in markets where it offers Google Fiber Internet and TV service, according to two people who have discussed the matter with Google," the paywalled website claims.

"Such an offering would mean Google customers in places like Kansas City, Mo. could get voice and Internet access through their mobile devices wherever they go."

The Register contacted Google for comment on the matter, but it was not available for comment.

Google began its foray into the ISP business in 2012 in Kansas City, Missouri, where it sells wired broadband connections as fast as 1Gbps. That initial project was declared a success and Google moved on to Provo in Utah, and Austin in Texas.

Earlier this year, the company said it will consider nine new markets for the service, including the population hubs of San Antonio, Phoenix, Portland and San Jose (which, despite its status as the capital of Silicon Valley has yet to receive the Fiber treatment.)

The reported mobile expansion would complement other plans Google has rolled out for the Fiber platform. The company has said that it plans to bump data speeds on the service as high as 10Gbps in the coming years.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04..._network_plan/





T-Mobile Ranked Fastest 4G LTE Network in the US, Sprint the Worst
Albert

If you’re lucky to live in an area where T-Mobile has a good 4G LTE coverage, then you’re using the fastest 4G LTE network in the U.S. According to a report conducted in February, T-Mobile has the fastest 4G LTE network in the US, study from OpenSignal concluded.

The study found out that on average T-Mobile users receive a download speed of 11.5 Mbps, which makes it the fastest 4G LTE network in the US. So does this makes T-Mobile better than Verizon who’s famous for its LTE network? Nope. Although the study shows that T-Mobile has a fast 4G LTE network, the carrier appears to have a much lower coverage than Verizon and AT&T. T-Mobile users only have LTE access 59 percent of the time while Verizon users have access 77 percent of the time, according to OpenSignal’s data.

With an LTE average download speed of 8.9 Mbps, AT&T appears to have the second fastest 4G LTE network in the US. Their users have access to their LTE network 69 percent of the time.

As expected, out of the top four major American cellular providers, the data shows that Sprint users have download average speeds of 4.2 Mbps, with users having access to their LTE network 51 percent of the time. This ranks Sprint as the worst carrier in the US when it comes to coverage and speeds when compared to AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon.
http://www.mod-gadget.com/t-mobile-r...-sprint-worst/





Prepare to Hang Up the Phone, Forever

Telecom providers want an end to the landline
Jennifer Waters

Telecom giants AT&T T +0.31% and Verizon Communications VZ -0.57% are lobbying states, one by one, to hang up the plain, old telephone system, what the industry now calls POTS--the copper-wired landline phone system whose reliability and reach made the U.S. a communications powerhouse for more than 100 years.

Last week, Michigan joined more than 30 other states that have passed or are considering laws that restrict state-government oversight and eliminate "carrier of last resort" mandates, effectively ending the universal-service guarantee that gives every U.S. resident access to local-exchange wireline telephone service, the POTS. (There are no federal regulations guaranteeing Internet access.)

The two providers want to lay the crumbling POTS to rest and replace it with Internet Protocol-based systems that use the same wired and wireless broadband networks that bring Web access, cable programming and, yes, even your telephone service, into your homes. You may think you have a traditional landline because your home phone plugs into a jack, but if you have bundled your phone with Internet and cable services, you're making calls over an IP network, not twisted copper wires.

California, Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Ohio are among states that agree telecom resources would be better redirected into modern telephone technologies and innovations, and will kill copper-based technologies in the next three years or so. Kentucky and Colorado are weighing similar laws, which force people to go wireless whether they want to or not.

In Mantoloking, N.J., Verizon wants to replace the landline system, which Hurricane Sandy wiped out, with its wireless Voice Link. That would make it the first entire town to go landline-less, a move that isn't sitting well with all residents.

New Jersey's legislature, worried about losing data applications such as credit-card processing and alarm systems that wireless systems can't handle, wants a one-year moratorium to block that switch. It will vote on the measure this month. (Verizon tried a similar change in Fire Island, N.Y., when its copper lines were destroyed, but public opposition persuaded Verizon to install fiber-optic cable.)

It's no surprise that landlines are unfashionable, considering many of us already have or are preparing to ditch them. More than 38% of adults and 45.5% of children live in households without a landline telephone, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That means two in every five U.S. homes, or 39%, are wireless, up from 26.6% three years ago. Moreover, a scant 8.5% of households relied only on a landline, while 2% were phoneless in 2013.

Metropolitan residents have few worries about the end of landlines. High-speed wire and wireless services are abundant and work well, despite occasional dropped calls. Those living in rural areas, where cell towers are few and 4G capability limited, face different issues.

Safety is one of them. Call 911 from a landline and the emergency operator pinpoints your exact address, down to the apartment number. Wireless phones lack those specifics, and even with GPS navigation aren't as precise. Matters are worse in rural and even suburban areas that signals don't reach, sometimes because they're blocked by buildings or the landscape.

That's of concern to the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees all forms of U.S. communications services. Universal access is a tenet of its mission, and, despite the state-by-state degradation of the mandate, it's unwilling to let telecom companies simply drop geographically undesirable customers. Telecom firms need FCC approval to ax services completely, and can't do so unless there is a viable competitor to pick up the slack. Last year AT&T asked to turn off its legacy network, which could create gaps in universal coverage and will force people off the grid to get a wireless provider.

AT&T and the FCC will soon begin trials to explore life without copper-wired landlines. Consumers will voluntarily test IP-connected networks and their impact on towns like Carbon Hills, Ala., population 2,071. They want to know how households will reach 911, how small businesses will connect to customers, how people with medical-monitoring devices or home alarms know they will always be connected to a reliable network, and what the costs are.

"We cannot be a nation of opportunity without networks of opportunity," said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in unveiling the plan. "This pilot program will help us learn how fiber might be deployed where it is not now deployed…and how new forms of wireless can reach deep into the interior of rural America."
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...65321638954500

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

March 29th, March 22nd, March 15th, March 8th, March 1st

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
- Hugo Black
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 30th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-07-11 06:58 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 16th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-07-11 06:43 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 30th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-01-10 07:49 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 16th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-01-10 09:02 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 5th, '09 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 02-12-09 08:32 AM






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 03:45 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)