Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 21st, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"I think it is an important moment in the Capitol. Too often, legislation is about competing business interests. This is way beyond that. This is individual citizens rising up." – Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California)


"A spokeswoman for Google confirmed that 4.5 million people added their names to the company's anti-SOPA petition today." – L.A. Times


"The Committee will continue work with copyright owners, Internet companies, financial institutions to develop proposals that combat online piracy and protect America’s intellectual property." – Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas)


"In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT IP Act." – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada)


"The people who run [Hollywood] are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise." – YCombinator


"The week the web changed Washington." – Alex Howard
































Sopopera

The early edition of the Week in Review, normally published Wednesday, was instead held back a day in protest of SOPA and PIPA, two odious anti-internet/pro-censorship bills under serious and continuing consideration from congress.

The Intellectual Property industries, or what I like to more accurately call the Information Monopolists, have all but co-opted law making in the US.

There is however some remaining strength in numbers and since there are millions of us and just a handful of them, power is for the moment at least, on our side, assuming we exercise it.

Please do.

Get involved. Be heard.


Best,

Jack Spratts























January 21st, 2012




A Political Coming of Age for the Tech Industry
Jenna Wortham

With a Web-wide protest on Wednesday that includes a 24-hour shutdown of the English-language Wikipedia, the legislative battle over two Internet piracy bills has reached an extraordinary moment — a political coming of age for a relatively young and disorganized industry that has largely steered clear of lobbying and other political games in Washington.

The bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate, are backed by major media companies and are mostly intended to curtail the illegal downloading and streaming of TV shows and movies online. But the tech industry fears that, among other things, they will give media companies too much power to shut down sites that they say are abusing copyrights.

The legislation has jolted technology leaders, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, who are not accustomed to having their free-wheeling online world come under attack.

One response is Wednesday’s protest, which directs anyone visiting Google and many other Web sites to pages detailing the tech industry’s opposition to the bills. Wikipedia, run by a nonprofit organization, is going further than most sites by actually taking material offline — no doubt causing panic among countless students who have a paper due.

It said the move was meant to spark greater public opposition to the bills, which could restrict its freedom to publish.

“For the first time, it’s very clear that legislation could have a direct impact on the industry’s ability to do business,” said Jessica Lawrence, the managing director of New York Tech Meetup, a trade organization with 20,000 members that has organized a protest rally in Manhattan on Wednesday. “This has been a wake-up call.”

Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, said that the technology industry, which has birthed large businesses like Google, Facebook and eBay, is much more powerful than it used to be.

“This is the first real test of the political strength of the Web, and regardless of how things go, they are no longer a pushover,” said Professor Wu, who is the author of “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.” He added, “The Web taking a stand against one of the most powerful lobbyers and seeming to get somewhere is definitely a first.”

Under the proposed legislation, if a copyright holder like Warner Brothers discovers that a foreign site is focused on offering illegal copies of songs or movies, it could seek a court order that would require search engines like Google to remove links to the site and require advertising companies to cut off payments to it.

Internet companies fear that because the definitions of terms like “search engine” are so broad in the legislation, Web sites big and small could be responsible for monitoring all material on their pages for potential violations — an expensive and complex challenge.

They say they support current law, which requires Web sites with copyright-infringing content to take it down if copyright holders ask them to, leaving the rest of the site intact. Google, which owns YouTube and other sites, received five million requests to remove content or links last year, and it says it acts in less than six hours if it determines that the request is legitimate.

The major players supporting the legislation, including the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Motion Picture Association of America, say those measures are not enough to protect intellectual property. They emphasize that their primary targets are foreign Web sites that sell counterfeit goods and let people stream and download music and video at no charge — sites that are now largely out of reach of United States law enforcement. And they are fighting against what they characterize as gimmicks and distortions by Internet companies opposed to the bills.

With talk of censorship and loss of Internet freedom, “the current debate has nothing to do with the substance of the bills,” David Hirschmann, who leads the Chamber of Commerce’s initiative on intellectual property, said in an interview. “We will certainly use every tool in our toolbox to make sure members of Congress know what’s in these bills.”

With financial resources that few other groups can match, the chamber is one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying forces and has shown the ability to alter Congressional debate on its own.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and author the Protect IP Act, accused opponents Tuesday of trying to “stoke fear” through tactics like the Wikipedia blackout. “Protecting foreign criminals from liability rather than protecting American copyright holders and intellectual property developers is irresponsible, will cost American jobs, and is just wrong,” he said in a statement.

Opponents of the legislation have clearly seized the momentum in the debate. Their protests have gained traction in that key provisions were stripped out of one bill and the Obama administration has raised concerns. Legislators have already agreed to delay or drop one ire-inducing component of the bills, Domain Name System blocking, which would prevent access to sites that were found to have illegal content.

A total of 115 companies and organizations have lobbyists working on the antipiracy bills, spending millions of dollars to sway the outcome, according to federal disclosure records. They include corporate and technology giants on both sides of the legislation, with entertainment groups like News Corporation and the Recording Industry Association of America backing it and Internet firms like Google and Facebook raising concerns about it.

The largest advocates for the bills disagree with the tech industry’s main rallying cry, which is the notion that they will hurt the average Internet user or interfere with their online activities.

“The bill will not harm Wikipedia, domestic blogs or social network sites,” said Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas and a primary sponsor of the House bill.

Most people in the tech world agree that the problem of piracy needs to be addressed. But they say their main concern is that the tech industry had little influence on the language of the legislation, which is still in flux and so broadly worded that it is not entirely clear how Internet businesses will be affected. Big Internet companies say the bills could prevent entire Web sites from appearing in search results — even if the sites operate legally and most content creators want their videos or music to appear there.

“It shouldn’t apply to U.S. Web sites, but any company with a server overseas or a domain name overseas could be at risk,” said Andrew McLaughlin, vice president at Tumblr, a popular blogging service.

Mr. McLaughlin said the fear is that on large and diverse Web communities like Tumblr, any user who uploads an unauthorized clip from a movie or an unreleased track from an album is putting the whole company in the line of fire.

In November, Tumblr rigged a tool that “censored” the page its users see when they log into the site, explained the legislation and routed them to contact information for their representatives in Congress. The stunt resulted in 80,000 calls to legislators in a three-day period. Mr. McLaughlin said the company was planning a similar approach for Wednesday.

Some who oppose the bill, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online rights group, see a bright spot in a potential compromise called the OPEN Act, which would provide for the International Trade Commission to judge cases of copyright or trademark infringement. If the commission found that a foreign site was largely devoted to piracy, it could compel payment processors and online advertising companies to stop doing business with it.

Silicon Valley has championed companies that provide alternatives to piracy, like Spotify and Netflix. And the industry says that the problem could be solved by letting it do what it does best — innovating.

“It’s something that could be solved using technology through collaboration with these start-ups,” said Ms. Lawrence of New York Tech Meetup.

Reporting was contributed by Eric Lichtblau, Edward Wyatt and Claire Cain Miller.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/t...acy-bills.html





MPAA Hits New Low In Self Pity Over SOPA
Dan Seitz

As you know, Wikipedia, Reddit and a few other sites are completely blacked out today, and many other sites are protesting in other ways. For example, if you head over to Google, you’ll find the logo has a big black box over it. Click it and you’ll be taken to an infographic laying out how everybody from tech professionals to ordinary Americans have raised objections to the idea of private corporations being handed the right to kill a website anytime they feel like it like with absolutely no due process or any sort of recourse for the website owner.

How does the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) feel about these protests?

We wish we were joking when we say this, but we’re not: They think it’s an “abuse of power.”

We’ve taken the liberty of offering a few rebuttals to their self-pitying statements below…

“Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called for all parties to work cooperatively together, some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users.”

The two major sites going dark over this are Reddit and Wikipedia. The latter is a non-profit, and Reddit users loathe the crap out of your terrible bill.

“or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging.”

Actually, there’s not a whole lot of agreement that piracy is damaging. In fact, studies not conducted by large corporations with a vested interest have found that piracy of MPAA member products is minimal. Also, informing citizens of the downsides of your custom-written legislation does not make people “corporate pawns.” Now, the members of Congress you paid to write this bill for you — those would be corporate pawns!

“It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services.”

Yes, informing the sheep, so irresponsible.

“It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.”

Yeah, maybe it’s not such a good idea to whine about other people’s transparency when you’ve consistently lied about the makeup of your ratings board and refuse to release the reports stating why movies get the ratings they do, and thus have near-total control over what goes into America’s movie theaters. We know you saw “This Film Is Not Yet Rated”, the documentarian sent it to you.

“It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.”

Yeah, it’s a shame when large lobbying groups who can spend six figures lobbying law enforcement groups if they want to abuse that muscle. That’s horrible.

“A so-called “blackout” is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals.”

OK, we can’t be funny about this. It is absolutely true that criminal gangs are involved in goods counterfeiting, but the MPAA doesn’t care about goods counterfeiting. The vast majority of Americans have to work a lot harder to find a counterfeit disc than to buy the real thing off Amazon or iTunes. What the MPAA wants to do is stop private citizens from ripping their DVDs and sharing those copies for free on the Internet, and they already have laws on the books making owning the tools to break DVD encryption illegal. But since suing individual citizens in court hasn’t worked, now they want to shut off websites at will.

In other words, MPAA, you are exploiting actual human suffering to acquire tools you don’t need to solve a problem you don’t have. And now you’re whining that other people are informing the American people of what you’re trying to do. How in God’s name do you sleep at night? Do you even understand how sickening that is to a normal human being?

“It is our hope that the White House and the Congress will call on those who intend to stage this “blackout” to stop the hyperbole and PR stunts and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy.”

Yeah, let’s start with the large groups that drag private citizens into court and strip them of thousands of dollars because you lost a few Redbox rental fees. How about disbanding and jail time? That seems like a good way to teach the bad guys here a lesson.
http://www.uproxx.com/technology/201...ity-over-sopa/





EXCLUSIVE: Hollywood Moguls Stopping Obama Donations Because Of President’s Piracy Stand: “Not Give A Dime Anymore”
Nikki Finke

EXCLUSIVE: Internet sites on their SOPAStrike may be conducting a blackout but Hollywood studios are conducting a boycott. Hollywood Obama DonorsI’ve learned that Hollywood studio chiefs individually and as a group are drawing a line in the sand on the piracy issue with the Obama re-election campaign and refusing to give any more donations. The blowup came after President Obama on Saturday dashed moguls’ hopes that he would remain on the sidelines in the dispute over the U.S. House Of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act and the U.S. Senate’s Protect IP Act. In a posting on the White House web site, three of the Obama administration’s top officials for Internet and intellectual property matters said that they share many of the concerns that the Internet community has about the Hollywood-supported bills. The trio said that they “will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, and Special Assistant to the President Howard Schmidt tried to soften the blow to Hollywood by acknowledging that that online piracy is “a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response.” They added that they plan to host an online event “to get more input” on the matter. But Hollywood moguls told me they “didn’t know it was going to be as over the top as it was” and took this as a declaration of war. “We just feel very let down by the administration and Obama for not supporting us,” one studio chief explained to me. “At least let him remain neutral and not go against it until we can get the legislation right. But Obama went against it. I’m personally not going to support him anymore and not give a dime anymore,” another movie mogul who’s also a well-known Obama supporter told me this week.

So far the most outspoken mogul against the Obama administration on this issue has been Rupert Murdoch who on Saturday told his new Twitter audience: “So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.” But I’ve learned that other moguls privately are having “direct and personal conversations” with Obama and his administration and the Democratic Party. Several moguls have informed Obama’s newly anointed Hollywood re-election liason to the entertainment community Nicole Avant and her husband who is helping her, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos, that they are pulling out of major fundraisers planned over the next few days and won’t participate in any more headed by Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (whom they see as in the pocket of the Internet giants like Google).

One of those events is a major January 31st fundraiser attended by First Lady Michelle Obama at the Beverly Hills home of Avant and Sarandos. There’s another LA fundraiser for the First Lady on February 1st. And both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will be coming for more fundraisers here in coming weeks. The moguls are telling Avant and Sarandos to count them out. “Now is when all the fundraises are starting. But everyone in my position is really pissed. It’s a real conundrum,” one mogul told me.

Alarmed by the mogul boycott, Sarandos sent a personal plea to the Hollywood studio chiefs over the weekend begging them to continue supporting the Obama re-election campaign even though he knows they are disappointed with the Obama administration’s position on the piracy bills. Several moguls, in response, ”sent back word saying ‘Fuck You’ basically,” one insider tells me, expressing how they feel used and abused by the President despite their campaign contributions. I’ve learned that Fox Filmed Entertainment Chairman Jim Gianopulos even sat down and wrote his good friend (and fellow Greek-American) Sarandos an articulate note over the weekend the gist of which said that he and his fellow moguls won’t give any more money if they keep getting taken for granted. One insider told me, “Jim explained that this notion that the Hollywood community will continue giving regardless of its business interests has to be taken into consideration. The message was, ‘Don’t expect Hollywood to show up and say ‘Who do I write the check to’ anymore.”

The moguls are reminding Obama et al that, in the words of one studio chief, “God knows how much money we’ve given to Obama and the Democrats and yet they’re not supporting our interests. There’s been no greater supporters of him than we’ve been from the first day and the first fundraisers continuing until he was elected. We all were pleased. And, at its heart institutionally, Hollywood supports the Democrats. Now we need the administration to support us. This is a very important time for Hollywood. The issue at hand — piracy — is a legitimate concern. But Google and those Internet guys have been swiftboating the entertainment industry by saying we’re trying to shut down the Internet just because we don’t want them to advertise pirated movies. As for other claims, we make 24. We don’t make national security problems.”

The boycott even extends to many of the moguls’ families who also are big Obama and Democratic Party donors. The situation is serious because many moguls and/or their families comprise Obama’s top bundlers in the TV/movie/music biz. Bundlers as defined by opensecrets.org are “people with friends in high places who, after bumping against personal contribution limits, turn to those friends, associates, and, well, anyone who’s willing to give, and deliver the checks to the candidate in one big ‘bundle’.” These donors direct more money to the candidates than anyone else. As of September 2011 these 357 elite bundlers were directing at least $55,900,000 for Obama’s re-election efforts — money that has gone into the coffers of his campaign as well as the Democratic National Committee, according to opensecrets.org. That figure by now has significantly increased and will continue to do so.
http://www.deadline.com/2012/01/excl...-piracy-stand/





MPAA Directly & Publicly Threatens Politicians Who Aren't Corrupt Enough To Stay Bought
Mike Masnick

Reinforcing the fact that Chris Dodd really does not get what's happening, and showing just how disgustingly corrupt the MPAA relationship is with politicians, Chris Dodd went on Fox News to explicitly threaten politicians who accept MPAA campaign donations that they'd better pass Hollywood's favorite legislation... or else:

"Those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,"

This certainly follows what many people assumed was happening, and fits with the anonymous comments from studio execs that they will stop contributing to Obama, but to be so blatant about this kind of corruption and money-for-laws politics in the face of an extremely angry public is a really, really, really tone deaf response from Dodd.

It shows, yet again, that he just doesn't get it. People were protesting not just because of the content of these bills, but because of the corrupt process of big industries like Dodd's "buying" politicians and "buying" laws. To then come out and make that threat explicit isn't a way to fix things or win back the public. It's just going to get them more upset, and to recognize just how corrupt this process is. If Dodd, as he said in yesterday's NY Times, really wanted to turn things around and come to a more reasonable result, this is exactly how not to do it. It shows, yet again, a DC-insider's mindset. He used Fox News to try to "send a message" to politicians. But the internet already sent a much louder message... and, even worse for Dodd, he bizarrely sent his message in a way that everyone who's already fed up with this kind of corruption can see it too. It really makes you wonder what he's thinking and how someone so incompetent at this could keep his job.

The MPAA doesn't need a DC insider explicitly demanding the right to buy laws and buy politicians. The MPAA needs a reformer, one who helps guide Hollywood into the opportunities of a new market place. The MPAA needs someone who actually understands the internet, and helps lead the studios forward. That's apparently not Chris Dodd.

Public Knowledge issued a fantastic statement that not only highlights the ridiculousness of Dodd's threats, but also the hypocrisy of the Hollywood studios on this issue:

Public Knowledge welcomes constructive dialog with people from all affected sectors about issues surrounding copyright, the state of the movie industry and related concerns. Cybersecurity experts, Internet engineers, venture capitalists, artists, entrepreneurs, human rights advocates, law professors, consumers and public-interest organizations, among others should be included. They were shut out of the process for these bills.

We suggest that in the meantime, if the MPAA is truly concerned about the jobs of truck drivers and others in the industry, then it can bring its overseas filming back to the U.S. and create more jobs. It could stop holding states hostage for millions of dollars in subsidies that strained state budgets can’t afford while pushing special-interest bills through state legislatures. While that happens, discussions could take place.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...y-bought.shtml





Bills to Stop Web Piracy Invite a Protracted Battle
Jenna Wortham and Somini Sengupta

When the Obama administration announced on Saturday its opposition to major elements of two Congressional bills intended to curtail copyright violations on the Internet, the technology industry, which has been loudly fighting the proposed legislation, could declare victory.

But few people in Silicon Valley or Hollywood consider the battle over.

The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Hollywood studios and is a principal proponent of the antipiracy legislation, suggested that it would continue to push the administration to approve a modified version of the bills, known as the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act. “Look forward to @whitehouse playing a constructive role in moving forward on #sopa & #pipa,” the association posted on its Twitter feed Saturday night.

Some leaders of the movie industry were not as diplomatic. The chief executive of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, in a flurry of Twitter messages in the hours after the White House announcement, accused President Obama of capitulating to the technology industry. “So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery,” he posted on his Twitter feed.

The antipiracy bills presented a difficult test to a young, disorganized and largely politically inactive technology industry. It is unclear that companies like Facebook and Google, left to themselves, could have swayed members of Congress or the White House without using the Internet to marshal opposition from technologists, entrepreneurs and computer-adept consumers. Opposition came from a vast spectrum, including computer security specialists who worried about a provision to tinker with Internet addresses and venture capitalists who feared the legislation would thwart the innovation of technology start-ups.

The opposition has been fueled by some of the most innovative pieces of the Internet — Twitter, Facebook, Reddit.com and even the I Can Haz Cheezburger? sites. “Looks like the Internet is winning a battle against some really bad potential law,” wrote Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, the online classified advertising site, in a blog post on Sunday.

Markham C. Erickson, executive director of NetCoalition, whose members include Google and Yahoo, said Sunday that it was too soon to dismiss entirely the House or Senate versions of the antipiracy bills. “I think the White House statement is very strong and it helps, but, no, I don’t think it’s dead,” Mr. Erickson said by telephone from Washington. “We will continue to have to educate as many members as possible.”

He said it was still an open question whether his group would seek to kill the bills or push for major changes.

Several Internet companies, including AOL, Facebook, Google and Yahoo, endorse an alternative that seeks to punish foreign Web sites that engage in copyright infringement through international trade law. That bill is co-sponsored by Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California. Last week, Mr. Issa said that his party’s leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, had assured him that the Stop Online Piracy Act would not come up for a vote until there was consensus. For technology companies, that holds out the promise of returning to the drawing board. For Hollywood and other media companies challenged by piracy, it defers the prospects of antipiracy legislation.

“We have a chance to reset the legislative table to find out what kind of legislation is needed,” Mr. Erickson said. “We have an opportunity to step back, recalibrate and understand what the problem is.”

Several prominent Web sites and start-ups that have been among the most vocal opposition to the bills say they will not let up on their online advocacy soon.

The comments by the administration’s chief technology officials was a sign that government officials were beginning to pay attention to the cries of concern from the technology industry about the bills’ ability to enable censorship and tamper with the livelihood of businesses on the Internet.

“It’s encouraging that we got this far against the odds, but it’s far from over,” said Erik Martin, the general manager of Reddit.com, a social news site that has generated some of the loudest criticism of the bills. “We’re all still pretty scared that this might pass in one form or another. It’s not a battle between Hollywood and tech, its people who get the Internet and those who don’t.”

Mr. Marin said that Reddit is planning a sitewide blackout on Wednesday to protest the bills — an effort joined by a number of other sites, including MoveOn, BoingBoing, a popular technology and culture blog, and the Cheezburger Network, a collection of several dozen Internet humor sites, including I Can Haz Cheezburger? and FailBlog.

In New York, the New York Tech Meetup, an eight-year-old organization of nearly 20,000 people who work in the technology industry throughout the city, is planning a protest Wednesday afternoon outside the Manhattan offices of Senators Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, who co-sponsored some of the proposed legislation.

The rallying of the Internet and heavyweights in the technology world was significant because it is one of the few times that the industry has united around a focal point, said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies how the Internet affects society.

Although certain hot button issues, like tax credits, patent policies and net neutrality, have driven industry leaders to Washington in the past, the Stop Online Piracy Act “awakened the entire tech world,” he said. “They are realizing just how big this fight was becoming.”

Michael O’Leary, executive vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America, said by telephone from Washington that his group was disappointed by parts of the White House statement but hoped the Obama administration would follow through on its stated commitment to stop copyright infringement.

“They believe piracy is a problem, that legislation is needed.” Mr. O’Leary said. “We take them at their word.”

He said the association opposes the alternative bill sponsored by Mr. Issa and Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, because it would be cumbersome. The group will continue to lobby for the existing House and Senate bills, he said. “I don’t think we need to go back to the drawing board,” he said. “What we have here is a good framework.”

Several people involved in the technology industry, including Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in New York whose firm, Union Square Ventures, has invested in a number of popular Web properties like Tumblr, Twitter and Etsy, expressed hope for a mutually beneficial outcome.

“What I’d love to see happen, is that the people from the entertainment industry, those who have a lot invested in the SOPA and PIPA legislation, get together with a group of people from the technology industry who have been actively fighting against this thing and talk about the right way to solve the problem,” he said. “I’m certainly not declaring victory yet.”

Pablo Chavez, a director of public policy at Google, said in a statement, “Like others, we believe Congress wants to get this right, and we know there are targeted and smart ways to shut down foreign rogue Web sites without asking U.S. companies to censor the Internet.”

Mr. Martin of Reddit echoed those sentiments, saying that he would be willing to work with government officials to draft legislation that would help prevent copyright infringement without threatening the livelihood of Reddit and similar sites.

“The Internet is disruptive and chaotic and it does allow things that are bad like unauthorized piracy, but the answer is not to have the federal government enforce potentially bad bureaucracy and legislation,” Mr. Martin said. “That’s not the way to actually solve anything.”

Nick Bilton contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/t...ed-battle.html





Lamar Smith Countermoves, Will Remove Court Order Provision from SOPA
Scott M. Fulton, III

In a move that could enable some form of anti-piracy legislation to pass this Congressional term, Rep. Lamar Smith (R - Texas), principal author of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), said this evening he will make adjustments in the bill to coincide with changes advised by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D - Vt.) yesterday to the Senate counterpart bill, PROTECT-IP.

In his statement, Rep. Smith says the remaining portion of SOPA, still due for a vote on January 24, will still contain a provision that compels (though not directly forces) payment network providers to act in good faith to refrain from handling payment transactions for IP trafficking sites.

The complete statement from Rep. Smith's office is as follows:

After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision. We will continue to look for ways to ensure that foreign websites cannot sell and distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers.

Current law protects the rights of American innovators by prohibiting the illegal sale and distribution of their products by domestic websites. But there is no equivalent protection for American companies from foreign online criminals who steal and sell American goods to consumers around the world. Congress must address the widespread problem of online theft of America's technology and products from foreign thieves.

The Stop Online Piracy Act cuts off the flow of revenue to these foreign illegal sites and makes it harder for online criminals to market and distribute illegal products to U.S. consumers. The bill maintains provisions that 'follow the money' and cut off the main sources of revenue to foreign illegal sites. It also continues to protect consumers from being directed to foreign illegal websites by search engines. And it provides innovators with a way to bring claims against foreign illegal sites that steal and sell their technology, products and intellectual property.

American intellectual property industries provide 19 million high-paying jobs and account for more than 60 percent of U.S. exports. Congress cannot stand by and do nothing while some of America's most profitable and productive industries are under attack. The Stop Online Piracy Act protects the products and jobs that rightly belong to American innovators.

The way the Senate's PROTECT-IP act is currently structured, payment network providers would be granted immunity from prosecution for suspending service to the owner of a domain name listed in a court order. Sen. Leahy's withdrawal of the court order provision yesterday makes it difficult to contemplate how this section of the Senate bill would be resolved.

By contrast, the way the House's SOPA is structured, payment network providers would be granted immunity from prosecution simply for suspending service to "a foreign infringing site or... an Internet site dedicated to theft of U.S. property." SOPA does not specify whether a court must first make that determination. At any rate, after Rep. Smith removes the court order provision, the remaining immunity grant provision could conceivably stand without significant revision.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...rt_order_p.php





Even Without DNS Provisions, SOPA and PIPA Remain Fatally Flawed
Timothy B. Lee

The special interests behind the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are in full retreat, throwing the bills' most controversial provisions overboard in a desperate attempt to stop the entire bill from sinking. Realizing that proposals to create a DNS-based blacklisting scheme had become politically radioactive, the bills' sponsors—Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), respectively—have pledged to drop these provisions. On Tuesday, even the Motion Picture Association of America declared that DNS filtering was "off the table" for this year's legislation.

So with the DNS-blocking provisions dead, are today's protests much ado about nothing? Not by a long shot. While the DNS language posed the gravest danger to free speech online, the bills are full of provisions that trample free speech, due process, and online innovation.

It's hard to know exactly what will be in the final version of these bills, since they are still due for several rounds of debate and amendment before they could reach President Obama's desk for a signature. But the latest versions of the bill we could get our hands on—the version of PIPA reported out of the Senate Judiciary in May, and Rep. Smith's "manager's amendment" to SOPA from December—show a number of remaining problems, and we've gotten no commitments from the sponsors to address these remaining issues.

Both PIPA and SOPA feature inadequate judicial oversight, allowing injunctions to be granted after a single, one-sided court hearing. Both give the power to seek injunctions not only to the attorney general but also to private copyright holders. And SOPA has a provision, not included in PIPA, that would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Due process problems

The Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment prohibits prior restraint—limiting access to speech before a court has provided due process to the defendant. In particular, as a letter signed by dozens of law professors pointed out, speakers are entitled to tell their own side of the story to the judge before their content is taken down. And if a defendant loses, he is typically given the opportunity to exhaust his appeals before his speech is censored.

The sponsors of SOPA and PIPA appear to have ignored these concerns. Both bills allow the attorney general (and, in some cases, private parties—more on that later) to request a takedown of an overseas site based on the legal fiction that the website, rather than its owner, is the defendant. Because a website owner isn't technically a party to the case, the judge can issue an injunction before he has even heard the defendant's side of the case. And the attorney general can have the target website cut off from access to search engines, advertising networks, and credit card payments.

Website owners can intervene to overturn an injunction, but the bill envisions this adversarial process happening after the injunction has been issued and the site has already been removed from search engines and had its funding cut off.

To see how this can burden free speech, we need only look at the case of rojadirecta, which was seized by the government last year. The Spanish sports site has been declared legal under Spanish law, but it has taken the site months to get a hearing in an American court. Whether or not the seizure of rojadirecta is declared legal or not, the site should have had its day in court before it lost its domain. SOPA and PIPA would make this problem worse by extending similar procedures to ad networks, payment networks, and search engines.

Private right of action

The seizure of rojadirecta.com was part of Operation In Our Sites, an aggressive anti-piracy operation authorized by the 2008 Pro IP Act. In Our Sites is a law enforcement effort; government officials take suggestions from copyright holders on which sites to target as part of Operation in our Sites, but they evaluate them independently and don't go after every site suggested by copyright holders. For example, out of one batch of 130 industry suggestions, the feds decided that only 82 of them warranted enforcement action.

No similar check would exist for the ad network and payment processing provisions of PIPA and SOPA. Any "qualifying plaintiff," defined as anyone with standing to bring a copyright lawsuit against the target site, would have access to the same one-sided process to seek an injunction. And it could take that injunction to ad networks and payment processors to cut off the flow of funds to the target site. And all of this could happen before the target site had the chance to give its own side, to say nothing of appealing the judge's decision.

This is important because major content producers don't have a great record of restraint when it comes to exercising takedown powers. Last month we covered UMG's claim that it has the power to take down YouTube videos it doesn't own. And the month before that, Warner Brothers admitted that it had sent automated takedowns under the DMCA against content it didn't own and that no Warner employee even looked at.

Neither SOPA nor PIPA have any penalties for copyright holders who abuse their new powers. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides for penalties (albeit fairly toothless ones) against copyright holders who abuse the powers provided by its notice-and-takedown rules. In contrast, websites targeted by bogus SOPA or PIPA injunctions would have no recourse.

Felony streaming

Last year, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) introduced legislation that would ratchet up the penalties for unauthorized streaming of copyrighted works. Under her bill, you could face up to five years in prison if you show 10 or more "public performances" over the Internet in a 180-day period, and the total retail value of the "performances" exceeds $2500.

When Rep. Smith introduced SOPA, he incorporated a lightly modified version of Klobuchar's bill. His version sets the bar even lower than Klobuchar's. Streaming even one copyrighted work subjects you to liability if it has a retail value of at least $1000. And any streaming of unauthorized copyrighted material "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" is subject to punishment.

Noted copyright scholar Justin Beiber has called for Klobuchar to be "locked up" for proposing the felony streaming bill. It's not clear exactly what this section of the bill would prohibit (some have suggested the videos that made Bieber famous would have made him a felon, since he sang copyrighted songs without getting licenses for them), but 5-year jail terms seem excessive in any case.

Kill bill(s)

The sponsors of these bills and their allies in the content industry have employed a savvy negotiating strategy. They began with a bill that contained every item in their anti-piracy wish list. This has allowed them to play the role of reasonable compromiser each time they drop a noxious provision from a bill. Yet what remains is still a serious threat to Internet freedom.

In recent months, each new revision of the bills has been slightly less awful than the ones that came before, and they're likely to continue that process in the coming weeks, hoping they can water the bill down enough to mollify the bill's critics.

But we think SOPA and PIPA are beyond saving. It was negotiated in a smoke-filled room with minimal input from the Internet community, and its core provisions are flatly inconsistent with the values of the Internet. Congress should stop considering SOPA and PIPA for this session. They may wish to consider the more reasonable (but still far from perfect) OPEN Act as an alternative. Or if that doesn't satisfy Hollywood, they should spend the next few months brokering a serious conversation between Hollywood and the Internet community. Then maybe all the parties can come back in 2013 with a new proposal that doesn't endanger online freedom.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...lly-flawed.ars





Google Calls Murdoch's Piracy Allegations 'Nonsense'
Greg Sandoval

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is talking nonsense, according to Google.

Murdoch, a Twitter user for only the past several weeks, used the service to fire a barrage of accusations Saturday night against President Obama and Google.

He accused the White House of being in the employ of "Silicon Valley paymasters." Murdoch claimed Google was profiting from advertisements sold against pirated materials. He also called the search company a "piracy leader." (Read more about Murdoch's Twitter tirade here).

In an e-mail sent to CNET on Sunday afternoon, Google responded to Murdoch's statements.

"This is just nonsense," wrote a Google spokeswoman. "Last year we took down 5 million infringing Web pages from our search results and invested more than $60 million in the fight against bad ads...We fight pirates and counterfeiters every day."

Murdoch's Twitter blast against the president and Google was triggered when the White House raised concerns about antipiracy legislation being debated in Congress. The Stop Online Piracy Act (House of Representatives) and Protect IP Act (Senate) are backed by numerous media companies, including News Corp.

Supporters say the legislation is needed to protect them from overseas sites that trade in pirated materials but aren't bound by U.S. copyright law.

A growing list of opponents, including much of the tech sector, argues the bills would threaten free speech, due process, and innovation without offering any protection against piracy.

Google said it thinks there are better methods to fighting piracy than those sought by copyright owners: "We believe, like many other tech companies," Google wrote in its statement, "that the best way to stop [pirates] is through targeted legislation that would require ad networks and payment processors--like ours--to cut off sites dedicated to piracy or counterfeiting."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57...ions-nonsense/





The Google-Approved Way To Take Down Your Website In Protest
Jon Mitchell

There's been a flurry of good news in the last few days for opponents of the SOPA/PIPA anti-piracy legislation worming its way through the U.S. Congress. The White House has come out opposing key flaws in the legislation, so both versions are effectively stuck for now. Not taking any chances, some of the world's biggest websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, are going dark on Wednesday, January 18 to protest the ill-conceived anti-piracy legislation.

On American Censorship Day in November, Tumblr censored its users' dashboards. Now other Web behemoths will follow suit, taking their sites offline entirely. For other sites interested in joining the protest, there are technical considerations affecting search engine placement that webmasters should consider. Google's Pierre Far has shared some important tips.

Far's recommendations apply for any intentional, temporary downtime, whether for protest or maintenance. The essential step is to use a 503 HTTP status code, which indicates "service unavailable," for all participating URLs.

That tells Google that the temporary conditions of the pages are not their "real" content, so the search engine won't index them. That will also prevent duplicate content issues, even if the same message - whether it's a word of protest or a message about maintenance - is displayed on all pages.

"Googlebot's crawling rate will drop when it sees a spike in 503 headers," Far says. This is normal, but he says the rate will recover soon for a temporary blackout. For webmasters only blacking out a portion of their sites, Far says they should not change the status code or explicitly disallow crawling in the robots.txt file, which gives Googlebot site-specific instructions. Webmaster Tools will report errors, but this is normal.

Far's bottom-line advice is, "Keep it simple and don't change too many things." You can read his full instructions over on Google+.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...ur_website.php





Google Says 4.5 Million People Signed Anti-SOPA Petition Today

When Google speaks, the world listens.

And today, when Google asked its users to sign a petition protesting two anti-piracy laws circulating in Congress, millions responded.

A spokeswoman for Google confirmed that 4.5 million people added their names to the company's anti-SOPA petition today.

Not too shabby.

The petition, which was available via a link from Google's homepage, states that although fighting online piracy is important, the plan of attack described in the SOPA and PIPA bills would be ineffective.

"There’s no need to make American social networks, blogs and search engines censor the Internet or undermine the existing laws that have enabled the Web to thrive, creating millions of U.S. jobs," the petition reads. "Too much is at stake -– please vote NO on PIPA and SOPA."

The search engine frequently delights users by toying with its homepage logo, but on Wednesday it did something it had never done before: it blocked out its logo completely.

A link below the blackout read "Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web!" and lead to a page with the petition.

Of course, Google's anti-SOPA and PIPA petition is not the only one out there on this day of mass online protest. As of this writing 1.458 million people signed a similar petition at the activist website Avaaz.org, and Fight for the Future said that between its two sites, Sopastrike.com and AmericanCensorship.org, at least 350,000 people have sent emails to representatives in the House and Senate.

A graphic put out by Google shows that before today's coordinated protests, 3 million Americans had signed various petitions against the two bills.

