Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 24th, '10

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April 10th, 2010




Preliminary Analysis of the Officially Released ACTA Text
Gwen Hinze

The text of the draft Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was finally released to the public yesterday. We welcome the official release of the ACTA text after two years of negotiations. We can now have a serious public debate about its content and far-reaching impact on citizens' lives.

If the previous leaks (here, here, here and here) left any doubt, the officially released text makes it crystal clear that ACTA is not just about counterfeiting. When ACTA was announced two years ago, it was portrayed as a modest effort at increasing coordination between customs agencies tracking counterfeit physical goods. The officially released text shows that it's far broader. First, it is not just about trademarks; it covers copyright, potentially patents, and all other forms of intellectual property. Second, it's not just about physical goods. It's all about the Internet — which it targets very specifically — and citizens' ability to use it to communicate, collaborate and create. ACTA contains new potential obligations for Internet intermediaries, requiring them to police the Internet and their users, which in turn pose significant concerns for citizens' privacy, freedom of expression and fair use rights.

Read on for our preliminary analysis on copyright issues.

Unlike previously leaked ACTA documents, the official ACTA text does not contain countries' negotiating stances, so it actually contains less information than the most recent leaked documents. However we presume ACTA followers will be reading the official text alongside the leaked 18 January 2010 annotated text, and in many places will be able to work out the originator of particular text. It's obvious that there is still quite a bit of disagreement between negotiating countries about the scope of ACTA (in particular, whether it extends to patents, as Japan and the EU have sought) and some of its fundamental features. As expected, much text is enclosed by square brackets — indicating that it has not been approved by all countries — and in several places there are multiple proposals. There are recurrent disagreements about whether obligations should be mandatory or discretionary, which will lead to heated future lobbying battles in the various ACTA countries' national legislatures.

The official text raises several concerns:

First, ACTA contains a number of provisions that are inconsistent with US law, despite the oft-repeated claim of the USTR that ACTA will "color within the lines of US law".

For instance, the text includes a EU proposal, for criminal sanctions for "inciting, aiding and abetting" intellectual property infringement (Article 2.15(2)]. That language is taken from the draft 2007 EU IPR enforcement criminal sanction directive. US copyright law does not recognize the concept of "inciting" copyright infringement, so it is unclear what this means and when it would apply. This raises the concern that ACTA could expand the scope of secondary copyright liability for Internet intermediaries, consumer device manufacturers and software developers, beyond the boundaries of the doctrines enunciated by US courts. Next, ACTA's chapter on "Special Measures Related to Technological Enforcement of Intellectual Property in the Digital Environment" contains a proposal (apparently put forward by Japan, based on the leaked 18 January 2010 draft) requiring ACTA signatories to enable IP rightsholders to expeditiously obtain subscriber identity information from ISPs (Article 2.18 (3ter)(Option 2). This appears to be inconsistent with US standards of due process and judicial oversight. US copyright holders must currently file a lawsuit and seek a court injunction to force ISPs to disclose such information. Further, ACTA's civil enforcement chapter includes two proposals for UK-style loser-pays attorney fee awards, something that is not common practice in US civil litigation (Article 2.2.5). In each of these examples the proposals are in square brackets and have not been agreed by all negotiating countries. In relation to the "inciting" proposal, footnote 39 notes that "At least one delegation has asked for the deletion of paragraph 3" (sic). Hence, there's no guarantee that this language will be in the final ACTA, but the key question is how will this be resolved in a way that does not involve changes to US law, or to EU law, as EU negotiators have claimed?

The official text also contains a number of provisions that appear to be based on parts of US copyright law, but are either incomplete or inaccurate characterizations of US law. For instance, ACTA requires countries to adopt laws prohibiting circumvention of copyright owners' technological protection measures modeled on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (discussed in more detail below). But ACTA does not precisely mirror the DMCA; in particular, it does not includes the seven exceptions in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, nor the triennial rulemaking process in section 1201(a)(1)(C), which provide a small measure of flexibility. ACTA contains two proposals that would permit (but not require) countries to create exceptions to these bans. In addition, as currently framed, particularly if read in conjunction with square-bracketted Article 2.18(5) or (4.2), the ACTA provisions are inconsistent with recent US Circuit court judgments on the scope of the US provisions, which required a nexus between copyright infringement and legal protection for TPMs. As a result, the ACTA text would require signatories to adopt anti-circumvention prohibitions that are even broader than those in U.S. law. Similarly, ACTA requires countries to adopt third party liability, but several proposals only permit, and do not require, countries to create limitations on the liability of Internet intermediaries, and contain vague limitations that are weaker than the limitations on monetary damages against Internet intermediaries found in the US safe harbor provisions.

Second, ACTA contains provisions that could constrain the ability of the US Congress to engage in legislative reform to meet changing public policy needs.

The ACTA text contains a proposal mandating countries to adopt statutory damages. While US copyright law contains a statutory damages regime, it is subject to an important limitation for innocent infringement done without knowledge, allowing judges to reduce or remit statutory damages in certain circumstances. ACTA includes a limitation provision, but it is discretionary, leaving it up to ACTA countries to decide whether to transpose it in their national law (Article 2.2(3)). Even with this important limitation, the US statutory damages regime has led to disproportionately large awards of damages against individuals in the file-sharing context, far exceeding the actual harm caused, and has had a significant chilling effect on innovation by Internet intermediaries and technology creators, who cannot afford to be threatened with statutory damages for engaging in activity that might be found to be fair use, or infringement. For that reason, Congress has been considering statutory reform in this area, (for instance in H.R. 1201 before the 110th Congress). ACTA would appear to lock-in the existing regime, to the detriment of US citizens and the technology sector.

Similarly, the inclusion of the DMCA TPM provisions in ACTA could act as a constraint on Congress' ability to amend the DMCA to clarify the scope or address other concerns with the current anti-circumvention provisions, such as those contained in the respective reform proposals of Representatives Boucher and Lofgren.

Third, ACTA will create new international norms, beyond those agreed in the 1994 Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property and the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty and Performances and Phonograms Treaty. Aside from creating a new international institution -- the ACTA Oversight Council -- ACTA will create new norms in the following areas.

(a) Internet Intermediary Liability

Internet intermediaries are the chokepoints for the Internet. Creating or increasing Internet intermediaries' liability for their users' behavior and content on their networks creates incentives for intermediaries to police their users and platforms. This in turn has a direct impact on citizens' privacy, freedom of expression, and ability to create and collaborate. Policy makers in the 1990s understood that Internet intermediaries had to be shielded from potentially unbounded liability if the Internet was to flourish. That is why many countries adopted special legal regimes for Internet Service Providers and other Internet intermediaries, limiting their potential legal liability for copyright infringement, and defamation. Now, as more and more of our cultural and civic life depends on the existence of content hosting platforms, discussion forums, wikis and social networking communities, these rules have come to have even greater significance. In short, appropriately tailored limitation of liability regimes for Internet intermediaries are key to individuals' freedom of expression and user generated content. The existing limitation of liability regimes are under attack in a range of national and international venues, but ACTA is the most troubling.

ACTA contains various provisions requiring countries to impose liability on intermediaries for their users' behavior (Article 2.18(3)). This would apply to Internet intermediaries, but also to intermediaries such as libraries and educational institutions, which frequently provide Internet access to their customers and users. This is not required by any of the major international IP treaties – not by the 1994 Trade Related Aspects of IP Agreement, nor the WIPO Copyright Treaty or WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, and so would establish a new global norm.

Previous ACTA leaks disclosed that the US was proposing that signatory countries recognize third party liability based on the secondary copyright liability doctrines developed by US courts, including for "inducement" of copyright infringement. (Apparently opposed by New Zealand, Canada, the EU and perhaps Japan). The official text shows that this is still proposed. Footnote 47 states that:

"[For greater clarity, the Parties understand that third party liability means liability for any person who authorizes for a direct financial benefit, induces through or by conduct directed to promoting infringement, or knowingly and materially aids any act of copyright or related rights infringement by another….]"