In other SOPA number news, a spokeswoman from the popular blogging platform WordPress, said that at last count, 25,000 WordPress blogs had joined the SOPA and PIPA protest by blacking out their blogs entirely, and another 12,500 used the "Stop Censorship" ribbon.

Today, the White House Blog reports that 103,785 people signed petitions through the We The People website asking the president to protect a free and open Internet.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/tech...-petition.html





SOPA Resurrected as Google and Others Join Protests
John Paul Titlow

U.S. Representative Lamar Smith would like to remind you that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) he helped architect is not dead yet. The House will continue marking up the proposed legislation in February, according to a press release. By the beginning of this week, the bill was considered by many to be as good as dead, given recent political developments, including a statement from the Obama Administration that condemned the more restrictive and controversial aspects of SOPA and related legislation.

The news comes a matter of hours before the start of what is expected to be a widespread, Web-based protest against the anti-piracy legislation. Yesterday, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made headlines by announcing that the enormous, user-generated encyclopedia will go dark tomorrow in protest of SOPA, joining Reddit, Mozilla, BoingBoing, all of the Cheezburger sites and others.

Today, the list of companies and organizations participating in the anti-SOPA protests grew to include such key players in the technology community as O'Reilly Media and Google. Rather than blacking out its services entirely, the search giant will simply add a link to its homepage highlighting its opposition to SOPA. It's not quite as dramatic as what Wikipedia and Reddit are doing, but given Google's daily reach, the move is likely to have a significant impact nonetheless.

All of this is the culmination of weeks of anti-SOPA sentiment and demonstrations that have been brewing across the Internet. What started as a Reddit-fueled PR campaign against GoDaddy and other SOPA supporters has turned into a much larger scale digital demonstration.

The bill was weakened somewhat over the weekend when Smith announced that the controversial DNS blocking provision would be shelved pending further research. SOPA would still force search engines to censor results and give the government the power to cut off funds to allegedly infringing websites.

It's true that SOPA as it was originally drafted will not likely see the light of the day, but today's announcement reminded those on both sides of the debate that it's far from over.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...in_protest.php





SOPA Lives—and MPAA Calls Protests an "Abuse of Power"
Nate Anderson

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has looked at tomorrow's "Internet blackout" in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—and it sees only a "gimmick," a "stunt," "hyperbole," "a dangerous and troubling development," an "irresponsible response," and an "abuse of power."

Wikipedia, reddit, and others are going dark to protest the legislation, while sites like Scribd and Google will also protest. In response, MPAA chief Chris Dodd wheeled out the big guns and started firing the rhetoric machine-gun style. His statement feels unusually angry for the normally unruffled trade group, but the MPAA has long asserted that Google simply wants to profit from piratical ad money.

Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called for all parties to work cooperatively together, some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging.

It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.

A so-called “blackout” is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals. It is our hope that the White House and the Congress will call on those who intend to stage this “blackout” to stop the hyperbole and PR stunts and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy.

As for SOPA, it's hardly dead—as some news outlets claimed this weekend. While House Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has expressed reservations about bringing the bill to a vote without "consensus," House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) is moving ahead with plans to mark up SOPA and move it out of committee. The most controversial bit, DNS blocking of "rogue" sites, will be removed from the bill.

"We will continue to bring together industry representatives and Members to find ways to combat online piracy," he said in an announcement today. "Markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act is expected to resume in February."

Note: reddit shares a parent company with Ars Technica.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...e-of-power.ars





PIPA Support Collapses, With 13 New Senators Opposed
Timothy B. Lee

Members of the Senate are rushing for the exits in the wake of the Internet's unprecedented protest of the Protect IP Act (PIPA). At least 13 members of the upper chamber announced their opposition on Wednesday. In a particularly severe blow from Hollywood, at least five of the newly-opposed Senators were previously sponsors of the Protect IP Act.

The newly-opposed Senators are skewed strongly to the Republican side of the aisle. An Ars Technica survey of Senators' positions on PIPA turned up only two Democrats, Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who announced their opposition on Wednesday. The other 11 Senators who announced their opposition on Wednesday were all Republicans. These 13 join a handful of others, including Jerry Moran (R-KS), Rand Paul (R-KY), Mark Warner (D-VA), and Ron Wyden (D-OR), who have already announced their opposition.

Marco Rubio, a freshman Republican Senator from Florida who some consider to be a rising star, withdrew his sponsorship of the bill, citing "legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet and about a potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government's power to impact the Internet." He urged the Senate to "avoid rushing through a bill that could have many unintended consequences."

Another co-sponsor, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) echoed that sentiment. He blamed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) for "pushing forward w/ a flawed bill that still needs much work."

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), one of the chamber's longest-serving members and another sponsor, described the Protect IP Act as "simply not ready for prime time."

The partisan slant of the defections is surprising because copyright has not traditionally been considered a partisan issue. Before Wednesday's protests, PIPA had 16 Republican co-sponsors and 23 Democratic ones. The bill lost a quarter of its Republican sponsors on Wednesday, while we know of only one Democrat, Ben Cardin (D-MD), who dropped his support.

Those who dropped their support were most likely bolstered by strong opposition from conservative think tanks and blogs. On Tuesday, the influential Heritage Foundation announced that it would include SOPA and PIPA as a key issue on its voter scorecard. And the popular conservative blog redstate.com, whose founder threatened to mount primary challengers to SOPA supporters last month, has been hailing Senators who come out in opposition.

Neither side is close to having a majority. A whip count by OpenCongress found 35 supporters (including 34 cosponsors), 18 opponents, and 12 more Senators leaning toward opposition. About 35 Senators have not committed to a position, perhaps reluctant to do so for fear of angering either deep-pocketed Hollywood campaign contributors or their constituents back home.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-in-senate.ars





PIPA Supporters Violate Copyright Laws, Too
Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

Last week, I wrote something about the hypocritical copyright violations on SOPA author Lamar Smith's very own website. You might have seen it when it was featured on the Forbes, Time or Huffington Post websites, or, most likely, when Tyler, the Creator tweeted about it just now.

I asked you guys to send me any other copyright violations you could find by supporters of Lamar's "Stop Online Piracy Act." To be honest, we thought the outcry surrounding the proposals had died down—there was talk that SOPA had been shelved, and Lamar's office hasn't been taking our calls—but earlier today, Lamar resurfaced to let us know that he still intends to use his bill to criminalize us all for posting the lyrics to "The Thong Song" on each other's Facebook pages.

But if SOPA does ultimately flop, as all sane people expect it to, the slightly-less-bad PIPA bill is still waiting in the wings to gallop in and throttle all the fun out of the internet. So I'm moving the search over to PIPA supporters. (A full list of which can be viewed here.)

Thanks to everyone who sent me stuff. Sorry if you haven't heard back from me, I got A LOT of emails relating to this. Below are the copyright violations carried out by PIPA supporters that I was able to prove. There's many many many more (from almost every single PIPA co-sponsor's site, in fact), but without actually getting written confirmation from the copyright owners in question, I'm unable to post anything here.

A lot of people have also been getting in touch to point out to me that these people are not violating SOPA/PIPA. Which is true. My point is more that, if these people aren't able to abide by EXISTING copyright laws, they clearly lack the understanding to create stricter ones and, ideally, should just GTFO.

ROY BLUNT

This is a screencap of PIPA co-sponsor Roy Blunt's Twitter page from a couple of days ago.

The background image is by photographer Walter Rowland. I spoke to his wife Linny, and she told me:

"Wow, I'm so surprised to see that someone would do this. Especially a senator! It's even more of a violation because I'm actually in the photo so it's as if I'm supporting his beliefs. Yes, that's one of my husband's photos who is actually a semi-professional photographer, and no, they weren't given permission."

Roy has since changed the background on his Twitter in an attempt to cover his tracks.

CLAIRE McCASKILL

This is PIPA supporter and Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill's Twitter page as it appears right now.

And this is the background image she stole from Flickr user J. Stephen Conn, who told me this:

"I do not recall giving the senator permission to use this photo on her Twitter account. I have put the photo in the Creative Commons, which means anyone may use it for non-commercial purposes, however, proper attribution of the photo should be given because it is NOT in the public domain."

DENNIS ROSS

The above screencap shows the homepage of Florida congressman/SOPA co-sponsor/probable PIPA supporter Dennis Ross' website.

Which features the appropriately titled illustration "Overweight Government Pig" by cartoonist John S. Pritchett. You'll notice that Dennis cropped out the part where it says "© John Pritchett". We contacted John, and he told us:

"To my knowledge, I did not license the usage of my "Overweight Govt. Pig" illustration to Dennis Ross."

Wuh oh!

SHERROD BROWN

And finally, we have Ohio senator and PIPA co-sponsor Sherrod Brown. Who, as you can see from the above screencap, is using an image lifted from Google Maps on his offical senate site.

According to the Google Maps content rules and guidelines page, you are only allowed to use content from Google Maps if you credit Google, and "Make attribution readable to the average reader or viewer." At the time of writing, Sherrod's site does not credit Google Maps.

It truly saddens me to see this group of people using creative content that they did not create to further their own political agendas. Here's to hoping PIPA passes to offer the world some protection from these wicked, wicked people.
http://www.vice.com/read/pipa-suppor...ght-violations





Public Outcry Over Antipiracy Bills Began as Grass-Roots Grumbling
Jenna Wortham

When Wikipedia went dark and Google blacked out its logo on Wednesday, millions of people could not help but notice. For most, it was the first time that they had heard about two antipiracy bills. One puzzled Twitter user wrote: “Isn’t a SOPA some kind of food?”

But that protest grew out of a much wider grass-roots movement — a collective flexing of Internet muscle that started in some of the less mainstream parts of the Web, like the social news site Reddit and the blogging service Tumblr, and in e-mail chains and countless message boards.

It is no coincidence that these social sites were among those that, according to critics of the legislation in question, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Protect Intellectual Property Act had the most to lose if it passed. And by design they were able to take the message about the threat and make it go viral.

In the resulting groundswell, lawmaker after lawmaker renounced support for the legislation. Fight for the Future, a nonprofit organization that helped organize the protests, said more than 115,000 Web sites participated, and three million people e-mailed Congress to voice their opposition to the bills. “The tech community is using its own technology to rally around the issue,” said Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley patriarch who has invested in hundreds of start-ups, and runs SV Angel, an investment fund. “We probably wouldn’t prevail here if we weren’t eating our own dog food.”

Supporters of the bills, which include major media and entertainment companies, say their only intention is to go after foreign Web sites that distribute unauthorized copies of software, videos and music. But the tech industry maintains that the language in the bills is too broad, and that they could pose a threat to free speech and stifle innovation. Among other things, they say, the bills could make sites responsible for all content or links posted by their users, a weighty burden for social sites.

Many in the industry say the legislation began to stir suspicion as early as September, with respected venture capitalists like Fred Wilson and Paul Graham calling attention to it in e-mails and on the Web.

But the cause gained visibility on Nov. 16 when Tumblr added a feature that “censored” the dashboard users see when they log into the site, and pointed them to information about the bills.

The idea for the feature came out of a three-hour meeting the weekend before, organized by people who opposed the legislation, including members of Fight for the Future; Brad Burnham, a partner at Union Square Ventures; and David Segal, executive director for Demand Progress, a non-profit group.

John Maloney, the president of Tumblr, said the company volunteered its offices in Manhattan for the meeting, which included roughly 40 people in the room and another 40 or so on speakerphone. Employees of well-known sites like Kickstarter and Reddit were there.

“They told us why it was flawed and asked us to think about it as an industry and a group,” said Mr. Maloney, who added that David Karp, Tumblr’s founder, “was very quick to raise his hand and say ‘We’re in.’ ”

“I looked at David and he had a spark in his eye,” Mr. Maloney said.

Mr. Maloney said a team of people at Tumblr worked late into that evening and returned early on Sunday. That Wednesday morning they posted their work, sat back and watched it come to life and spread around the Web.

Tumblr plays host to 40 million blogs, including the official blogs of start-ups and the personal sites of many tech types, and the alert caught their eye.

“For Tumblr, a New York company with a very solid reputation, to take such a vocal stance on an issue woke people up,” said Nate Westheimer, executive director of the New York Tech Meetup, which organized a rally in Manhattan on Wednesday to protest the bills.

Mr. Westheimer said Tumblr’s alert was the first he had heard of SOPA, and it was enough to prompt him to collaborate on the protest, which attracted close to a thousand people. He said Reddit played an equally important role in feeding the dissent.

Reddit, a site where users share links and chat about tech topics, funny photos and everything else, became a hive of organizational activity in November.

A link to a petition about the Stop Online Privacy Act surfaced on a Reddit discussion board and caught the attention of James Maw, a 20-year-old living in Yorkshire, England, who provides tech support for a bank. On Nov. 16 he created a separate forum on Reddit dedicated to discussion of the legislation.

“It was not at all well known then,” he said. The chatter on that board started out as a trickle before turning into a flood, and it attracted 2.5 million visitors a day at its peak.

“You wouldn’t think that a piece of U.S. legislation would affect people outside of the United States,” Mr. Maw said. “But I use Reddit and that could be affected by this.”

Reddit members began rooting out supporters of SOPA, zeroing in on Go Daddy, the domain name seller, and urging its customers to take their business elsewhere. The response was so great that Go Daddy rescinded its support of the bill. Reddit was also one of the first sites to commit to a protest shutdown.

Clay Shirky, a scholar of Internet culture who teaches at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, said that unlike other protests that are inflection points for a society, the SOPA-related outcry didn’t have one turning point when a switch flipped in the public consciousness. Instead, he said, it was a 21st-century version of a phone tree.

“It pervaded people’s consciousness more and more as time went on,” Mr. Shirky said. It wasn’t long, he said, before “a disorganized group of people online became a coordinated group of people taking action.”

Twitter played a role in keeping the momentum moving — particularly since there was little coverage of the bills in major media outlets until recently. There were nearly 200,000 Twitter posts mentioning SOPA on Monday, more than 450,000 on Tuesday and about 3.9 million on Wednesday.

And although the decision by Wikipedia and Google to join the protest was instrumental in drawing attention to the dissent, they “did not lead this effort,” Mr. Shirky said. “They followed it.”

Supporters of the legislation say that the response to it has been overblown. Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who drafted SOPA, said its opponents were spreading “fear rather than fact.”

But those who helped mobilize the protests disagree.

“The real question is, ‘Are they overreacting to the scale of the problem?’ ” said Mr. Burnham of Union Square Ventures.

Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/t...grumbling.html





The Other Side of SOPA and PIPA
Adam C. Engst

Don’t get me wrong. I’m utterly against the proposed U.S. legislation known as SOPA — the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act — and its sibling PIPA — the Senate’s Protect IP Act — for all the reasons that Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, outlines in his blog post about why the Media Lab has officially come out against these insanely overwrought bills. In short, these bills enable the content industry to upgrade its weapon for fighting copyright infringement from a tiring-to-wield club to a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile that would cause far more collateral damage than can possibly be warranted by the offense.

But while I cannot support SOPA and PIPA in any way, I wanted to provide a perspective generally lacking in these discussions — that of a tiny publishing company whose ebooks are regularly used without permission.

I say “used without permission” instead of the charged words “pirated” or “stolen,” because neither is accurate. “Piracy” has become watered down in the context of software copying and with the rebranding of pirates as lovable rogues with pet parrots rather than homicidal maniacs, but it still carries a whiff of Robin Hood-like taking from the rich to give to the poor.

But that seems inappropriate, given that content, whether it’s music, video, or, in my case, books, is essentially a luxury good. No one needs the newest Lady Gaga hit or even the latest Take Control ebook to put food on the table. Plus, though it’s possible to see major music labels as responsible for a certain level of cultural hegemony that’s worth railing against, I hope no one sees our mom-and-pop company that way. Similarly, “stealing” doesn’t precisely fit the act of making a digital copy — no one loses anything other than the opportunity to make a sale when digital content is copied, if the party who made a copy would have otherwise purchased it.

All that said, I hate it when I see our ebooks show up on file sharing sites for anyone to download in their entirety. I can’t measure whether it hurts our business and thus our authors. Nor can I say that it helps in any way. But I can say that it bugs the hell out of me, to the point where I wanted to address a few common tropes about online file sharing, at least from the perspective of a small ebook publisher — I can’t speak to how things might be different for large music or movie studios.

“Exposure is all good.” -- Some people rationalize widespread copying by suggesting that it’s actually good exposure for the author or the work. In my experience, this is wrong, despite Tim O’Reilly’s famous point that obscurity is the problem, not piracy.

The problem is that the way most of these people talk about exposure is meaningless, and harkens back to the dot-com bubble days when Internet startups had business plans that started with the size and growth rate of the Internet and jumped immediately to Profit With a Capital P. Having a potential large audience is a good first step, but it is by no means sufficient on its own.

We see this with Amazon and the iBookstore. Many people think that merely appearing in Amazon’s catalog will result in huge sales, and with the massive success of the iPad, the iBookstore is thought to have similar clout. It is true that if your books aren’t for sale in those venues, no one will buy them there, but in reality, appearing in those catalogs will mean only a handful of sales if there is no supporting marketing.

Back to widespread copying. The claim that “well, my book has been uploaded to all the file sharing sites, so at least I’m getting a lot of exposure” is bunk. BitTorrent may have 150 million users, but how many of them are searching for your book? Few, if any, just like on Amazon and the iBookstore. And those who do, unlike Amazon and the iBookstore, are assuming they’ll download your book for free, not buy it. This is considered good?

Don’t believe me? Look at your Web logs. In December 2011, Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which also powers searches on Yahoo, accounted for 5.3 billion searches. That’s a huge number for those believe in the power of raw exposure. But on the Take Control Web site, we received a whopping 222 searches that came from Bing and Yahoo, and, as far as I can tell, no sales. In other words, the exposure of appearing in Bing’s search engine was worthless.

Or, think about Web banner advertising. There’s no way to know how many people actually look at an ad on a Web site that's delivered to a page they're visiting (that’s the exposure number), but we know that the click-through rate on banner ads is well under 1 percent. And that’s in a situation where the advertiser is trying hard to be found.

One last point: Claims of the massive utility of social networking fall squarely into this category for us as well. We tweet about our book releases, and those tweets are often retweeted by authors and other friends (an always-appreciated and gratifying act!). Who knows what the total “reach” of those tweets is — it could be tens to hundreds of thousands — but the number of people who buy an ebook because of them is vanishingly small, which we know because of a tracking code we embed in tweeted URLs. In the first 11 months of 2011, we sold a grand total of 46 books via Twitter, out of a total of tens of thousands. (Our lifetime total of trackable Twitter-driven sales, for the record, is 186. Woo!)

We can't measure, of course, the influence of people having had our books recommended to them who then, later, purchase one or more without using direct links. The halo effect of recommendation is worthwhile, but much less quantifiable. We also haven't had titles recommended by a Twitter user with, say, a million-plus followers, where the effect could be more noticeable.

So there are two seemingly contradictory conclusions to draw here. On the one hand, for the Take Control series, the “exposure” of having a book uploaded to the file sharing sites is no more measurably helpful than appearing in the Bing search engine — essentially no one is being exposed to it. On the other, it’s not as though significant sales are being lost, especially given that it seems unlikely that those who fail to find the book on a file sharing site would then go buy it.

Tim O’Reilly is right. Obscurity is the problem, not piracy. But that doesn’t mean piracy will, on its own, address the obscurity problem. That’s what promotion is for, and promotion is one of the key roles of publishers and retailers. This is not to say that widespread copying can’t be a part of promotional efforts. The authors who give their books away successfully — Cory Doctorow and Seth Godin are the best examples — do a fabulous job of self-promotion. But they have carefully designed business models (give away ebooks while selling print copies) that work for them because of the quality and type of books they write (well-received science fiction and business books), their relationships with their publishers, speaking fees charged partly on a basis of their reach, hard work, and, I presume, some luck (given that few others have replicated their success).

Indeed, giving books away can be an excellent promotion, but you have to be realistic about what it can do. In 2010, we licensed Joe Kissell’s “Take Control of Passwords in Mac OS X, Second Edition” to AgileBITS (the 1Password people) to give away to their customers for a limited time as a holiday present, along with a 50-percent-off coupon for that same audience. It was a great promotion, and while we don’t know how many people were exposed to the offer, over 38,000 downloaded the book. We have no way of knowing how many of those people will ever order another book from us, but from a marketing perspective, it was a big win. From a sales perspective, though? Also a win, but on 2 orders of magnitude smaller — only 373 people took advantage of the sale.

“Copying is harmless.” -- If you believe my claims so far that widespread copying has little effect, either in increasing exposure or in increasing sales, why am I bothered by it? A few reasons:

• It feels wrong. Put simply, I can (and just did) rationalize away the effect that widespread copying has on my business, but the emotional impact is real. Imagine that you come home from work to discover that your house has been broken into, but nothing has been taken or damaged. You’ve suffered no real harm, but that doesn’t mean you’ll sleep well that night. If nothing else, I feel a certain uneasiness when I know that copies of our books are available for free download. Something bad could happen, just as there’s a sense that something bad could happen when you know someone has been prowling around your house.

• These sites are masquerading as me, and doing it badly. There are actually two levels of sites involved in widespread copying operations. First are the file hosting sites that blindly serve user-uploaded files for free — FileServe, FileSonic, Depositfiles, Wupload, Uploadstation, and many more. On their own, they wouldn’t be too troublesome, since the only way to download a file from those sites is to know its direct URL. The second type of sites are more problematic: They act as search engines for the file hosting sites, indexing the uploaded files and providing descriptions and graphics. The end result is that someone searching on Google for one of our books can end up on a page that uses our description and cover graphic, along with a link to download for free. The descriptions are often somewhat mangled and the page is overloaded with nasty ads, so as someone who believes in at least attempting to put one’s best foot forward, I’m embarrassed to be associated with these sites, however unwillingly.

• Someone else is making money from my work. I’m pretty liberal when it comes to how people use our books. We don't use encryption to protect them from copying or lock them to an individual reader on our direct sales. I’m in favor of the concept of public libraries (heck, I’d love to sell a copy of each of our ebooks to every library in the world to lend out), and we say explicitly in our ebooks that readers should treat them as physical books in terms of lending to friends. We also have a generous raffle/review program for Mac user groups (and a generous group discount). Once you buy an ebook, we’re happy to let you download it in multiple formats and install it on all your computers and mobile devices, including your spouse’s iPad and your daughter’s vintage Mac. But I really don’t like the feeling that I’m being taken for a sucker, and these sites — these parasites — are basing their business success on my hard work. I don’t approve of parasitic business models in general, and I especially dislike it when I’m the one being exploited for gain.

(Just so you know, the file hosting sites base their business models on making it hard to download files for free. Their goal is to get people to pay for a premium account that will have faster and easier downloads. Once, in trying to have one of our books removed, an employee of one of the hosting sites admitted they didn’t actually have the book for download; they just pretended to in order to con people into signing up for premium accounts. The indexing sites are pure ad plays: they want as many eyeballs as they can get.)

“The DMCA is good enough.” -- This is the closest I get to approving of SOPA. There’s a belief that the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is a draconian law that gives content creators significant powers. I know that lawyers for large corporations can attempt to twist the DMCA to their needs, but from the perspective of a small publisher, the DMCA is only minimally useful in preventing widespread copying. Here’s how it works.

I have a Google alert set to look for copies of our ebooks that are being shared on the Internet. Google doesn’t search the file hosting sites directly, but it does search all the indexing sites. When I get an alert that one of our books is available for copying, I immediately go to the indexing site, follow the links to the file hosting sites, and file DMCA takedown notices with them.

It’s important that I do this quickly, for several reasons. First, the indexing sites seem to copy one another, so if one of our books appears on one of them, several more will pick it up within a few days. Second, some of the indexing sites attempt to defeat DMCA takedown notices by downloading the book from one file hosting site and then re-uploading it with a different name to the same hosting site and four or five others. That way they get a “private” copy that’s less vulnerable to being taken down and that causes me more work.

Also, while filing a DMCA takedown notice isn’t hard, it’s not instantaneous either. I’ve automated it to the extent that I can copy the URL of the offending page, create and address a new email message in Mailplane, and invoke a Keyboard Maestro macro that builds the customized takedown message (and records the URL for future reference). Some sites require that I fill out complex forms to submit a takedown notice, which increases the effort tremendously. But the real problem is that it’s seldom a matter of filing one DMCA takedown; because the indexing sites often list related pages, each of which will link to four or five file hosting sites, I often end up filing numerous takedowns at all once. To give you an idea of the severity of the problem, I’ve filed DMCA takedowns in nearly 1,000 instances. That’s a lot of time.

With the larger file hosting sites, the DMCA takedowns are quick, and that prevents the indexing sites from spreading the files further. But the indexing sites are even shadier, and either don’t accept DMCA takedowns at all or just ignore them. No matter what, though, I never get the sense that either of these types of sites give a damn. My DMCA takedowns are nothing more than an annoyance to them. Oh, and BitTorrent? Because of the peer-to-peer nature of the sharing and the way the torrent search engines work, there’s no way to issue a DMCA takedown notice. So I don’t have a lot of sympathy for BitTorrent. (And yes, I’m fully aware that BitTorrent and the file hosting services can and are used for legitimate purposes; I strongly suspect that their legitimate uses are a small fraction of overall usage.)

Web-based file sharing used to be more of a problem. In mid 2011, Google changed its search algorithm so that the indexing sites are significantly deprecated in search results. Before this, it was possible to search for the title of one of our books and have a free download link appear on the first page of the search results. That was truly concerning, since Google was presenting legitimate and illegitimate methods of acquisition with nearly equal rank.

Again, if I don’t believe these sites are harmful, why am I going to all this effort? First, it really did seem for a while as though if they weren’t stopped, the free downloads would become more popular than our actual pages in search results. And second, if my takedowns are an annoyance, good! If anyone is the victim here, it’s me, and if all I can do is cause them extra work in removing my files, that’s what I’ll do. In my wildest dreams, the extra work will make the business model enough less attractive that they’ll shut the sites down.

So, in the end, let’s bury SOPA and PIPA back under the rock from which they crawled, but let’s not pretend that widespread copying is necessarily a good thing or that the companies that SOPA and PIPA intend to target are anything but sleazeballs out to make a buck off the hard work of others.
http://tidbits.com/article/12719





SOPA is a Red Herring
Adam Curry

As usual, the bought and paid for self-fulfilling tech press is missing the elephant in the room.

The blogosphere discussion surrounding a self-imposed 'blackout' of "key" websites and services that we apparently can't live without, is scheduled for this wednesday. All in protest of proposed legislation in the house and senate.

I submit this is a big fat red herring.

First some background:

Actually there are 3 pieces of legislation; the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN,) which is currently in draft form, initially proposed by Darrel Issa (R) who will be holding a hearing on Wednesday regarding the strong opposition to DNS 'tampering' as a punitive measure against foreign registered websites infringing on intellectual property and trademarks of US companies within the borders of the United States.

I have read all three pieces of legislation (its a hobby) and can confidently say that not only are they pretty much identical in scope. The key differences are that only SOPA proposes the DNS 'tampering', which would allow US officials to remove an infringing website's DNS records from the root servers if deemed to be operating in defiance of Intellectual Property and Trademark law, effectively rendering them unfindable when you type in a corresponding domain name website address.

The boundaries of what is legal and not is not actually contained in any of the bills, as they all universally refer to mainly the Lanham Act. All of it tried and true legislation. Nothing new there.

All three bills further provide language that will allow justice to forbid US based financial transaction providers, search engines and advertising companies from doing business with a 'website' that is found to be guilty of infringement.

Of the three proposals, OPEN appears most fair to all parties in any dispute, by requiring a complainant to post a bond when requesting an investigation of infringement in order to combat frivolous use of the provisions available.

The outrage over SOPA's DNS provisions is justified, but misdirected, Congress is already backpedaling on including it in any final legislation and even the Administration's own response to the "We the People Petitions on SOPA" included an firm stance against measures that would affect the DNS infrastructure:

We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk.

Without the DNS clause, it would appear perfectly logical that the government pursue action against websites that attempt to cash in on fake products and stolen intellectual property of it's people.

The entire reason for even trying to get a DNS provision into law is because it is nearly impossible to track down the owner of a website, or domain name, through today's registration tools.

A whois lookup on a domain name merely provides whatever information is given at time of registration, and there is no verification of the registrant.

So, here's what the press has missed;

During all the shouting about SOPA and proposed blackouts to 'protest', the organization that actually runs the DNS root servers, ICANN, the backbone of the web, has been quite busy in plain view on changing the game, in favor of the government.

It's been highly underreported that ICANN is now accepting submissions for new gTLD's, or 'generic top level domains'.

Without getting into all the details of what that means, other than possibly hundreds if not thousands of new domains like .shop .dork .shill and .drone that you will be able to register vanity domain names under, ICANN has come up with a new requirement upon registration:

You must verify who you are when you register a new domain name, even an international one.

So, if I pay GoDaddy or any other outfit my $9 for curry.blog and have it point to my server at blog.curry.com, I will have to prove my identity upon registration. Presumably with some form of government approved ID.

This way, when OPEN or perhaps a non-NDS-version of SOPA is passed, if you break the rules, you will be hunted down, regardless of where you live or operate since this also includes international domain names.

The Administration like this approach as well. Just read the language from the International Strategy For Cyberspace document [pdf]:

In this future, individuals and businesses can quickly and easily obtain the tools necessary to set up their own presence online; domain names and addresses are available, secure, and properly maintained, without onerous licenses or unreasonable disclosures of personal information.

onerous licenses and unreasonable disclosures of personal information clearly indicates you will have to provide verification of your identity, which in today's world is not a requirement.

"Hey Citizen, if you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about?" Just follow the rules and all will be fine. I don't think I need to explain the implications of this massive change in internet domain name policy and to your privacy.

The term for this new type of registration is Thick Whois and you'll be hearing about it eventually, when the so called 'tech press' stops their circle jerking around the latest facebook/google/twitter cat fights and actually starts reporting on things that matter.

Until then, feel free to make your google+ facebook and twitter icons all black, as your faux protest is futile. The real change, that of your privacy online, is being made in plain sight by former Director of the National Cyber Security Center of the Department of Homeland Security Rod Beckstrom, current CEO of ICANN. Shill anyone?

This topic was originally discussed on the No Agenda Podcast of Janury 15th 2012.

Disclaimers: I am not a lawyer, nor am I a journalist. I am not distracted by shiny gadgets.
http://blog.curry.com/stories/2012/0...edHerring.html





SOPA, Internet Regulation and the Economics of Piracy
Julian Sanchez

Earlier this month, I detailed at some length why claims about the purported economic harms of piracy, offered by supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), ought to be treated with much more skepticism than they generally get from journalists and policymakers.

My own view is that this ought to be rather secondary to the policy discussion: SOPA and PIPA would be ineffective mechanisms for addressing the problem, and a terrible idea for many other reasons, even if the numbers were exactly right. No matter how bad last season’s crops were, witch burnings are a poor policy response. Fortunately, legislators finally seem to be cottoning on to this: SOPA now appears to be on ice for the time being, and PIPA’s own sponsors are having second thoughts about mucking with the Internet’s Domain Name System.

That said, I remain a bit amazed that it’s become an indisputable premise in Washington that there’s an enormous piracy problem, that it’s having a devastating impact on US content industries, and that some kind of aggressive new legislation is needed tout suite to stanch the bleeding. Despite the fact that the Government Accountability Office recently concluded that it is “difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the net effect of counterfeiting and piracy on the economy as a whole,” our legislative class has somehow determined that—among all the dire challenges now facing the United States—this is an urgent priority. Obviously, there’s quite a lot of copyrighted material circulating on the Internet without authorization, and other things equal, one would like to see less of it.

But does the best available evidence show that this is inflicting such catastrophic economic harm—that it is depressing so much output, and destroying so many jobs—that Congress has no option but to Do Something immediately? Bearing the GAO’s warning in mind, the data we do have doesn’t remotely seem to justify the DEFCON One rhetoric that now appears to be obligatory on the Hill.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance—a kind of meta-trade association for all the content industries, and a zealous prophet of the piracy apocalypse, released a report back in November meant to establish that copyright industries are so economically valuable that they merit more vigorous government protection. But it actually paints a picture of industries that, far from being “killed” by piracy, are already weathering a harsh economic climate better than most, and have far outperformed the overall US economy through the current recession. The “core copyright industries” have, unsurprisingly, shed some jobs over the past few years, but again, compared with the rest of the economy, employment seems to have held relatively stable at a time when you might expect cash-strapped consumers to be turning to piracy to save money.

Decreasing creative output?

Since the core function of copyright is to incentivize the production of creative works, it’s also worth looking for signs of declining output associated with filesharing. Empirically, it’s surprisingly hard to find an effect. Rather, a recent survey study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School concluded that “data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers” from producing more works, at least in the US market.

So, for instance, Nielsen SoundScan data shows new album releases stood at 35,516 in 2000, peaked at 106,000 in 2008, and (amidst a general recession) fell back to mid-decade levels of about 75,000 for 2010. That’s against a general background of falling sales since 2004—mostly explained by factors unrelated to piracy—which finally seems to have reversed in 2011. The actual picture is probably somewhat better than that, because SoundScan data is markedly incomplete when it comes to the releases by indie artists who have benefited most from the rise of digital distribution.

Most entertainment industries continue to operate on a “tournament” or “lottery” model, where a few hits generate jackpot revenues, sufficient to make up for losses on the majority of new products

If we look at movies, the numbers compiled by the industry statistics site Box Office Mojo show an average of 558 releases from American studios over the past decade, which rises to 578 if you focus on just the past five years. The average for the previous decade—before illicit movie downloads were even an option on most people’s radar—is 472 releases per year. (As we learn from a recent Congressional Research Service report, it’s weirdly hard to detect a strong overall correlation between output and employment in the motion picture industry, which actually fell slightly from 1998 to 2008, even as profits and CEO pay soared. One reason is the growing trend in recent decades for “Hollywood” features to actually be produced in Canada or Australia.)

That’s all very nice, one might object, but wouldn’t these heartening numbers be even higher if labels and studios could recapture some of the revenue lost to illicit downloads? Well, they surely might—but it’s not nearly as clear as you’d think.

One reason is that they already are recapturing much of that revenue through “complementary” purchases. As Oberholzer-Gee observes, recording industry numbers show large increases in concert revenues corresponding to the drop in recorded music sales. That suggests that, as people discover new artists by sampling downloaded albums online, they’re shifting consumption within the sector to live performances. In other words, people have a roughly constant “music budget,” and what they don’t spend on the albums they’ve downloaded gets spent on seeing that new band they discovered. For the firms that specifically make their money from the sale of recordings, that may seem like cold comfort, but if we’re concerned with the music industry as a whole, it’s a wash. Something similar might occur with respect to purchases of merchandise based on licensed film properties.