As others have noted, the language here and in previously leaked texts does not accurately reflect US case law in this area, and effectively takes one side in an ongoing debate about the interpretation of the 2005 Supreme Court decision in MGM v. Grokster. The official text also contains other potential new sources of liability for intermediaries, including a proposal for pre-litigation injunctions against intermediaries (Article 2.5 X).

ACTA allows, but does not require, countries to create limitations on intermediaries' civil liability (Article 2.18(3), Options 1 and 2 and Footnote 47). However, unlike the US safe harbor provisions, the ACTA text does not specify what types of limitations of liability can be created, and for what activities. This may reflect an effort to find compromise language between the safe harbor regime in section 512 of the US Copyright Act and similar provisions in the laws of US Free Trade Agreement partners, the European Union's eCommerce Directive framework, and Japanese law. Much would then depend on the national implementation and judicial interpretations of these provisions in ACTA countries. This creates the potential for US Internet companies to be subject to more onerous requirements and higher levels of liability in other countries in which they operate. And this in turn, is likely to have an adverse impact on citizens' freedom of expression, and ability to access content hosted on platforms in different countries.

(b) Three Strikes

"Graduated response" or "three strikes" regimes which require ISPs to disconnect their subscribers' Internet access for alleged copyright infringement are extremely controversial. Three strikes laws currently exist in only three countries – South Korea, France and Taiwan – so inclusion in ACTA might result in more countries adopting such regimes. This has rightly been the subject of much debate in Europe, where the European Parliament has categorically rejected three strikes regimes on several occasions. Accordingly, the European Commission went to considerable lengths in their press release yesterday to emphasize that ACTA does not require countries to adopt three strikes laws:

“The negotiation draft shows that specific concerns, raised in particular by the civil society, are unfounded. No party in the ACTA negotiation is proposing that governments should introduce a compulsory "3 strikes " or "gradual response" [sic] rule to fight copyright infringements and internet piracy.”

We agree that ACTA does not require countries to adopt a three strikes law, but the more interesting question is: does it create a legal framework that facilitates that? Article 2.18(3) of ACTA contains three proposals in this area. In our view, the answer is yes under at least two of those proposals. Here's why.

The words "graduated response" and "three strikes" do not appear in the official ACTA text. The three strikes discussion is taking place in the context of intermediary liability for copyright infringement. The first proposal, put forward by the US, in Option 1 of Article 2.18.3 (on page 21), sets out conditions that intermediaries will need to comply with in order to get the benefit of limitation of liability provisions that countries might enact. The US proposes that online service providers should be required to adopt and reasonably implement a policy "to address the unauthorized storage or transmission of materials protected by copyright".

A previously leaked European Commission memo describes how US negotiators had explained the intent of this provision:

"On the limitations from 3rd party liability: to benefit from safe harbors, ISPs need to put in place policies to deter unauthorised storage and transmission of IP infringing content (ex: clauses in customers' contracts allowing, inter alia, a graduated response). From what we understood, the US will not propose that authorities need to create such systems. Instead they require some self-regulation by ISPs."

And footnote 29 in the leaked 18 January 2010 consolidated text stated that:

"An example of such a policy is providing for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscriptions [US: and][AUS:or] accounts on the service provider's system or network of repeat infringers."

That footnote has now disappeared. If the US proposal is adopted in the final ACTA language, what constitutes appropriate policies for this purpose will therefore be a question for interpretation by national policymakers and perhaps by the ACTA Oversight Council which is tasked with monitoring and evaluating whether signatories' laws comply with ACTA.

The EU has tabled its own proposal (in square brackets in Option 2 on page 21). It would permit countries to create a system requiring ISPs to terminate particular subscribers upon receipt of an order from a judicial or administrative body should they be inclined to do so – as in the French HADOPI law's internet disconnection regime.

"[Paragraph 3(a) shall not affect the possibility for a judicial or administrative authority in accordance with the Parties legal system, requiring the service provider to terminate or prevent an infringement, nor does it affect the possibility of the parties establishing procedures governing the removal or disabling of access to information."

While this might be consistent with one EU Member States' national law, creating the global framework for ISP termination obligations on the basis of a non-judicial administrative body order poses significant due process concerns for citizens.

A third proposal is in square brackets in Article 2.18 (3 quater), apparently put forward by Japan. It states that:

"Each Party shall promote the development of mutually supportive relationships between online service providers and right holders to deal effectively with patent, industrial design, trademart and copyright or related rights infringement which takes place by means of the Internet, including the encouragement of establishing guidelines for the actions which should be taken."

This language would also leave room for a Three Strikes policy.

If ACTA incorporates the EU proposal permitting regimes requiring ISPs to terminate Internet access by non-judicial administrative order, or the US or Japanese proposals for conditions that ISPs must comply with to obtain the benefit of a limitation on liability, it will create a new global norm - facilitating an ISP practice of Internet user disconnection on the basis of copyright holder allegations of copyright infringement.

(c) Technological Protection Measures – a Global DMCA

As we have previously noted ACTA would make the US DMCA TPM legal framework the de facto global norm, effectively displacing the more open-ended language finally adopted in the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty and Performances and Phonograms Treaty. The US TPM regime contains at least three characteristics that are broader than what is required to implement the WIPO Treaty obligations. First, it creates an absolute ban on TPM circumvention, even where done for lawful non-copyright infringing purposes. Second, it requires legal protection for TPMs that control access (and not just use) of technologically protected copyrighted works. (To which Japan strenuously objected in the leaked 18 January 2010 text.) Third, it includes a broad prohibition on the manufacture and distribution of circumvention devices. Fourth, it requires criminal penalties for flouting the TPM circumvention bans,while the WIPO treaties are silent on this point.

Other countries have chosen to implement the WIPO treaties by creating TPM legal regimes with different features to avoid some of the collateral damage experienced in the US. If ACTA contains an obligation to adopt the DMCA TPM framework, the US will be able to achieve what it was not able to do by international agreement in Geneva in 1996, and has only been able to do on a piecemeal basis since then via its bilateral free trade agreements.

(d) Criminalization of Individuals' Non-Commercial Behavior

Finally, ACTA could rewrite the current internationally agreed standards for criminal penalties for copyright and trademark infringement. At the time that the TRIPS Agreement was negotiated it was understood that criminal penalties would be reserved for the worst cases of willful, commercial-scale copyright piracy and counterfeiting. This is reflected in the language of Article 61 of TRIPs. However, ACTA could expand this, imposing criminal sanctions for individuals' non-commercial activities via a broad definition of "commercial scale". ACTA contains a US proposal to define "commercial scale" to include activities that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain (Article 2.14 (1)(a) and (b) (in square brackets)). While that appears consistent with US law, incorporating this in ACTA would amount to a wholesale re-write of the internationally agreed TRIPs standard.

This clearly reflects a desire to penalize P2P file-sharing. But no matter what views you hold about file-sharing, no one should lose sight of the larger impact of this: some of the 37 countries negotiating ACTA are seeking to overturn the standards agreed to by the more than 150 member countries of the World Trade Organization.

There is much more to digest in the official ACTA text. We'll be doing further analysis in coming days.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04...ased-acta-text





'Three-Strikes' Rule Dropped from ACTA

48 hours until draft agreement launch
Darren Pauli

The controversial three-strikes ban in the secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) appears to have been dropped.

The proposal to include the ban was shot down by member countries including Australia and New Zealand during the eighth ACTA meeting in Wellington last week. A three-strikes ban, such as the French HADOPI law, would require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to cut-off users from Internet access after receiving three copyright law breach notifications.

Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) staff met in Wellington with representatives from New Zealand, the US, Europe, Japan, Canada and others for to discuss the draft ACTA plurilateral trade agreement, which was leaked in February. The agreement aims to ramp-up control held by intellectual property owners over their products and ideas and reduce counterfeiting and illegal trade.

According to an ACTA statement issued by DFAT today, and 48 hours ahead of the public launch of the ACTA discussion paper, no member country will "mandate a 'graduated response' or 'three-strikes' approach to copyright infringement on the Internet".

"Good progress was made toward narrowing existing differences, in the areas of civil enforcement, border measures, criminal enforcement and special measures for the digital environment," the statement reads. "The participants held constructive discussions regarding the scope of intellectual property rights covered in ACTA."

Member countries agreed to issue a draft ACTA text, specifically "the consolidated text coming [from the] discussions which will reflect the substantial progress made", to assist the "process of reaching a final agreement".

But countries will maintain the veil of secrecy shrouding their own stances on the ACTA agreement. Australian Trade Minister, Simon Crean said the government will not seek to change national law through the agreement, but could not discuss the details of ACTA. Australia has not joined ACTA to drive change in Australian domestic laws. Taking part in the negotiations does not oblige Australia to join any resulting treaty, DFAT notes on its web site.

According to the statement, ACTA will not:

• Interfere with a country's ability to respect its citizens' fundamental rights and liberties.
• Oblige ACTA participants to require border authorities to search travellers' baggage or their personal electronic devices for infringing materials.
• Address the cross-border transit of legitimate generic medicines.

The next ACTA meeting will be held in Switzerland in June this year.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...pped-from.html





Major Labels Go Bragh? Irish Judge Allows 3 Strikes
Nate Anderson

The Irish High Court ruled on April 16 that cutting off the Internet access of suspected P2P pirates was fine, that no data privacy rules would be breached by doing so, and that such schemes are needed because "the mischievous side of the human personality, containing a repulsive aspect as well as an attractive and humorous one, has also come to the fore over the Internet."

When the major music labels in Ireland sued Eircom, one of the country's largest ISPs, the case was eventually settled out of court. The labels wanted Eircom to take some responsibility for the file-sharing behavior of its subscribers, and the company agreed to implement a voluntary three strikes system that would result in Internet disconnection. This made the lawsuit go away, but the Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland raised objections to the proposal, and the country's High

That judgment has just arrived, and it pulls no punches. Mr. Justice Peter Charleton refers to illegal downloads of music and movies with a wide variety of synonyms: theft, stealing, filtering, "plague of copyright infringement." He has already approved an Eircom block of the entire Pirate Bay website.

When it comes to the actual technology involved here, the justice betrays a certain lack of confidence. "Again, reviewing the evidence that I heard in this case, it seems to operate like this," he says, trying to describe P2P technology. Or again, "As I understand the evidence that I heard..." Or again, "One can find out by looking at the IP number, I understand..."

The justice refers to legal alternatives to illicit downloading, such as "an I-player system," when he's writing about the BBC's well-known iPlayer catch-up service. He refers numerous times in the order to "DetectNet," a company which can find P2P infringers, when he really means DtecNet. A strong grasp of the technical details won't be found in this ruling (though the broad understanding of the issues appears to be correct).

Much odder still is the fact that, though this case turns on questions of data privacy, Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner did not even testify. Why not? "The Data Protection Commissioner did not appear because of the concern over indemnity as to his costs." Awesome.

No problems here

Shutting off Internet access seems like a heavy-handed remedy to the (real) issue of online copyright infringement. Given the incredible utility of the Internet, which is used to do everything from making phone calls to paying bills to sending e-mail to watching video to playing games to conducting commerce, cutting off a connection completely over the downloading of music raises questions about proportionality. Those questions are obviously stronger when applied to a household, where five people might share this crucial resource but only a 14-year old daughter has decided to download some Justin Bieber tracks she heard on the radio.

And to do it all without judicial oversight or judicial appeal—could that be fair? (Eircom's approach does allow a private appeal to the company, which has the last word. The labels have undertaken similar lawsuits against other ISPs, seeking to make the scheme a national one without having to actually pass a law.)

The French Constitutional Council said "no" when the government tried to mandate a similar scheme there; the law had to be reworked in order to add oversight. Similarly, the European Parliament has objected for years on the same grounds. None of that has any resonance with the Irish High Court. The sharp legal reasoning behind the Irish decision? " Some would argue that it is an imposition on human freedom. There is no freedom, however, to break the law."

In the long history of strawmen, this statement must rank pretty high on the list. The issue isn't about "freedom to break the law," but about proportionality. Does the punishment fit the crime (which is not, in this case, even a "crime" but a civil matter)?

The justice's one clarifying remark is that "most people in Ireland have only to walk down to their local town centre to gain access for around €1.50 an hour."

But the real issue here is data protection, and that's where the bulk of the ruling spends its time. Because the Data Protection Commissioner didn't show up, the judge relied exclusively on a five-paragraph letter sent from the Commissioner to the music labels in December 2009. The letter asks whether IP addresses might be "personal data" and therefore might fall under Irish data protection legislation. It also asks if a judge should be involved in disconnections.

In a wide-ranging analysis that invokes both Saint Colmcille and European law, the judge concludes that no, data protection laws don't enter into this. Furthermore, judicial oversight is not needed because "no one is accusing anyone of an offense. There is no issue as anything beyond civil copyright infringement." Unlike in France and the UK, the Irish situation is voluntary; the government is not compelling any of this behavior.

The conclusion: "yes, the graduated response process is lawful," and Eircom can proceed to implement the settlement after a six-month delay while the decision was awaited.

Willie Kavanagh, Chairman of Ireland's major label music trade group, called it a great day for the country. "The whole music industry, including performers, composers and record labels, has been decimated by illegal peer to peer traffic and our losses amount to over €60m per annum," he said. "Our industry has lost 40 per cent in sales value between 2005 and 2009 with devastating effects on artists and creativity. Today's decision is the first step back towards allowing artists to make a living again."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-3-strikes.ars





Tech Companies Fear Implications of Trade Pact
Joelle Tessler

Companies across the technology industry — from Internet access providers to social networking sites to video-sharing services — are bracing for this week's release of a draft of a trade agreement that they fear could undermine all sorts of online activities.

The agreement, being negotiated by the United States and nearly a dozen trading partners, is intended to create an international framework to crack down on counterfeiting, copyright violations and other intellectual property theft. But skeptics warn that it could chill free speech and other online expression by making technology companies liable for the misdeeds of their users.

"If online platforms themselves are held liable in a way that is overly broad, the platforms themselves will start screening and censoring or scaling back how open to user participation they are," said David Sohn, senior policy counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology, an interest group that advocates for civil liberties online. "They will have to exercise really tight control."

The Bush administration began negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, in the fall of 2007 in an effort to harmonize intellectual property protections across different nations. The far-reaching agreement would encompass everything from counterfeit pharmaceuticals to fake Prada bags to online piracy of music and movies. Once ratified, trade agreements take full effect and a country can face complaints for noncompliance.

Since early on, the talks have been mired in controversy. For one thing, countries that are considered the biggest sources of intellectual property theft — such as China and Indonesia — are not participating. Nations taking part include the European Union member states, Japan, Korea, Canada, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland and Australia.

The negotiations have been held behind closed doors, with no opportunity for public comment or outside input. Earlier versions of the trade agreement have been leaked, but the first official draft won't be released until Wednesday — even though last week's talks in New Zealand marked the eighth round of negotiations. The next round will take place in Switzerland in June.

Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in Internet and electronic commerce issues, argues that because the agreement could reshape intellectual property laws in so many countries, the proper forum for such negotiations is the World Intellectual Property Organization. WIPO negotiations are more open to public scrutiny and include countries where much of the counterfeiting takes place, he noted.

"Anyone in a democratic country should be uncomfortable when governments go behind closed doors to negotiate an agreement that will ultimately have a significant impact on domestic law," Geist said.

Many technology companies fear that ACTA could undermine existing legal precedent and intellectual property laws in the United States, including the landmark 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The current U.S. legal framework includes important protections for Internet service providers and other technology companies when their users are accused of copyright infringement. Although current law requires companies to remove infringing content, it limits their liability.

Most big technology companies are hesitant to comment on the record about ACTA until they see an official draft, but privately they say that immunity is critical not just for Internet service providers such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., but also for any online company that hosts user-generated content. That includes social networking sites such as Facebook, video-sharing sites such as Google Inc.'s YouTube and even the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The darkest fear of the technology companies is that ACTA contains provisions that would require them to cut off access to users who violate copyright protections and possibly would hold the companies liable for violations.