Another factor is that, notwithstanding projections of a “long tail” effect resulting from lower search and distribution costs in the digital era, most entertainment industries continue to operate on a “tournament” or “lottery” model, where a few hits generate jackpot revenues, sufficient to make up for losses on the majority of new products. Unsurprisingly, the most heavily pirated movies each year tend to be the ones that are also highly successful at the box office and in DVD sales, with similar patterns in album downloads. In other words, bleeding revenue to piracy is going to be a problem to the extent that your product is a hit, in a market where the core uncertainty about this crucial fact (at the time when the decision whether to greenlight production is made) looms a lot larger than the marginal loss from illicit downloads if you are successful.

It’s a tricky but more or less tractable problem to estimate roughly how many full-time jobs you’ll need regionally to support one additional $150 million movie production next year. It’s a totally different question how aggregate sectoral employment in a volatile and evolving industry changes based on investor responses to a $150 million across-the-board drop in the size of the total film jackpot, especially given that arcane financial arrangements are one place Hollywood does show a genius for constantly adapting its business model. If you want to know how many people are getting laid off when McDonald’s revenues drop, it makes a difference whether it’s each of 13,000 franchises earning $100 less per year, or one franchise earning $1.3 million less, even though the total reduction is the same.

Finally, more demand for content being captured by the content industries is not always the same thing as demand for more content, in the sense of “a greater variety of output.” I noted earlier that the past few years have seen a significant spike in the number of movie titles released annually. But as the Los Angeles Times reported in 2008, studio executives soon began complaining about a “glut” of new movies, many of which were targeted at the same demographics, and therefore cannibalizing their own audiences. As one executive suggested, that meant that (at least in a market dominated by a few huge distributors) releasing fewer titles could yield higher profits—and, indeed, the number of titles released in the following two years dropped back to mid-decade levels.

The key point here is that shifting some portion of the pirate audience to some form of legal viewing doesn’t necessarily change this basic calculus, because there’s an upper bound to the number of hours most people are going to spend watching (say) racing movies, whether they’re paying for the privilege or not. Rising demand can just as easily, for instance, bid up star salaries for a fixed number of films.

Still seeking a real, quantifiable link

The point here isn’t that piracy by American consumers is somehow completely independent from output or employment rates in the content industries—though, again, that’s not at all the same thing as the overall US employment rate. Obviously, at some level it has to have some effect. But the link is, to use the technical economic term, weirder than in many other sectors of the economy. In many industries, the relationship between consumer spending and job creation is relatively straightforward. If demand for widgets or restaurant meals rises, satisfying that demand requires a roughly linear increase in widget factories and restaurants, in hiring of widget-makers and cooks and waiters, and in purchases of the raw material inputs for those goods. Distribution of copyrighted content—and in particular digital distribution over the Internet—is a bit more complicated, for precisely the same reason piracy is an issue: once the first copy of a work has been created, an unlimited number of additional units (of the digital product) can be produced at effectively zero cost.

No doubt piracy is costing the content industries something—or they wouldn’t be throwing so much money at Congress in support of this kind of legislation

Let’s imagine, implausibly, that a measure like SOPA did manage to reduce online piracy by US consumers by some meaningful amount. A small portion of that reduction, the minority of downloads representing legal purchases displaced by file sharing, would translate into sales for the content industries. What form would these take? It seems reasonable to suppose that the majority of people who were previously getting their music and movies from The Pirate Bay are not typically lining up to buy shiny plastic discs at Wal-Mart. Rather, they’re probably disproportionately displacing legal digital downloads from venues like iTunes and Amazon, or subscription services like Netflix and Spotify, which are pretty clearly where the overall market is quickly going anyway. (Apparently, literal thieves don’t even bother stealing physical media anymore.) For movies, there’s probably also some displacement of theatrical ticket sales, though as the theatrical experience is in many ways a distinct good, it’s hard to say how much substitution it’s reasonable to expect.

In the very short term, increased legal purchases of digital content wouldn’t seem likely to generate many additional jobs. If spending in the physical retail sector jumps 20 percent, shops need to hire more clerks, and their suppliers more manufacturing workers, to meet the increased demand. If spending in the iTunes store jumps 20 percent, Apple probably needs to pay a few bucks more for bandwidth and electricity, but basically everyone just gets to smile and pocket the extra profit. The jobs effects estimates we’re seeing tossed around, however, are coming from a 2007 study that would have had to employ, at the most recent, adjustments made several years before that to the benchmark multipliers the Bureau of Economic Analysis developed in 2002.

Even leaving aside its many other problems, then, the job impact estimates in that study would have been largely based on legacy assumptions from a brick-and-mortar economy. (The loss estimates relied on would also, necessarily, fail to account for the recent rise of popular, legal streaming services that have likely lured many consumers back from the pirate market. There is, alas, no very good data here, but I’d wager Hulu and Netflix have done exponentially more to reduce piracy losses than enforcement crackdowns ever will.) In any event, you’d expect the most immediate effect of consumer spending shifts from widgets and restaurants to digital downloads would be, if anything, fewer net jobs. The output and employment effects, rather, would show up in the longer term as lower returns reduce incentives to produce new content—and hire the workers needed to support that production. For some of the reasons discussed above, though, empirically there’s just not much evidence for a dramatic effect of this kind.

No doubt piracy is costing the content industries something—or they wouldn’t be throwing so much money at Congress in support of this kind of legislation. If we could wave a magic wand and have less piracy, obviously that would be good. But in the real world, where enforcement has direct costs to the taxpayer, regulation has costs on the industries it burdens, and the reduction in piracy they’re likely to produce is very small, it seems important to point out that the credible evidence for the magnitude of the harm is fairly thin.

As a rough analogy, since anti-piracy crusaders are fond of equating filesharing with shoplifting: suppose the CEO of Wal-Mart came to Congress demanding a $50 million program to deploy FBI agents to frisk suspicious-looking teens in towns near Wal-Marts. A lawmaker might, without for one instant doubting that shoplifting is a bad thing, question whether this is really the optimal use of federal law enforcement resources. The CEO indignantly points out that shoplifting kills one million adorable towheaded orphans each year. The proof is right here in this study by the Wal-Mart Institute for Anti-Shoplifting Studies. The study sources this dramatic claim to a newspaper article, which quotes the CEO of Wal-Mart asserting (on the basis of private data you can’t see) that shoplifting kills hundreds of orphans annually. And as a footnote explains, it seemed prudent to round up to a million. I wish this were just a joke, but as readers of my previous post will recognize, that’s literally about the level of evidence we’re dealing with here.

In short, piracy is certainly one problem in a world filled with problems. But politicians and journalists seem to have been persuaded to take it largely on faith that it’s a uniquely dire and pressing problem that demands dramatic remedies with little time for deliberation. On the data available so far, though, reports of the death of the industry seem much exaggerated.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...-piracy-costs/





Father of the Web Backs SOPA Protests
Nate Cochrane

Tim Berners-Lee says US government plan to censor the internet violates human rights.

The father of the web has added his voice to the global chorus of outrage at US Government plans to censor the internet, saying its plans are undemocratic and violate human rights.

The US Congress is pushing ahead with contentious legislation to censor internet communications, the Stop Online Piracy Act, that is backed by five-year jail terms. Although it applies ostensibly to only US entities, Australians who host websites or do online business or rely on resources on US servers would be impacted.

The bill is currently held for "markup" next month, a review that may mean alterations in light of wide-ranging criticism.

As major websites including Wikipedia blacked out in protest overnight, the web's creator, Sir Tim-Berners Lee, urged people to let their feelings be known to block it before it is enacted.

"It affects all the stuff on the internet working and something which would affect what you want to connect to, where you want to connect to," Sir Tim said.

"If you're in America then you should go and call somebody or send an email to protest against these (censorship) bills because they have not been put together to respect human rights as is appropriate in a democratic country."

Sir Tim's call to arms was met with rousing applause and hoots from 5000 delegates to IBM's annual Lotusphere conference, held in the southern, state of Florida.

High-profile sites such as Wikipedia's English-language edition, Google, Yahoo!'s Flickr photo sharing site, news aggregator Reddit and web browser Mozilla are among a growing number of digital media companies who banded together to protest the proposed changes to America's copyright regime either blacking out entirely or carrying messages in condemnation. Google redacted its name in response to one of the biggest ever changes proposed to global copyright policing.

Critics from a broad coalition that includes most IT companies contend the bill's wording would make any internet use potentially impossible without fear of running foul of the law that they say undermines online security while its proponents backed by Hollywood's powerful film distributors say it is needed to stop rampant online piracy.

The bill, coupled to the related Protect IP Act, would grant the US Government unprecedented powers to:

# Block websites thereby erasing protections afforded by internet security standards;

# Demands search engines censor their results not to point to allegedly infringing content;

# Orders payment providers not to process funds deemed to be from alleged infringers;

# Erodes internet commerce by demanding online ad companies refuse to accept ads from allegedly infringing advertisers.

Those convicted of breaking the eventual law face up to five years in jail but compliant internet service providers would be immune from prosecution.
http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/busines...119-1q7rm.html





Long Arm of US Piracy Law Will Reach Further Than You Think
Nate Cochrane

Australians face a threat to their online freedom and security as pernicious as it is out of their hands.

US legislators are set to pass contentious copyright legislation with which even US President Barack Obama says he has problems.

This proposed legislation affects internet governance around the world.

US House Bill 3261 Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, cracks down on internet piracy and counterfeit goods with what critics say are draconian penalties, including five years' jail. It aims to attack the scourge of intellectual property theft but its framers face a pyrrhic victory if it undermines virtual society.

Normally I would direct you to Wikipedia for finer details but that won't be possible by the time you read this because the online encyclopaedia is one of those taking the extraordinary action of striking to protest against the legislation. Nerds are mad as hell and they're not going to take it any more.

They're riled because the legislation attacks the basis of the internet - linking to sites and staying secure online.

It proposes that search engines blackball sites alleged to have infringed on copyright and for internet service providers to bar users from getting access to them. It does this in a way that undercuts a new security standard that thwarts malicious redirects of web traffic, which often go to criminal and phishing sites.

And it erodes the economic foundation of web commerce by banning advertising networks - those services that place ads on websites - from doing business with offenders.

It does all this in the sort of vague and extensible language only a lawyer could love, potentially making normal - or any - internet use impossible, depending on interpretation, critics say.

Australians are caught in its scope because the US can use its muscle to ensure that we comply. That's because so many Australian sites are based in the US, Australian ''clouds'' sit in US data centres or businesses here have internet domain names either registered over there or which would fall under this law's jurisdiction.

My own site, is hosted by GoDaddy, a US domain name seller that initially supported the legislation.

If it is passed, I couldn't mention sites that allegedly hold infringing content or that point to it, for fear of being shut down, loss of my livelihood and possible extradition to the US to stand trial.

It's this last point that niggles at the back of net activists who see the long arm of US extraterritorial law reach out for Australian Julian Assange through the proxy of Sweden with our government's tacit support.

Some would argue the bill's provisions are the logical trajectory of laws written by Hollywood over years and passed by our representatives.

Much of Australia's copyright law was ''harmonised'' with the US years ago, extending terms and making it easier for judgments handed down over there to be compelling on our own judiciary.

No. 2 ISP iiNet has spent the past year before the courts fighting a powerful coalition of film studios over alleged copyright infringement, and the job of such businesses would be made untenable by having to comply with the letter of this bill.

I am attending an IT conference in Orlando, Florida, as a guest of IBM where the mantra of proceedings is all around social networks - think Twitter and Facebook for business (IBM worked with media companies to trace through social networks' alleged pirates).

But such legislation would make it difficult for social networks to operate and that would have an immediate effect on Australians, say critics such as the Australian Pirate Party.

''A link placed by a user in the comment section of an article in a regular internet magazine could result in the magazine going bankrupt and the owners being charged with a crime,'' the Pirate Party says.

''It would be a flagrant violation of the fundamental human right to free speech.''

Strangely, the US legislation may be our own judge-made law coming back to bite us.

In 2005, and after two years of legal wrangling, Australian Federal Court judge Brian Tamberlin, since retired, handed down a guilty verdict against Stephen Cooper and his ISP Comcen for Cooper's website MP3s4Free.com linking to allegedly infringing music.

Tamberlin ruled that merely linking to potentially infringing content was itself illegal, and this rule has informed the decisions of media companies generally when reporting such issues ever since.

''This is a very significant blow in the war against piracy,'' Michael Kerin, then head of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, a private eye and litigator for the big four record companies, said outside the court at the time.

''It sends the message that ISPs who involve themselves in copyright infringement can be found guilty.''
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/soc...118-1q6h0.html





US Copyright Lobby Wants Canada Out of TPP Until New Laws Passed, Warns of No Cultural Exceptions
Michael Geist

The U.S. government just concluded a consultation on whether it should support Canada's entry into the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations (I have posted here, here, and here about the implications of the TPP for Canada based on a leaked chapter of the intellectual property provisions). The Canadian government submitted a brief one-pager, pointing to Bill C-11, ACTA, the dismantling of Canadian Wheat Board, and forthcoming procurement concessions to Europe as evidence that it is ready to negotiate the TPP.

While most submissions support the entry of Canada into the negotiations, it is worth noting that the major intellectual property lobby groups want to keep Canada out of the deal until we cave to the current U.S. copyright demands. The IIPA, which represents the major movie, music, and software lobby associations, points to copyright reform and new border measures as evidence of the need for Canadian reforms and states "we urge the U.S. government to use Canada’s expression of interest in the TPP negotiations as an opportunity to resolve these longstanding concerns about IPR standards and enforcement."

Moreover, the IIPA wants it made clear that there will be no cultural exception in the agreement:

IIPA is also concerned about the significant market access barriers to U.S. copyrighted materials that Canada maintains pursuant to the “cultural exception” in its FTA with the U.S. Canada has interpreted this exception to be unreasonably broad, even to encompass discriminatory application of its copyright law, and has insisted on this misinterpretation of the exception in similar provisions in other trade agreements. IIPA strongly opposes the inclusion of any such cultural exclusion in the TPP, and the Canadian government must understand that TPP will not admit of such exceptions.

Its position is therefore that "once Canada adopts legislation that sufficiently addresses the copyright law and enforcement concerns that the U.S. government has clearly and consistently expressed, and once it disavows the introduction of overarching cultural exemptions into the TPP-FTA, its participation in the TPP negotiations should be welcomed." The large pharmaceutical companies adopt a similar approach, stating "there are a number of significant issues that need to be meaningfully addressed before Canada joins the TPP negotiations." These include some dramatic changes to Canada's patent laws.

The U.S. copyright and patent lobby groups are not shy about demanding that Canada cave to external pressure on intellectual property before even being admitted to negotiate an agreement that as currently proposed would require Canada to cave to further changes, including the extension of the term of copyright. The IIPA demands would also mean that all Canadian cultural industries would be on the table, potentially including current foreign ownership restrictions and other programs geared toward supporting Canadian culture.

In light of these demands, it is critical for Canadians to use the Canadian consultation process to ensure their voices are heard on the TPP, particularly on the intellectual property issues. The consultation is open until February 14, 2012. All it takes a single email with your name, address, and comments on the issue. The email can be sent to consultations@international.gc.ca. Alternatively, submissions can be sent by fax (613-944-3489) or mail (Trade Negotiations Consultations (TPP), Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, Trade Policy and Negotiations Division II (TPW), Lester B. Pearson Building, 125 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0G2).
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6243/125/





ISPs Launch Copyright Law Appeal

BT and TalkTalk have gone to the Court of Appeal in the latest challenge over Government moves to tackle online copyright infringement - particularly in music, films and books.

The pair are two of the UK's largest internet service providers (ISPs) and are attempting to overturn a ruling in favour of controversial measures to curb illegal internet file sharing.

They say the measures will invade privacy, result in disproportionate costs for ISPs and consumers, and are not compatible with EU law.

High Court judge Mr Justice Kenneth Parker rejected the challenge in April last year, declaring the proposals under the Digital Economy Act 2010 a proportionate parliamentary response to the serious economic problem of peer-to-peer file sharing, and the likely costs were justified.

He upheld submissions made by lawyers for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) that there were sufficient safeguards to protect the rights of consumers and ISPs .

The judge's decision was welcomed by supporters of the new laws, including employers and unions in the creative industries, who say copyright infringement is taking place on "a massive scale", costing millions and threatening livelihoods.

But BT and TalkTalk have now asked the appeal court to rule that the High Court had "erred in law", and the contested provisions were incompatible with a number of EU directives related to "electronic commerce".

BT and TalkTalk are submitting to the court that provision is also being made for the possible future introduction of certain "technical obligations" aimed at suspending, curtailing or limiting a subscriber's internet access.

A DCMS spokesperson said: "We are confident the High Court's original verdict will be upheld."

The hearing before Lady Justice Arden, sitting with Lord Justice Richards and Lord Justice Patten, is expected to last two days.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukp...2673646847 3A





Grooveshark Fights a Copyright Lawsuit by Chasing After Anonymous Commenters
Peter Kafka

A media company is using subpoenas to demand the names and addresses of anonymous Web users. That’s a story we’ve seen before.

But this one has a twist or two. The media company is Grooveshark, an increasingly popular music service that’s also being sued by all of the major music labels.

And Grooveshark doesn’t want information about alleged lawbreakers. Instead, it wants details about an anonymous user who posted comments on Digital Music News, an industry news site.

Paul Resnikoff, the site’s owner, publisher and primary writer, writes about the subpoenas (and posts them in their entirety) here. And Ben Sisario of the New York Times has a good summary of the story. So I’ll try to do my version very quickly:

• Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest label, is suing Grooveshark over copyright violations, and has cited an Oct. 2011 story that Resnikoff published, along with comments made by one more readers, in its case.
• The story concerned claims by musician Robert Fripp and his team, who argued that though they didn’t want Fripp’s music on Grooveshark, the company wouldn’t take his songs off its site.
• The comments in question came from someone who said they were a Grooveshark employee, and that they had specific instructions to upload music from the big labels to the site, without permission from the labels or artists. “And,” the commenter adds, “to confirm the fears of [Fripp], there is no way in hell you can get your stuff down.”
• Grooveshark is demanding that Resnikoff hand over “any and all correspondence or other communications” between himself and Universal Music over the story. They also want “any and all documents concerning the identity of the First Anonymous Commenter, including, without limitation, that person’s name, address, telephone number and e-mail address, and the IP Address and ISP associated with that person.”

Resnikoff says he won’t comply with the subpoenas. He tells me that even if he wanted to hand over information about his anonymous commenters, he couldn’t. He says that as a matter of policy his site routinely “flushes” any information about anonymous commenters within two days of their posts.

And Resnikoff says that even though the comments in this case contained explosive allegations about Grooveshark, he never tried to verify the commenter’s identity: “What the world sees is what we have.”

In his post, Resnikoff suggests he’ll be protected by whistleblower laws when he fights Grooveshark’s demands. But he tells me that his legal team isn’t sure what laws they’ll cite yet. “We’re just incredibly committed to protecting any informants or sources of information,” he says.

This fight has plenty of interesting gray areas. For instance: What kind of legal responsibility does a news site have for claims that its commenters make? But I’ll let media law experts weigh in on that. For me, the notion that a Web publisher that isn’t directly involved in a legal suit can be forced to cough up names and addresses of contributors makes me shiver.

That scenario also strikes me as similar to some of the worst-case scenarios that SOPA/PIPA opponents have been making in recent weeks — this is a Web site faced with big legal problems over the actions of a single user, right? So I’ll be interested to see if they jump on Grooveshark over this one.

But Grooveshark doesn’t seem to think anyone will get riled up about this. This afternoon, I received an unsolicited email from Edelman, its PR firm. The email contained a copy of the subpoena, and a statement Edelman wants attributed to Grooveshark: “Grooveshark reaffirms its confidence that it will prevail in this litigation and that this filing represents the next step in reaching that end.”
http://allthingsd.com/20120118/groov...us-commenters/





File-Sharing ACS Law Solicitor Fined and Suspended
Nicole Kobie

A lawyer has been suspended from his trade and fined more than £70,000 over a file-sharing case.

Andrew Crossley, the sole solicitor of the now defunct ACS Law, was banned from practising law for two years and issued with the fine at a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal in London today.

Crossley's firm infamously sent letters to alleged illegal file-sharers on behalf of a pornography rights firm, demanding recipients pay hundreds of pounds to avoid going to court, as part of what has since come to be called "speculative invoicing".

However, none of the cases went to full trial, with Crossley himself successfully shutting down 17 cases that did end up in court.

His firm was attacked online, with his website knocked down and email database leaked, leading to a charge from the Information Commissioner's Office. The expected fine of £200,000 was later dropped to only £800 on the grounds Crossley couldn't pay - despite the solicitor seemingly continuing to live a luxury lifestyle.

Following a complaint, the Solicitor's Regulatory Authority raised a case against Crossley on seven charges, which alleged that the profit-sharing structure between ACS Law and the client MediaCAT lead to his "independence" being compromised and caused "diminished trust" in the legal profession.

Crossley admitted the first six, and denied the seventh, a charge relating to the data breach, but was found guilty on all counts by the SDT panel. He was fined £76,326.55 - although we've yet to see full details of the ruling.

Crossley declined to comment when contacted by PC Pro.

The SDT has previously issued a £20,000 fine to a pair of lawyers from Davenport Lyons - the firm that passed the case to ACS Law - for using similar "distressing" tactics.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/372247/f...-and-suspended





MegaUpload Files Countersuit Against Universal Music Group
Jessica Sager

We all know that MegaUpload is one of the web’s biggest file sharing services (and the only one with its own catchy theme song). What most users don’t realize is that the site’s CEO is none other than Swizz Beatz, who has some of his pals in trouble with their label.

Universal Music Group is home to song contributors Kanye West, Diddy and will.i.am. The label issued a take down notice to YouTube, citing that their artists’ performances were unauthorized. Now MegaUpload is fighting back — in court.

MegaUpload is filing a lawsuit against Universal for blocking distribution of the promotional video. The file sharing giant’s reps told the New York Post, “We have never received any word that any artist has [individually] filed a take-down … [we have] legally binding agreements with the performers that appear in the video … They promised that they had the rights to enter into that agreement and it’s not interfering with any third-party rights.”

This isn’t the first time the file sharing debate has gotten litigious. Last month, Universal filed a copyright suit against MegaUpload, claiming that the artists who appeared in the video and on the song were under contract.

The artists’ promotion of the site puts them in a tricky situation. File sharing hurts their sales, which hurts their label — but it’s also a way for them to proliferate their art, and most artists don’t earn much from actual album sales anyway.

The artists themselves listed other incentives to using MegaUpload. West called it “the fastest and safest way to send files,” while Snoop Dogg claims that “it keeps the kids off the street.” While we’re not sure that file sharing will prevent kids from joining gangs later in life, we do see why artists would endorse it — and why labels would shun it.
http://popcrush.com/megaupload-count...l-music-group/





U.S. Accuses Website, Execs of Copyright Infringement

A major Internet content hosting website, Megaupload.com, its founders and employees have been charged by a U.S. grand jury over a massive copyright infringement scheme, the latest skirmish in a battle against piracy of movies and music.

The group, dubbed by prosecutors as "Mega Conspiracy," was accused of engaging in a scheme that took some $500 million away from copyright holders and generated more than $175 million in criminal proceeds, according to the indictment unsealed on Thursday.

"In exchange for payment, the Mega Conspiracy provides fast reproduction and distribution of infringing copies of copyrighted works from its servers located around the world," the indictment said.

A federal court in Virginia ordered that 18 domain names associated with the group be seized. Further, some 20 search warrants were executed in the United States and eight countries and about $50 million in assets and targeted sites were also seized.

The founders of the company - Kim Dotcom, who is also known as Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, and Mathias Ortmann - were charged. The company's chief marketing and sales officer, Finn Batato, head of development Sven Echternach and other company officials were also charged.

The charges included copyright infringement as well as conspiracies to commit racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering.

Dotcom, Batato, Ortmann and another individual charged were arrested in Auckland, New Zealand, by local authorities on Thursday, the U.S. Justice Department said. Echternach and two others charged remain at large.

The charges emerge as Congress is struggling over legislation sought by the movie and music industry to crack down on Internet piracy and theft of its content. Major Internet sites like Google and Facebook complained that such legislation as it was drafted would lead to censorship.

(Reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky; Editing by Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80I24220120119





Antipiracy Case Sends Shivers Through Some Legitimate Storage Sites
Nicole Perlroth and Quentin Hardy

If Megaupload is guilty, then who among its brethren is innocent?

On Thursday, federal authorities shut the Web site of Megaupload, a file-sharing service, and accused its operators of copyright infringement and running a vast “Mega Conspiracy.” They could face 20 years in prison.

But Megaupload was not the only such service on the Web. Many companies have crowded into the online storage market recently, most of them aimed at consumers and businesses that want convenient ways to get big data files out of their teeming in-boxes, off their devices and into the cloud — perhaps so that friends or co-workers can download them. They include MediaFire, RapidShare, YouSendIt, Dropbox and Box.net. And there are similar services from Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

All of these market themselves as legitimate ways to store content online. But they are inherently ideal for anyone looking to illegitimately upload and share copyrighted video and audio files. Most companies rarely, if ever, inspect individual files to see if the material they store on behalf of users violates copyrights, unless they are notified by someone claiming infringement.

The Megaupload indictment reminds companies that how they manage copyrighted material on their sites could determine whether they continue to operate freely or face legal consequences. At the same time, it offers a look at just how widespread such piracy is and how tricky it can be to cut down on it, given the many ways people can send files to each other online.

“The goal of the Megaupload indictment is to push and prod other companies to take copyright infringement more seriously,” said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University.

Federal prosecutors seem to have thrown the book at Megaupload. The indictment asserts that the company’s business model depended on people violating copyright and that it gave them incentives to do so, while charging subscription fees for watching video and placing ads in front of material it did not own.

When asked to remove copyrighted works, the indictment says, Megaupload at best removed a particular version but left copies elsewhere in its system.

Federal prosecutors assert that although the site claimed to be protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or D.M.C.A., the business was in fact a sham that made $175 million off $500 million in copyrighted goods. Web sites that operate in the United States are typically offered “safe harbor” for copyright violations under the D.M.C.A., as long as they do not profit from the illegitimate material and immediately take it down once contacted.

But the act treats violations “very much as a ‘you know it when you see it’ rule,” said Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box.net, a popular online storage company. “You look at how they make money, and you look at how they treat D.M.C.A. requests to take down material.”

Megaupload waved the D.M.C.A. flag even though it was based in Hong Kong and many of its executives were in New Zealand. It was a juicy federal target for its sheer size. The site accounted for roughly 1 percent of total Internet traffic in North America, nearly 2 percent of traffic in the Asia-Pacific region and more than 11 percent in Brazil, according to Sandvine, a Canadian company that provides equipment to monitor Internet traffic. The indictment contends that Megaupload has over 180 million registered users and, at one point, was the 30th-most-visited site on the Web.

Ira P. Rothken, a lawyer for Megaupload, said on Thursday, “Megaupload believes the government is wrong on the facts, wrong on the law.”

Mr. Levie of Box.net noted that his company and Dropbox, as well as the services from Google and Microsoft, were less likely prosecution targets because they depended to a large extent on legitimate corporate purchases of their storage. These services are more focused on sharing within organizations and small groups. While this can make it more difficult for an outsider or the authorities to see who is storing what, it makes it less likely that huge copyright violations are taking place.

Lori Shen, a spokesman for YouSendIt, said any comparison between that site and Megaupload would be inaccurate.

“YouSendIt is a private and secure business collaboration tool for business users. It provides a secure vehicle to share, send, sign and sync business content online,” Ms. Shen said.

Megaupload had its fans in the workplace, too. A study published Thursday by the security firm Palo Alto Networks indicated that the use of Megaupload on corporate networks was greater than the combined use of Box.net, Dropbox and YouSendIt, as measured by the amount of data transferred. Of course, it is not clear how much of that data was work-related and how much was for the purpose of in-cubicle entertainment.

After the indictment, a number of Megaupload users took to Twitter to complain that they had used it to back up personal files, to share files with clients and as a collaboration tool.

When asked about the Megaupload case, RapidShare, Minus and several other consumer-oriented storage sites offered statements saying that they respected copyright and complied with requests to take down material.

The Megaupload indictment came amid a battle in Washington over antipiracy legislation. Some of the recent concern among those in the tech industry about the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, was that it would permit the rapid shutdown of any site that had even a small amount of unauthorized copyrighted material on it, a big risk for sites that accept uploads from users. Backers of the legislation, which has been shelved for now, say it was aimed only at foreign sites that were primarily about piracy.

As online storage businesses go, Mr. Levie said, Megaupload was more lucrative than most. “I looked at the list of cars Kim Dotcom owned and wondered if I was in the wrong business,” he said, a reference to the company’s founder.

He added: “Then again, I’m not in jail.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/t...age-sites.html





Before Shutdown, Megaupload Ate Up More Corporate Bandwidth than Dropbox
Jon Brodkin

Before being shut down by the feds today, the file-sharing site Megaupload was extraordinarily popular with home Internet users—so much so that the file downloading habit was spilling over into the workplace in a significant way.

The shutdown of the site—and the arrests of four of Megaupload's leaders today in New Zealand—are bound to have major consequences in the file sharing market. Although Megaupload's presence in the corporate world may not have matched its overall share of Internet usage, its consumption of bandwidth was outpacing Dropbox and numerous other business-focused file-sharing services, according to a new study. BitTorrent is also quite popular in the workplace, and some people are even installing Tor clients on their work machines to conceal details of their Internet usage, the study found.

The data comes from security vendor Palo Alto Networks, which used its technology to monitor a week's worth of traffic traversing the Internet gateway at 1,636 businesses around the world, mostly at medium to large businesses with at least 2,500 users. The eighth version of the resulting report, published every six months, came out this week.

"The key point is that this is real network traffic, it's not a survey. It's not speculation on anyone's part," said Matt Keil, Palo Alto senior research analyst.

We spoke with Palo Alto prior to today's news that Megaupload.com was taken down by the FBI, with the Justice Department unsealing an indictment that charges seven people associated with the site with "widespread online copyright infringement." We were planning to report on the data anyway—and today's news makes it even more interesting.

Megaupload usage was found on the networks of 57 percent of the 1,636 organizations in the study. That's quite a bit less than the 76 percent of networks with Dropbox traffic, and equal to the 57 percent of networks that have Box.net traffic. However, in terms of bandwidth, Megaupload accounted for 20,405 gigabytes, compared to 17,573 for Dropbox and just 86 gigabytes for the business-focused Box.net. The Dropbox numbers, indicating lots of traffic but a smaller average file size, suggest a mix of personal and work usage. Another consumer-oriented service accounting for a chunk of traffic was Filesonic, which appeared on 52 percent of networks and consumed 4,058 gigabytes.

Overall, Palo Alto tracked 76,225 gigabytes worth of traffic being used up by some 65 browser-based file sharing applications (including Dropbox, even though the Dropbox service can be used outside the browser). Counting only Web-based file-sharing, then, Megaupload accounted for more than a quarter of corporate traffic.

However, Web-based file sharing is still just a small part of overall Internet usage in corporations. Looking at all types of applications and use cases, Palo Alto found 10.9 million gigabytes of consumption across the 1,636 companies. In fact, the BitTorrent peer-to-peer service alone accounted for much more traffic than all browser-based file-sharing applications combined, with 177,513 gigabytes of bandwidth consumed, or less than 2 percent of all corporate Internet traffic.

Proportionally, BitTorrent and Megaupload likely have a much greater share of the Internet as a whole than they do in corporate networks. One previous study by Envisional pegged BitTorrent as taking up 13.5 percent of peak bandwidth usage in the US and 28.4 percent in Europe, and also said downloads from cyberlocker sites such as Megaupload, Rapidshare and HotFile take up 7 percent of all Internet traffic.

Still, when Palo Alto reports back to customers on the usage of Web-based file sharing, the reaction is usually "I knew I had some of these applications on my network, but I didn't realize I had so many," Keil said.

Although Dropbox seems to straddle the line between personal and business use, in most cases there's usually a clear distinction between "tools that help me get my job done and tools that help us stay entertained," with business-focused services usually transferring smaller files, Keil said. Yousendit, for example, is mostly used for productivity and was found in 51 percent of networks, but accounted for just 423 gigabaytes.

Megaupload clocks in with big numbers because of the types of files being shared. "Of the top-20 file downloads found on December 5th, 2011, six of the files were software applications, eight were games or game demos, and six were movie trailers," the Palo Alto report states.

Interestingly, Tor client software for encrypting a user's traffic was found on 13 percent of corporate networks. Palo Alto didn't detail this usage in its report because of how low it was, accounting for 0.077 percent of bandwidth. Companies with a Tor presence might have it on just one or two machines. But certainly, it's something any IT security pro will want to locate and get rid of.

Tor "is not really that trivial of a tool to use," said Wade Williamson, Palo Alto senior security analyst. "Tor is kind of a pre-requisite tool if you're going to be a hacker. If I'm going to attack someone's network i'm definitely going to use Tor or something like it so people can't follow my footsteps and see where they come from." Palo Alto's research didn't determine what exactly people were using Tor to do. "It's hard to say if they're hackers," Wade said. "Someone could have heard this is the best way to anonymize yourself. We're not saying all these are hackers, but there is definitely a security issue there."

It turns out that Tor's presence has remained steady in the 13 to 14 percent range in all of Palo Alto's previous reports, the company said. Megaupload traffic also hasn't changed much recently. But it will, if the site stays shut down for long.
http://arstechnica.com/business/news...an-dropbox.ars





Megaupload Site Wants Assets Back, to Fight Charges
Jeremy Pelofsky

The Internet website Megaupload.com, shut down by authorities over allegations that it illegally peddled copyrighted material, is trying to recover its servers and get back online, a lawyer for the company said on Friday.

The company and seven of its executives were charged in a 5-count, 72-page indictment unsealed on Thursday accusing them of engaging in a wide-ranging and lucrative scheme to offer material online without compensating the copyright holders.

Authorities in New Zealand arrested four of those charged, including one of its founders, who legally changed his name to Kim Dotcom. Assets were also seized money, servers, domain names and other assets in the United States and several countries.

"The company is looking at its legal options for getting back its servers and its domain and getting its servers back up online," Megaupload's lawyer Ira Rothken told Reuters. "Megaupload will vigorously defend itself."

He said the company simply offered online storage. "It is really offensive to say that just because people can upload bad things, therefore Megaupload is automatically responsible," he said.

No decision has been made yet about whether they will fight extradition from New Zealand to the United States, Rothken said.

U.S. authorities have painted a much darker picture of the company's operations, saying that Megaupload readily made available copyrighted material including music, television shows, movies, pornography and even terrorism propaganda videos.

Users could upload material to the company's sites, which then would create a link that could be distributed so others could download it, according to the indictment. Some paid subscription fees for faster upload and download speeds.

Despite complaints from copyright holders, the Megaupload did not remove all of the material when requested to do so, prosecutors said. The company's executives earned more than $175 million from subscription fees and advertising, they said.