The dangers of such "secondary liability" were underscored by a recent court ruling in Italy, which held three Google executives criminally responsible for hosting an online video of an autistic teenager being bullied, said Sohn of the Center for Democracy & Technology.

Sohn also said he worries that the trade agreement will exclude another "safeguard" in U.S. law — the "fair use" doctrine, which allows limited use of copyright-protected material for commentary, criticism, research, teaching and news reporting.

"While this is being characterized as an anti-counterfeiting agreement, it is really a copyright deal with rules that will affect the daily lives of millions of people both online and in the digital realm," Geist said.

ACTA skeptics aren't only worried that it will bring more-restrictive rules to the U.S. Sherwin Siy, deputy legal director for Public Knowledge, another public interest group, fears that ACTA could also export strict, punitive copyright enforcement measures that exist in U.S. law to other countries. That could include high statutory damage awards, he said.

To be sure, ACTA has plenty of defenders. In November, a long list of media companies and trade groups, including the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, sent a letter to Congress expressing support for the agreement.

ACTA, they wrote, has the potential to "preserve high value American jobs, and create new ones" and "buttress our country's leading position in the creation, publishing and distribution of software, video games, films, music, books, television programs, journals, visual materials and other works protected by copyright."

The office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which is negotiating ACTA on behalf of the U.S., said in a statement that it is working to implement "President Obama's commitment to aggressively protect American intellectual property overseas" and is "respecting the balance struck by the U.S. Congress on these issues."

The trade representative added that secondary liability for copyright infringement already exists in U.S. and foreign laws. ACTA, it hopes, would "protect Internet intermediaries from secondary liability if they play by the rules."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...mFS0AD9F6IM8O0





India's Copyright Bill Gets it Right
Cory Doctorow

India's new copyright bill sounds like a pretty good piece of work: it declares private, personal copying to be "fair dealing" (like US fair use) and limits the prohibition on breaking DRM so that it's only illegal to do so if you're also violating copyright. That means that you can break the DRM on your iPad to move your books to your Kindle or vice-versa. It also makes it legal to make, distribute and sell tools to accomplish this.

India Introduces Major Copyright Reform Bill Copyright
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/22...right-bil.html





The Pirate Bay, A Year After The Verdict
Ernesto

Exactly one year ago The Pirate Bay Four were sentenced to a year in prison, and on top of that each ordered to pay $905,000 in damages. The entertainment industries hoped that the ruling would set an example, but today The Pirate Bay is larger than ever before.

Millions of BitTorrent users all around the world followed the Pirate Bay trial with great interest last year. Many had hoped that the court would decide that operating a BitTorrent tracker was no offense and that the defendants would walk free.

The ten day trial started off with a small victory for the accused. On the second day the prosecutor announced that half of the charges against the four defendants had been dropped. The prosecutor couldn’t prove that the .torrent files that were submitted as evidence actually used The Pirate Bay’s tracker and therefore had to drop all charges of ‘assisting copyright infringement’.

What remained was the claim that the Pirate Bay folks were ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. In the days that followed the defendants’ lawyers nullified the ‘assisting’ part by arguing that there was no link between the accused and users who download copyrighted material. The prosecution, on the other hand, argued the opposite and brought in screenshots of websites and torrent files as evidence.

On April 17th 2009, the verdict was announced and Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom were found guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. The court sentenced each of the defendants to one year in prison and a fine of $905,000.

Immediately after the verdict the defendants announced they would appeal. In the weeks that followed the news came out that the judge who delivered the verdict had ties to several pro-copyright organizations. Following this news the defendants’ lawyers decided to file for a retrial, but this request was denied.

While awaiting the appeal that is currently scheduled to take place during the summer of 2010, The Pirate Bay continued to operate. Despite efforts from the entertainment industry to shut it down the site is now bigger than ever before. At the time of writing The Pirate Bay has 4,349,457 signed up members, growing by 105 members during the time taken to write this article.

This doesn’t mean that nothing has changed though. In the months following the verdict there were plans for the site to be sold to a gaming company who wanted to transform it into a BitTorrent-powered media store. The takeover plans dominated the news for months but the deal eventually went bust in the fall of last year.

Around the same time, two of the founders of The Pirate Bay were told by the court that they could no longer be involved in the daily operations of the site. This didn’t change much either because the two had already said that they were no longer involved in its operation. All this time, The Pirate Bay continued to serve torrents to the public.

Last November, The Pirate Bay decided to close down its tracker. According to The Pirate Bay team, BitTorrent has evolved up to a point where trackers are no longer needed. “We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time, adding that they might even stop serving torrents in the future.

Since November, The Pirate Bay has continued without a tracker, with its website gaining more and more users month after month. This relative calm is expected to last for a few more months until the appeal trial starts. When that happens, The Pirate Bay will have close to 5 million registered users, which is 4 million more than when the legal troubles began.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...erdict-100417/





Movie Studios Threaten Strike On Pirate Bay Nuclear Bunker
enigmax

Last year, The Pirate Bay moved to an ISP that has facilities located in a former NATO nuclear bunker. It has operated with them successfully for some time but we can now reveal that Hollywood movie studios are threatening the ISP with a legal strike over its servicing of TPB and several other sites. The ISP’s owner, however, is in no mood to capitulate.

In early October 2009, The Pirate Bay was forced to move outside its native Sweden and find a new host in Ukraine. Their stay in Eastern Europe didn’t last long though, and soon they found a new and fairly unorthodox home.

CyberBunker is a former nuclear warfare bunker in The Netherlands. The facility was built by NATO in the 1950s and was designed to survive a nuclear war. After that threat largely subsided the bunker changed owners and is now believed to be used as a webhosting data center and is the presumed (in reality this is almost impossible to prove) home of The Pirate Bay.

At the time, Sven Kamphuis, one of the owners of CB3ROB/Cyberbunker, said there were initial difficulties with setting up The Pirate Bay in its new location. Several carriers refused to assist following threats from local anti-piracy group, BREIN. Those problems were soon overcome but although The Pirate Bay continued to function and even grow, we can now exclusively reveal that there are turbulent seas ahead.

According to detailed information received by TorrentFreak, Disney Enterprises and Paramount Pictures in association with Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. (known collectively as the MPA) have been threatening CB3ROB Ltd with legal action over their hosting of The Pirate Bay and several other prominent movie-related sites.

Via its lawyers, in November 2009 the MPA sent CB3ROB a written “copyright warning” which stated that its members own the exclusive rights to a list of movies. The MPA further noted that CB3ROB is the Internet service provider for not only The Pirate Bay, but also movie streaming giants including Watch-Movies-Online.tv, Movie2K.com, TVShack.net, NovaMov.com and MovShare.com. Those sites, they say, are infringing their exclusive rights.

The complaint went on to detail the mechanics of The Pirate Bay, the guilty verdict delivered to its operators in a Swedish court in 2009 and the injunction placed on the site in the Amsterdam District Court in October the same year. Information on the nature of the streaming sites detailed above was also included.

The MPA warning then went on to suggest that since CB3ROB are aware that The Pirate Bay and the other sites are infringing, it is their responsibility to ensure that those infringements stop – i.e, bring an end to providing them with hosting and bandwidth or, as appears to be the case with The Pirate Bay, filter out torrents relating to MPA member works. Failure to do so would result in the MPA taking CB3ROB to court in Germany.

A very tight deadline of a few days was set for a CB3ROB respond, which appears to have been adhered to. The response, however, was not what the MPA had hoped for.

Through their lawyers, CB3ROB rejected the claims of the MPA on several grounds including what they term as an incorrect description of The Pirate Bay’s business model.

As readers will remember, last year the site “went magnetic” by dumping its tracker and relying on DHT and PEX instead. Therefore, CB3ROB argued, the rulings against TPB in Sweden and The Netherlands related to a time when the site’s operations were conducted in a different manner. The complaint is further rejected on grounds that as an ISP, CB3ROB aren’t responsible for the activities of its customers.

TorrentFreak spoke with Sven Olaf Kamphuis from CB3ROB who confirmed our information is correct.

“Once again [Disney] tried to infringe upon the right to provider immunity and the concept of net neutrality by claiming that by providing the Pirate Bay (and others) with Internet connectivity we (CB3ROB Ltd. & Co. KG) would be ‘assisting them in engaging in copyright violations’, which, should our customers be doing that, remains to be proven in court anyway,” he told us.

“They tried this (as usual) by means of an injunction, which we have had our attorneys block by means of a schutzbrief sent to all courts, basically saying they can’t get an injunction without going through the usual court case process,” he added.

Kamphuis says that he believes German law is quite specific in granting provider immunity, with data communications receiving protection under the law in pretty much the same way as postal mail. He explained:

“Providers are immune to any liability claims as long as they:

1: Don’t initiate the transfer of data (which we don’t, the user’s browser does)
2: Don’t select the addressees (IP addresses in this case) of the information to be transferred (Which we don’t, even Disney is free to use the PirateBay as far as we’re concerned ;) )
3: Don’t modify or select the information to be transferred (which we don’t)”

Kamphuis told TorrentFreak that if Disney and friends have a problem with the activities of CB3ROB clients, they should start a court case against them, a route he notes that has been traveled before, without success.

“If they’re too lazy (or don’t have valid arguments) to win court cases against individual parties and force them to terminate their activities, that cannot and will not be made the problem of the Internet industry, we simply cannot tolerate that,” he insists. “They’re trying to blackmail ISPs into cleaning up the mess caused by their dysfunctional business model, which the Internet industry, of course, will not do.”

The information we received detailing CB3ROB’s rejection of the Swedish and Dutch decisions was also confirmed.

“Disney apparently also can’t read Dutch, nor Swedish, as all court verdicts so far are for the Pirate Bay WITH torrent trackers, which they seem to keep messing up with torrent-files. It would help if they would pick some attorneys to represent them who at the very minimum know what they’re talking about, and stop babbling nonsense.”

Kamphuis insists that his company will accept anyone as a customer who can pay the bills and they will do everything required to deliver Internet connectivity to them – period. As an ISP, he says, they provide this service indiscriminately, “..but you know what,” he adds, “I’ve got a great idea.”

“Why don’t all ISPs just give them what they want and drop all packets that contain the word ‘Disney’ from them, including the ones from and to -their- websites, let’s see how long they last without using OUR internet for promoting and selling their shitty crap,” he concludes.
http://torrentfreak.com/movie-studio...bunker-100422/





Italian ISPs Ruled Not Responsible For File-Sharing Customers
enigmax

The far-reaching demands of an anti-piracy group working on behalf of the movie industry have been rejected by a judge. Federazione Anti-Pirateria Audiovisiva wanted ISP Telecom Italia to take unprecedented action against file-sharing subscribers, but the court decided that the ISP couldn’t be held responsible for the actions of its customers.

After failing to bring online piracy under control by other methods, the music and movie industries have been increasingly turning to the courts to force ISPs into action against their own customers.

In Italy, movie anti-piracy group Fapav (Federazione Anti-Pirateria Audiovisiva) went to court in an attempt to compel Italy’s largest ISP, Telecom Italia, to take unprecedented action against subscribers FAPAV say are infringing their members’ copyrights.

In a April 15th ruling that has just been made public, Judge Antonella Izzo largely rejected FAPAV’s demands.

FAPAV wanted the court to force Telecom Italia to monitor its users, report those who file-share to the authorities, and block them along with a range of web locations including BitTorrent sites The Pirate Bay, 1337x and isoHunt. FAPAV had also called for fines of 10,000 euros per day if Telecom Italia refused to comply.

But in a big blow for FAPAV, Judge Izzo ruled that Internet service providers cannot be held responsible for the material carried over their networks and rejected calls for user and site blocking. The demand that huge fines should be imposed on Telecom Italia for non-compliance was also rejected.

The decision was welcomed by the rest of Italy’s Internet service providers, who had feared the implications for their businesses should the case have gone FAPAV’s way.

FAPAV didn’t come away from the case entirely empty-handed though. It achieved token success when the judge ruled that ISPs should pass on copyright infringement complaints from rightsholders to the local prosecutor, rather than the current position where the rightsholders have to do that themselves.

After years spent souring relationships with their customers through legal action, one has to wonder about the extent of the damage now being done to the relationships between the entertainment industries and Internet service providers. Will the worldwide tour of expensive and damaging litigation against them continue, or will changes in the law negate the need for that approach? Time will tell.
http://torrentfreak.com/italian-isps...tomers-100420/





isoHunt Vows Copyright Appeal
David Canton

In December 2009, isoHunt, a BitTorrent and peer-to-peer search engine, was found liable by a U.S. District Court judge for inducing copyright infringement. The operator of the isoHunt website says he will appeal.

IsoHunt was founded by Canadian Gary Fung in January 2003. According to Wikipedia, thousands of torrents are added to and deleted from the website each day. Users of the website perform more than 40 million unique searches each month.

The isoHunt website is a file search engine, but according to its creator, it does not induce copyright infringement. This distinction is crucial because over the last few years, a number of peer-to-peer service companies have been shut down because they were deemed to have induced copyright infringement.

These players include Napster, shut down in 2001, Grokster and Morpheus, shut down in 2005, and TorrentSpy, shut down in 2008.

BitTorrent websites allow users to download files of any kind directly from the computers of other users. Fung says the isoHunt website is similar to a search engine, such as Google, as the website itself does not store any contents and the files are not downloaded from the servers of the websites, and thus should not be liable for inducing copyright infringement.

The U.S. District Court said Fung had solicited infringement of copyrighted files by the way he has designed his website and by comments he made in interviews and online. For example, the isoHunt website allows users to access the top searches or the top files by category. The website also links users to websites that have torrent files or that invite users to upload copyrighted files. The judge felt Fung was aware of the copyright infringement and actively induced the infringement.

More recently, Judge Stephen Wilson of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles ordered isoHunt to remove all infringing content from its website.

“It is axiomatic that the availability of free infringing copies of the plaintiffs’ work through defendants’ websites irreparably undermines the growing legitimate market for consumers to purchase access to the same works,” Judge Wilson said.

Fung said Wilson’s injunction “amounts to nothing less than taking down our search engine . . . We’re discussing the mechanics, the process that is reasonable for an injunction. We’re still trying to hope that the judge will do the right thing.”

IsoHunt has also taken the initiative and sued the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) to get a court ruling regarding the legality of the website. This came before the Supreme Court of British Columbia in March 2009 for a summary judgment, but the court ordered the matter proceed to trial.

The line where someone becomes liable for a copyright infringement of another is not clear. U.S. courts have found some peer-to-peer service companies liable for providing tools that were deemed to be intended to be used for unlawful copying. But others have created services that essentially allow users to do the same thing but in a way that avoids liability for copyright infringement.
http://www.torontosun.com/blogs/tech.../13665771.html





Anti-Piracy Outfit Chases Torrent Site Domain Registrar
Ernesto

After targeting companies that dare to provide hosting services to torrent sites, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has now started to apply pressure to a domain registrar. The tactic seems to work as at least one site, Torrentbit.nl, has decided to change its domain name to prevent being shut down.

torrentbitTorrentbit is a medium-sized torrent site with about 100,000 daily visitors. Like many other torrent sites hosted in The Netherlands, Torrentbit has found itself in the crosshairs of BREIN. In February the anti-piracy outfit sent a request to its host NFOrce, demanding that the company take the site offline.

NFOrce communicated this request to the owner of the site, who had no other option than to move his site to a hosting provider outside The Netherlands. The alternative – facing legal battle against BREIN in court – was not a viable option for the site’s operator.

Soon after BREIN’s request, Torrentbit moved to a Swedish hosting provider, hoping that its issues with BREIN were solved. Previously, many sites have moved outside The Netherlands after threats from BREIN, including BTjunkie, Demonoid and What.cd.