Possible New Megaupload Site

Less than a day after U.S. authorities shut down the Megaupload.com site and several of its sister sites, there appeared to be an attempt to resurrect the site.

Twitter was flooded with messages circulating a new Internet Protocol address, but the site offered no substantive content immediately and it did not appear that it was sanctioned by Megaupload.

The new website, which is being hosted in the Netherlands, looked similar to the original Megaupload.com website. The company's lawyer said that he was not directly familiar with the new site.

"We're not familiar with any official effort at this point to get the site back up in light of the fact that its major servers are in the possession of the United States government and other governments," Rothken said.

One of those arrested on Thursday was Bram van der Kolk, who has citizenship in the Netherlands and New Zealand. He oversaw programming and the network structure for Megaupload's websites, according to court papers.

U.S. officials were asked on Thursday about the risk of the site reappearing elsewhere in the future, a key issue that has confronted authorities in the past when they've tried to shut down Internet sites selling counterfeit goods.

"Right now we're in the process of executing search and seizure warrants and certainly it's not going to pop up again today. But I couldn't speculate as to what may or may not happen in the future," one Justice Department official said on Thursday.

Another official said "maintaining and running and assembling a site like this is very expensive. And obviously the seizure of financial assets is critical in this type of investigation and prosecution in preventing it from going forward."

The case, which started as an investigation in March 2010, emerged just as lawmakers in Congress have been battling over new legislation sought by the television, movie and music industries that was aimed at making it harder for such material to be so easily peddled over the Internet.

Some major technology companies, including Google and Facebook, have sought to derail the current versions of the legislation because they were concerned they would lead to censorship and lengthy litigation.

Earlier on Friday, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid postponed a vote on one bill that was set for Tuesday until several issues are resolved.

(Additional reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston; Editing by Howard Goller, Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80I24220120120





Megaupload Details Raise Significant Concerns About What DOJ Considers Evidence Of Criminal Behavior
Mike Masnick

Yesterday I wrote up a first reaction to the Megaupload case. Having spent some more time going through the indictment in much greater detail, I have some more thoughts and concerns.

First, it's important to acknowledge that the founder of Megaupload, who goes by Kim Dotcom, has a long history of flaunting the law in a variety of ways. That makes him quite unsympathetic in a court. On top of that, there are certain claims in the indictment that, if true, mean it's quite likely that he broke the law. Whether or not the violations amount to racketeering & conspiracy is beyond any analysis that we're going to be able to do here. I would say that I would not be at all surprised if he's found guilty.

Where my concerns come in is in some of the "evidence" that's used to add to the overall indictment. To be clear, in a case like this, the issue is the evidence as a whole, combined to show intent and a general pattern to actions. So the allegations in the indictment don't necessarily mean that any individual action is, by itself, illegal. But, I still worry that some of the specific actions used to pain this picture are (1) potentially taken out of context, (2) are presented in a way that likely misrepresents the actual situation and (3) could come back to haunt other online services who are providing perfectly legitimate services.

• For example, the indictment points out that Megaupload did not have a site search, by which users could find material. That's interesting, but it seems like an odd piece of information in making the case. Other copyright cases have specifically found that having a search engine is part of an inducement claim -- so there's an argument that the idea not to have a search engine wasn't so much "conspiracy," as it was an attempt to follow the guidance of the court and to stay legal. To use the lack of a feature, that previously was shown to be a problem, as evidence of a conspiracy is crazy. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

• Separately, the indictment lists various feature choices as part of making its case. There is, for example, the fact that if certain files aren't downloaded in a certain amount of time, then they are deleted. The indictment presents this as evidence that the service is mainly for infringement, because it potentially precludes the idea that the site is used for long-term backup. Of course, that falsely assumes that long-term backup is the only legitimate use of a cyberlocker. But that might not be the case at all. The service could (and is) used to just distribute large files in a directed, short-term effort. If anything, the fact that files are deleted after they're done being shared highlights a key legal function of the site: it was used by people to exchange large files once or twice, since they're too big to share via email attachment.

• On top of that, other, legitimate, sites have similar policies. The popular image hosting site Imgur does the same thing: if people don't access an image for an extended period of time, Imgur may delete it. That's not because it's encouraging infringement, but because it knows that the service is being used for short-term distribution.

• There is also the question of paying certain uploaders. However, there does seem to be a bit of a stretch in assuming that because some uploaders get lots of downloads by posting infringing content, all such "paid" users must be putting up infringing works. There are plenty of viral videos that are quite popular not because of infringement. In fact, much of this seems to be based on the simple assumption that encouraging more usage means they must be encouraging infringement. It's entirely possible that Dotcom did encourage infringement, but it feels like there should be more actual evidence of that, rather than pasting together a bunch of claims that could be interpreted in legitimate ways. Paying users for popularity is not, and should not, be evidence of criminality, or even infringement.

• There is also the claim that, while the company did remove some works upon takedown notice, it merely removed one link to the work, but left up other links. The issue here, as noted elsewhere in the indictment, is that Megaupload has a system for de-duplication -- so that if multiple people uploaded the same file, it only kept one version, but made it available at a different link for each person. This is the same sort of thing that lots of legitimate sites do, including Dropbox. The question, then, is if you do something like that with a locker service, and keep a single file, accessible through multiple locker links, what do you do if you get a takedown? This is still somewhat of an open question -- and was one of the points raised (in a civil copyright infringement context, which is very different) in the EMI vs. MP3tunes case. In that case, the company was told that it did, in fact, have to delete the actual file. But that raises other questions. Let's present a hypothetical: what if infringer A and authorized distributor B both upload the same file. The system de-dupes and uses a single file for each to access. Now, the copyright holder discovers A's version, and issues a takedown. It will automatically take down B's authorized work as well -- even though that copy was not infringing. Or... what if someone uploads a copy, but for their own personal use to access remotely, but never shares the link? In that case, no infringement is occurring... but DOJ seems to claim that the site would have to delete the file anyway, or there may be criminal risk. That's crazy.

• The complaint argues that because Megaupload's "top 100" list does not actually list the top 100 downloads on the site, this is more evidence of conspiracy. The issue here is that the list apparently removes files that are likely infringing. But... again, in other cases (like the IsoHunt case) such lists were also seen as proof of inducement. So, again it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If Megaupload's list showed infringing works, then they'd be charged with inducement... but removing them from the list makes them guilty of conspiracy?

• In addition, the indictment shows that, despite the company not being a US company, it did set up a DMCA agent, a tool to make removing files easier, and did take down works on request. There are some reasonable questions about if it ignored some takedown messages (likely) and the fact that it put limits on how many takedowns could be done per day with its tool. Those certainly work against the company in terms of retaining any DMCA safe harbors. Similarly, there is some evidence that the owners of the site may have uploaded infringing files themselves -- which, again, has no DMCA protections.

• The indictment points out that Megaupload used its hashing system to maintain a list of known child porn and block those files from being re-uploaded. The problem here is that copyright is different than child porn. Child porn is a strict liability issue: it is always illegal. There are no extenuating circumstances. But copyrighted content is different. It could be authorized. It could be fair use. And that depends on the specific use, not the file. So using a hash system there doesn't make sense, whereas it can make sense for child porn.

• The indictment also lists all sorts of emails, some of which are more damaging than others, but some of which may be taken out of context. All of them seem to assume that Megaupload employees can easily tell, often just by file name, what's infringing and what's not. I think this is an assumption that many people who don't understand copyright law make. And while you can guess... it's not always so easy. The recording industry, for example, regularly uses cyberlockers as a legitimate way to distribute promo copies. How would Megaupload know if certain files were legit or not, without further details? Yes, there's obvious infringement happening on the site, but will Megaupload always know which specific files are infringing?

• The indictment discusses demands from Universal Music that Megaupload would need to meet before UMG would even discuss a potential license. This included: "proactive fingerprint filtering to ensure that there is no infringing music content hosted on its service; proactive text filtering for pre-release titles that may not appear in fingerprint databases at an early stage; terminate the accounts of users that repeatedly infringe copyright; limit the number of possible downloads from each file; process right holder take down notices faster and more efficiently." While the DMCA does require action against repeat infringers, there are no legal requirements for the other issues. It's not clear why that should be evidence here. The fact that Megaupload didn't go above and beyond what the law requires shouldn't be seen as evidence of wrongdoing...

• Many of the emails discuss the fact that, in general, there are infringing works on the site. Yeah, but that's the same issue in the YouTube case and other cases. General knowledge that your tool is used for infringement is kind of meaningless, because you can't take works down if you don't know what's actually infringing.

• Money laundering claims are tricky and perhaps there was some "money laundering" going on here, but this indictment seems to include basic payments to Megaupload's hosting companies. Using payments to companies for hosting as evidence of money laundering seems pretty extreme, and suggests the possibility that this is just a "lumping in" situation, just to pile on more things that look bad, but aren't illegal by themselves.

Do these kinds of things work together to paint a picture of the company encouraging infringement? It's certainly possible that a court will add up a bunch of things like this and insist that's true. My fear is that, at least with some of these points, there are perfectly reasonable, non-infringing contexts for them. Then, what I worry about, is that in later cases, these types of things are used as "evidence" against companies and services that are legit. Even worse, there's a real worry that it creates chilling effects for lots of legitimate services who do things like de-duplification, or have legitimate backup services. If you're running Amazon S3 or Dropbox, do you now suddenly change how you do business, just to avoid the possibility of being accused of racketeering and criminal copyright infringement? That's worrisome.

But the bigger overall issue is why this action and why now? Companies in the US have filed civil cases against Megaupload in the US and the company was willing to come to the US and deal in US courts. Taking it up to a criminal "conspiracy" and racketeering charge seems like overkill, with tremendous collateral damage and chilling effects.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...behavior.shtml





Spanish Anger at Megaupload Closure
David Roman

A prominent Spanish lawyer is threatening a lawsuit over the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s decision to shut down Megaupload Ltd., one of the world’s most popular file-sharing website.

Barcelona-based Carlos Sánchez Almeida, a veteran of Internet privacy and piracy fights in Spain, says he’s upset at the move because it endangers the legal contents stored in Megaupload, now inaccessible for company customers. In a post in his Jaque Perpetuo blog, he’s recommending that Spanish users of the service gather information about the files they may lose due to the FBI shutdown, in preparation for a legal claim.

Mr. Almeida’s complaint is the most visible of many that have appeared all over social networks in Spain, as people who paid fees to store files in the “cyberlocker” wonder what comes next. This is important because Spain has already proved to be one tough cookie for U.S. law enforcement, when it comes to file-sharing shenanigans.

In February, U.S. authorities shut down Roja Directa, a website that specializes in posting links to shared sports content that had previously survived a legal challenge in its native Spain. No Roja Directa managers were arrested — unlike the case of Megaupload, where four company employees have already been charged — and the website simply moved away to an Indian domain extension.

Spain’s government has also tried to tighten the screws on the country’s happy-go-lucky file-sharing scene (at last count, more than 500 Spanish websites indulged in the practice) but it has faced significant opposition from cyber-activists armed with Spain’s stringent privacy laws. A recent corruption scandal in the country’s main artists union, a key opponent of file sharing, is only making it harder for the government to use FBI-style tactics.

As the FBI tries to make its case by pointing to the fact that Hong Kong-based Megaupload and its collection of websites generated more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and caused more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners, Mr. Almeida and others take a different view: Megaupload served a role as cyberlocker for legal content and, in case of a conflict between the two sides of the coin, it is the citizen’s right to the privacy of personal files that should prevail.

One other argument is that, in the big scheme of things, Megaupload’s shutdown will only result in its replacement by smaller, more nimble file-sharing networks that will be even tougher to control. If Roja Directa’s continued survival is any guide, they may have a point.
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/201...pload-closure/





Anonymous Launches "Largest Attack Ever on Government and Music Industry Sites"
Mike Lennon

Anonymous Launches #OpMegaupload, Launches Massive DDoS Attacks Against Multiple Targets in Retaliation for Action Against Megaupload.Com

The Anonymous collective moved swiftly today, in response to actions taken by the Justice Department against operators of Megaupload.com, a wildly popular file sharing and online storage service.

The Department of Justice said that seven individuals and two corporations have been charged with running a criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for “massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works.” The site has been taken down and assets and domain names have been seized by authorities.

In response, the hacktivist collective clenched its virtual fist and launched what it says will be the “largest attack ever on government and music industry sites.”

Anonymous DDos Attacks Protest Megaupload.Com

The main tool powering the efforts of Anonymous to take its targets offline is the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC), a favorite tool used by “members” to conduct DDoS attacks by sending a flood of TCP/UDP packets in an attempt to overwhelm a system and make it inaccessible.

Via Twitter, it’s evident that today’s action against MegaUpload has sparked many more individuals to get involved in the online protests and download the LOIC to take part in the DDoS attacks. Chatter on Twitter and IRC is extremely active, and the attacks are likely to continue for some time.

“We Anonymous are launching our largest attack ever on government and music industry sites,” the group said in an online note. “Lulz. The FBI didn't think they would get away with this did they? They should have expected us.”

Already, the group has targeted and taken down most of the following sites, at least for some period of time. Some appear to be sporadically accessible. It's not the first time these sites have been hit with DDoS attacks, and while some were taken down, they often kick over to cloud based services or implement other DDoS mitigation actions until the attacks subside.

justice.gov | hadopi.fr | universalmusic.com | riaa.org | mpaa.org | copyright.gov | wmg.com | usdoj.gov | bmi.com | fbi.gov

“DDoS is to the Internet what the Billy club is to gang warfare: simple, cheap, unsophisticated and effective,” said Rob Rachwald, Director of Security Strategy at Imperva. “But DDoS lends itself well to the Anonymous model which relies on crowd sourcing. During Operation Payback, Anonymous inspired an army of thousands in an attempt to bring numerous commercial sites.”

According to the Department of Justice, Megaupload.com and other related sites generated more than $175 million in profits through ad revenue and premium memberships, while causing more than $500 million dollars in damage to copyright owners. While the DOJ did not elaborate on how these figures were calculated, it did say the case is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States.

The indictment states that the conspirators promoted the uploading of popular copyrighted works including movies, music, television programs, electronic books, and software on a massive scale so that millions of users could download the content.

The individuals and two corporations – Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited – were indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on Jan. 5, 2012, and charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement. As part of the crackdown, authorities executed more than 20 search warrants in the U.S. and eight countries, and seized approximately $50 million in assets. Agents also seized several Megaupload servers and a U.S. ordered the seizure of 18 domain names connected to the operation.

Megaupload.com claims it had more than 150 million registered users and 50 million daily visitors to its site, accounting for four percent of total Internet traffic.

The individuals charged each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit racketeering, five years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering and five years in prison on each of the substantive charges of criminal copyright infringement.
https://www.securityweek.com/anonymo...industry-sites





Downloads of LOIC DoS Attack Tool Spike as Anonymous Inspires Online Protests
Mike Lennon

As Anonymous initiated what it said will be the “largest attack ever on government and music industry sites” in response to actions taken by the Justice Department against operators of file sharing site Megaupload.com, downloads of a popular DoS attack tool have spiked.

Anonymous DDoS AttacksWhile the Denial of Service tool known as the “Low Orbit Ion Cannon” (LOIC) was developed by the “good guys” to stress test websites, it has been a favorite tool of Anonymous to take its targets offline by sending a flood of TCP/UDP packets in an attempt to overwhelm a system and make it inaccessible.

Interactions seen on Twitter and IRC, made it clear that the action against MegaUpload has sparked many more individuals to get involved in the online protests and download the LOIC to take part in the attacks.

The chart below shows the number of LOIC downloads from Sourceforge so far for the monthly of January 2012. These figures do not include downloads from other sites and sharing, which increases the number even more.
https://www.securityweek.com/downloa...nline-protests





RFS 9: Kill Hollywood

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.

That's one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they're resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn't stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it's only when he's beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

There will be several answers, ranging from new ways to produce and distribute shows, through new media (e.g. games) that look a lot like shows but are more interactive, to things (e.g. social sites and apps) that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention. Some of the best ideas may initially look like they're serving the movie and TV industries. Microsoft seemed like a technology supplier to IBM before eating their lunch, and Google did the same thing to Yahoo.

It would be great if what people did instead of watching shows was exercise more and spend more time with their friends and families. Maybe they will. All other things being equal, we'd prefer to hear about ideas like that. But all other things are decidedly not equal. Whatever people are going to do for fun in 20 years is probably predetermined. Winning is more a matter of discovering it than making it happen. In this respect at least, you can't push history off its course. You can, however, accelerate it.

What's the most entertaining thing you can build?
http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html





The Next SOPA

Every few years, the MPAA’s lobbying power, rhetoric, and immense campaign contributions succeed in purchasing a bill in Congress to advance their agenda in a way that’s hostile to the technology industry and consumers.

Their bills have had mixed success and usually die before being brought to a vote, but SOPA and PIPA came frighteningly close to becoming law. The internet-wide protest this week seems to have stalled their progress and probably killed them for now.

But what will happen when the MPAA buys the next SOPA? We can’t protest every similar bill with the same force. Eventually, our audiences will tire of calling their senators for whatever we’re asking them to protest this time.

Eventually, we will lose.

Such ridiculous, destructive bills should never even pass committee review, but we’re not addressing the real problem: the MPAA’s buying power in Congress. This is a campaign finance problem.

We can attack this by aggressively supporting campaign finance reform to reduce the role of big money in U.S. policy. This is the goal of groups such as United Republic and Rootstrikers.

It’s also worth reconsidering our support of the MPAA. The MPAA is a hate-sink, a front to protect its members from negative PR. But unlike the similarly purposed Lodsys (and many others), it’s easy to see who the MPAA represents: Disney, Sony Pictures, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Brothers. (Essentially, all of the major movie studios.)

The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.

Yet when we watch their movies, we support them.

Even if we don’t watch their movies in a theater or buy their plastic discs of hostility, we’re still supporting them. If we watch their movies on Netflix or other flat-rate streaming or rental services, the service effectively pays them on our behalf next time they negotiate the rights or buy another disc. And if we pirate their movies, we’re contributing to the statistics that help them convince Congress that these destructive laws are necessary.

They use our support to buy these laws.

So maybe, instead of waiting for the MPAA’s next law and changing our Twitter avatars for a few days in protest, it would be more productive to significantly reduce or eliminate our support of the MPAA member companies starting today, and start supporting campaign finance reform.
http://www.marco.org/2012/01/20/the-next-sopa





Pick up the Pitchforks: David Pogue Underestimates Hollywood
Clay Shirky

Writing in his blog on the New York Times yesterday, David Pogue, one of the Times’ tech columnists, advises toning down the alarmist rhetoric over SOPA, suggesting that opponents of the bill (and its Senate cousin PIPA) should Put Down the Pitchforks. He takes particular issue with people who have criticized SOPA without actually understanding the text of the bill. Then, after this preamble, Pogue proceeds to offer an explanation of SOPA that makes it clear that he does not understand the text of the bill.

Here’s his description of what’s at stake:

If the entertainment industry’s legal arm gets out of control, [opponents] say, they could deem almost anything to be a piracy site. YouTube could be one, because lots of videos include bits of TV shows and copyrighted music. Facebook could be one, because people often link to copyrighted videos and songs. Google and Bing would be responsible for removing every link to a questionable Web site. Just a gigantic headache.

That’s Pogue’s perspective: Letting Hollywood decide whether any given site with user contributions facilitates piracy would amount to nothing more than “a gigantic headache.” (Me, I’d have gone with “a violation of the First Amendment.”) To come to a conclusion like this, you’d have to believe that traditional media companies are committed to balancing their desire for control with a respect for citizen rights, and indeed, Pogue does seem to believe this (hence the observation that bad things would happen only if the entertainment industry’s legal arm gets out of control.)

If their legal arm gets out of control? This is an industry that demands payment from summer camps if the kids sing Happy Birthday or God Bless America, an industry that issues takedown notices for a 29-second home movie of a toddler dancing to Prince. Traditional American media firms are implacably opposed to any increase in citizens’ ability to create, copy, save, alter, or share media on our own. They fought against cassette audio tapes, and photocopiers. They swore the VCR would destroy Hollywood. They tried to kill Tivo. They tried to kill MiniDisc. They tried to kill player pianos. They do this whenever a technology increases user freedom over media. Every time. Every single time.

And they don’t just want control — they want it at low cost, and high speed. Pogue talks about the bills’ allowing the Government to sue. What he doesn’t mention is that the bills were also written to allow “market based” system allowing media firms to get injunctions against sites they don’t like, or that they were written so that firms who host user conversations would have incentives to censor their own users in advance, rather than waiting for notification from a copyright holder, as happens now.

I know David Pogue, and he’s a smart guy. I don’t think he’s intentionally trying to obscure the way the bill imagines letting media firms escape due process and impose “market-based” censorship. I think he simply cannot imagine that the bills are as bad as they actually are.

This is a general problem — there is a reasonable conversation to be had about sites set up for large, commercial operations that are designed to violate copyright. And because there’s a reasonable conversation to be had, Pogue (and many others) simply imagine that the core of SOPA must therefore be reasonable. Surely Hollywood wouldn’t try to suspend due process, would they? Or create a parallel enforcement system? Or take away citizen recourse if they were unfairly silenced? They wouldn’t imagine the possibility of a longer jail term for streaming a Michael Jackson video than Jackson’s own doctor got for killing actual Michael Jackson? Would they?

Hollywood wants to take the law into their own hands — they had our representatives add a vigilante clause, for God’s sake, to protect overzealous censors from legal challenge by users — and like a Scooby Doo™ episode, they would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for us meddlesome kids.

Chris Dodd, lobbyist-in-chief for the MPAA, who is watching the thick end of a hundred million bucks of paid-for legislation swirl around the drain, has been reduced to bizarrely indirect defensiveness, touting the First Amendment credentials of the bill’s co-sponsors, as if that meant these bills must therefore be clean as well. Yet the very first substantive section of SOPA, Section 2.a.1., gives the game away, by being a little too touchy about its constitutional implications: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to impose a prior restraint on free speech.” Got that? This bill is not about prior restraint. Totally not! What would make you even think such a thing!?

And arguments like Pogue’s are dangerous not because they are pro-SOPA — Pogue himself is glad it is in trouble — but because they obscure the core historical fact: The American media industry tries to stifle user freedom. Every time. Every single time.

We should delight in the stand we’ve taken in favor of things like, say, notifications, and trials, and proof before censoring someone, but we should get ready to do it again next year, and the year after that. The risk now is not that SOPA will pass. The risk is that we’ll think we’ve won. We haven’t; they’ll be back. Get ready to have this fight again.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/01...tes-hollywood/





Supreme Court Says Congress May Re-Copyright Public Domain Works
David Kravets

Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

In a 6-2 ruling, the court said that, just because material enters the public domain, it is not “territory that works may never exit.”

The top court was ruling on a petition by a group of orchestra conductors, educators, performers, publishers and film archivists who urged the justices to reverse an appellate court that ruled against the group, which has relied on artistic works in the public domain for their livelihoods.

They claimed that re-copyrighting public works would breach the speech rights of those who are now using those works without needing a license. There are millions of decades-old works at issue. Some of the well-known ones include H.G. Wells’ Things to Come; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the musical compositions of Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky.

The court, however, was sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ argument. Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Ginsburg said “some restriction on expression is the inherent and intended effect of every grant of copyright.” But the top court, with Justice Elena Kagan recused, said Congress’ move to re-copyright the works to comport with an international treaty was more important.

For a variety of reasons, the works at issue, which are foreign and produced decades ago, became part of the public domain in the United States but were still copyrighted overseas. In 1994, Congress adopted legislation to move the works back into copyright, so U.S. policy would comport with an international copyright treaty known as the Berne Convention.

In dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito said the legislation goes against the theory of copyright and “does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work.” Copyright, they noted, was part of the Constitution to promote the arts and sciences.

The legislation, Breyer wrote, “bestows monetary rewards only on owners of old works in the American public domain. At the same time, the statute inhibits the dissemination of those works, foreign works published abroad after 1923, of which there are many millions, including films, works of art, innumerable photographs, and, of course, books — books that (in the absence of the statute) would assume their rightful places in computer-accessible databases, spreading knowledge throughout the world.”

Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University and a plaintiff’s lawyer in the case, called the decision “unfortunate” and said it “suggests Congress is not required to pay particularly close attention to the interests of the public when it passes copyright laws.”

The majority, however, rebuffed charges that a decision in favor of Congress’ move would amount to affording lawmakers the right to legislate perpetual copyright terms.

“In aligning the United States with other nations bound by the Berne Convention, and thereby according equitable treatment to once disfavored foreign authors, Congress can hardly be charged with a design to move stealthily toward a regime of perpetual copyrights,” Ginsburg wrote.

It’s not the first time the Supreme Court has approved the extension of copyrights. The last time was in 2002, when it upheld Congress’ move to extend copyright from the life of an author plus 50 years after death to 70 years after death.

The lead plaintiff in the case, Lawrence Golan, told the high court that it will not longer be able to perform Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and Peter and the Wolf, or Shostakovich’s Symphony 14, Cello Concerto because of licensing fees.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ight-decision/





Scarcity Is A Shitty Business Model

The Gotham Gal has been under the weather this weekend. Last night we made soup for dinner and decided to sit on the couch and watch a movie and go to bed early. After dinner, we fired up Boxee and checked out Netflix. Nothing good there. Then we fired up the Mac Mini and checked out Amazon Instant Video. Nothing good there. Then we went to the Cable Set Top Box and checked out movies on demand. Nothing good there. Frustrated and unwilling and uninterested in heading to a "foreign rogue site" to pirate something good, we watched a TV show and went to bed.

Making movies is expensive and risky. I totally get that the studios need to make a lot of money on those movies to make their business model work.

But denying customers the films they want, on the devices they want to watch them, when they want to watch them is not a great business model. It leads to piracy, as we have discussed here many times, but more importantly it also leads to the loss of a transaction to a competing form of entertainment.

We would have paid good money to watch Sherlock Holmes or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. But it simply was not an option. So we went with a TV show that was free and then went to bed.

I am sure there was a time when scarcity was a good business model for the film industry. And I am sure that many of the leaders of the film industry came of age during that time. I understand their muscle memory in terms of the scarcity business model. But restricting access to content is a bad business model in the age of a global network that costs practically nothing to distribute on.

I've argued this point many times with film executives. They insist that they need their windows. They argue they need to manage access to their films to extract every last dollar from the market. That just doesn't make sense to me. If they went direct to their customers, offered their films at a reasonable price (say $5/view net to them), and if they made their films available day one everywhere in the world, I can't see how they wouldn't make more money.

I understand that many participants in the broader film ecosystem might do worse under this model. And I understand that moving to such a model will cause great disruption and pain to the broader film industry. But the studios themselves are likely to do better in a direct distribution model where they reach a broader market at lower effective prices to the end customer. This is what happens in digital distribution. Prices come down, markets expand, customers see lower prices and broader availability. Producers do better. Everyone else does worse.

But for some reason the fim industry doesn't want to move to the new model. They want to stick with scarcity. So they lost a transaction last night. And they lose transactions every night, to piracy, to competing forms of entertainment, and possibly to apathy brought about by frustration. Such a shame.
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/01/scar...ess-model.html





Typing at 255 WPM Shouldn't Cost $4000: Plover, the Open Source Steno System
Mel Chua

"Imagine if programming required a special computer that couldn't connect to the internet or run games or do anything else except write computer software, and that it sold for $1,500. What do you think the state of software development would look like?"

I'm talking with Mirabai Knight, sole proprietor of StenoKnight CART Services, one of a small handful of providers of live captioning. I'm personally interested in this for a few reasons: first, I grew up with a severe hearing loss. However, like 98% of the 35 million deaf and hard of hearing people in the USA, I consider ASL (American Sign Language) a gorgeous language that I can't fluently understand. CART (Communication Access Realtime Transcription) offers an alternative option for folks like me; a stenographer sits either remotely or in the classroom, meeting, theatre, or wherever you are, and realtime captions stream to a projector screen, your laptop, your cellphone... it's like having closed-captioning for your life.

Second, I'm an open source geek, and Mirabai is describing the sort of locked-down proprietary domain that makes my blood boil. The equipment and software and training is so expensive that basically only people who intend to do it as a profession have any access to it; they buy $1,000 student hardware and $500 student software (professional software is $4,000) and then pay $300 or more per month to get dictated at by "readers" at for-profit schools geared towards the narrow domain of court transcriptions.

But it wasn't until Mirabai mentioned that she could get me to type 240 WPM on $45 of equipment that I really perked up. I'm a pretty fast typist, averaging 120-160 wpm on qwerty, but hand and shoulder troubles prevent me from going at it for more than an hour at a time, and even my flying fingers can't keep up with my racing thoughts. In contrast, Mirabai explained, steno is every bit as efficient as human speech and kinder on the hands, so it sounds like it should be the perfect thing for geeks. However, it's been forced into undeserved obscurity by its high entry cost and inaccessible design.

So last year, armed with a little free time, a few geek friends, and a Python programmer named Josh Lifton, she set out to change exactly that. The result is Plover, an open source stenography suite that works with a $45 gaming keyboard (not $1,000 hardware); the software is, of course, free. The Linux version is now complete, and a developer named Hesky Fisher has created a semi-functional Windows port that remains a work in progress; you can play around with an interactive online demo to get a basic idea of how steno would work with your keyboard, watch one of Mirabai's (captioned) talks on Plover, and check out the project wiki at http://ploversteno.org.

Plover isn't just a straight-out copy-paste of existing proprietary CART software; it also has several feature advantages over them. Most steno software has a time-based buffer, forcing the user to conform to the software's timing; Plover is designed the other way around, so the software responds to a human, and typists can take their time to think and control the pacing of their words. Plover is also the first steno software of any kind that follows the Unix design principle of modularity, acting essentially as a keyboard emulator - no different from any other alternative input option such as on-screen keyboards for tablets or input methods for the disabled. In contrast, proprietary steno programs contain full-fledged word processors that typists are then forced to use. "They have file managers, separate display and print settings for all text, and a whole host of other things that reinvent the wheel," Mirabai explained.

This complexity is frequently unnecessary. "My $4,000 steno machine malfunctioned at my afternoon class today. But for backup I always carry a qwerty keyboard that works with Plover, so I was still able to do my job. My court reporting software comes with a four-inch-thick manual that starts with "how to move the mouse"; goes through to automatic indexing, form filling, audio synchronization, and file management; and finishes with regular expressions. The software I used today to provide CART with Plover? [Open-source text editor] Gedit, with the font size increased to 28. The end."

Of course, stenography is difficult to learn, and the "just keep trying to type and you'll eventually get it" of professional steno schools seems... pedagogically suboptimal; typing up jury charges for three hours straight is enough to put anyone into a stupor. They're also expensive and have high dropout rates. "I don't want to be cynical," Mirabai told me, "but many of these for-profit schools make a tidy packet selling the $1,000 machine to all the incoming students, then buying it back for $300 when they drop out, and selling it again to another newbie."

That's why Mirabai is recruiting volunteer developers for Hover Plover, a series of arcade-style minigames for learning steno. She's thinking of a simple 2D platformer for one-stroke practice, a top-down space shooter for multi-stroke word and dictionary definition practice ("This might appeal to RPG lovers," Mirabai notes -- "building your own word hoard out of the spare parts floating around in your head"), and something like Guitar Hero for rhythm practice. "Most people in steno school get up to 100 WPM within the first six months or so. Then it takes them between two and six years to get the other 125 WPM, although I went from 0 to 255 WPM in a year and a half. But if someone's just using steno for RSI reasons or to increase the fluency of their writing or coding, 100 WPM is plenty fast for daily use; they can proceed and build speed naturally as they continue to use the software." Other developers have started making training tools as well; Pragma Nolint recently released Fly, a program that allows Plover users to do drill practice with their dictionaries.

I asked Mirabai what motivated her work on Plover. Her answer was so enthusiastic and eloquent that I've simply quoted it below in its entirety.

"Well, there are 547 registered ASL (American Sign Language) interpreters in New York State. (Ed. note: Mirabai did an interview on "That Keith Wann Show" on how CART and ASL are complementary rather than competitive.) As far as I can tell, there are fewer than 20 CART providers. Steno schools are shutting down. People are starting to consider it obsolete technology, because they're all holding out for natural language speech recognition, which has been "right around the corner" for the last 20 years. That's because they figure if people have been talking to computers on Star Trek since the '60s, it must already be a solved problem! The problem is that speech recognition, since it relies on matching waveforms probabilistically rather than semantically, is pretty much unable to cope with poor quality audio, nonstandard accents, homonyms, neologisms, mumbling, and a host of other common complications that crop up when transcribing speech in realtime."

"I know how useful steno is, not just for transcribing realtime speech, but for composing text at the speed of thought - and with fewer keystrokes than letter-for-letter typing systems, which makes steno more efficient, more portable, more ergonomic, more accurate, and faster than anything else out there. It's useful to FOSS geeks, accessibility mavens, video gamers, writers, and speed demons; my "What is Steno Good For" series goes into each of those in turn."

"Even if steno were only used to provide captioning for people with hearing loss (and central auditory processing disorder, autism, ADHD, kids learning how to read, speakers of language other than English who find it easier to comprehend by eye than by ear... The list goes on), we need many, many, many more people to do it. I also think that people with speech disabilities could be a potential power user base. It's the only input system that can let people speak at typical rates of speech just using their fingers. We've reached out to Roger Ebert, but he felt it was too much of an old dog new tricks situation. If you know of any people with speech disabilities who'd be willing to try it out, please let me know."

Mary Gardiner recently mentioned Plover in her PyConAu keynote, pointing out some of the things the fledgling project needs help with: testers to try out of the software, developers to work on feature implementation, cross-platform porting, and game development; visual and sound artists and game designers for Hover Plover... and help with making Plover a sustainable project, which may mean donations of time, equipment, money, or business model expertise. "I'm about tapped out of my own money," Mirabai explained. "I've put about $3,000 into it so far, and I don't think I have enough spare cash to bankroll the development of a whole game." We've since started looking for game development students who might be able to take on parts of Hover Plover as a class or capstone project.

"You're a great evangelist for this," I told her at the end of our interview.

"I'm just obsessed, is all," Mirabai responded. "I dream about it. Thanks so much for giving me a voice. Sometimes I tell people "I can type 240 words a minute" and they're like "Yeah, and? Who cares?" but sometimes people are like "Dude! That's so awesome! I wanna do that!" and that's when I think this thing actually has a chance."

For more on Mirabai and Plover, read her 2010 interview with Leigh Honeywell and check out the project website at http://ploversteno.org.
http://opensource.com/life/11/12/ope...aring-impaired





Cracking Open the Scientific Process
Thomas Lin

The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867), among others.

For centuries, this is how science has operated — through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate.

The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.”

Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction.

Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.

On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.

And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.

Editors of traditional journals say open science sounds good, in theory. In practice, “the scientific community itself is quite conservative,” said Maxine Clarke, executive editor of the commercial journal Nature, who added that the traditional published paper is still viewed as “a unit to award grants or assess jobs and tenure.”