Relocating has solved the issues for the aforementioned sites, but not for Torrentbits. Aside from using NFOrce as a hosting provider, the company also acted as the domain registrar for the .nl domain the site was using. So, in a second attempt to shut Torrentbit down, BREIN sent a request to NFOrce to make the domain unavailable.

NFOrce did not comply with this request immediately, but saw no other option than to do so if Torrentbit’s owners did not make their identity know to BREIN so they could fight this out between themselves. Again, this was not a viable option for the Torrentbit administrator.

“In order to be confident of my site’s future I decided to change domain to a .net extension and make it not so dependent on Dutch laws and existing court decisions,” Torrentbit founder Torro told TorrentFreak when explaining the recent domain change.

Torrentbit continues to operate just fine, but one has to wonder where this will end now domain registrars are becoming a target as well. For now these actions seem to be limited to The Netherlands and Russia, but in the United States the RIAA and MPAA are lobbying for registrars to disable ‘infringing’ sites as well.

It is obvious that BREIN is very creative in using verdicts of previous court cases as ammunition to put pressure on webhosting companies and also domain registrars. With two hosting providers having lost their cases against BREIN in court, it seems that most others would rather comply than put up a costly fight.
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-...istrar-100422/





Is CD Piracy a Matter for Homeland Security?
Betsy Schiffman

Several influential entertainment industry trade groups, including the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Screen Actors Guild, seem to think that the nation's security is at risk because of DVD and CD piracy.

In a plea to the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, the group pitched some seemingly odd ideas about how they think the government should prevent piracy. Among their proposals are calls for the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice to arrange preventative measures to combat piracy before major motion pictures are released.

"The planned release of a blockbuster motion picture should be acknowledged as an event that attracts the focused efforts of copyright thieves, who will seek to obtain and distribute pre-release versions and/or to undermine legitimate release by unauthorized distribution through other channels," the document says. "Enforcement agencies (notably within DOJ and DHS) should plan a similarly focused preventive and responsive strategy."

Keeping America Safe . . . From Pirates?

But does piracy really fall under the Department of Homeland Security's mission? The agency, founded in 2002, aims to "keep America safe," primarily by preventing terrorist attacks within the U.S. and assisting in the recovery from terrorist attacks "that occur within the United States." Based on its mission alone, one might assume that piracy falls under the domain of domestic law enforcement.

Not so, says Pat Reilly, spokeswoman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a department within the Department of Homeland Security.

"We definitely go after pirates," Reilly says. "We're constantly picking up pirated CDs and DVDs. People often ask, 'Why are you picking up counterfeit t-shirts when you should be looking for terrorists?' But the Department of Homeland Security is made up of 22 components. Ours is the traditional customs service, and we're the largest investigative arm of the DHS."

Pirated DVD Sales and Terrorism

This isn't the first time the MPAA has tried to link film piracy with national security, though. In a 2009 study funded by the MPAA, the RAND group concluded that organized crime and terrorism are funded by pirated DVD sales. The report argued that countless mobsters around the world, from Russia to Malaysia, and in a variety of gangs including the Big Circle Boys in Canada and the Camorra Mafia in Italy, have relied upon pirated goods to fund illegal activities.

Critics argue that relying upon the Department of Homeland Security to organize pirated DVD busts is not the most efficient use of government funds. Among the most notable busts listed on the ICE site over the last two years, is a seizure of approximately 1,500 pirated DVDs at a convenience store in Bakersfield, Calif.

To be fair, that's only one of the most recent busts -- there certainly are bigger, more brag-worthy: Six years ago, for example, ICE seized 210,000 pirated DVDs in China as part of an ongoing investigation. And in 2007, ICE seized 90,000 pirated CDs and DVDs at a flea market in Puerto Rico.

Illegal Legal Tactics?

Still, there's a question of whether the MPAA and RIAA are hogging up government resources for their own interests. The RIAA, has filed thousands of lawsuits against John Does, which often amount to woefully tiny settlements, if the lawsuits aren't ignored altogether. Further, some question the legality of the RIAA's legal tactics. In one complaint filed against music labels Sony, Electra, BMG and Motown, Shahanda Noelle Moursy argued that the record companies are "abusing the federal court judicial system for the purpose of waging a public relations and public threat campaign targeting digital file sharing activities."

Her complaint argued that the damages sought by the labels -- at $750 per song -- are unconstitutional, representing roughly 974 times the actual damages, assuming the market value of each song is 99 cents, and the labels' profits on the sale of a single track are typically about 77 cents per song.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/me...rity/19445139/





Ubisoft's Controversial 'Always On' PC DRM Hacked
Josh Lowensohn

Ubisoft's always-on digital rights management solution, dubbed the "Online Services Network," has apparently been circumvented by hackers. News of its arrival on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks began circulating in places like social-news site Reddit Wednesday morning.

The DRM, which now ships with every new PC game made by Ubisoft, requires that gamers have a constant connection to the Internet in order to play their games. The security feature caused a large backlash by users for its inclusion in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed 2 title, which was released last month.

The hack itself removes the DRM entirely and is being claimed by a consortium known as Skid Row. It requires users to download and install a modified version of the game's executable file to their computers. These modified game files, alongside a crack that can be applied to a retail version of the game, were uploaded to various file-sharing sites late Tuesday evening.

Attached to the "readme" file that comes with the hacked content (which can be found here), Skid Row alerted other hackers that the group's methods were safeguarded against reverse-engineering in order to fend off competing hacking groups and Ubisoft itself.

Skid Row also left a note for Ubisoft directly, telling the company to spend less time on its DRM and more on the actual game play:

"Thank you Ubisoft, this was quiete [sic] a challenge for us, but nothing stops the leading force from doing what we do. Next time focus on the game and not on the DRM. It was probably horrible for all legit users. We just make their lifes [sic] easier."

Prior to Skid Row's release, there has been a hack that emulated the back and forth of Ubisoft's DRM servers to the game. However, it did not work for all users or localizations of the game. In the readme file, Skid Row claimed its new solution "cannot be compared to that."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20003120-248.html





Music Industry Warns That It May Sue UK File-Sharers
enigmax

The BPI has warned that it may be forced into suing UK file-sharers, despite the recent passing of the Digital Economy Act. In an interview yesterday, Chief Executive Geoff Taylor said although the industry would prefer for file-sharing to be dealt with via ‘technical measures’, they might still have to sue some people.

Following the passing of the UK’s Digital Economy Act in early April, BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor has been speaking with Billboard about how he sees the next steps for tacking file-sharing in the UK.

Although so-called “educational letters” will be sent out to those suspected of illicit file-sharing towards the end of this year and “technical measures” (throttling/account suspension) imposed if illicit sharing isn’t reduced by around 70% in the next 18 to 24 months, Taylor says that the music industry will probably have to start suing people again in the meantime.

Due to the fact that ISPs will have to keep lists of those subscribers who have received the greatest number of educational letters, ultimately the music industry will be able to identify, they say, those who are being most stubborn to change.

Armed with this information they will be able to proceed to court to obtain their real-life names and addresses. Taylor says that there is a possibility that even at the early stages of the letter sending campaign, the music industry will use this information to start suing the “most egregious infringers”.

Taylor insists that the BPI will take this action reluctantly, and would have preferred that the problem be solved through the early introduction of technical measures, but that wasn’t to be.

“Government disagreed with us, regrettably, and decided not to bring the technical measures into effect immediately and has said to us that it expects us to bring legal cases and that it will take that into account when it looks at whether or not to introduce technical measures,” he explained.

To this end, Taylor said that the BPI may well have to sue people “at some level”, a course of action that he claims the Government expects of them in advance of its decision to implement technical measures.

Of course, suing file-sharers is something that the BPI did before back in 2004. Taylor admitted that they were unable to carry out that campaign on a level which would become a deterrent to the masses but said at least this time round they will be able to target those who have offended the most and failed to change their ways.

This approach raises another interesting situation. Rather than just about anyone being a target for litigation – potentially for downloading a single album for example – the BPI is now saying that only the worst offenders will be targeted for action. Since their legal resources are limited, this could only conceivable aimed at the top 1 or 2% of aggressive file-sharers.