Dr. Nielsen, 38, who left a successful science career to write “Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science,” agreed that scientists have been “very inhibited and slow to adopt a lot of online tools.” But he added that open science was coalescing into “a bit of a movement.”

On Thursday, 450 bloggers, journalists, students, scientists, librarians and programmers will converge on North Carolina State University (and thousands more will join in online) for the sixth annual ScienceOnline conference. Science is moving to a collaborative model, said Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiology blogger who is a founder of the conference, “because it works better in the current ecosystem, in the Web-connected world.”

Indeed, he said, scientists who attend the conference should not be seen as competing with one another. “Lindsay Lohan is our competitor,” he continued. “We have to get her off the screen and get science there instead.”

Facebook for Scientists?

“I want to make science more open. I want to change this,” said Ijad Madisch, 31, the Harvard-trained virologist and computer scientist behind ResearchGate, the social networking site for scientists.

Started in 2008 with few features, it was reshaped with feedback from scientists. Its membership has mushroomed to more than 1.3 million, Dr. Madisch said, and it has attracted several million dollars in venture capital from some of the original investors of Twitter, eBay and Facebook.

A year ago, ResearchGate had 12 employees. Now it has 70 and is hiring. The company, based in Berlin, is modeled after Silicon Valley startups. Lunch, drinks and fruit are free, and every employee owns part of the company.

The Web site is a sort of mash-up of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, with profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and “like” and “follow” buttons (but without baby photos, cat videos and thinly veiled self-praise). Only scientists are invited to pose and answer questions — a rule that should not be hard to enforce, with discussion threads about topics like polymerase chain reactions that only a scientist could love.

Scientists populate their ResearchGate profiles with their real names, professional details and publications — data that the site uses to suggest connections with other members. Users can create public or private discussion groups, and share papers and lecture materials. ResearchGate is also developing a “reputation score” to reward members for online contributions.

ResearchGate offers a simple yet effective end run around restrictive journal access with its “self-archiving repository.” Since most journals allow scientists to link to their submitted papers on their own Web sites, Dr. Madisch encourages his users to do so on their ResearchGate profiles. In addition to housing 350,000 papers (and counting), the platform provides a way to search 40 million abstracts and papers from other science databases.

In 2011, ResearchGate reports, 1,620,849 connections were made, 12,342 questions answered and 842,179 publications shared. Greg Phelan, chairman of the chemistry department at the State University of New York, Cortland, used it to find new collaborators, get expert advice and read journal articles not available through his small university. Now he spends up to two hours a day, five days a week, on the site.

Dr. Rajiv Gupta, a radiology instructor who supervised Dr. Madisch at Harvard and was one of ResearchGate’s first investors, called it “a great site for serious research and research collaboration,” adding that he hoped it would never be contaminated “with pop culture and chit-chat.”

Dr. Gupta called Dr. Madisch the “quintessential networking guy — if there’s a Bill Clinton of the science world, it would be him.”

The Paper Trade

Dr. Sönke H. Bartling, a researcher at the German Cancer Research Center who is editing a book on “Science 2.0,” wrote that for scientists to move away from what is currently “a highly integrated and controlled process,” a new system for assessing the value of research is needed. If open access is to be achieved through blogs, what good is it, he asked, “if one does not get reputation and money from them?”

Changing the status quo — opening data, papers, research ideas and partial solutions to anyone and everyone — is still far more idea than reality. As the established journals argue, they provide a critical service that does not come cheap.

“I would love for it to be free,” said Alan Leshner, executive publisher of the journal Science, but “we have to cover the costs.” Those costs hover around $40 million a year to produce his nonprofit flagship journal, with its more than 25 editors and writers, sales and production staff, and offices in North America, Europe and Asia, not to mention print and distribution expenses. (Like other media organizations, Science has responded to the decline in advertising revenue by enhancing its Web offerings, and most of its growth comes from online subscriptions.)

Similarly, Nature employs a large editorial staff to manage the peer-review process and to select and polish “startling and new” papers for publication, said Dr. Clarke, its editor. And it costs money to screen for plagiarism and spot-check data “to make sure they haven’t been manipulated.”

Peer-reviewed open-access journals, like Nature Communications and PLoS One, charge their authors publication fees — $5,000 and $1,350, respectively — to defray their more modest expenses.

The largest journal publisher, Elsevier, whose products include The Lancet, Cell and the subscription-based online archive ScienceDirect, has drawn considerable criticism from open-access advocates and librarians, who are especially incensed by its support for the Research Works Act, introduced in Congress last month, which seeks to protect publishers’ rights by effectively restricting access to research papers and data.

In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times last week, Michael B. Eisen, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a founder of the Public Library of Science, wrote that if the bill passes, “taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.”

In an e-mail interview, Alicia Wise, director of universal access at Elsevier, wrote that “professional curation and preservation of data is, like professional publishing, neither easy nor inexpensive.” And Tom Reller, a spokesman for Elsevier, commented on Dr. Eisen’s blog, “Government mandates that require private-sector information products to be made freely available undermine the industry’s ability to recoup these investments.”

Mr. Zivkovic, the ScienceOnline co-founder and a blog editor for Scientific American, which is owned by Nature, was somewhat sympathetic to the big journals’ plight. “They have shareholders,” he said. “They have to move the ship slowly.”

Still, he added: “Nature is not digging in. They know it’s happening. They’re preparing for it.”

Science 2.0

Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has refused to conduct peer review for or submit papers to commercial journals. “I got tired of giving free labor,” he said, to “these very rich for-profit companies.”

Dr. Aaronson is also an active member of online science communities like MathOverflow, where he has earned enough reputation points to edit others’ posts. “We’re not talking about new technologies that have to be invented,” he said. “Things are moving in that direction. Journals seem noticeably less important than 10 years ago.”

Dr. Leshner, the publisher of Science, agrees that things are moving. “Will the model of science magazines be the same 10 years from now? I highly doubt it,” he said. “I believe in evolution.

“When a better system comes into being that has quality and trustability, it will happen. That’s how science progresses, by doing scientific experiments. We should be doing that with scientific publishing as well.”

Matt Cohler, the former vice president of product management at Facebook who now represents Benchmark Capital on ResearchGate’s board, sees a vast untapped market in online science.

“It’s one of the last areas on the Internet where there really isn’t anything yet that addresses core needs for this group of people,” he said, adding that “trillions” are spent each year on global scientific research. Investors are betting that a successful site catering to scientists could shave at least a sliver off that enormous pie.

Dr. Madisch, of ResearchGate, acknowledged that he might never reach many of the established scientists for whom social networking can seem like a foreign language or a waste of time. But wait, he said, until younger scientists weaned on social media and open-source collaboration start running their own labs.

“If you said years ago, ‘One day you will be on Facebook sharing all your photos and personal information with people,’ they wouldn’t believe you,” he said. “We’re just at the beginning. The change is coming.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/s...aboration.html





Apple Unveils App and Tools for Digital Textbooks
Brian X. Chen and Nick Wingfield

Apple wants students to bid farewell to the days of lugging around backpacks of heavy textbooks, and to welcome the iPad tablet as their new all-in-one reading device.

On Thursday the company released iBooks 2, a free app that will support digital textbooks that can display interactive diagrams, audio and video. At a news conference, the company demonstrated a biology textbook featuring 3-D models, searchable text, photo galleries and flash cards for studying. Apple said high school textbooks from its initial publishing partners, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, would cost $15 or less.

“Education is deep in our DNA and it has been from the very beginning,” said Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, at the event at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Apple also announced a free tool called iBooks Author, a piece of Macintosh software that allows people to make these interactive textbooks. The tool includes templates designed by Apple, which publishers and authors can customize to suit their content. It requires no programming knowledge and will be available Thursday.

The company also unveiled the iTunes U app for the iPad, which allows teachers to build an interactive syllabus for their coursework. Students can load the syllabus in iTunes U and, for example, tap to open an electronic textbook and go directly to the assigned chapter. Teachers can use iTunes U to create full online courses with podcasts, video, documents and books.

Apple’s push into textbooks brought with it far less buzz than is usual with the company’s new product announcements, in part because of an unusual spoiler. In “Steve Jobs,” the biography that was published in October shortly after Apple’s former chief executive died, Mr. Jobs declared that he wanted to transform the textbook market with the iPad.

Mr. Jobs told the book’s author, Walter Isaacson, that he wanted to hire well-known textbook writers to create electronic versions of their books. He said that Apple could sidestep the state certification process for K-12 textbooks by making them available free for iPads.

By most estimates, Apple has not captured as much of the electronic book market with the iPad and its iBookstore as its chief rival in the business, Amazon, has with the Kindle e-reader.

But while Amazon was a much earlier entrant into the e-books business, it has been less successful in the education market.

Amazon in 2009 announced plans to target the textbook publishing industry with the Kindle DX, a larger version of its e-reader. Not only did Amazon fail to make a dent in the digital textbook market, it also did not impress students. For instance, at Princeton, one of the universities that offered a Kindle DX pilot program, students complained about the device’s sluggishness, lack of color and limited interactivity, according to the university’s student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian.

Education is where Apple has an advantage against Amazon. Apple has a deep and longstanding connection with the education market that could serve it well as it enters the textbook business. Even as its Macintosh computers were shunned by big purchasers of technology inside corporations in decades past, Apple found success selling them to K-12 schools and colleges.

The advent of the iPad and iPhone, along with a resurgence in the growth of the Mac, has made Apple products an even more ubiquitous sight on campuses than they are in the general population.

Before Apple formed official partnerships with textbook publishers, some universities had already embraced the iPad as an experimental learning tool for the classroom. In 2010, Seton Hill University, George Fox University and Abilene Christian University began pilot programs, in which students received iPads as part of their tuition and instructors were trained to use mobile software to teach their courses.

The base price of an iPad is $500, but that cost is inconsequential when considering the lower prices of digital textbooks purchased through iBooks, says Bill Rankin, a professor of medieval studies at Abilene Christian University. In 2008, Mr. Rankin helped start a pilot program in his school where students and teachers used iPhones in the classroom. He explained that textbook publishers typically mark up the prices of print textbooks by six times, because they predict the books will be resold six times, and therefore students would quickly get their money’s worth after purchasing iPads.

Mr. Rankin predicted that with digital textbooks, publishers will realize they can sell more titles for less money, which would drive down overall costs of textbooks both in print and digitally.

He called Apple’s new education apps and tools “revolutionary,” because they give teachers, authors and publishers the ability to create and share books easily. He compared this to how Apple’s App Store democratized the way software was distributed.

“This is something we’ve been dreaming about for years,” he said. “And to see the first steps of this being realized is immensely exciting.”

However, an executive at CourseSmart, an electronic textbook provider that offers digital textbooks for the iPad, iPhone and Android devices, said in response to Apple’s announcements that it was an issue that the company’s digital textbooks would be exclusively available for Apple products.

“Based on the fact that you have to mandate a specific device, that’s going to be difficult for school districts to decide students are going to take their strained budgets to purchase these devices,” said Jill Ambrose, chief marketing officer at CourseSmart, in an interview.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...tal-textbooks/





The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
Dan Wineman

Apple just released iBooks Author, a free Mac app for creating digital books for the new version of iBooks. I haven’t played with it much, but so far it looks like a very good tool. However, a curious thing happens when you go to export your work in iBooks format:

This restriction — that iBooks can be sold only in the iBookstore — isn’t enforced on a technical level. You can save the document, move it to your iPad in any of the usual ways (including just emailing it to yourself), and it happily opens in the iBooks app.

But if you look at the end-user license agreement (EULA) for iBooks Author, accessible via the app’s About box, the following bold note appears at the top:

IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

And in section 2:

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:
(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.

In other words: Apple is trying to establish a rule that whatever I create with this application, if I sell it, I have to give them a cut. And iBooks Author is free, so this arrangement sounds pretty reasonable.

Here’s the problem: I didn’t agree to it. Apple wants me to believe I did, of course, just by using the software:

PLEASE READ THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT (“LICENSE”) CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE. BY USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE, YOU ARE AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE, DO NOT INSTALL AND/OR USE THE SOFTWARE.

But that language is in the EULA itself, a contract of adhesion which I was not required to sign (or even indicate my agreement to by clicking) before installing the software. So, to paraphrase: By using this software, you agree that anything you make with it is in part ours. But if it can say that and have legal force, can’t it say anything? Isn’t this the equivalent of a car dealer trying to bind you to additional terms by sticking a contract in the glove compartment? By driving this car, you agree to get all your oil changes from Honda of Cupertino?

Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented. I’m sure it’s commonplace with enterprise software, but the difference is that those contracts are negotiated by corporate legal departments and signed the old-fashioned way, with pen and ink and penalties and termination clauses. A by-using-you-agree-to license that oh by the way asserts rights over a file format? Unheard of, in my experience.

When I make something myself, no matter what software I use to make it, then — assuming it doesn’t infringe any copyrights — it’s my right to distribute it however I want, in whatever format I choose, for free or not. I don’t lose the right to publish my novel if Microsoft determines that I wrote it using a pirated copy of Word. Would I lose that right if I tried to sell my iBook outside of the iBookstore and Apple got wind of it? I don’t know; we’re in uncharted waters here. Or how about this: for a moment I’ll stipulate that Apple’s EULA is valid and I’ve agreed to it implicitly by using the software. Now suppose I create an iBook and give it to someone else who has never downloaded iBooks Author and is not party to the EULA, and that person sells it on their own website. What happens now?

In ensuring that the App Store remains the only legitimate market for iOS apps, Apple doesn’t claim any legal rights to the content I create using its Xcode toolset. Instead, they enforce technical restrictions; apps must be cryptographically signed by Apple in order to run on unaltered iOS devices. Is this a good situation? For Apple and for novice users, maybe, but for developers it sucks and causes massive headaches. But in a way it’s better than a world in which software can assert whatever rights it wants over your stuff just by hiding a few paragraphs in its glove compartment.
http://venomousporridge.com/post/161...-eula-audacity





As Demand for E-Books Soars, Libraries Struggle to Stock Their Virtual Shelves
Christian Davenport

Kindles, Nooks and iPads can do many amazing things, but they can’t bump you ahead in line at the Reston Regional Library. In fact, if you want to borrow a book, it may be quicker to put down your sleek new device and head into the stacks.

Checking out e-books without having to leave home — just as you would buy a title online: click and boom, there it is — might be the fastest-growing segment in the library business these days. But the experience is often far from the on-demand satisfaction people have come to expect from their laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Want to take out the new John Grisham? Get in line. As of Friday morning, 288 people were ahead of you in the Fairfax County Public Library system, waiting for one of 43 copies. You’d be the 268th person waiting for “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” with 47 copies. And the Steve Jobs biography? Forget it. The publisher, Simon & Schuster, doesn’t make any of its digital titles available to libraries.

Frustration is building on all sides: among borrowers who can’t get what they want when they want it; among librarians trying to stock their virtual shelves and working with limited budgets and little cooperation from some publishers; and among publishers who are fearful of piracy and wading into a digital future that could further destabilize their industry. In many cases, the publishers are limiting the number of e-books made available to libraries.

Already, the exploding demand for e-books has changed how libraries operate. Traditionally, going to the library has been like going to Wal-Mart, said Paula Isett, outreach specialist with the Maryland Department of Education, who consults with the state’s libraries.

“Everything you need and want is there,” she said. “There are unlimited books, and if a library doesn’t have a book, they can get it. . . . Our e-book library is not like that. There is such demand, and we’re struggling to keep up with it.”

Now libraries are increasingly faced with a delicate balancing act: How much of their acquistion money should be spent on print books, and how much on digital content?

Accelerating growth

Even though Maryland’s entire library system more than doubled its inventory in the past couple of years, it has fewer than 10,000 copyrighted e-books available. Meanwhile, the number of e-book checkouts across the state almost quadrupled in that time, to 266,000 last year.

Librarians are seeing the growth accelerate. In September, Amazon announced that for the first time, its hugely popular Kindle devices would be able to download e-books from libraries. In the past few weeks, there has been a post-holiday surge as millions of people unwrapped iPads, Nook Colors, Kindle Fires and other e-readers.

In the District, where the library budget has been slashed so much in recent years that the system considered closing its main branch on Sundays, e-book checkouts grew 116 percent from 2010 to 2011. And there were more checkouts in the first quarter of this fiscal year than there were in all of the previous year, said Ginnie Cooper, chief librarian of the D.C. Public Library system.

E-books now account for 2 percent of the system’s total circulation, she said. But at a recent meeting, Cooper asked her branch managers to predict what that figure would be in five years.

“The lowest prediction was 15 percent, and some said they thought it would be half of what we do,” Cooper said.

In Fairfax, officials more than doubled the inventory of e-book copies from 2010 to 2011, to more than 10,000, but demand for the books tripled in that time. Now the average wait time is three weeks. Of course, there can also be lengthy waits for hardcover and paperback books, although those waits are usually for current bestsellers while older titles are generally available.

By contrast, on a typical day, about 80 to 85 percent of the system’s e-books are checked out, said Elizabeth Rhodes, the collection services coordinator for the Fairfax library system. But after the holidays, when many people received e-readers, 98 percent of the collection was spoken for.

And thousands of books are simply unavailable — not because they’re checked out, but because many publishers have strictly limited the number of e-books made available to libraries or have withheld them altogether.

Wary of piracy and the devastation it has caused the music and film industries, Penguin recently put its new e-book titles off-limits. Like Simon & Schuster, Macmillan doesn’t make its e-book content available to libraries. And last year, HarperCollins announced that it would require libraries to renew licenses for e-books after 26 checkouts, outraging some librarians.

Several library systems have pushed back against publishers who limit their content, refusing to buy from them and speaking out about how such restrictions upend more than 200 years of collaboration between publishers and libraries to make information available to the public.

Publishers have bristled at the criticism, saying that they have long supported libraries and that there are legitimate concerns about piracy.

In November, when it announced that it was withholding its new e-books from libraries, Penguin said it has “always placed a high value on the role that libraries can play in connecting our authors with our readers. However, due to new concerns about the security of our digital editions, we find it necessary to delay the availability of our new titles in the digital format while we resolve these concerns with our business partners.”

Piracy is a real concern that has cost publishers tens of millions, said Albert Greco, a professor at the Fordham University business school who specializes in publishing.

“U.S. government departments and agencies have been hacked,” he said. “If they can be hacked, think about the local public library in Alexandria, Virginia. The odds are its firewall is not as good as the Defense Department’s.”

‘Fluid and dynamic time’

Publishers are also struggling to cope with vast changes in the industry, as brick-and-mortar stores such as Borders go under and online vendors such as Amazon have started selling e-books for far less than the print editions.

“It is a fluid and dynamic time, and many publishers are reevaluating their business model as it relates to retail and libraries,” said David Burleigh, a spokesman for OverDrive Inc., which serves as an intermediary between publishers and libraries.

In the short term, libraries may not be able to meet customer demand for e-books, he said.

“But it’s still very early,” he said. “E-books have just really grown significantly in the last couple of years. . . . Libraries have had decades to build their physical catalogues.”

Cooper, the District’s chief librarian, is confident that library e-book collections will continue to grow and that the market is just experiencing growing pains.

“I can see the day when we will make the choice to lease . . . e-book content rather than a physical copy of the book,” she said.

Until then, expect to wait.

Meg Broad, 22, a recent American University graduate, got a Kindle Fire for Christmas and immediately put herself on waiting lists for several books at the Montgomery County library, including “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell.

Since then, she’s moved up the waiting list, but as of last week, she had still not received any books. So, she said, she used a gift card she also received to buy the first book of “The Hunger Games” trilogy from Amazon.

“And,” she said, “I played a lot of Angry Birds.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...XzP_story.html





The Pirate Bay Launches Promo Platform For Artists
Ernesto

Hollywood and the major music labels frequently describe The Pirate Bay as a piracy haven that ruins their businesses. On the other side, however, there are many independent artists who would like nothing more than to be featured prominently on the world’s largest torrent site. For the latter group The Pirate Bay team have just released a new platform where artists can have their content promoted on the site’s homepage, free of charge.

For many independent artists obscurity is a bigger problem than piracy, but it’s a problem that The Pirate Bay hopes to solve.

Today the largest torrent site on the Internet rolled out a new promotion platform for filmmakers, musicians, writers and all other artists alike. To help them reach an audience of tens of millions of people, The Pirate Bay is offering the artists a prime advertising spot on the site’s homepage, replacing the iconic logo.

True to The Pirate Bay spirit, the Promo Bay campaigns are free of charge.

“As you might have seen we sometimes replace our front page logo with others. Sometimes we link to important political issues like internet censorship and sometimes it’s to some cool indie musicians we like. We would now like to improve this feature,” The Pirate Bay announces.

Artists who want to participate have to offer something free in return, so a link to the iTunes store wont work, but apart from that pretty much anything goes. The promos can be targeted to a maximum of 3 countries, but if an artist manages to impress the Pirate Bay team, they may choose to promote it worldwide.

The Pirate Bay is no stranger to helping out artists. The site has been one of the key partners of the indie movie distribution platform VODO, and they’ve also run several promotional campaigns for content creators on their own.

On the other hand, many artists are already releasing their work voluntarily on The Pirate Bay, and not just basement bands either. To promote their new single, Radiohead turned to The Pirate Bay in 2009, and Nine Inch Nails have made pretty much all their music available on the torrent site.

Best selling author Paulo Coelho is another dedicated fan of The Pirate Bay, sharing his books on there every time his publisher looks away. “I am openly supporting their site,” Coelho told TorrentFreak when the site’s founders were defending themselves in a Swedish court.

There is little doubt that the new promotion platform will be welcomed by artist all across the globe. Perhaps there will even be a few established names that sign up who want to take advantage of this free advertising opportunity. To those who are about to try we have one piece of advice; please make sure your website can handle the load – with 1.8 billion page views a month a worldwide promotion can be quite a hit.
https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-...rtists-120116/





Where the Hits Are Streaming in 2011

A year ago, I looked at the availability of recent blockbuster hits in online stream and discovered some interesting patterns in online stream offerings. This year, I’m doing the same with the 2011 list of box office hits. The great news is that we appear to see some progress.

2011: Box Office Winners availability

For each movie of the top 100 movies at the box office, I pulled data on for streaming info on Netflix, Amazon on Demand, iTunes, and Vudu. I also pulled up availability of DVDs to use as a yardstick in terms of overall movie availability. The final chart looked like this:

Rank Movie Title Netflix Amazon iTunes Vudu DVD

1 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 No Yes Yes Yes Yes
2 Transformers: Dark of the Moon No Yes Yes Yes Yes
3 The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 No No No No Yes
4 The Hangover Part II No Yes Yes Yes Yes
5 Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides No Yes Yes Yes Yes
6 Fast Five No Yes Yes Yes Yes
7 Cars 2 No Yes Yes Yes Yes
8 Thor No Yes Yes Yes Yes
9 Rise of the Planet of the Apes No Yes Yes Yes Yes
10 Captain America: The First Avenger No Yes Yes Yes Yes
11 The Help No Yes Yes Yes Yes
12 Bridesmaids No Yes Yes Yes Yes
13 Kung Fu Panda 2 No Yes Yes Yes Yes
14 X-Men: First Class No Yes Yes Yes Yes
15 Puss in Boots No No No No No
16 Rio No Yes Yes Yes Yes
17 The Smurfs No Yes Yes Yes Yes
18 Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol No No No No No
19 Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows No No No No No
20 Super 8 No Yes Yes Yes Yes
21 Rango No Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only Yes
22 Horrible Bosses No Yes Yes Yes Yes
23 Green Lantern No Yes Yes Yes Yes
24 Hop No No No No No
25 Paranormal Activity 3 No No No No No
26 Just Go With It No Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only Yes
27 Bad Teacher No Yes Yes Yes Yes
28 Cowboys & Aliens No Yes Yes Yes Yes
29 Gnomeo and Juliet Yes Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only Yes
30 The Green Hornet No Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only Yes
31 Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked No No No No No
32 The Lion King (in 3D) No Purchase only (non-3D) Purchase only (non-3D) Purchase only No
33 Real Steel No No Purchase only No Yes
34 Crazy, Stupid, Love. No Yes Yes Yes Yes
35 The Muppets No No No No No
36 Battle: Los Angeles No Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only Yes
37 Immortals No No No No No
38 Zookeeper No Yes Yes Yes Yes
39 Limitless Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
40 Tower Heist No No No No No
41 Contagion No Purchase only Yes Yes Yes
42 Moneyball No Yes Purchase only Purchase only Yes
43 Justin Bieber: Never Say Never Yes Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only Yes
44 Dolphin Tale No Yes Yes Yes Yes
45 Jack and Jill No No No No No
46 No Strings Attached Yes Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only No
47 Mr. Popper’s Penguins No Yes Yes Yes Yes
48 Unknown No No No No Yes
49 The Adjustment Bureau No No No No No
50 Happy Feet Two No No No No No
51 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) No No No No No
52 Water for Elephants No Yes Yes Yes Yes
53 The Lincoln Lawyer No Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only Yes
54 Midnight in Paris No Yes Yes Yes Yes
55 Friends with Benefits No Yes Yes Yes Yes
56 I Am Number Four No Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only Yes
57 Source Code No Yes Yes Yes Yes
58 Insidious Yes Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only Yes
59 Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family No Yes Yes No Yes
60 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules No No No No Yes
61 Footloose (2011) No No No No No
62 The Adventures of Tintin No No No No No
63 Hugo No No No No No
64 The Dilemma No No No No Yes
65 New Year’s Eve No No No No No
66 Arthur Christmas No No No No No
67 War Horse No No No No No
68 Hall Pass No No No No Yes
69 We Bought a Zoo No No No No No
70 Soul Surfer No Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only Yes
71 Final Destination 5 No Yes Yes Yes Yes
72 The Ides of March No No Purchase only Yes Yes
73 The Descendants No No No No No
74 Hanna No Yes Yes Yes Yes
75 Something Borrowed No Yes Yes Yes Yes
76 Spy Kids: All the Time in the World No Yes Yes Yes Yes
77 Scream 4 No Yes Yes Yes Yes
78 Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son No No No No Yes
79 Red Riding Hood No No No No Yes
80 Paul No Yes Yes Yes Yes
81 The Roommate No Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only Yes
82 Jumping the Broom No Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only Yes
83 The Change-Up No Yes Yes No Yes
84 30 Minutes or Less No Yes Yes Yes Yes
85 In Time No No No No No
86 Colombiana No Yes Yes Yes Yes
87 J. Edgar No No No No No
88 Sucker Punch No No No No Yes
89 Larry Crowne No Yes Yes Yes Yes
90 50/50 No No No No Yes
91 Drive (2011) No No No No Yes
92 A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas No No No No No
93 Courageous No Purchase only No Yes Yes
94 The Rite No No No No Yes
95 Arthur (2011) No No No No Yes
96 The Debt No Yes Yes Yes Yes
97 Priest No Purchase only Purchase only Purchase only Yes
98 The Mechanic No Yes Yes Yes Yes
99 Abduction No Yes Yes Yes Yes
100 Beastly No Yes Yes Purchase only Yes

But the information, in a raw form, doesn’t really tell us much. To get a better sense of where we are, we need to re-aggregate the info.
Aggregate rental data

Looking at the rental market, we can now see the aggregation providing us a clearer picture

Netflix Amazon iTunes Vudu DVD
Top 10 0 7 7 7 7
Top 25 0 16 16 16 19
top 50 4 25 25 25 35
Top 100 5 45 44 44 74

The data shows that Netflix appears to be missing the Flix part of its name when it comes to streaming, as it offers only 5 of the top 100 box office winners of 2011. By comparison, pay-per-view seems to be doing a better job at making top hits available for streaming, with the numbers declining as you go deeper into the list. So top movies seem to be widely available this year (in fact, 64 percent of the top 25 movies were available for streaming only 9% short of what’s available on more traditional formats like DVD).

Another interesting thing to note here is that the data seems to be relatively consistent across online pay-per-view services with Amazon, iTunes, and Vudu apparently getting access to the same movies, leading one to think that there is little differentiation between those products (of note: Vudu has actually tried to differentiate on offering by providing 7.1 surround sound and 3D movies to available TV sets.) With prices across those services being roughly the same (movies are renting for $3.99 to $5.99 on average), there is a question as to how those services will be able to provide a differentiated experience in the future.

But the big advantage of doing this again this year is that we can compare the information against last year’s data and see if progress has been made:

Netflix Amazon iTunes Vudu DVD
Top 10 –1 Same Same Same –1
Top 25 –2 +2 +2 +2 +2
top 50 0 Same Same Same –1
Top 100 –5 –3 –2 –2 Same

The story here isn’t that pretty for Netflix, which has lost substantial ground from last year’s position, offering less than half of the hits it used to offer last year. If you think of their recent moves towards creating original content, it appears that Netflix is slowly moving away from its initial strategy of providing online streaming of movies on a subscription basis and moving more to a model more akin to that of a TV network.

Another interesting development here is that online streaming seems to be some losing ground compared to DVDs. One could assume that, as a new technology, online streaming would be gaining ground on DVDs but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Granted, we only have a couple of data points so next year’s data will provide us with a better understanding as to whether hollywood is trying to slow down the progress of online streaming.

Sales Data

If we are witnessing such a slow down, one of the reason may be that movie studios are looking to maximize revenue coming from sales.

Amazon iTunes Vudu DVD
Top 10 7 7 7 7
Top 25 18 18 18 19
top 50 33 34 34 35
Overall 61 62 61 74

The first interesting item to show up here is that we are now seeing remarkable consistency in availability of titles on streaming services. However, the availability of legal movie streams is still trailing the availability of movies on DVDs. This gap seems to be less pronounced when it comes to the top of the list than when ones goes further back into the box office records.

Once again, looking at how availability this year compared to last year’s availability provides some interesting information:

Amazon iTunes Vudu DVD
Top 10 +1 –1 –1 –1
Top 25 +3 –2 –1 +1
top 50 +6 +5 +4 Same
Overall +5 –2 +4 +1

As opposed to online rentals, sales of streaming movies seem to be gaining on sales of DVDs, with an increasing parity in availability of movies as bits (streams) or plastic (DVDs). This appears to confirm the suspicion that movie studios are trying to protect their sales revenue at the expense of promoting pay-per-view.

Conclusion

The past year has seen an increasing alignment in the libraries of titles offered by online streamers in an on-demand basis. At the same time, we have seen Netflix apparently abandon its strategy of offering popular movies on a subscription basis. Next week, I will look at whether Netflix’s efforts are getting more focused on television streams or whether we are seeing them pull back across the board in terms of availability of more recent content.

We are also seeing Hollywood now treating online as more equivalent to DVD sales, offering titles for sale online at roughly the same rate as they do on DVD. Let’s hope that this trend continues to hold and that the industry sees the wisdom of providing online streams in an earlier release window. A few independent movies have done simultaneous releases online and in theaters this year and Hollywood has a potential to increase its revenues if it were to increasingly go in that direction.

Two sets of data only provide a small view into an overall trend but I promise I will continue growing the data set and revisit those numbers next year, giving us a better sense as to whether there is any changes in this segment of the media distribution puzzle.
http://www.tnl.net/blog/2012/01/14/i...d-2011-movies/





Comcast is the Fastest Broadband Provider in the U.S.
Om Malik

Comcast, the Philadelphia-based cable company, was the fastest broadband service provider in the U.S. during 2011, according to Ookla, a broadband speed test company. Comcast recently announced that it had completed the upgrade of its entire broadband network to newer DOCSIS 3.0 technology that helps enable faster connections. Comcast was followed by Charter Communications, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable and Insight Communications, according to Ookla‘s Net Index. Multichannel News, which initially reported the news noted:

“Comcast and Charter delivered average download speeds of 17.19 Megabits per second, followed by Cablevision at 16.40 Mbps, Cox at 15.76 Mbps, TWC at 14.41 Mbps and Insight at 14.22 Mbps. Verizon Communications fared better than its telco peers with an average download speed of 12.94 Mbps, thanks to FiOS Internet, its fiber-to-the-home service that provides up to 150 Mbps downstream. And overall, Verizon had the highest upstream speeds with an average of 7.41 Mbps. Still, the company’s legacy DSL services dragged down overall speeds.

AT&T delivered an overall average download speed of 4.40 Mbps, according to Net Index data for SBC and Bell South, which are the regional bell operating companies that now comprise AT&T. Qwest Communications, which last year merged with CenturyLink, delivered an average of 6.34 Mbps in 2011, the Net Index data shows.”

Research firm Sanford Bernstein predicts that by 2020, cable operators will control about 70 percent of the U.S. broadband market. The research from Sanford Bernstein predicts that by 2020, AT&T’s U-verse will have 10.1 percent of the market, while Verizon’s FiOS will own about 7.9 percent. Given that Verizon has gotten in bed with cable companies, it doesn’t surprise me that they are not going to be a bigger portion of the broadband pie. Sanford Bernstein data also shows that there is not much competition in the U.Ss when it comes to broadband.

As an observation, these top speeds from cable companies are much slower than the top speeds in other countries such as South Korea, Japan, the Baltic nations and parts of Eastern Europe. Comcast and its cable brethren have to offer their higher bandwidth tiers — 50 Mbps or higher — at more affordable prices in order for those to become widely adopted.

When it comes to broadband, I am one of the fortunate “1 percent” — my average speed on any given day is between 60 Mbps to 95 Mbps (download) and about 75 Mbps (upload), thanks to a fiber-only ISP, WebPass.
http://gigaom.com/broadband/comcast-...er-in-the-u-s/





New Fast Fourier Math Could Give Image Compression 10X Boost
Electronista Staff

MIT researchers have put forward a paper for a new approach to fast Fourier transform math that could provide a major lift to image compression and other signal processing technology. The new technique, discovered by associate professor Dina Katabi and professor Piotr Indyk, divides signals and looks for "sparse" but strong frequencies within each section of the signal. Since it would only need to sample random details from those sparse signals instead of full details, it could speed up the processing time by as much as ten times, MIT said.

One version of the technique would borrow from 4G cellular data processing to find dominant frequencies and quickly find what they need. It would also merge filters during the process to avoid signals that would be too attenuated at the edge of a given filter and thus couldn't be sampled otherwise.

Earlier approaches tried speeding things up, but often broke down if there were too many of these important signals to sample relative to the total number of signals. This approach degrades, MIT said, but unlike before still improves on earlier fast Fourier transforms.

The speed-up could allow for much tighter photo and video compression that could have particular benefits in mobile. High-resolution images or long movies could consume less space and consequently would use less bandwidth and battery life to send. Audio files could also get smaller, and certain kinds of general math would also accelerate.

How soon the new algorithms could reach shipping software and products wasn't mentioned. As math rather than a physical product, though, it could arrive faster than other forms of research.
http://www.electronista.com/articles...or.image.tech/





A 14-Year-Old Could Build 1998's Google Using Her Dad's Credit Card!
Paul Bohm

Technology speeds everything up - more so in some areas than in others. While it's easy to see that erecting a 15-story building in two days is faster than it's used to be done, it's harder to get a grip on the giant strides we're making in software construction. Nonetheless, software is probably the discipline with the most reliably accelerating productivity.