So, since many file-sharers download a hell of a lot more music than they’d ever really need, it could be argued that by only downloading the stuff that they really want, their chances of ending up at the top of the heap are very slim indeed.

This would of course result in a sizable reduction in file-sharing transfers, but would it drive people into music stores? It seems unlikely.
http://torrentfreak.com/music-indust...harers-100417/





Is Piracy Really Killing The Music Industry? No!
Ernesto

For more than a decade the music industry has claimed that digital piracy is the main cause for the gradual decline in revenues. However, looking at the sales data of the music industry itself shows that the disappointing income might be better explained by a third factor that is systematically ignored.

After music cassettes were introduced in the mid-70s the number of sales saw a gradual increase, until the late 80s when the CD took over in popularity. Cassettes were eventually phased out as CD sales continued to skyrocket. In music industry vocabulary one could argue that CDs killed cassettes.

Interestingly enough, this format shift was nothing new for the music industry. The exact same pattern also applied to the LP/cassette battle, with cassettes eventually taking over from LPs in the early 80s. Now, three decades after cassettes started to dominate the music business, the CD is losing ground.

This time around there is a new enemy in town, digital piracy. For nearly a decade the U.S. music industry has seen a decline in sales of physical CDs and all this time it has put the blame on digital piracy. By doing so, the labels conveniently ignore the most drastic format shift music has ever seen – the digital revolution.

With the growing popularity of the Internet, computers and most importantly MP3-players, music fans have started to trade in their CDs for MP3s and other digital files. Initially, the public had to convert CDs themselves, but in 2003 the iTunes store opened, selling over a million tracks in the first week.

With this shift from physical to digital, another important change hit the industry, one that may in part explain why the labels’ revenues in the U.S. continued to decline. With the introduction of paid downloads, consumers no longer had to buy a full album if they were only interested in two or three songs. This new freedom for consumers has dramatically changed the music sales landscape.

According to statistics taken from the RIAA shipment database, between 2004 and 2008 the number of single tracks sold in the U.S. increased by 669 percent while the number of album sales dropped 42 percent. Consequently, the income of the big labels suffered since single track sales are less profitable than full albums.

So where does piracy fit into this picture? Truth is, we just don’t know.

File-sharing is obviously a by-product of the digital revolution in music, but its effect on revenues has been much overstated. In every annual report that comes out, the music industry blames piracy for its troubles, even though digital sales are booming and even though these are directly competing with piracy.

We believe that the format shift from physical to digital music, and the change in buying habits that came along with it, may explain the decline in revenue more than piracy can. To back this up we’ve compared the labels’ revenues in two countries on opposite ends of the digital / physical rift, the U.S. and Germany.

Although piracy is rampant in both of these countries, the local music consumption habits are very different according to data published by IFPI. In Germany physical CDs are still very popular, with digital sales representing less than 25% of all music ‘units’ sold. In the U.S. on the other hand, digital outsells physical with 70% of all sales.

If the theory that the shift towards digital music is negatively impacting revenues holds up, then the German record labels should do much better. Indeed, between 2004 and 2008 the net revenue (in dollars) of the U.S record companies fell more than 30%, compared to less than 5% in Germany.

If the data above is not convincing enough, there is also another unexplained anomaly in the sales data.

If digital piracy is such a problem one would expect that it will mostly hurt digital sales, but these are booming instead. Many younger people don’t even own a CD-player anymore, yet the music industry sees digital piracy as the main reason for the decline in physical sales. Strange, because digital piracy would be most likely to cannibalize digital sales. This anomaly also refutes the excuse that the U.S industry could be hit more by piracy than the German.

So what does the music industry have to say about this all? TorrentFreak asked the RIAA to comment on our findings and they released the following statement.

“We’ve always said there are multiple reasons for the decline of the industry during the past ten years: Competition for the entertainment dollar. Diversification of music consumption and access. But we also think people being able to steal music online is the primary reason. Not the only, but the primary.”

We obviously have to differ with the RIAA here. The digital revolution in music has changed the entire industry by altering the consumption habits of music fans. Although piracy could also be a factor, the data we’ve seen thus far suggests that it plays only a minor role, if it has any effect at all.
http://torrentfreak.com/is-piracy-re...try-no-100418/





EMI To Propose New Financial Plan This Week
FMQB

EMI Chairman Charles Allen is this week expected to lay out a new five-year plan to Terra Firma boss Guy Hands in order to save the troubled music company. Hundreds more EMI staffers could face losing their jobs as managers prepare to present the plan to investors to persuade them to pour more money into the company, the Times in the U.K. reported. Allen is expected to say that profits at EMI Music could be close to £300 million by 2015, as opposed to less than £200 million in the year ending March 2010. But to get there, EMI will need to shed employees again and make a fresh attempt to lease its music catalog to a rival label.

Terra Firma needs approval from 75 percent of investors to draw down £120 million in fresh funds by June 14, or it runs the risk of its lender, Citigroup, seizing control of EMI. This week, Citi will be handed the music group’s trading figures for the last quarter so that it can calculate how much cash Terra Firma must come up with to "cure" a breach in the terms of its £3.3 billion loan agreement, the Times says.

Hands reportedly believes he can raise enough cash from investors to give EMI two years of breathing space. Including the contribution of its publishing arm, EMI thinks it can push its profits as high as £550 million by 2015, although a group target of £400 million is thought to be more realistic, according to the Times.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1775701





Newbies and the Reunited Gather in the Desert
Jon Pareles

“We’re Pavement, back from the dead,” Scott Kannberg, Pavement’s rhythm guitarist, told thousands of people gathered on Sunday night at the main stage of the 11th Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. A reunited Pavement, the epitome of disheveled 1990s indie-rock until it dissolved in 2000, wasn’t the only re-emergent act at Coachella. The three-day rock festival, in the California desert, with more than 100 bands and D.J.’s, also featured Faith No More, Public Image Ltd., the Specials and Sly Stone, whose set started four hours after it was scheduled and closed out the weekend as a funky mess.

For the up-and-coming bands that filled most of the weekend, a Coachella booking is an imprimatur of quality and a chance to face audiences much larger than their usual club circuit. For headliners — the rapper Jay-Z, the flashy progressive-rock band Muse, Damon Albarn’s conceptual studio project Gorillaz, the hard-rock supergroup Them Crooked Vultures (with members from Led Zeppelin, the Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age) and the tightly wound pop-rockers Vampire Weekend — Coachella certifies top-sellers as something cooler than mere pop. They become compatriots of rebels and bohemians like the communal, hippie-flavored Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros; the raunchy, funny, speed-tongued South African “zef-rap” duo Die Antwoord; the manic, quick-fingered art-hardcore band Dillinger Escape Plan and the jittery new wave group White Rabbits.

But this year’s lineup relied more than ever on Coachella’s other role: as a festival that catalyzes reunions and reappearances. It sold out its 75,000 three-day passes at $269 each. Reunited bands make news because they appear rarely and briefly. For many of the other bands at Coachella — from Jay-Z on down — touring is now, and promises to be for some time, the core of a music career as sales of recordings decline. Coachella puts quite a few small bands on big stages, and many of them proclaimed how exhilarating it was. Some, like the elemental, noisy New York City duo Sleigh Bells, joyfully danced across every inch of their newfound space.

Each day’s lineup was spun back from its headliners. Along with Jay-Z, rapping about his riches and featuring a surprise appearance by Beyoncé, Friday’s program included the supercharged, pan-American, politicized Puerto Rican hip-hop of Calle 13; the quick-tongued rock-rapper P.O.S., the Washington rapper Wale (in a set cut short by lateness). Friday’s counterweight was Public Image Ltd., John Lydon’s post-punk band, which mocked materialism and most other comforts; its droning, throbbing riffs were a little more jovial than they were on the band’s 1980s recordings, but Mr. Lydon’s voice was no less corrosive.

With Muse and Faith No More headlining on Saturday, the day was filled with fellow progressive-rock virtuosos like Dirty Projectors, Coheed and Cambria and Porcupine Tree. Faith No More’s ironclad set, featuring Mike Patton’s chameleonic voice, quick-cut from punk to prog-rock to sardonic croon to ironic arena bombast. Mr. Patton, 42, crowd-surfed as he sang Michael Jackson’s ballad “Ben.”