Just a few years ago software wasn't moving all that fast. In those days most programming time was spent on squeezing the maximum performance from CPU and memory and programmers like John Carmack achieved lasting fame for their knack for teasing just a little bit more performance out of machines. And a few years before that, as prog21 points out, even writing a working basic spellchecker was a major achievement. You simply didn't have the memory to store a list of words. Never mind building a really good spellchecker, you'd be busy with optimizing the base case.

But whenever hardware advanced, it only took a jiffy till programmers would again use up all that extra power. At that point in time, software's progress was held back by the (comparatively) slow-moving physical nature of hardware. However computer networks were able to free software from the shackles of hardware: If you built your software right, you could just add more servers as you needed them, instead of relying on manufacturers to provide faster and faster hardware.

Google was among the pioneers of networked architecture and built its service using arrays of cheap commodity hardware from the start. But it wasn't until 2006, when Amazon introduced the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), that the chains of physicality were finally broken for everyone. Now you could add and remove machines from software as needed. This development opened up a whole new way of thinking about software to every programmer on the planet.

Three years later, in 2009 I proclaimed to a friend:

Today a fourteen year old could build 1998's Google using her dad's credit card!

To put that into perspective, there's three parts in play here: 1998, her dad's credit card, and the software engineering knowledge and tools required to build what Google built in 1998. Let's start with 1998: The internet was much smaller back then. By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages, and Larry Page's web crawler had been exploring the web since 1996. The total amount of data downloaded was probably in the ballpark of 200 gigabytes by the end of 1998. Storing 200GB of data on 33 bleeding edge 6GB hard drives at $370 a piece would have cost about $12,210 non-inflation-corrected at that time. That's without the hardware, electricity, nor bandwidth to actually operate machines to fetch and store the data. In 2009 you'd have gotten a 1000GB drive for $74.99 and could have run it from a single computer, while people regularly download more than 200GB a month on unlimited cable broadband.

So getting the data had become cheap enough for our hypothetical teen's dad's credit card. Crunching the numbers would require a few more resources, but 1998's internet was small enough to be crunched on EC2 with her parents's credit card. Serving the data and answering queries on a popular website without feeling sluggish would also require a few more servers. Let's assume 30 servers would handle the peak load for a start (Altavista was running off 20 multi-processor DEC 64-bit Alpha's in 1998). At not-the-cheapest-at-the-time $70 per server-month on Amazon, that would give us an estimated cost ceiling of $2100/month, with the expected cost being more along the lines of $500-$1000/month. Now I'm sure Dad wouldn't appreciate it, but for many people that's in the ballpark of what they pay for rent and thus affordable.

So theoretically speaking it could have been done in 2009. More than that, price-wise it probably could even have been done in 2006 without ever touching any hardware yourself. But of course money wouldn't have been the only difficulty for a hypothetical fourteen year old trying to build Google in 1998 or even 2009. Just because you can build anything you want in theory, doesn't mean you know how to do so in practice.

But not only has hardware gotten cheaper and easier to handle (through software), but during the same time our collective understanding of best practice software engineering has progressed by leaps and bounds as well. In between 2006 and 2009 many more people became acquainted with highly distributed architectures. More tutorials, libraries, and opensource software were written than ever before. Distributed Databases and NoSQL systems garnered a lot of attention. And with distributed version control systems like Git, code reuse and collaborative development became more commonplace. Many people stopped thinking about how to program individual computers altogether, and started thinking only in networked systems. Because of the wealth of information and code available, and a large community concerned with distributed system problems, a lot of things that were difficult a decade earlier, had become fairly easy to do.

Somewhen towards the end of 2009 I realized that writing Google as it was in 1998 didn't seem as daunting a task anymore. Not only was the hardware cheap, and the information on how to do it widely spread, but a lot of the functionality had already been implemented. Distributed Datastores? Check. Batch Data Processing? Check. Web Crawlers? Check. Web Servers? Check. The age of big data had arrived, because self-taught kids who wanted to could now play with it without asking for permission.

So do I think a fourteen year old could have pulled it off? I sure think so, but I realize in 2009 it would have taken a very tenacious fourteen year old. But that was 2009. If you are skeptic about my predictions for the past, how about applying them to today or 2015? How long till the technology that, at the time, precipitated the fastest wealth generation humanity had ever seen, can be replicated by a teenager with next to no budget during summer break? How long till it's something you write as a pet project while learning to program. Our tools are still getting more powerful, and our collective understanding of software problems is still increasing at a rapid pace. Do you think there's an upper ceiling for how good we can get at writing software? Are we close?

A few years ago, it was hard to find a library providing the functionality you'd need to write your application. A few decades ago the concept of reusable shared libraries had to be invented before you could write one. And if you'd wanted to use a hash table, if you even knew what a hash table was, you'd have to write your own. Today programmers have a wealth of collaboratively developed libraries for almost any purpose at their disposal. When you write software today, you're standing on the shoulders of countless giants.

Personally I believe that a large part of the reason we're collectively getting better at building software is that a portion of software written is software for building better tools for building better tools. We're not even close to peak productivity yet. We're so much drowning in solvable problems, that we don't even know what peak productivity in software engineering would look like. Something I realized after moving to the Bay Area and working with some of the best engineers I've ever met at amazing companies like ReMail and Dropbox is that when solving similar hard problems repeatedly, at some point patterns start to emerge. And once you know how to solve a recurrent problem that many people have, you can build something that isn't just useful to you, but to a lot of other people out there as well. And hopefully it will allow them to in turn write even better software.

That's why I decided last November to join the awesome team at Flotype, where we're building something that I believe could end up being almost as influential for software development as shared libraries. Flotype's Bridge makes it possible to write applications that can talk to each other, no matter what programming language they are written in, or what device or platform they are running on. With Bridge you could build reusable services in one language and then proceed to use them from any other language, and have them talk to hundreds of thousands of clients without worrying about scalability.

It's the kind of infrastructure I wish I'd had for each of my previous web projects, but never built because it's a hard problem that requires the full attention of a dedicated team. That said, we're hiring. We're working from a beautiful penthouse overlooking Berkeley and are actively looking for self-driven people who are passionate about writing high-visibility code that might just end up being used by almost every web developer out there.
http://paulbohm.com/2012/01/16/a-14-...s-credit-card/





Kodak Files for Bankruptcy, Secures $950 Million Lifeline

Eastman Kodak Co, which invented the hand-held camera and helped bring the world the first pictures from the moon, has filed for bankruptcy protection, capping a prolonged plunge for one of America's best-known companies.

The more than 130-year-old photographic film pioneer, which had tried to restructure to become a seller of consumer products like cameras, said it had also obtained a $950 million, 18-month credit facility from Citigroup to keep it going.

The loan and bankruptcy protection from U.S. trade creditors may give Kodak the time it needs to find buyers for some of its 1,100 digital patents, the key to its remaining value, and to reshape its business while continuing to pay its 17,000 workers.

"The board of directors and the entire senior management team unanimously believe that this is a necessary step and the right thing to do for the future of Kodak," Chairman and Chief Executive Antonio Perez said in a statement.

"Now we must complete the transformation by further addressing our cost structure and effectively monetizing non-core intellectual-property assets. We look forward to working with our stakeholders to emerge a lean, world-class, digital imaging and materials science company," he added.

At end September, the group had total assets of $5.1 billion and liabilities of $6.75 billion.

Kodak said it and its U.S. subsidiaries had filed for Chapter 11 business reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Non-U.S. subsidiaries were not covered by the filing and would continue to honor all obligations to their suppliers, it added.

A Fallen Icon

Kodak once dominated its industry and its film was the subject of a popular Paul Simon song, but it failed to embrace more modern technologies quickly enough, such as the digital camera -- ironically, a product it even invented.

Its downfall hit its Rust Belt hometown of Rochester, New York, with employment there falling to about 7,000 from more than 60,000 in Kodak's heyday.

Its market value has sunk to below $150 million from $31 billion 15 years ago.

In recent years, Chief Executive Perez has steered Kodak's focus more toward consumer and commercial printers.

But that failed to restore annual profitability, something Kodak has not seen since 2007, or arrest a cash drain that has made it difficult for Kodak to meet its substantial pension and other benefits obligations to its workers and retirees.

Perez said bankruptcy protection would enable Kodak to continue to work to maximize the value of its technology assets, such as digital-imaging patents it says are used in virtually every modern digital camera, smartphone and tablet. The company has also built up patented printing technology.

Kodak said it was being advised by investment bank Lazard Ltd, which has been helping Kodak look for a buyer for its digital patents.

Other advisers included business-turnaround specialist FTI Consulting Inc, whose vice chairman, Dominic DiNapoli, would serve as chief restructuring officer for Kodak, supporting existing management.

In the last few years, Kodak has used extensive litigation with rivals such as Apple Inc, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd and Taiwan's HTC Corp over those patents as a means to try to generate revenue. Those patents may now be sold through the bankruptcy process.

Walking On The Moon

George Eastman, a high school dropout from upstate New York, founded Kodak in 1880, and began to make photographic plates. To get his business going, he splurged on a second-hand engine for $125.

Within eight years, the Kodak name had been trademarked, and the company had introduced the hand-held camera as well as roll-up film, where it became the dominant producer.

Eastman also introduced the "Wage Dividend" in which the company would pay bonuses to employees based on results.

Nearly a century after Kodak's founding, the astronaut Neil Armstrong used a Kodak camera the size of a shoebox to take pictures as he became in 1969 the first man to walk on the moon.

Those pictures arguably had more viewers than the 80 films that have won Best Picture Oscars and were shot on Kodak film.

Six years after Armstrong's walk, and not long after Simon told his mama not to take his Kodachrome away, Kodak invented the digital camera.

The size of a toaster, it was too big for the pockets of amateur photographers, whose pockets now are stuffed with digital offerings from the likes of Canon, Casio and Nikon.

But rather than develop the digital camera, Kodak put it on the back-burner and spent years watching rivals take market share that it would never reclaim.

In 1994, Kodak spun off a chemicals business, Eastman Chemical Co, which proved to be more successful.

Kodak's final downfall in the eyes of investors began in September when it unexpectedly withdrew $160 million from a credit line, raising worries of a cash shortage. It ended September with $862 million of cash.

Pensions In Focus

In its bankruptcy, Kodak could try to restructure its debts, or perhaps sell all or some of its assets, including the patent portfolio and various businesses.

It is unclear how Kodak will address its pension obligations, many of which were built up decades ago when U.S. manufacturers offered more generous retirement and medical benefits than they do now. Many retirees hail from Britain where Kodak has been manufacturing since 1891.

The company had promised to inject $800 million over the next decade into its UK pension fund. It now remains unclear how that country's pension regulator might seek to preserve some or all of the company's obligations to British pensioners.

(Reporting by Nick Brown, Caroline Humer and Jonathan Stempel; Editing by Mark Bendeich)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80I08G20120119





Your iPhone Was Built, In Part, By 13 Year-Olds Working 16 Hours A Day For 70 Cents An Hour
Henry Blodget

We love our iPhones and iPads.

We love the prices of our iPhones and iPads.

We love the super-high profit margins of Apple, Inc., the maker of our iPhones and iPads.

And that's why it's disconcerting to remember that the low prices of our iPhones and iPads — and the super-high profit margins of Apple — are only possible because our iPhones and iPads are made with labor practices that would be illegal in the United States.

And it's also disconcerting to realize that the folks who make our iPhones and iPads not only don't have iPhones and iPads (because they can't afford them), but, in some cases, have never even seen them.

This is a complex issue. But it's also an important one. And it's only going to get more important as the world's economies continue to become more intertwined.

Last week, NPR's "This American Life" did a special on Apple's manufacturing. The show featured (among others) the reporting of Mike Daisey, the man who does the one-man stage show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," and The NYT's Nicholas Kristof, whose wife is from China.

You can read a transcript of the whole show here. Here are some details:

• The Chinese city of Shenzhen is where most of our "crap" is made. 30 years ago, Shenzhen was a little village on a river. Now it's a city of 13 million people — bigger than New York.

• Foxconn, one of the companies that builds iPhones and iPads (and products for many other electronics companies), has a factory in Shenzhen that employs 430,000 people.

• There are 20 cafeterias at the Foxconn Shenzhen plant. They each serve 10,000 people.

• One Foxconn worker Mike Daisey interviewed, outside factory gates manned by guards with guns, was a 13-year old girl. She polished the glass of thousands of new iPhones a day.

• The 13-year old said Foxconn doesn't really check ages. There are on-site inspections, from time to time, but Foxconn always knows when they're happening. And before the inspectors arrive, Foxconn just replaces the young-looking workers with older ones.

• In the first two hours outside the factory gates, Daisey meets workers who say they are 14, 13, and 12 years old (along with plenty of older ones). Daisey estimates that about 5% of the workers he talked to were underage.

• Daisey assumes that Apple, obsessed as it is with details, must know this. Or, if they don't, it's because they don't want to know.

• Daisey visits other Shenzhen factories, posing as a potential customer. He discovers that most of the factory floors are vast rooms filled with 20,000-30,000 workers apiece. The rooms are quiet: There's no machinery, and there's no talking allowed. When labor costs so little, there's no reason to build anything other than by hand.

• A Chinese working "hour" is 60 minutes — unlike an American "hour," which generally includes breaks for Facebook, the bathroom, a phone call, and some conversation. The official work day in China is 8 hours long, but the standard shift is 12 hours. Generally, these shifts extend to 14-16 hours, especially when there's a hot new gadget to build. While Daisey is in Shenzhen, a Foxconn worker dies after working a 34-hour shift.

• Assembly lines can only move as fast as their slowest worker, so all the workers are watched (with cameras). Most people stand.

• The workers stay in dormitories. In a 12-by-12 cement cube of a room, Daisey counts 15 beds, stacked like drawers up to the ceiling. Normal-sized Americans would not fit in them.

• Unions are illegal in China. Anyone found trying to unionize is sent to prison.

• Daisey interviews dozens of (former) workers who are secretly supporting a union. One group talked about using "hexane," an iPhone screen cleaner. Hexane evaporates faster than other screen cleaners, which allows the production line to go faster. Hexane is also a neuro-toxin. The hands of the workers who tell him about it shake uncontrollably.

• Some workers can no longer work because their hands have been destroyed by doing the same thing hundreds of thousands of times over many years (mega-carpal-tunnel). This could have been avoided if the workers had merely shifted jobs. Once the workers' hands no longer work, obviously, they're canned.

• One former worker had asked her company to pay her overtime, and when her company refused, she went to the labor board. The labor board put her on a black list that was circulated to every company in the area. The workers on the black list are branded "troublemakers" and companies won't hire them.

• One man got his hand crushed in a metal press at Foxconn. Foxconn did not give him medical attention. When the man's hand healed, it no longer worked. So they fired him. (Fortunately, the man was able to get a new job, at a wood-working plant. The hours are much better there, he says — only 70 hours a week).

• The man, by the way, made the metal casings of iPads at Foxconn. Daisey showed him his iPad. The man had never seen one before. He held it and played with it. He said it was "magic."

Importantly, Shenzhen's factories, as hellish as they are, have been a boon to the people of China. Liberal economist Paul Krugman says so. NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof says so. Kristof's wife's ancestors are from a village near Shenzhen. So he knows of what he speaks. The "grimness" of the factories, Kristof says, is actually better than the "grimness" of the rice paddies.

So, looked at that way, Apple is helping funnel money from rich American and European consumers to poor workers in China. Without Foxconn and other assembly plants, Chinese workers might still be working in rice paddies, making $50 a month instead of $250 a month (Kristof's estimates. In 2010, Reuters says, Foxconn workers were given a raise to $298 per month, or $10 a day, or less than $1 an hour). With this money, they're doing considerably better than they once were. Especially women, who had few other alternatives.

But, of course, the reason Apple assembles iPhones and iPads in China instead of America, is that assembling them here or Europe would cost much, much more — even with shipping and transportation. And it would cost much, much more because, in the United States and Europe, we have established minimum acceptable standards for the treatment and pay of workers like those who build the iPhones and iPads.

Foxconn, needless to say, doesn't come anywhere near meeting these minimum standards.

If Apple decided to build iPhones and iPads for Americans using American labor rules, two things would likely happen:

• The prices of iPhones and iPads would go up
• Apple's profit margins would go down

Neither of those things would be good for American consumers or Apple shareholders. But they might not be all that awful, either. Unlike some electronics manufacturers, Apple's profit margins are so high that they could go down a lot and still be high. And some Americans would presumably feel better about loving their iPhones and iPads if they knew that the products had been built using American labor rules.

In other words, Apple could probably afford to use American labor rules when building iPhones and iPads without destroying its business.

So it seems reasonable to ask why Apple is choosing NOT to do that.

(Not that Apple is the only company choosing to avoid American labor rules and costs, of course — almost all manufacturing companies that want to survive, let alone thrive, have to reduce production costs and standards by making their products elsewhere.)
The bottom line is that iPhones and iPads cost what they do because they are built using labor practices that would be illegal in this country — because people in this country consider those practices grossly unfair.

That's not a value judgment. It's a fact.

So, next time you pick up your iPhone or iPad, ask yourself how you feel about that.
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-child-labor-2012-1





How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work
Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Companies and other economists say that notion is naïve. Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.

To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.

Apple was provided with extensive summaries of The New York Times’s reporting for this article, but the company, which has a reputation for secrecy, declined to comment.

This article is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former Apple employees and contractors — many of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs — as well as economists, manufacturing experts, international trade specialists, technology analysts, academic researchers, employees at Apple’s suppliers, competitors and corporate partners, and government officials.

Privately, Apple executives say the world is now such a changed place that it is a mistake to measure a company’s contribution simply by tallying its employees — though they note that Apple employs more workers in the United States than ever before.

They say Apple’s success has benefited the economy by empowering entrepreneurs and creating jobs at companies like cellular providers and businesses shipping Apple products. And, ultimately, they say curing unemployment is not their job.

“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

‘I Want a Glass Screen’

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?

The answers, almost every time, were found outside the United States. Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad. Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.

In its early days, Apple usually didn’t look beyond its own backyard for manufacturing solutions. A few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, for instance, Mr. Jobs bragged that it was “a machine that is made in America.” In 1990, while Mr. Jobs was running NeXT, which was eventually bought by Apple, the executive told a reporter that “I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.” As late as 2002, top Apple executives occasionally drove two hours northeast of their headquarters to visit the company’s iMac plant in Elk Grove, Calif.

But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing. Guiding that decision was Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs’s death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

The impact of such advantages became obvious as soon as Mr. Jobs demanded glass screens in 2007.

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

In Foxconn City

An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

Foxconn, in statements, declined to speak about specific clients.

“Any worker recruited by our firm is covered by a clear contract outlining terms and conditions and by Chinese government law that protects their rights,” the company wrote. Foxconn “takes our responsibility to our employees very seriously and we work hard to give our more than one million employees a safe and positive environment.”

The company disputed some details of the former Apple executive’s account, and wrote that a midnight shift, such as the one described, was impossible “because we have strict regulations regarding the working hours of our employees based on their designated shifts, and every employee has computerized timecards that would bar them from working at any facility at a time outside of their approved shift.” The company said that all shifts began at either 7 a.m. or 7 p.m., and that employees receive at least 12 hours’ notice of any schedule changes.

Foxconn employees, in interviews, have challenged those assertions.

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Some aspects of the iPhone are uniquely American. The device’s software, for instance, and its innovative marketing campaigns were largely created in the United States. Apple recently built a $500 million data center in North Carolina. Crucial semiconductors inside the iPhone 4 and 4S are manufactured in an Austin, Tex., factory by Samsung, of South Korea.

But even those facilities are not enormous sources of jobs. Apple’s North Carolina center, for instance, has only 100 full-time employees. The Samsung plant has an estimated 2,400 workers.

“If you scale up from selling one million phones to 30 million phones, you don’t really need more programmers,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, who oversaw product development and marketing for Apple until he left in 1990. “All these new companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter — benefit from this. They grow, but they don’t really need to hire much.”

It is hard to estimate how much more it would cost to build iPhones in the United States. However, various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward.

But such calculations are, in many respects, meaningless because building the iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would require transforming the national and global economies. Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility. Other companies that work with Apple, like Corning, also say they must go abroad.

Manufacturing glass for the iPhone revived a Corning factory in Kentucky, and today, much of the glass in iPhones is still made there. After the iPhone became a success, Corning received a flood of orders from other companies hoping to imitate Apple’s designs. Its strengthened glass sales have grown to more than $700 million a year, and it has hired or continued employing about 1,000 Americans to support the emerging market.

But as that market has expanded, the bulk of Corning’s strengthened glass manufacturing has occurred at plants in Japan and Taiwan.

“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

Corning was founded in America 161 years ago and its headquarters are still in upstate New York. Theoretically, the company could manufacture all its glass domestically. But it would “require a total overhaul in how the industry is structured,” Mr. Flaws said. “The consumer electronics business has become an Asian business. As an American, I worry about that, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Asia has become what the U.S. was for the last 40 years.”

Middle-Class Jobs Fade

The first time Eric Saragoza stepped into Apple’s manufacturing plant in Elk Grove, Calif., he felt as if he were entering an engineering wonderland.

It was 1995, and the facility near Sacramento employed more than 1,500 workers. It was a kaleidoscope of robotic arms, conveyor belts ferrying circuit boards and, eventually, candy-colored iMacs in various stages of assembly. Mr. Saragoza, an engineer, quickly moved up the plant’s ranks and joined an elite diagnostic team. His salary climbed to $50,000. He and his wife had three children. They bought a home with a pool.

“It felt like, finally, school was paying off,” he said. “I knew the world needed people who can build things.”

At the same time, however, the electronics industry was changing, and Apple — with products that were declining in popularity — was struggling to remake itself. One focus was improving manufacturing. A few years after Mr. Saragoza started his job, his bosses explained how the California plant stacked up against overseas factories: the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85. Wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities. Rather it was costs like inventory and how long it took workers to finish a task.

“We were told we would have to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays,” Mr. Saragoza said. “I had a family. I wanted to see my kids play soccer.”

Modernization has always caused some kinds of jobs to change or disappear. As the American economy transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing and then to other industries, farmers became steelworkers, and then salesmen and middle managers. These shifts have carried many economic benefits, and in general, with each progression, even unskilled workers received better wages and greater chances at upward mobility.

But in the last two decades, something more fundamental has changed, economists say. Midwage jobs started disappearing. Particularly among Americans without college degrees, today’s new jobs are disproportionately in service occupations — at restaurants or call centers, or as hospital attendants or temporary workers — that offer fewer opportunities for reaching the middle class.

Even Mr. Saragoza, with his college degree, was vulnerable to these trends. First, some of Elk Grove’s routine tasks were sent overseas. Mr. Saragoza didn’t mind. Then the robotics that made Apple a futuristic playground allowed executives to replace workers with machines. Some diagnostic engineering went to Singapore. Middle managers who oversaw the plant’s inventory were laid off because, suddenly, a few people with Internet connections were all that were needed.

Mr. Saragoza was too expensive for an unskilled position. He was also insufficiently credentialed for upper management. He was called into a small office in 2002 after a night shift, laid off and then escorted from the plant. He taught high school for a while, and then tried a return to technology. But Apple, which had helped anoint the region as “Silicon Valley North,” had by then converted much of the Elk Grove plant into an AppleCare call center, where new employees often earn $12 an hour.

There were employment prospects in Silicon Valley, but none of them panned out. “What they really want are 30-year-olds without children,” said Mr. Saragoza, who today is 48, and whose family now includes five of his own.

After a few months of looking for work, he started feeling desperate. Even teaching jobs had dried up. So he took a position with an electronics temp agency that had been hired by Apple to check returned iPhones and iPads before they were sent back to customers. Every day, Mr. Saragoza would drive to the building where he had once worked as an engineer, and for $10 an hour with no benefits, wipe thousands of glass screens and test audio ports by plugging in headphones.

Paydays for Apple

As Apple’s overseas operations and sales have expanded, its top employees have thrived. Last fiscal year, Apple’s revenue topped $108 billion, a sum larger than the combined state budgets of Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Since 2005, when the company’s stock split, share prices have risen from about $45 to more than $427.

Some of that wealth has gone to shareholders. Apple is among the most widely held stocks, and the rising share price has benefited millions of individual investors, 401(k)’s and pension plans. The bounty has also enriched Apple workers. Last fiscal year, in addition to their salaries, Apple’s employees and directors received stock worth $2 billion and exercised or vested stock and options worth an added $1.4 billion.

The biggest rewards, however, have often gone to Apple’s top employees. Mr. Cook, Apple’s chief, last year received stock grants — which vest over a 10-year period — that, at today’s share price, would be worth $427 million, and his salary was raised to $1.4 million. In 2010, Mr. Cook’s compensation package was valued at $59 million, according to Apple’s security filings.

A person close to Apple argued that the compensation received by Apple’s employees was fair, in part because the company had brought so much value to the nation and world. As the company has grown, it has expanded its domestic work force, including manufacturing jobs. Last year, Apple’s American work force grew by 8,000 people.

While other companies have sent call centers abroad, Apple has kept its centers in the United States. One source estimated that sales of Apple’s products have caused other companies to hire tens of thousands of Americans. FedEx and United Parcel Service, for instance, both say they have created American jobs because of the volume of Apple’s shipments, though neither would provide specific figures without permission from Apple, which the company declined to provide.

“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

What’s more, Apple sources say the company has created plenty of good American jobs inside its retail stores and among entrepreneurs selling iPhone and iPad applications.

After two months of testing iPads, Mr. Saragoza quit. The pay was so low that he was better off, he figured, spending those hours applying for other jobs. On a recent October evening, while Mr. Saragoza sat at his MacBook and submitted another round of résumés online, halfway around the world a woman arrived at her office. The worker, Lina Lin, is a project manager in Shenzhen, China, at PCH International, which contracts with Apple and other electronics companies to coordinate production of accessories, like the cases that protect the iPad’s glass screens. She is not an Apple employee. But Mrs. Lin is integral to Apple’s ability to deliver its products.

Mrs. Lin earns a bit less than what Mr. Saragoza was paid by Apple. She speaks fluent English, learned from watching television and in a Chinese university. She and her husband put a quarter of their salaries in the bank every month. They live in a 1,080-square-foot apartment, which they share with their in-laws and son.

“There are lots of jobs,” Mrs. Lin said. “Especially in Shenzhen.”

Innovation’s Losers

Toward the end of Mr. Obama’s dinner last year with Mr. Jobs and other Silicon Valley executives, as everyone stood to leave, a crowd of photo seekers formed around the president. A slightly smaller scrum gathered around Mr. Jobs. Rumors had spread that his illness had worsened, and some hoped for a photograph with him, perhaps for the last time.

Eventually, the orbits of the men overlapped. “I’m not worried about the country’s long-term future,” Mr. Jobs told Mr. Obama, according to one observer. “This country is insanely great. What I’m worried about is that we don’t talk enough about solutions.”

At dinner, for instance, the executives had suggested that the government should reform visa programs to help companies hire foreign engineers. Some had urged the president to give companies a “tax holiday” so they could bring back overseas profits which, they argued, would be used to create work. Mr. Jobs even suggested it might be possible, someday, to locate some of Apple’s skilled manufacturing in the United States if the government helped train more American engineers.

Economists debate the usefulness of those and other efforts, and note that a struggling economy is sometimes transformed by unexpected developments. The last time analysts wrung their hands about prolonged American unemployment, for instance, in the early 1980s, the Internet hardly existed. Few at the time would have guessed that a degree in graphic design was rapidly becoming a smart bet, while studying telephone repair a dead end.

What remains unknown, however, is whether the United States will be able to leverage tomorrow’s innovations into millions of jobs.

In the last decade, technological leaps in solar and wind energy, semiconductor fabrication and display technologies have created thousands of jobs. But while many of those industries started in America, much of the employment has occurred abroad. Companies have closed major facilities in the United States to reopen in China. By way of explanation, executives say they are competing with Apple for shareholders. If they cannot rival Apple’s growth and profit margins, they won’t survive.

“New middle-class jobs will eventually emerge,” said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist. “But will someone in his 40s have the skills for them? Or will he be bypassed for a new graduate and never find his way back into the middle class?”

The pace of innovation, say executives from a variety of industries, has been quickened by businessmen like Mr. Jobs. G.M. went as long as half a decade between major automobile redesigns. Apple, by comparison, has released five iPhones in four years, doubling the devices’ speed and memory while dropping the price that some consumers pay.

Before Mr. Obama and Mr. Jobs said goodbye, the Apple executive pulled an iPhone from his pocket to show off a new application — a driving game — with incredibly detailed graphics. The device reflected the soft glow of the room’s lights. The other executives, whose combined worth exceeded $69 billion, jostled for position to glance over his shoulder. The game, everyone agreed, was wonderful.

There wasn’t even a tiny scratch on the screen.

David Barboza, Peter Lattman and Catherine Rampell contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/b...dle-class.html





EcoATM To Roll-out Automated Phone Recycling Machines Across US
Steve McCaskill

EcoATM is preparing to rollout a fully automated phone recycling machine across the US during 2012.

The machine, which pays cash for a variety of portable electronic devices, was displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and is already available at a number of locations in California.

Instant Cash

Users can receive an instant quote for their mobile phone, MP3 player, tablet or Kindle by placing their device in a metal tray, where a camera identifies it against a database of 4,000 gadgets. The machine then presents a cable which must be plugged in to see if the device is functioning, before offering a quote based on what second hand electronic recycling companies are willing to pay for it.

Should the quote be accepted, the cash is provided immediately.

The company says that the machine can help with the global problem of e-waste, adding that the ecoATM is “a great example of technology solving a problem created by technology.”

“Almost everyone has a collection of used portable electronics stored somewhere,” commented ecoATM chairman and CEO Tom Tullie. ”At ecoATM, we believe strongly in repurposing good electronics that can be refurbished and used by consumers in other markets.”

“We find a second life for about 75 percent of the used devices we collect at the kiosks. For the other 25 percent of devices that are truly at their end of life, we work with either R2-certified or BAN-certified recyclers who reclaim the raw materials and precious metals in an environmentally responsible way,” he added.

Dirty Money

Not all e-waste is disposed of responsibly, with some of it exported illegally to developing countries, where it is processed in lethally unsafe ways. The European parliament has responded by voting for tough Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) disposal rules, however the EU’s five percent target has been labelled as ‘pathetic’ by electronics repair company Comtek.

If the machines were ever to find their way over to the UK, they would have to adhere to a new code of practice introduced by the government which closed a loophole that allowed criminals to sell stolen mobile phones to recycling firms.

It was estimated that prior to the implementation of the code, an estimated 100,000 stolen phones, worth £4 million, were sold to recycling companies each year. The majority of these phones were blocked across all UK networks within 48 hours of being reported stolen, but many of these phones could still be sold abroad.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...cross-us-54379





Why the Video Pros are Moving Away from Apple
Jacqui Cheng

Six months after the launch of Final Cut Pro X (FCPX), Apple's major overhaul to its professional video editing software Final Cut Pro, video pros find themselves increasingly looking at other software options. The new version of Final Cut Pro was controversial—there were significant changes to the Final Cut interface, a plethora of editing features were taken away, and worst of all, Final Cut Pro X was rendered unable to import projects from previous versions of the software. For video editors and producers with years of work using Final Cut Pro, the launch of Final Cut Pro X made it seem like Apple no longer cared for its market of creative professionals.

Is that still the case now, half a year later? TV production company Bunim/Murray recently brought the issue back into the public consciousness by announcing that it was switching from Final Cut Pro to Avid, noting that the company needed "a partner who would understand our long-term needs."

As it turns out, the reaction to Bunim/Murray's announcement from creative pros was, "took them long enough." We spoke to a handful of professionals who work in the video production industry to see how they're feeling now that the dust has settled, and the general consensus appears to be "not good."

Chicken versus the egg

Which came first: Apple's creative pro market shrinking, which might have led to dramatic changes in Final Cut Pro; or Apple's cavalier attitude toward legacy features, which might have frightened video editors? According to the professionals we spoke to, there was already signs of an industry shift to Avid before FCPX came along, but Apple still had a very loyal and dedicated user base that it's now turning away from.

"The perception here is that Apple is more concerned with selling iPads and iPhones than they are with the people who have stuck with them since the 90's, the professional editors and VFX people," said Jude Mull, who works at a post-production facility in Hollywood that processes and digitizes some of your favorite TV shows.

Mull explained that this perception was already there when FCPX was announced, but has only increased since then due to Apple's aggressive attempt to cut and switch up its features. For example, when editing video for TV shows, editors will put together a final Edit Decision List (EDL) with data that essentially tells the post production facility which scenes to keep or cut. "Why Apple decided to do away with EDLs is beyond me. This makes me think they aren't targeting the professional market," Mull told Ars. "When I read Final Cut Pro X didn't have the ability to generate an EDL I figured Apple is targeting a different audience, the Tweeners, people with a little $, time and creativity, the Indie crowd. This looks stupid to even read, so again, kind of baffled."

Mull also pointed out another sore spot among professionals: FCPX no longer allows output to tape. "While ideally the industry is trending towards tapeless, we still live in a world where the Video Assembled Masters and Color Corrected Masters are played out to HD tape formats, generally HDSR and D5. This is a basic function and removing this, while possibly forward thinking with regards to tapeless workflow, is totally counterproductive within the reality of today, that most everybody still goes to tape," he said.

This, combined with the aforementioned inability to import legacy projects, are complete dealbreakers for those who work in the video production industry. Noted production systems and workflow consultant Jon Alper compared Apple's decisions to cut things like tape support and legacy products to the launch of the iMac—that is, the company wanted older formats to be dead (like the floppy drive that never made it into the iMac) and therefore simply got rid of them, demanding the rest of the industry to catch up.

"Not supporting tape-based workflow is forward looking but they 'iMac-ed' it.'" They wanted it to be dead," Alper told Ars. "This was fine for the old Bondi Blue iMac when the buyers of those tools didn't generally have massive investments in Serial, ADB and SCSI peripherals. It's not fine when production houses own and rely on hundreds of thousands (or many millions) [of dollars] in decks, cameras and other gear."

Another filmmaker in Los Angeles, Seth Hancock, agreed that even if FCPX had more of the features that video editors want, the fact that it's so different from previous versions of Final Cut Pro would still push the industry towards the competition.

"If we are taking the time to retrain people for a brand new software—which is what FCPX is—then we might as well use tools that are more industry standards here in L.A. like Avid and, now, Premiere Pro," Hancock told Ars. "There are too many choices and options for better, more professional options that keep us working and employable here in L.A. What's sad is that Apple was destroying Avid and really cutting into their revenue and market share. Now Avid, by default, is going to revert back the to industry standard."

The Mac Pro plays a part, too

The release of FCPX may be the catalyst for driving away industry professionals, but it's not the only contributor to the problem. The fact that the Mac Pro seems to be on Apple's back burner is making professional users nervous and forcing them to begin looking at other—non-Mac—hardware solutions to ensure their future employability.

"This comes at a bad time. Mac Pro is long in the tooth and pundits speculate and seemingly seem to relish encouraging its demise because they can write and function entirely on a MacBook Air and do the FCP tutorials too," Alper said. "Pundits, I might add, who have never dealt with managing seven [years] worth of Antiques Roadshow being repackaged and encoded for the Web. Pundits who have never had 3.5TB single projects."

And it's not just Hollywood feeling that way. Ryan Poirier, who works in the video production department of one of the largest public school districts in the US, agreed that regular updates to the Mac Pro are key in maintaining confidence among the professional crowd.

"Many folks in the industry have the perspective that Apple is willing to cut out the legs from under professionals without warning. And that can make project leads weary of putting full faith into a entire workflow, which goes well beyond the actual editing software," Poirier told Ars. "The simple question of the survival of the features a Mac Pro provides can push workflow managers to migrate over to Windows, where Avid and Adobe can be installed. Professionals must be able count on lasting support for a few years at a time. If there are any doubts, about where the roadmap leads, it's simply not worth the risk of taking that leap of faith. Post-production houses simply can't afford to be caught off guard."

With the current iteration of the Mac Pro about to turn 18 months old—and even at the time of that update, the previous version was nearly two years old—these users are becoming increasingly jaded about Apple's commitment to the pro market. And because Apple's Final Cut products only work on the Mac, the Mac Pro is a big part of the equation when it comes to production houses choosing which software to use.

FCPX ain't all bad

Despite the amount of hatorade being dumped on FCPX by the professional crowd, not everything about it is sour.

"My personal view on FCP X is that it's a brilliant program, provided the user can essentially forget everything they've learned from using the previous Final Cut Pro/ Studio applications and go into it with an open mind. Don't be quick to judge a book by its cover, or give in to all the negative hype," Poirier told Ars. "I may be more optimistic then others by nature, but after learning FCPX in it's current state, I'm more excited about future potential of the application then I am concerned with it's current shortfalls. "

Alper agreed. "There's a lot more 'right' about it than Apple gets credit for," Alper said. "Realtime processing, of course, but I actually think the "metadata" model for media management is, long term, the much better model." In a blog post he wrote after FCPX's release, he went into more detail as to why he believes these elements will help videographers create better products, adding, "These changes will revolutionize video editing."

Alper also took special exception to repeated complaints that the new version of Final Cut Pro looks too much like iMovie, noting that he believes there's a certain level of "pro tools machismo" in the industry that opposes any kind of change that might make it seem easier to do their jobs. "It is a completely valid concern that a tool would be ‘dumbed down’ to make integration into pro workflows a problem or professional level functionality either removed or so deeply hidden as to be useless," he wrote on his blog. "It’s utterly laughable to be worried that a tool you learned with difficulty will now be easier for others to master."

Everyone we spoke to agreed that Apple would have a much better standing among professional users if the company would just acknowledge them a little more and act like their concerns are being listened to. "Apple needs to be a little more open with third parties about how they plan to improve FCP over time. They need to enable those third parties to feel that when FCP improves, they can make more money selling their products," Alper said.

"What Apple could do would be to make it known that they intend to keep the pro market viable is let the pros know you still care!" Mull added. "As it is, everything seems lukewarm."
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...y-and-fast.ars





‘MegaSearch’ Aims to Index Fraud Site Wares
Brian Krebs

A new service aims to be the Google search of underground Web sites, connecting buyers to a vast sea of shops that offer an array of dodgy goods and services, from stolen credit card numbers to identity information and anonymity tools.

A glut of data breaches and stolen card numbers has spawned dozens of stores that sell the information. The trouble is that each shop requires users to create accounts and sign in before they can search for cards.

Enter MegaSearch.cc, which lets potential buyers discover which fraud shops hold the cards they’re looking for without having to first create accounts at each store. This free search engine aggregates data about compromised payment cards, and points searchers to various fraud shops selling them.

According to its creator, the search engine does not store the compromised card numbers or any information about the card holders. Instead, it works with card shop owners to index the first six digits of all compromised account numbers that are for sale. These six digits, also known the “Bank Identification Number” — or BIN — identify which bank issued the cards. Searching by BIN, MegaSearch users are given links to different fraud shops that are currently selling cards issued by the corresponding bank.

I first read about this offering in a blog post by RSA Fraud Action Research Labs. It didn’t take much time poking around a few hacker boards to find the brains behind MegaSearch pitching his idea to the owners of different fraud shops. He agreed to discuss his offering with me via instant message, using the search service as his screen name.

“I’m standing on a big startup that is going to be [referred to as] the ‘underground Google,’” MegaSearch told KrebsOnSecurity. “Many users spend a lot of time looking [through] shops, and I thought why not make that convenient?”

The service currently indexes compromised BINs from five different card shops, although he said several more shops are close to completing their integration with MegaSearch. He acknowledged garnering a small advertising fee for each relationship, although he repeatedly declined to discuss the particulars of those arrangements. But he said both sides benefit: stolen card data grows less reliable with age, and fraud shops that are indexed by MegaSearch stand a better chance of clearing their inventory faster, the hacker argues.

MegaSearch said that when his site first launched at the end of 2011 and began indexing the five card shops he’s now tracking, those shops had some 360,000 compromised accounts for sale, collectively. Since then, those shops have moved more than 200,000 cards. The search engine currently has indexed 352,000 stolen account numbers that are for sale right now in the underground.

According to BIN search stats published on the site, Citibank cards are the most sought-after, followed by cards issued by FIA Card Services, Capital One and Chase.

In the coming weeks, he said, the site will include new features that index other types of criminal wares, including Social Security numbers and proxies — addresses of hacked PCs that paying clients can use as a relay to anonymize their online communications.

“I’m about to add more services to that site that would help newbie underground, including proxies, stolen identity information, etc.,” MegaSearch told me. “I’m also going to add a survey [to rate] the best shop.”

2011 has been called the Year of the Data Breach. If services like MegaSearch are indicative of a trend, 2012 may well become known as the year the criminal underground started getting a clue about how to better index and use all of its stolen data.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/01/...ud-site-wares/





Hackers Disrupt Israel Airline, Stock Market Sites
Amy Teibel

Hackers disrupted the websites of Israel's stock exchange and national air carrier El Al on Monday in a deepening cyber war launched earlier this month by a group claiming to be Saudis.

Neither website contains sensitive information and trading and flights were not affected. But the ongoing salvos by hackers who use anti-Israel language in their posts has revealed how vulnerable Israel is to cyber warfare, despite its sophisticated computer security units in the military and advanced high-tech sector.

The attacks began earlier this month when hackers identifying themselves as group-xp, a known Saudi hacking group, claimed on an Israeli sports website to have gained access to 400,000 Israeli credit card accounts. The group called it a "gift to the world for the New Year" designed to "hurt the Zionist pocket."

Israeli authorities said 15,000 accounts were hacked in that episode and credit card information about 6,000 other Israelis was disclosed online a few days later by the same network.

Last week, an Israeli hacker identifying himself as a soldier in an Israeli intelligence unit retaliated by posting information online about hundreds of Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians and others.

El Al Israel Airlines took down its website after the alleged Saudi network linked to previous attacks warned that both sites would be targeted by allied pro-Palestinian hackers, a source close to the company said. The source asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

The company said in a statement that it was taking security measures to protect the website and that disruptions on the site were to be expected.

Orna Goren, a spokeswoman for the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, said the site was overwhelmed by electronic requests that slowed it down dramatically but it was still operating. Trading was not affected, she said.

Cyber experts say Israel is a common target for online attackers who oppose the Jewish state and its policies toward the Palestinians.

There have been no confirmed reports of sensitive Israeli government sites being hacked. Several weeks ago, websites of Israeli spy services and other official sites briefly went down, but the government denied hackers were to blame and characterized the event as a technical malfunction.

Israel is a world leader in cyber security, and the Shin Bet internal security agency provides advisory services to sensitive business sectors such as banks and public utilities.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...es-2563392.php





Web Gang Operating in the Open
Riva Richmond

Five men believed to be responsible for spreading a notorious computer worm on Facebook and other social networks — and to have pocketed several million dollars from online schemes — are hiding in plain sight in St. Petersburg, Russia, according to investigators at Facebook and several independent computer security researchers.

The men live comfortable lives in St. Petersburg — and have frolicked on luxury vacations in places like Monte Carlo, Bali and, earlier this month, Turkey, according to photographs posted on social network sites — even though their identities have been known for years to Facebook, computer security investigators and law enforcement officials.

One member of the group, popularly known as the Koobface gang, has regularly broadcasted the coordinates of its offices by checking in on Foursquare, a location-based social network, and posting the news to Twitter. Photographs on Foursquare also show other suspected members of the group working on Macs in a loftlike room that looks like offices used by tech start-ups in cities around the world.

Beginning in July 2008, the Koobface gang aimed at Web users with invitations to watch a funny or sexy video. Those curious enough to click the link got a message to update their computer’s Flash software, which begins the download of the Koobface malware. Victims’ computers are drafted into a “botnet,” or network of infected PCs, and are sent official-looking advertisements of fake antivirus software and their Web searches are also hijacked and the clicks delivered to unscrupulous marketers. The group made money from people who bought the bogus software and from unsuspecting advertisers.

The security software firm Kaspersky Labs has estimated the network includes 400,000 to 800,000 PCs worldwide at its height in 2010. Victims are often unaware their machines have been compromised.

The Koobface gang’s freedom underscores how hard it is to apprehend international computer criminals, even when identities are known. These groups tend to operate in countries where they can work unmolested by the local authorities, and where cooperation with United States and European law enforcement agencies is poor. Meanwhile, Western law enforcement is awash in computer crime and lacks the resources and skilled manpower to tackle it effectively, especially when evidence putting individuals’ fingers on keyboards must be collected abroad.

On Tuesday, Facebook plans to announce that it will begin sharing information about the group and how to fight them with security researchers and other Internet companies. It believes public namings can make it harder for such groups to operate and send a message to the criminal underground.

None of the men have been charged with a crime and no law enforcement agencies have confirmed they are under investigation.

The group investigators have identified has adopted the tongue-and-cheek name, Ali Baba & 4: Anton Korotchenko, who uses the online nickname “KrotReal”; Stanislav Avdeyko, known as “leDed”; Svyatoslav E. Polichuck, who goes by “PsViat” and “PsycoMan”; Roman P. Koturbach, who uses the online moniker “PoMuc”; and Alexander Koltysehv, or “Floppy.” )

Efforts to contact members of the group for comment have been unsuccessful.

Weeks after early versions of the Koobface worm began appearing on Facebook, investigators inside the company were able to trace the attacks to those responsible. “We’ve had a picture of one of the guys in a scuba mask on our wall since 2008,” said Ryan McGeehan, manager of investigations and incident response at Facebook.

Since then, Facebook and several independent security researchers have provided law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with information and evidence. Most notably, Jan Droemer, a 32-year-old independent researcher in Germany, has provided important information and leads, including a password-free view inside Koobface’s command-and-control system, known as the “Mothership.” Mr. Droemer spent nights and weekends for four months in late 2009 and early 2010 unmasking the gang members using only information available publicly on the Internet.

The F.B.I. declined to comment.

That computer crime pays is fueling a boom that is leaving few Internet users and businesses unscathed. The toll on consumers alone is estimated at $114 billion annually worldwide, according to a September 2011 study by the security software maker Symantec.

Russia, in particular, has a reputation as a hacker haven, although it has pursued several prominent cases against spammers recently. The Soviet education system’s emphasis on math and science combined with post-Communist economic collapse and weak private industry meant there were many highly trained engineers, but few legitimate outlets for their skills, said Vsevolod Gunitskiy, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.

“Russia is sort of a perfect storm for cybercrime,” he said. The proliferation of organized crime and official corruption created “this very strong legacy of contempt for the laws and general culture of criminality.”

The Russian Embassy in Washington said it does not have any information regarding this group and that American law enforcement officials had never contacted the embassy on this issue.

The men investigators believe are behind Koobface look a lot like ordinary software enthusiasts, albeit with more tattoos and an outlaw persona. Mr. Avdeyko, who is two decades older than the other men and has been tied to an infamous spyware program dating to 2003 called CoolWebSearch, appears to hold a leadership role.

He and at least two of the other men have worked in the world of online pornography, said Mr. Droemer. Mr. Korotchenko and several of the other men apparently tried to run a legitimate mobile software and services business, colorfully named MobSoft Ltd. They did not reply to e-mails requesting interviews.

Mr. Droemer said the gang’s success was more attributable to workaday persistence and willingness to adapt than technical sophistication. They could have spread Koobface to many more PCs, he said. “They could have done a lot more technical things to make it more perfect, more marvelous. But there was just no need to do it. They were just investing as much to get the revenue they wanted to get.”

The group cleverly harnessed the infrastructures of powerful online services — from Facebook and Twitter to Google’s search engine and Blogger — to do the heavy lifting, and may have run its enterprise with just a few computers.

Koobface will probably earn its place in history for pioneering and leading the criminal exploitation of social networks, rather than the size of its profits. Data found in the botnet’s command-and-control system suggests the group has earned at least $2 million a year for the 3 1/2 years of its existence, although the actual total is very likely higher, Mr. Droemer said.

Experts say the gang could have further enriched itself through identity fraud, since it has had access to millions of PCs and social-network profiles, but that there is no evidence it has done so.

Indeed, in a 2009 Christmas e-card to security researchers left inside victim computers, the gang vowed it would never steal credit card or banking information. It called viruses “something awful.” Its tactics have been less ruthless than those of many other hacker groups, experts said. For instance, it has never deployed malicious programs that install automatically, and rather has required its victims to make several unwise clicks.

While the Koobface gang operates freely, Facebook has focused on building elaborate defenses against the worm, which relentlessly struck the site again and again until disappearing in March. The gang abandoned the site after Facebook mounted a major counteroffensive, which included an effort to dismantle the command-and-control system of the botnet and a simultaneous push to scrub its network of the worm and clean up infections in users’ PCs.

“We fired all the different guns at the same time,” said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer at Facebook. “If we could literally shut down the command-and-control, all the infections, and just make them have to start over from scratch in all contexts, we figured they might decide to move on.” He hoped they would conclude Facebook was unprofitable, he said.

But Facebook’s effort and two earlier takedown efforts by security researchers — including one by the Bulgarian researcher Dancho Danchev, who revealed the name of one Koobface member on his blog last week — have failed put an end to Koobface, and smaller sites continue to suffer.

“People who engage in this type of stuff need to know that their name and real identity are going to come out eventually and they’re going to get arrested and they’re going to be targeted,” Mr. Sullivan said. “People are fighting back.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/t...rful-worm.html





News Corp Admits Guilt, Settles Hacking Claims
Georgina Prodhan and Kate Holton

The British newspaper arm of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp looks set to settle at great expense a string of legal claims after admitting wide-scale phone hacking that was both known about and concealed by senior management.

Murdoch's News International had for years claimed that the hacking of voicemails to generate stories was the work of a single "rogue" reporter who went to jail for the crime in 2007.

However, under a wave of damning evidence last year it finally admitted that the problem was widespread, sparking a scandal that has rocked the company, the British press, police and the political establishment.

In a statement that could further damage the firm's reputation, lawyers for victims who have reached settlements said on Thursday their agreements were based on News Group Newspapers, publisher of some of News International's newspapers, acknowledging that senior management were at fault.

News International declined to comment on the statement.

"News Group has agreed to compensation being assessed on the basis that senior employees and directors of NGN knew about the wrongdoing and sought to conceal it by deliberately deceiving investigators and destroying evidence," the statement said.

In a London court packed with journalists and lawyers, Judge Geoffrey Vos went through each case and heard the grounds for the settlement. At the end of each statement a lawyer for News Corp confirmed the details and offered "sincere apologies."

Settlements announced in court generally ranged from around 30,000 pounds ($46,000) to 60,000 pounds, while some were not revealed. Actor Jude Law accepted over 100,000 pounds after he was physically surveilled abroad as well as in Britain.

The admissions may also lift some immediate pressure off the group, as it will prevent lawyers from poring over further details in open court, but it could lead to increased scrutiny of James Murdoch, who has been heavily criticized for his handling of the situation.

Murdoch's son James was not in charge of News International at the time of the hacking but has been accused of leading a cover-up by the company. He has denied all knowledge of the scale of the problem and blamed many of those around him for the failings.
Pay-Out Time

The lawyers issued the statement on Thursday as they prepared to tell a judge in a London court that many of the most high-profile victims - who include sports stars, actors and politicians - were ready to settle their claims. The move means that all cases could eventually be settled.

The court was told that 36 claimants were ready to settle, including actor Law, politicians Chris Bryant, John Prescott and Tessa Jowell and other celebrities, while 10 cases were ready to go to court.

News Corp has already received 60 claims and police say there are almost 6,000 potential victims.

Lawyers for the victims said they had obtained documents from News International that revealed its attempts to destroy evidence, partly thanks to the fact that the 12 solicitors' firms involved had joined forces to work together.

"As a result, documents relating to the nature and scale of the conspiracy, a cover-up and the destruction of evidence/email archives by News Group have now been disclosed to the claimants," their statement said.

In July, after it emerged that the voicemail of missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler, later found dead, had been hacked into by the News of the World, News Corp took the drastic step of shutting down the 168-year-old tabloid.

The scandal had already forced the resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron's spokesman, a former News of the World editor, while British police were accused of failing to properly investigate the affair, forcing top police officials to resign.

Criminal probes are now under way into the phone hacking and allegations of payoffs to police. A judge-led inquiry into Britain's press ethics also sits most days, bringing yet more attention to the conduct of the press.

And at the height of the scandal, News Corp was forced to scrap plans to take full control of Britain's highly profitable satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

"This settlement, which is tantamount to accepting that there was a deliberate conspiracy to deceive the police and destroy evidence, raises fundamental questions both about the inadequacy of press regulation in general and about corporate governance specifically at News International," Steven Barnett, professor of communications at Westminster University in London, told Reuters.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan and Kate Holton; Edited by Richard Meares)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80I0OW20120119





A Move to Investigate the Investigators in WikiLeaks Case
Somini Sengupta

This much is known: In its hunt for information about three people it believes to be associated with the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks, the Justice Department has sought to extract details about them and their communications on Twitter. What is not yet known is where else the Justice Department went looking.

On Friday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked a federal court in Virginia to reveal the names of the other Internet companies from whom the Justice Department solicited information about the three people: Jacob Appelbaum, an American citizen; Birgitta Jonsdottir of Iceland; and Rop Gonggrijp of the Netherlands.

Their case has become a testing ground for online privacy and speech, in part because the Justice Department sought the information without a search warrant in 2010. Instead, it relied on a 1994 law called the Stored Communications Act, and asked Twitter to release information about the three Twitter users. It sought, among other things, their Internet Protocol addresses, which identify and can give the location of a computer used to log onto the Internet. Twitter responded by informing the three about the government’s request – and they, in turn, went to court.

The petitioners argued that their I.P. addresses should be considered private information, and that this was unrelated to WikiLeaks. A federal judge in Virginia, Liam O’Grady, ruled against them last November, saying that the information sought by the government was relevant to a continuing ongoing investigation. The court also dismissed a petition to unseal the Justice Department’s explanation for why it sought the account information.

Earlier in January, the same judge refused to suspend the order pending an appeal, which meant that Twitter was required to furnish the data to the government.

The only other window into the Justice Department’s strategy came from a small Internet service provider in Northern California called Sonic.net. It too received a request from the Justice Department for information on Mr. Appelbaum, one of its customers. Sonic successfully went to court so it could inform Mr. Appelbaum of the government’s request.

The brief filed Friday seeks to unseal court orders sent to other companies seeking information about the three people. Aden Fine, an attorney with the A.C.L.U., said in a statement, “This case is just one example of the unfortunate recent trend to make our court processes less open and transparent.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...ikileaks-case/





Young, in Love and Sharing Everything, Including a Password
Matt Richtel

Young couples have long signaled their devotion to each other by various means — the gift of a letterman jacket, or an exchange of class rings or ID bracelets. Best friends share locker combinations.

The digital era has given rise to a more intimate custom. It has become fashionable for young people to express their affection for each other by sharing their passwords to e-mail, Facebook and other accounts. Boyfriends and girlfriends sometimes even create identical passwords, and let each other read their private e-mails and texts.

They say they know such digital entanglements are risky, because a souring relationship can lead to people using online secrets against each other. But that, they say, is part of what makes the symbolism of the shared password so powerful.

“It’s a sign of trust,” Tiffany Carandang, a high school senior in San Francisco, said of the decision she and her boyfriend made several months ago to share passwords for e-mail and Facebook. “I have nothing to hide from him, and he has nothing to hide from me.”

“That is so cute,” said Cherry Ng, 16, listening in to her friend’s comments to a reporter outside school. “They really trust each other.”

We do, said Ms. Carandang, 17. “I know he’d never do anything to hurt my reputation,” she added.

It doesn’t always end so well, of course. Changing a password is simple, but students, counselors and parents say that damage is often done before a password is changed, or that the sharing of online lives can be the reason a relationship falters.

The stories of fallout include a spurned boyfriend in junior high who tries to humiliate his ex-girlfriend by spreading her e-mail secrets; tensions between significant others over scouring each other’s private messages for clues of disloyalty or infidelity; or grabbing a cellphone from a former best friend, unlocking it with a password and sending threatening texts to someone else.

Rosalind Wiseman, who studies how teenagers use technology and is author of “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” a book for parents about helping girls survive adolescence, said the sharing of passwords, and the pressure to do so, was somewhat similar to sex.

Sharing passwords, she noted, feels forbidden because it is generally discouraged by adults and involves vulnerability. And there is pressure in many teenage relationships to share passwords, just as there is to have sex.

“The response is the same: if we’re in a relationship, you have to give me anything,” Ms. Wiseman said.

In a 2011 telephone survey, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 30 percent of teenagers who were regularly online had shared a password with a friend, boyfriend or girlfriend. The survey, of 770 teenagers aged 12 to 17, found that girls were almost twice as likely as boys to share. And in more than two dozen interviews, parents, students and counselors said that the practice had become widespread.

In a recent column on the tech-news Web site Gizmodo, Sam Biddle called password sharing a linchpin of intimacy in the 21st century, and offered advice to couples and friends on how to avoid missteps.

“I’ve known plenty of couples who have shared passwords, and not a single one has not regretted it,” said Mr. Biddle in an interview, adding that the practice includes the unspoken notion of mutually assured destruction if somebody misbehaves. “It’s the kind of symbolism that always goes awry.”

Students say there are reasons, beyond a show of trust, to swap online keys. For instance, several college students said they regularly shared Facebook passwords — not to snoop on or monitor each other, but to force themselves to study for finals. A student would give her password to a friend to change it — and not disclose the new password — thereby temporarily locking out the Facebook account holder and taking away a big distraction to studying.

Alexandra Radford, 20, a junior at San Francisco State University, said she had done this for friends several times during exams. One friend wanted to know the new password before finals ended, but Ms. Radford held firm.

“Once finals were over, I gave it to her,” she said. “She was, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, thank you.’ She knew I was good about not giving her the password back.”

But Ms. Radford is more sheepish about the passwords she shared a few years ago in high school with her boyfriend. They even changed their passwords to reflect their relationship. Hers: ILoveKevin. His: ILoveAly.

“We did it so I could check his messages because I didn’t trust him, which is not healthy,” she conceded.

Counselors typically advise against the practice, and parents often preach the wisdom of password privacy. Winifred Lender, a child psychologist in Santa Barbara, had her three sons sign “digital contracts” that outline terms for how much media they will consume, how they will behave online and that they will not share passwords. Still, Ms. Lender said, her 14-year-old was recently asked by a friend for his password.

“He said: ‘You give me yours and I’ll give you mine.’ ”

Her son was taken aback but then relied on a tried-and-true excuse for saying no. “He blamed it on his parents,” Ms. Lender said of her son. “He said, ‘If I give you my password, my mom will have a cow.’ ”

Emily Cole, 16, a high school junior in Glastonbury, Conn., felt the sting of password betrayal in seventh grade, when she gave her e-mail password to her first boyfriend.

Then she started to develop feelings for another student, she said, and sent an e-mail to her. Her boyfriend read the e-mail and started spreading it around the school, calling Ms. Cole a “pervert.”

Ms. Cole said it was deeply hurtful. And yet, despite what happened, she said she would not have reservations about sharing her password with her new boyfriend.

“I know this sounds kind of weird, but we have a different relationship,” she said. “We’re not in seventh grade. I trust him in a different way, I suppose.”

Ms. Cole’s mother, Patti, 48, a child psychologist, said she believed her daughter would be more judicious now about sharing a password. But, more broadly, she thinks young people are sometimes drawn to such behavior as they might be toward sex, in part because parents and others warn them against doing so.

“What worries me is we haven’t done a very good job at stopping kids from having sex,” she said. “So I’m not real confident about how much we can change this behavior.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/u...affection.html





Web Protests Piracy Bills, and Senators Change Course
Jonathan Weisman

Online protests on Wednesday quickly cut into Congressional support for online antipiracy measures as lawmakers abandoned and rethought their backing for legislation that pitted new media interests against some of the most powerful old-line commercial interests in Washington.

A freshman senator, Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising Republican star, was first out of the starting gate Wednesday morning with his announcement that he would no longer back antipiracy legislation he had co-sponsored. Senator John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who heads the campaign operation for his party, quickly followed suit and urged Congress take more time to study the measure, which had been set for a test vote next week.

By Wednesday afternoon, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah and one of the Senate bill’s original co-sponsors, called it “simply not ready for prime time” and withdrew his support.

Their decisions came after some Web pages were shut down Wednesday to protest two separate bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, written by Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, drafted by Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Protests organized in the real world drew far less attention. A rally convened in Midtown Manhattan outside the offices of Senators Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten E. Gillibrand, who co-sponsored some of the proposed legislation, drew a few hundred protesters.

Members of Congress, many of whom are grappling with the issues posed by the explosion in new media and social Web sites, appeared caught off guard by the enmity toward what had been a relatively obscure piece of legislation to many of them. The Internet sensibility of the Senate was represented a few years ago in remarks by the late Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, who called the Internet “not a big truck” but a “series of tubes” — an observation enshrined in the Net Hall of Shame.

In reaction to the pending legislation, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia went dark. Google’s home page had a black banner across its home page that led to pointed information blasting the bills.

Such new-media lobbying was having an impact.

“As a senator from Florida, a state with a large presence of artists, creators and businesses connected to the creation of intellectual property, I have a strong interest in stopping online piracy that costs Florida jobs,” Mr. Rubio wrote on his Facebook page. “However, we must do this while simultaneously promoting an open, dynamic Internet environment that is ripe for innovation and promotes new technologies.”

Mr. Rubio has outsize influence for a junior senator entering his second year in Congress. He is considered a top contender for the vice presidential ticket of his party’s White House nominee this year, and is being groomed by the Republican leadership to be the face of his party with Hispanics and beyond.

Mr. Cornyn posted on his Facebook page that it was “better to get this done right rather than fast and wrong. Stealing content is theft, plain and simple, but concerns about unintended damage to the Internet and innovation in the tech sector require a more thoughtful balance, which will take more time.”

The moves on Capitol Hill came after the White House over the weekend also backed off the legislative effort.

“While we believe that online piracy by foreign Web sites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet,” a White House official said.

With the growing reservations, a bill that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously and without controversy may be in serious trouble. Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader and Democrat of Nevada, has scheduled a procedural vote on the Leahy version for early next week, but unless negotiators can alter it to satisfy the outraged online world, no one expects it to get 60 votes.

“I encourage Senator Reid to abandon his plan to rush the bill to the floor,” Mr. Rubio wrote. “Instead, we should take more time to address the concerns raised by all sides, and come up with new legislation that addresses Internet piracy while protecting free and open access to the Internet.”

Indeed, a senior Senate Republican leadership aide said the Senate version of the bill was dead in its current form, and bipartisan negotiations had begun to revise it considerably. Senators from both parties want to address the Internet piracy issue, but they acknowledged that issues raised by Google and its online partners would have to be addressed.

At issue is how the bills deal with “DNS filtering.” Web site addresses are converted by the Internet’s domain name server system from typed words into computer language to bring a user to a specific Web site.

The Congressional bills would allow the Justice Department to seek injunctions to prevent domestic Internet service providers from translating the names of suspected pirate sites; the legislation would also require search engines such as Google not to display suspected sites on search results. In effect, the bills would make search engines the enforcers of a law they oppose.

Congressional negotiators are looking at radical revisions to the DNS provisions, but lawmakers may decide the resulting legislation is too neutered to pursue, aides from both parties say.

Support for the legislation on Capitol Hill eroded throughout the day. Another Republican co-sponsor of the Senate bill, Roy Blunt of Missouri, withdrew his support in the early afternoon. Other senators who issued concerns about the legislation as written included Republican Senators Mark Kirk of Illinois and Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Senator Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, had said on Tuesday that he would vote against the measure.

Mr. DeMint called the proposed legislation “misguided bills that will cause more harm than good.”

“In seeking to protect intellectual property rights, we must ensure that we do not undermine free speech, threaten economic growth, or impose burdensome regulations,” he said in a statement.

The media industry has been pushing for a legislative response to online piracy for some time. Groups like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, as well as giants like News Corporation, are practiced at old-time lobbying — hiring big-name Washington personalities like the former senator Christopher J. Dodd and salting campaign funds with contributions.

Mr. Dodd, who is now chairman and chief executive of the motion picture association, forcefully denounced the shutdowns in a statement issued on Tuesday.

“Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called for all parties to work cooperatively together, some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging,” he said.

In the Tea Party era of grass-roots muscle, though, the old school was taken to school, Congressional aides and media lobbyists agree.

“The problem for the content industry is they just don’t know how to mobilize people,” said John P. Feehery, a former Republican leadership aide and executive at the motion picture lobby. “They have a small group of content makers, a few unions, whereas the Internet world, the social media world especially, has a tremendous reach. They can reach people in ways we never dreamed of before.

“This has been a real learning experience for the content world,” Mr. Feehery added.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/t...ge-course.html





In Fight Over Piracy Bills, New Economy Rises Against Old
Jonathan Weisman

When the powerful world of old media mobilized to win passage of an online antipiracy bill, it marshaled the reliable giants of K Street — the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Recording Industry Association of America and, of course, the motion picture lobby, with its new chairman, former Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat and an insider’s insider.

Yet on Wednesday this formidable old guard was forced to make way for the new as Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts and cascading criticism, sending an unmistakable message to lawmakers grappling with new media issues: Don’t mess with the Internet.

As a result, the legislative battle over two once-obscure bills to combat the piracy of American movies, music, books and writing on the World Wide Web may prove to be a turning point for the way business is done in Washington. It represented a moment when the new economy rose up against the old.

“I think it is an important moment in the Capitol,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and an important opponent of the antipiracy legislation. “Too often, legislation is about competing business interests. This is way beyond that. This is individual citizens rising up.”

Legislation that just weeks ago had overwhelming bipartisan support and had provoked little scrutiny generated a grass-roots coalition on the left and the right. Wikipedia made its English-language content unavailable, replaced with a warning: “Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet.” Visitors to Reddit found the site offline in protest. Google’s home page was scarred by a black swatch that covered the search engine’s label.

Phone calls and e-mails poured in to Congressional offices against the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect I.P. Act in the Senate. One by one, prominent backers of the bills dropped off.

First, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising Republican star, took to Facebook, one of the vehicles for promoting opposition, to renounce a bill he had co-sponsored. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who leads the G.O.P.’s Senate campaign efforts, used Facebook to urge his colleagues to slow the bill down. Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina and a Tea Party favorite, announced his opposition on Twitter, which was already boiling over with anti-#SOPA and #PIPA fever.

Then trickle turned to flood — adding Senators Mark Kirk of Illinois and Roy Blunt of Missouri, and Representatives Lee Terry of Nebraska and Ben Quayle of Arizona. At least 10 senators and nearly twice that many House members announced their opposition.

“Thanks for all the calls, e-mails, and tweets. I will be opposing #SOPA and #PIPA,” Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, wrote in a Twitter message. Late Wednesday, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, withdrew his support for a bill he helped write.

The existing bill “needs more due diligence, analysis and substantial changes,” he said in a statement.

Few lawmakers even now question the need to combat pirates at Web sites in China, Russia and elsewhere who have offered free American movies, television shows, music and books almost as soon as they are released. Heavyweights like Walt Disney secured the support of senators and representatives before the Web companies were even aware the legislation existed.

“A lot of people are pitching this as Hollywood versus Google. It’s so much more than that,” said Maura Corbett, spokeswoman for NetCoalition, which represents Google, Amazon.com, Yahoo, eBay and other Web companies. “I would love to say we’re so fabulous, we’re just that good, but we’re not. The Internet responded the way only the Internet could.”

For the more traditional media industry, the moment was menacing. Supporters of the legislation accused the Web companies of willfully lying about the legislation’s flaws, stirring fear to protect ill-gotten profits from illegal Web sites.

Mr. Dodd said Internet companies might well change Washington, but not necessarily for the better with their ability to spread their message globally, without regulation or fact-checking.

“It’s a new day,” he added. “Brace yourselves.”

Citing two longtime liberal champions of the First Amendment, Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Mr. Dodd fumed, “No one can seriously believe Pat Leahy and John Conyers can be backing legislation to block free speech or break the Internet.”

For at least four years, Hollywood studios, recording industry and major publishing houses have pressed Congress to act against offshore Web sites that have been giving away U.S. movies, music and books as fast as the artists can make them. Few lawmakers would deny the threat posed by piracy to industries that have long been powerful symbols of American culture and have become engines of the export economy. The Motion Picture Association of America says its industry brings back more export income than aerospace, automobiles or agriculture, and that piracy costs the country as many as 100,000 jobs.

The House response, SOPA, was drafted by a conservative Republican, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, with the backing of 30 co-sponsors, from Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, to mainline Republican Peter King of New York. The Senate’s version, written by Mr. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, attracted 40 co-sponsors from across the political spectrum and cleared his committee unanimously.

Then the Web rose up. Activists said the legislation would censor the Web, force search engines to play policemen for a law they hate and cripple innovation in one of the most vibrant sectors of the American economy.

Mr. Smith, the House Republican author, said opposition Web sites were spreading “fear rather than fact.”

“When the opposition is based upon misinformation, I have confidence in the facts and confidence that the facts will ultimately prevail,” Mr. Smith said.

Google, Facebook and Twitter have political muscle of their own, with in-house lobbying shops and trade associations just like traditional media’s. Facebook has hired the former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart. Google’s Washington operations are headed by Pablo Chavez, a former counsel to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and a veteran of the Senate Commerce Committee.

And for all the campaign contributions, Washington parties and high-priced lobbyists the old economy could muster, nothing could compare to the tentacles the new economy can reach into Americans’ everyday lives through sites like Wikipedia. It appeared by Wednesday evening that Congress would follow Bank of America, Netflix and Verizon as the latest institution to change course in the face of a netizen revolt. Aides to Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, say he will press forward with a vote Tuesday to open debate on the Protect I.P. bill. Negotiators from both parties are scrambling for new language that could assuage the concerns of the Internet community, but expectations are that the bill will now fail to get the 60 votes to move forward — a significant setback.

“The problem for the content industry is they just don’t know how to mobilize people,” said John P. Feehery, a former House Republican leadership aide who previously worked at the motion picture association. “They have a small group of content makers, a few unions, whereas the Internet world, the social media world especially, can reach people in ways we never dreamed of before.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/t...ge-course.html





Protests Against Antipiracy Bills Take to the Streets
Jenna Wortham

On Wednesday, as many sites around the Web participated in virtual protests against two Congressional antipiracy bills, some opponents to the legislation took their demonstrations offline and into the real world.

The New York Tech Meetup, an eight-year-old trade organization that has nearly 20,000 members, called for those who oppose the proposed bills to rally in Midtown Manhattan outside the offices of Senators Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten E. Gillibrand, who co-sponsored some of the proposed legislation.

Close to a thousand protesters gathered in metal pens that the police had set up on the sidewalk.

“A lot of people in Washington are scratching their heads today because conventional wisdom is that SOPA would have passed by now,” said one speaker, Timothy Karr, strategy director for an organization called Free Press, referring to one of the bills. “But conventional wisdom is wrong, and it is no longer business as usual in Washington.”

Several local start-ups, including CrowdTap and LocalResponse, said earlier that they were planning to shut down their offices and bring all their employees to the event.

Sebastian Delmont, 38, who works at StreetEasy, a real estate site, said that about half of his co-workers had come to the protest. He said the risk to his company from the legislation was low, “but our worry is that they are building something like a Great Firewall, like in China and the Middle East.”

Sarah Hromack, who manages the Web site of the Whitney Museum, said she was at the protest as someone who cared about visual content online. Ms. Hromack said she was worried about the long-term implications of the legislation. She said she had participated in some online shows of support for the movement, “but getting out of our offices is also important.”

Similar rallies are planned for San Francisco and Seattle.

The offline events mirror online efforts, which include the darkening of several major Web sites, including English-language Wikipedia (although it is still possible to access the encyclopedia’s content through several clever workarounds), Reddit, Boing Boing and the comedy video site My Damn Channel . Tumblr, a blogging platform, is also giving its users a tool to let them black out what information they see when they log into their accounts in protest.

Several sites have not gone dark, but have blanketed their pages with information about one of the bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act, known as SOPA; these include Google, Craigslist and I Can Haz Cheezburger, a hub for humorous pictures of cats.

Google, whose SOPA page calls for visitors to sign a petition to Congress, said on Wednesday afternoon that 4.5 million people had done so.

The mobile restaurant finder UrbanSpoon is restricting access for its users, and some news organizations, including Wired.com are protesting the legislation by blacking out content on their Web sites.

Flickr, the photo site owned by Yahoo, gave users a tool that let them black out their photos “to deprive the Web of the rich content that makes it thrive.”

Such an outpouring of support around a political cause is atypical in the tech world, which tends to limit its gatherings to technology demonstrations, social events and launch parties around new products and services.

But Jessica Lawrence, the managing director of the New York Tech Meetup, said this legislation — which its most vocal opponents say could lead to censorship and thwart the innovation of technology start-ups — is sparking an unusually vigorous response.

“The tech community has not typically been engaged in political issues but that is changing, especially for smaller start-ups and companies that aren’t as big as Facebook and Google that have someone on staff for legislative issues,” she said. “These small companies would be left in the dark without anyone to represent their ideas.”

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, weighed in against the legislation on his own Facebook page Wednesday afternoon, saying: “The world today needs political leaders who are pro-Internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals.” Within an hour, more than 200,000 Facebook users had clicked the “Like” button on his post. Facebook did not make any site-wide changes to support the protests.

While there were blackouts on the Web, a whiteout prevented critics of the proposed legislation from congregating in Seattle. An overnight snowstorm dumped several inches of snow on the city, scuttling plans for a protest. “If our goal is to educate people, it will be pretty hard to find people to educate today,” the organizers of the rally said in an update announcing the postponement of the rally.

The Seattle area is home to technology companies like Amazon and Microsoft that have voiced opposition to SOPA. Amazon did not black out its Web site, instead providing a link from its home page to Net Coalition, a group opposing the legislation.

Nick Wingfield contributed reporting.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...o-the-streets/





Hollywood Studios, MPAA to Attempt to Neutralize SOPA Protests With Ad Campaign
Todd Wasserman

The Motion Picture Association of America is looking to fight back against Wednesday’s Internet protests over SOPA with an ad campaign aiming to address “misconceptions” about the bill, according to a report.

Citing “a person familiar with the matter,” The Wall Street Journal reports that the MPAA is talking to studio chiefs and Hollywood unions about such a campaign, which would hit in “coming days.” The MPAA has been a vocal supporter of SOPA and PIPA. Christopher Dodd, chairman and CEO of the MPAA, released a statement on Tuesday denouncing blackouts by Wikipedia and Reddit as “stunts” that “punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns.”

The campaign would come after the blackout succeeded in getting a fair number of both bills’ supporters in Congress — including PIPA co-sponsor Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.), a co-sponsor of SOPA — to withdraw their support on Wednesday. Others, including Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), also announced they were no longer backing PIPA.

Despite the change of heart among some in Congress, though, groups aligned with Hollywood continue to fight the bills. A campaign by an organization called Creative America, for instance, ran a billboard in New York’s Times Square on Wednesday reading, “What to do during an Internet blackout” and suggested the public read books, listen to music or watch movies. Another ad from Creative America, shown below, charges that foreign-based Internet pirates are “stealing American ideas and innovation and hundreds of thousands of American jobs.”
http://mashable.com/2012/01/19/holly...campaign-sopa/





Dodd Calls for Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Meet
Michael Cieply and Edward Wyatt

When Jack Valenti walked the halls of Congress, friends by the dozen gripped, grinned and took note of what was worrying the movie industry’s dapper chief lobbyist.

Christopher J. Dodd now fills Mr. Valenti’s shoes. But he stays out of those halls, thanks to restrictions on his ability to lobby Congress until 2013.

It just cost him a big one.

A major push by copyright holders — including those in the Motion Picture Association of America, of which Mr. Dodd is chairman — for a tough federal law to control foreign online piracy collapsed this week under stiff resistance from technology companies and their allies.

On Wednesday, as Web sites expressed opposition to the legislation, important lawmakers withdrew their support, leaving Mr. Dodd and his associates scrambling to find what could be salvaged.

In an interview Thursday, Mr. Dodd said he would welcome a summit meeting between Internet companies and content companies, perhaps convened by the White House, that could lead to a compromise. Looming next Tuesday is a cloture vote scheduled in the Senate, which appears to promise the death of the legislation in its current form.

“The perfect place to do it is a block away from here,” said Mr. Dodd, who pointed from his office on I Street toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But the startlingly speedy collapse of the antipiracy campaign by some of Washington’s savviest players — not just the motion picture association, but also the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Recording Industry Association of America — signaled deep changes in antipiracy lobbying in the future. By Mr. Dodd’s account, no Washington player can safely assume that a well-wired, heavily financed legislative program is safe from a sudden burst of Web-driven populism.

“This is altogether a new effect,” Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing “an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically” in the last four decades, he added.

That shift was exposed this week partly because Mr. Dodd found himself in a political knife fight while being forced to sheathe his most powerful weapon: 36 years of personal relationships with a Congress in which he had served as a representative and then senator since 1975, before joining the motion picture association last March.

Under legislation passed in 2007, Mr. Dodd is barred from personally lobbying Congress for two years after leaving office. Hired as the consummate Washington insider to carry the film industry’s banner on crucial issues like piracy, Mr. Dodd ended up being more coach than player. He helped devise a strategy that called for his coalition to line up a strong array of legislative sponsors and supporters behind two similar laws — the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, and the Protect I.P. Act in the Senate — and then to move them through the Congress quickly before possible opposition from tech companies could coalesce.

But slow pacing gave the Internet and free speech advocates time to wake up and mobilize, turning what might have been a relatively simple exercise for Mr. Dodd and his allies into a bitter struggle. The delays violated a cardinal rule among professional lobbyists, who generally believe the worst enemy of a proposed law is the legislative clock.

Mr. Dodd said that the entire industry was surprised by the intensity of the objections that arose in the last couple of weeks. “This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,” he said. “This thing was considered by many to be a slam dunk.”

Data shows that copyright holders and supporters of the bills outspent opponents substantially in the early stages of the debate. But by many accounts the tech industry has stepped up its lobbying efforts in recent weeks. New spending reports expected shortly indicate whether the balance has shifted.

The Senate vote on Tuesday will show whether opponents like Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, have succeeded in derailing that chamber’s version of the law.

On Thursday, however, Mr. Dodd appeared to have all but thrown in the towel on the bills in their current form, and was talking about lessons learned. He acknowledged his side had committed a misstep by allowing Hollywood to become the face of laws that were intended to protect not just movies, but also more mundane products — for instance, home smoke alarms — that are frequently counterfeited abroad, sometimes with disastrous effects.

“In terms of public perception, I’m Exhibit A,” said Mr. Dodd, who spent last weekend hobnobbing with stars at the Golden Globes. “This is seen as a red carpet business.”

It was a further problem, he said, that Hollywood’s writers, directors, producers and blue-collar workers — whose unions squarely backed the new law — never personally campaigned in a way that might have helped to counter the Web assault.

“There’s a disconnect between the business interests and the politics of Hollywood,” Mr. Dodd said, meaning that the film industry and its denizens provided money for many campaigns, including those of Mr. Obama, without pushing its issues to the fore.

Mr. Wyden said the public resistance confirmed his longstanding belief that the measures would become wildly unpopular once people saw their potential for censoring Web sites and unleashing litigation against entrepreneurs, both large and small.

“I will use every ounce of my strength to fight” to stop PIPA in next week’s procedural vote, said Mr. Wyden, who has been pushing what he said was a less intrusive alternative. The fight has been a challenge for Mr. Dodd in other ways as well. A silver-haired 67-year-old, Mr. Dodd risks looking like a scold in public appearances that find him lecturing opponents about damage to the economy, including some $58 billion in estimated annual losses to copyright thieves.

In his office on Thursday, he pointed his finger while recalling how he had recently admonished high school-age students on a Massachusetts film set. The next time they are tempted to steal a film, he told them, think about the makeup artists and grips whose jobs are at stake.

“I think Chris Dodd has done a spectacular job,” said Jim Gianopulos, co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, who spoke by telephone on Thursday. “He’s been unable to do direct lobbying, but as a strategist, he’s been superb,” said Mr. Gianopulos. Misinformation about the antipiracy bills had complicated a campaign that is not yet over, he said.

While Mr. Dodd is barred from Congressional contact, he has had a free hand in lobbying the White House and federal agencies. On Saturday, however, the Obama administration dealt his efforts a blow by announcing publicly, in response to online petitions, that it had reservations about a provision in the proposed laws that called for blocking user access to offending sites.

Mr. Dodd spoke with barely concealed anger at what he called a “really gratuitous” statement delivered by what he had presumed was a sympathetic administration, which came after the blocking provisions had effectively been killed in Congress.

The real message, said Mr. Dodd, may be that further change is in order for the motion picture association, which represents Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios and Warner Brothers. The group, he said, lost focus and energy after Mr. Valenti’s retirement in 2004.

The companies, Mr. Dodd said, are “rethinking everything,” not just about the bills, but about their relationship with an estranged Silicon Valley.

That need for rapprochement, he said, “has come home in a way that no rhetoric of mine could express.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/t...y-to-meet.html





SOPA Is Dead: Smith Pulls Bill
Todd Wasserman

Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, said on Friday that he is pulling the bill “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

“I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy,” Smith (R-Texas) said. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”

Smith also released the following statement on Friday:

“We need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products. “The problem of online piracy is too big to ignore. American intellectual property industries provide 19 million high-paying jobs and account for more than 60% of U.S. exports. The theft of America’s intellectual property costs the U.S. economy more than $100 billion annually and results in the loss of thousands of American jobs. Congress cannot stand by and do nothing while American innovators and job creators are under attack.”

“The online theft of American intellectual property is no different than the theft of products from a store. It is illegal and the law should be enforced both in the store and online.

“The Committee will continue work with copyright owners, Internet companies, financial institutions to develop proposals that combat online piracy and protect America’s intellectual property. We welcome input from all organizations and individuals who have an honest difference of opinion about how best to address this widespread problem. The Committee remains committed to finding a solution to the problem of online piracy that protects American intellectual property and innovation.”

The move comes after widespread protest on the Internet on Wednesday by Wikipedia, Reddit and others. The sites signaled their displeasure with the bill by going dark. That day, several Congressmen dropped their support for SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA. The latter bill has also been taken off the table for now.

“In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT IP Act,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in a statement Friday morning.

Smith’s stance comes just two days after he told The Wall Street Journal that he didn’t plan to back down on SOPA, telling the newspaper he expected to “move forward” with the bill in February.
http://mashable.com/2012/01/20/sopa-...th-pulls-bill/





The Week the Web Changed Washington

Collective action halted SOPA and PIPA. Now we're in unexplored territory.
Alex Howard

This morning, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), the Senate Majority Leader, said in a statement that he would postpone next week's vote on the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) followed with a statement that he would also halt consideration of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Collectively, millions of people rose up and told Washington that these bills shall not pass.

This outcome was driven by an unprecedented day of online protests on Wednesday of this week, and the resulting coverage on cable and broadcast news networks had an effect.

"Senator Reid made the right decision in postponing next week's vote on PIPA," said Center for Democracy and Technology president Leslie Harris. "It's time for a hard reset on this issue. We need a thoughtful and substantive process that includes all Internet stakeholders. We need to take a hard look at the facts and find solutions that honor the Internet's openness and its unique capacity for innovation and free expression. We are thankful for the efforts of Senator Ron Wyden who from the beginning stood against this bill; his early opposition and leadership gave voice to the important concerns of the Internet community."

Wikipedia, Google, BoingBoing, Reddit, O'Reilly Media and thousands of other websites, blogs and individual citizens asked their communities to take a stand and contact Washington. January 18, 2012, will go down as an historic day of online action. Consider the following statistics:

• 162 million Wikipedia page views, with some 8 million visitors using an online form to look up the address of their Congressional representatives.
• 7 million signatures on Google's petition.
• 200,000+ signatures on the Progressive Change Campaign Committee petition.
• 30,000+ Craigslist users called Congress through the PCCC's website.
• 250,000+ people took action through the EFF's resources.
• 2.4 million+ SOPA-related tweets were sent between 12 a.m. and 4 p.m. on January 18.
• 140,000 phone calls made through Tumblr's platform.
• Nearly 1,000 protesters outside New York's U.S. Senators' office in New York City.

The key metric to consider for impact of this action, however, was not measured in digital terms but by civic outcomes: 40 new opponents in Congress.

On Wednesday morning, according to ProPublica's SOPA Tracker, U.S. Senators and Representatives were 80-31 for SOPA and PIPA. By the end of the day, SOPA and PIPA had 68 supporters and 71 opponents in Congress. And by week's end, ProPublica's data showed 187 opponents and "leaning no."

"The amazing thing is that the power of these networks delivered," wrote Votizen co-founder David Binetti on TechCrunch. "By the end of the day, 25 Senators — including at least 5 former co-sponsors of the bill — had announced their opposition to SOPA. Think about that for just a second: A well-organized, well-funded, well-connected, well-experienced lobbying effort on Capitol Hill was outflanked by an ad-hoc group of rank amateurs, most of whom were operating independent of one another and on their spare time. Regardless where you stand on the issue — and effective copyright protection is an important issue — this is very good news for the future of civic engagement."

I concur with that last point. Last night, we finally saw one of the most important questions about the future of the Internet and society asked in a presidential debate: all four GOP candidates for the presidential nomination came out against SOPA during Thursday's debate on CNN.

"Get ready to have this fight again"

Carl Franzen, in his must-read analysis of how the Web killed SOPA and PIPA, lays out a convincing case for why we should think of these bills as effectively "dead."

These bills are not completely in the grave, no matter what headlines you read today, although I can now say with confidence that they will not pass as currently drafted. In the months to come, keep an eye out for efforts to redraft them, cutting DNS filtering provisions or search engine blocks in an effort to make them acceptable to technology companies like Google.

It will be some months yet before Congress is "done" in this election year. No one I've consulted at the Center for Democracy and Technology or Public Knowledge thinks this is over. I'm certainly not convinced yet. The White House said that it would like to see action on anti-piracy legislation this year. Senator Reid had indicated that he would like to revisit legislation in February. It will be months until Congress really shuts down during the election year.

Clay Shirky made an important point today in his post on Hollywood and copyright today: "The risk now is not that SOPA will pass. The risk is that we'll think we've won. We haven't; they'll be back. Get ready to have this fight again."

While the power of the Internet to drive media coverage and collective action mattered in Washington this week, it's also critically important to recognize that but for the efforts of Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Rep. Jared Polis (R-CO) and Rep. Zoe Logren (D-CA), I believe SOPA and PIPA would likely have passed.

Senator Wyden put a critical hold on the PROTECT IP Act after it sailed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The four representatives proposed dozens of amendments to SOPA in a marathon, days-long markup session that effectively filibustered the bill, delaying it until the House came back into session in January. That delay enabled hundreds of organizations and individuals, including newspaper editors, human rights advocates, academics, engineers and public interest groups, to rally to save the Internet as we know it.

"Supporters of the Internet deserve credit for pressing advocates of SOPA and PIPA to back away from an effort to ram through controversial legislation," Issa said in an emailed statement.

The statement continued:

"Over the last two months, the intense popular effort to stop SOPA and PIPA has defeated an effort that once looked unstoppable but lacked a fundamental understanding of how Internet technologies work.

"Postponing the Senate vote on PIPA removes the imminent threat to the Internet, but it's not over yet. Copyright infringement remains a serious problem and any solution must be targeted, effective, and consistent with how the Internet works. After inviting all stakeholders to help improve American intellectual property protections, I have introduced the bipartisan OPEN Act with Senator Rob Wyden which can be read and commented on at KeepTheWebOPEN.com. It is clear that Congress needs to have more discussion and education about the workings of the Internet before it moves forward on sweeping legislation to address intellectual property theft on the Internet. I look forward to working with my colleagues and stakeholders to achieve a needed consensus about the way forward."

Unexplored territory

In the meantime, everyone who participated in this week's unprecedented day of online action should know that the action mattered. If you'd asked me about the prospects for the passage of these bills back in December — and many people did, after I wrote a feature in November that highlighted the threat these anti-piracy bills presented to the Internet, security and freedom of expression online — I estimated that it was quite likely. So did Chris Dodd, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, who told the New York Times that these passage of these bills was "considered by many to be a 'slam dunk'.'"

We're now in unexplored territory. I've been writing about how the Internet affects government and government affects the Internet for years now. This week was clearly a tipping point in that space. The voices of the people, expressed in calls, letters, tweets, petitions and protests, were heard in Washington.

We saw unprecedented mobilization across the Internet, enabled by an increasingly networked society, social media and a number of tech companies and website owners taking principled stands in support of freedom of expression and the Open Web.

I support the right of Internet companies and services to use their platforms to educate their users about proposed legislation that would harm a free and open Internet, as we understand that term today. It's important now that those same companies and citizens work together to craft an alternative to SOPA, as Rob Preston, the editor-in-chief of Information Week, argued today. The problem of money, politics and SOPA is a thorny one, as John Battelle wrote this morning:

"We can't afford to not engage with Washington anymore ... Silicon Valley is waking up to the fact that we have to be part of the process in Washington — for too long we've treated 'Government' as damage, and we've routed around it."

Just so. We need the smartest minds of our generation thinking about how to help make society work better, creating tools to help others do so and using them to help millions of citizens still struggling to make their way out of the Great Recession. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, there are more than 3 million unfilled jobs. Let's figure out how to fill them.

We need our elected leaders not to focus on big government or small government but a smarter government, more innovative government that uses the power of technology to empower civil society and the collective intelligence of its citizens to adapt to our rapidly changed world. This is precisely what the open government movement that we've been writing about at O'Reilly over the past five years is focused upon.

Anil Dash, in a post on the history and future of Web protest, gives special credit to the new civic infrastructure we've gained in the past few years:

One of the most unheralded successes of this week's SOPA and PIPA victories was the role that pioneering open government and government transparency efforts had in enabling the protests to take off. Just a few weeks ago, few online had heard of either bill, almost no one could understand their potential impact, and even fewer had read the actual bills.

But thanks to efforts like OpenCongress, which routinely creates valuable resources like this look at the money behind SOPA through its support from the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation, the web was able to see who was helping pay for the law. Giving that information a place to live on the web was a fundamental step that enabled powerful demonstrations like the GoDaddy protests in which thousands of users moved their business from the company in protest of its support of SOPA. (I have some misgivings about the tactics and effectiveness of that particular protest, but overall as a first example of the organization and focus of those who would object to SOPA, it was inarguably powerful.)

Similarly, the Center for Responsive Politics powered detailed look at lobbying dollars which drove the bills, which organizations like MapLight could use to create a clear picture of how SOPA and PIPA were purchased.

There are incredibly difficult challenges that face us as a country and as a global community, from jobs to healthcare to the environment to civil liberties to smoldering wars around the world. If more leaders in Silicon Valley and the rest of the country heed Battelle's call, we'll have a chance at solving some of the problems ahead.

What happened this week, however, will reinvigorate the notion that participating in the civic process matters.

Here's to working on stuff that matters, together.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/01/the...ged-washi.html





5 Lessons From The SOPA/PIPA Fight
Matthew Yglesias

This looks like the end of the beginning for PIPA/SOPA, as Harry Reid tweets: "In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday's vote on the PROTECT IP Act." I think we can learn a few lessons here, many of which illustrate the main conclusions of Baumgartner et. al.'s excellent book Lobbying and Policy Change: Why Wins, Who Loses, and Why.

1) Lobbying isn't all about money: Hollywood badly outspent Silicon Valley on this issue and still lost. This is completely typical. There's no evidence that better-funded groups systematically win policy fights.

2) But money matters a lot: That said, it's extraordinarily difficult to get on the agenda if you don't have some money to spend. The fact that Silicon Valley firms like Google now have Washington offices and are clearly capable of offering both campaign contributions and the "legislative subsidy" of policy analysis to people who champion their causes was critical to getting opposition off the ground.

3) In America, always bet on change not happening: In the U.S. political system, there is a ton of status quo bias. It's easy to look at some worthy reform measure failing and then say the forces of evil always win, but the fact is that when the forces of evil want to push a terrible reform on the country they usually lose too. To pass something, you need to run the table -- committees, two different houses of congress, the president -- while to block something you only need one stopping point.

4) Polarization is an illusion of agenda-control: SOPA/PIPA was a completely bipartisan endeavor, promoted by Republican Lamar Smith in the House and Democrat Pat Leahy in the Senate. The opposition was bipartisan too. Democrat Ron Wyden played the crucial role in delaying PIPA in the Senate, but Tea Partiers led the opposition in the House. Nancy Pelosi became a vocal opponent, and at last night's debate all the Republican presidential candidates were suddenly in opposition. This is a stark contrast to the narrative of partisan polarization, but it illustrates that the parties are polarized in part because the leadership deliberately promotes a polarizing agenda. Leaders deliberately put issues that unite their caucuses on the agenda. When happenstance causes the agenda to be dominated by something outside the main structure of partisanship, the polarization dynamic breaks down.

5) Public engagement matters: One key difference between this and, say, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is that SOPA/PIPA opponents actually got in the arena and did politics instead of complaining about how this showed that politics is corrupt and stupid. It was the whole boring dreary "call your congressman, sign this petition" rigamarole. Yes, often done in creative and innovating and webby ways. But still fundamentally about the idea that citizens need to communicate their views to elected officials. Members of congress, just like regular people, only have deep commitments to a few priorities. When they suddenly learn that they've mis-judged how many of their constituents care about something and which side they're on, they're happy to change positions.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/...ipa_fight.html





The Legislation That Could Kill Internet Privacy for Good
Conor Friedersdorf

An overzealous bill that claims to be about stopping child pornography turns every Web user into a person to monitor

Every right-thinking person abhors child pornography. To combat it, legislators have brought through committee a poorly conceived, over-broad Congressional bill, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. It is arguably the biggest threat to civil liberties now under consideration in the United States. The potential victims: everyone who uses the Internet.

The good news? It hasn't gone before the full House yet.

The bad news: it already made it through committee. And history shows that in times of moral panic, overly broad legislation has a way of becoming law. In fact, a particular moment comes to mind.

In the early 20th Century, a different moral panic gripped the United States: a rural nation was rapidly moving to anonymous cities, sexual mores were changing, and Americans became convinced that an epidemic of white female slavery was sweeping the land. Thus a 1910 law that made it illegal to transport any person across state lines for prostitution "or for any other immoral purpose." Suddenly premarital sex and adultery had been criminalized, as scam artists would quickly figure out. "Women would lure male conventioneers across a state line, say from New York to Atlantic City, New Jersey," David Langum* explains, "and then threaten to expose them to the prosecutors for violation" unless paid off. Inveighing against the law, the New York Times noted that, though it was officially called the White Slave Traffic Act (aka The Mann Act), a more apt name would've been "the Encouragement of Blackmail Act."

That name is what brought the anecdote back to me. A better name for the child pornography bill would be The Encouragement of Blackmail by Law Enforcement Act. At issue is how to catch child pornographers. It's too hard now, say the bill's backers, and I can sympathize. It's their solution that appalls me: under language approved 19 to 10 by a House committee, the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along with your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and IP addresses you've been assigned.

Tracking the private daily behavior of everyone in order to help catch a small number of child criminals is itself the noxious practice of police states. Said an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation: "The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American." Even more troubling is what the government would need to do in order to access this trove of private information: ask for it.

I kid you not -- that's it.

As written, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 doesn't require that someone be under investigation on child pornography charges in order for police to access their Internet history -- being suspected of any crime is enough. (It may even be made available in civil matters like divorce trials or child custody battles.) Nor do police need probable cause to search this information. As Rep. James Sensenbrenner says, (R-Wisc.) "It poses numerous risks that well outweigh any benefits, and I'm not convinced it will contribute in a significant way to protecting children."

Among those risks: blackmail.

In Communist countries, where the ruling class routinely dug up embarrassing information on citizens as a bulwark against dissent, the secret police never dreamed of an information trove as perfect for targeting innocent people as a full Internet history. Phrases I've Googled in the course of researching this item include "moral panic about child pornography" and "blackmailing enemies with Internet history." For most people, it's easy enough to recall terms you've searched that could be taken out of context, and of course there are lots of Americans who do things online that are perfectly legal, but would be embarrassing if made public even with context: medical problems and adult pornography are only the beginning. How clueless do you have to be to mandate the creation of a huge database that includes that sort of information, especially in the age of Anonymous and Wikileaks? How naive do you have to be to give government unfettered access to it? Have the bill's 25 cosponsors never heard of J. Edgar Hoover?

You'd thing that Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), who claims on his Web site to be "an outspoken defender of individual privacy rights," wouldn't lend his name to this bill. But he co-sponsored it! You'd think that the Justice Department of Eric Holder, who is supposed to be friendly to civil libertarians, would oppose this bill. Just the opposite. And you'd think that lots of tea partiers, with all their talk about overzealous government and intrusions on private industry, would object.

But they haven't.

As Julian Sanchez recently wrote on a related subject, "In an era in which an unprecedented quantity of information about our daily activities is stored electronically and is retrievable with a mouse click, internal checks on the government's power to comb those digital databases are more important than ever... If we aren't willing to say enough is enough, our privacy will slip away one tweak at a time."
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...r-good/242853/





Cracking Teenagers’ Online Codes
Pamela Paul

WITH her coordinated zebra-striped scarf, tights and arm warmers (arm warmers?), spiky out-to-there hat and pierced tongue, 34-year-old Danah Boyd provides an electric Gen Y contrast to the staid gray lobby of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Mass., which she enters in a flurry of animated conversation, Elmo-decorated iPhone in hand. In a juxtaposition that causes her no end of mischievous delight, her laptop bears a sticker of Snow White, whose outstretched arm gently cradled the Apple logo.

But Dr. Boyd — a senior researcher at Microsoft, an assistant professor at New York University and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard — is a widely respected figure in social media research. With a number of influential scholarly papers under her name, she travels relentlessly, tweets under the handle Zephoria and has fans trailing her at TED conferences, at South by Southwest and elsewhere on the high-tech speaking circuit.

She is also a kind of rock star emissary from the online and offline world of teenagers. The young subjects of her research become her friends on Facebook and subscribe to her Twitter feed.

“The single most important thing about Danah is that she’s the first anthropologist we’ve got who comes from the tribe she’s studying,” said Clay Shirky, a professor in the interactive telecommunications program at N.Y.U. and a fellow at the Berkman Center.

There’s no shortage of grown-up distress over the dangers young people face online. Parents, teachers and schools worry about teenagers posting their lives (romantic indiscretions, depressing poetry and all), leaking passwords and generally flouting social conventions as predators, bullies and unsavory marketers lurk. Endless back-and-forthing over how to respond effectively — shutting Web sites, regulating online access and otherwise tempering the world of social media for children — dominates the P.T.A. and the halls of policy makers.

But as Dr. Boyd sees it, adults are worrying about the wrong things.

Children today, she said, are reacting online largely to social changes that have taken place off line.

“Children’s ability to roam has basically been destroyed,” Dr. Boyd said in her office at Microsoft, where a view of the Boston skyline is echoed in the towers of books on her shelves, desk and floor. “Letting your child out to bike around the neighborhood is seen as terrifying now, even though by all measures, life is safer for kids today.”

Children naturally congregate on social media sites for the relatively unsupervised conversations, flirtations, immature humor and social exchanges that are the normal stuff of teenage hanging-out, she said.

“We need to give kids the freedom to explore and experience things online that might actually help them,” she added. “What scares me is that we don’t want to look at the things that make us uncomfortable. So rather than see what teenagers are showing us online about bullying and suicide and the problems they’re dealing with and using that information to help them, we’re making ourselves blind to it.”

These are issues that Dr. Boyd has lived with and knows well.

“At the age of 16, I thought I’d be dead by 21,” she said. “I lost 13 classmates to drug overdoses, suicides, accidents and a murder.”

Her parents divorced when she was 5 and her father largely disappeared. She was raised by her mother, sometimes in straitened circumstances, in Lancaster, Pa. Bored at school, she rebelled — challenging teachers, lashing out at her mother, hanging out with hackers and languishing in school.

“The Internet was my saving grace,” Dr. Boyd said. “I would spend my teenage nights talking to strangers online, realizing there were other smart kids out there.”

She also often reached out to adults online, many of whom acted as de facto counselors and mentors. Dr. Boyd’s own positive experience on platforms like Usenet and Internet Relay Chat fuels her dismay over attempts to restrict children’s use of the Internet today.

She asks, for example, how teenagers can be encouraged to become politically active when so much of that activity takes place online. And she wonders whether gay children grappling with their sexuality might benefit enormously from chatting online with adults who have been through similar situations.

“There are lots of places where it’s extraordinarily helpful for kids to talk to adults,” she said.

Moreover, grown-ups’ panic about teenage online behavior distracts from the potential benefits. Bullying, Dr. Boyd said, occurs more frequently in schools than on the Internet, and in neither case, according to data she cites, is it on the rise.

“The most deadly misconception about American youth has been the sexual predator panic,” she said. “The model we have of the online sexual predator is this lurking man who reaches out on the Internet and grabs a kid. And there is no data that support that. The vast majority of sex crimes against kids involve someone that kid trusts, and it’s overwhelmingly family members.”

A teenage girl who has been sexually molested by an uncle and who has nobody she can talk to in her hometown might benefit greatly from communicating with a counselor online.

Despite her own teenage rebellion or perhaps because of it, Dr. Boyd ended up at Brown, where she studied computer science, and at the Media Lab at M.I.T., where she got her master’s. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, working at Google, Yahoo and Tribe at the same time.

She now calls herself an activist and a scholar. Her Twitter handle is “social media scholar, youth researcher & advocate.” She is also working on a long overdue book for Yale University Press, “The Social Lives of Networked Teens.” (The title, she said jokingly, should really be “It’s Complicated.”)

In November she was tapped, along with John Palfrey, a director of the Berkman Center, to run the research arm of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation, an organization devoted to empowering youth.

Dr. Boyd’s standard mode of research combines traditional quantitative work with deep ethnographic research — embedding herself in youth communities, whether it’s middle-class Muslim gangs in Nashville or Ivy League aspirants who navigate social media with startling sophistication.

One of her most influential and contentious papers showed that when teenagers transitioned from MySpace to Facebook, a kind of “white flight” occurred, in which Facebook became more associated with children who aspire to college.

By focusing on a range of issues — sexual predation, teenage suicide, bullying, sexting, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual trafficking — Dr. Boyd has shown, often to the dismay of those in the tech community who believe that the Internet is the ultimate equalizer, that issues of race, class and gender persist in the virtual world just as in the real world. The children in families characterized by alcohol and drug abuse, financial stress, divorce and sexual abuse reveal their struggles online just as they do off.

“She was the first to say that the teenagers at risk off line are the same ones who are at risk online,” said Alice Marwick, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft who works closely with Dr. Boyd. “It’s not that the Internet is doing something bad to these kids, it’s that these bad things are in kids’ lives and the Internet is just a component of that.”

Most broadly, with troubled teenagers and model youth alike, adolescent online behavior is a reflection of what teenagers’ social lives have always been: friendship, gossip, flirting, transgressing and keeping it all — good and bad — from parents.

One girl Dr. Boyd knows made her Facebook page sound as if she were depressed so that she could use her mental state as a pretext for breaking up with a boyfriend. When a teenager posts the lyrics to a suicidal love song on her Facebook page, her mother may panic while her friends know it’s just a reference to an annoying ex-friend.

“Teenagers try to hide what’s really going on in their communication online,” said Ethan Zuckerman, director of the M.I.T. Center for Civic Media. “Danah is very good at figuring out how to crack those codes. And she’s made a strong case that teenagers are using the Internet in ways that are far more productive and creative and less harmful than people assume.”

Most shocking to adults may be how similar teenagers are to them when it comes to online behavior.

“Teenagers absolutely care about privacy,” Dr. Boyd said, adding that like adults, they share things to feel loved, connected and supported.

“Teenagers are not some alien population,” she said. “When we see new technologies, we think they make everything different for young people. But they really don’t. Teenagers are the same as they always were.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/f...ine-codes.html



















Until next week,

- js.



















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