Saturday’s other headliner, the volatile, spooky 1960s-tinged blues-rock band the Dead Weather (formed by Jack White from the White Stripes) had coattails for other ’60s-loving bands: the wistful low-fi guitar-pop of Girls, the easy-swaying reveries of Beach House, the gently barbed folk-pop of Camera Obscura and the neo-psychedelic jams of Portugal. the Man.

On Sunday, Pavement was tied in with do-it-yourself indie-rock: well-traveled groups like Spoon, Yo La Tengo and Sunny Day Real Estate and newer ones including the Big Pink, Deerhunter, Florence and the Machine and the irrepressibly perky drums-and-synthesizer duo Matt and Kim. Sunday’s other headliner was Thom Yorke of Radiohead with his funky band Atoms for Peace (with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers on bass). Its music dovetailed with other arty Minimalists like Owen Pallett, looping his pizzicato violin into dizzying patterns, and a performance by the minimal-techno DJ Plastikman.

Coachella chooses its older bands with hipster hindsight, providing ancestors that younger bands can imagine in their own family trees. Every funk and hip-hop act owes something to the hits Sly and the Family Stone made in the 1960s. Every politically minded band can look at the Specials, a multiracial late-1970s group that used Jamaican ska and reggae to denounce poverty and racial tension as its members went bounding across the stage. Also on Friday’s bill was Gil Scott-Heron, 61, the poet turned singer who made his political advice avuncular as he played electric-piano vamps: “If you believe in peace, time to go to work,” he sang.

The regrouped Pavement, which played its first American show on Thursday night in Pomona, Calif., was its old wayward, brilliantly ambivalent self. Its songs, most of them written and sung by Stephen Malkmus, crumple up radio-friendly California guitar rock, in the lineage of the Eagles and the Byrds, with tangled guitar lines and splintered lyrics that often question the whole preposterous idea of rock stardom. In Pavement’s closing song, “Cut Your Hair,” Mr. Malkmus yelped, “Career, career, career.”

Pavement hasn’t tidied up its music one bit, making clear that each dissonant guitar tangent and each jumpy melody was deliberate and self-conscious. By contrast, bands like the French pop-rockers Phoenix (playing just before Pavement) and Gorillaz (performing afterward) sounded all too eager to proffer hooks and nothing but hooks, as if no longer expecting listeners to unravel multiple ideas.

Nor has Pavement professionalized its rumpled stage presence. One member, Bob Nastanovich, whacked a second drum kit, concocted noise from analog electronics and shouted punky responses to Mr. Malkmus’s lead vocals. At one point, after a lead guitar solo that led to a grand power chord, Mr. Malkmus threw both hands in the air like a rock star; a moment later he shrugged. “Thanks for coming to see us,” he said as the set ended. “You were here anyway.”

Mr. Stone’s latest re-emergence was a wreck. He arrived with dark mumblings — “I made so much money I didn’t know I was being stolen from” — and snippets of new, computerized songs. His band, including some original Family Stone members, nudged him toward hits that showed glimmers of his old rasp and timing, but he cut them short and eventually, after about 40 minutes, climbed down into the photo pit and disappeared, leaving the band to finish the set.

Coachella strives not to be genre-bound, which suits a pop landscape that has no fixed center. Roots-rock, synth-pop revivals, 21st-century electronica and wryly intelligent pop were all represented — as they will be at other summer festivals like Sasquatch!, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, which all share various headliners with Coachella.

Current pop’s relentless touring means that bands on the rise are likely to be back in town sooner rather than later. That interchangeability threatens to blur the identities of festivals like Coachella, even with its spectacular mountain views and clear (if hot) desert weather. But Coachella is likely to be plotting its next band reunions already.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/ar...coachella.html





Patti Smith Rescued from Penury by Song Royalties
Dean Goodman

Not every rock 'n' roll icon is awash in cash. Some, like rock poetess Patti Smith, have endured hard times fairly recently in their careers.

Smith, receiving a lifetime achievement award in Hollywood on Wednesday from songwriting royalties group ASCAP, recalled how the 1994 death of her husband, punk rocker Fred "Sonic" Smith, left her a widowed mother of two young children.

"I was actually down on my luck," she said.

"And what helped bail me out and helped me get back to my feet were the ASCAP checks that I got for 'Because the Night,'" Smith said, referring to her best-known song.

ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, collects royalties on behalf of its member songwriters and copyright holders from public performances, such as on the radio and TV, and in bars, restaurants and concert halls.

Songwriters benefit especially when their songs are covered by other artists. In the case of Smith, whose renown overshadows her record sales, versions of "Because the Night" by co-writer Bruce Springsteen and by folk group 10,000 Maniacs are the gifts that keep on giving.

She said that when she released her first album, "Horses," in 1975, she knew nothing about royalties.

"I just thought you did your record and that was it. And the first time I got these checks, I said, 'I already got paid for that song.' So I'm grateful in good times, and I was very grateful in hard times."

Smith, who steadfastly denies categorization and especially disdains the sobriquet "Godmother of Punk," received the Founders Award at ASCAP's 27th annual pop music awards dinner honoring the writers and publishers of last year's most-performed songs.

She also sang four songs with her band, including fiery versions of "Because the Night" and "People Have the Power."

The songwriter of the year award went to Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald, who co-wrote five of ASCAP's biggest hits last year: Britney Spears' "Circus," Katy Perry's "Hot N Cold," Kelly Clarkson's "My Life Would Suck Without You," Miley Cyrus' "Party in the USA," and Flo Rida's "Right Round."

Perry thanked Gottwald "for making me rich."

Jason Mraz won the song of the year award for his ballad "I'm Yours," which he performed, while rock band the Killers won the Vanguard Award for their work in helping "shape the future of American music."

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63L0S220100422





Congressmen Circulate Letter Opposing Performance Royalty
FMQB

Congressmen Gene Green (D-TX) and Mike Conaway (R-TX) circulated a letter this week to their colleagues, emphasizing their opposition to the proposed Performance Royalty for radio. However, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday that she backs the controversial royalty.

In the letter Green and Conaway write that if the Performance Royalty is enacted, "it would undermine the economics of free radio, and result in dramatic changes in the way stations are programmed." They emphasize that the royalty will lead to "a trend towards less diversity on the radio, and an increase in homogenized playlists that carry less risk."

The Congressmen add that if the Royalty passes, "Few, if any, stations will air the music of new, and unknown performers;" "there will be an inevitable increase in talk radio" and "diversity of ownership will decrease." They also claim that the legislation "will result in cutbacks in local programming" and in the end, jobs will be lost.

Green and Conaway conclude, "Radio stations across the country are united in their opposition to this legislation - and given the anti-consumer effects it will have if it is enacted, we hope that you will join with us and oppose it too. Local radio is vital to local businesses, charitable organizations, and the community as a whole. We should seek ways to strengthen - not undermine - the important partnership stations have with their communities. We can help preserve radio's unique role in providing free entertainment, local news and public service programming designed to help the community by opposing H.R. 848 and supporting H.R. Con. Res. 49 which opposes the implementation of a performance royalty."

Speaking at the Recording Academy's "Grammy on the Hill" advocacy event yesterday, Pelosi came out in favor of the performance royalty. According to The Hill, Pelosi told the attendees, "The rights of performers are not forgotten. You have an army of advocates by your side — from both parties — on Capitol Hill."

Pelosi also tied the Performance Royalty battle into the Health Care debate, adding that 44 percent of artists are uninsured. "Many strive to make it on their own and follow their creative, entrepreneurial spirit, yet face soaring costs and skyrocketing premiums," she said. "Health care reform gives all artists — and every American — the freedom to lead healthier lives and the liberty to pursue their dreams."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1772195





The Ark Pulls Tax Trick with Music Magazine
Paul O'Mahony

Swedish glam band The Ark has taken a novel approach to combating music industry monetary woes by releasing its new album as a magazine freebie.

The innovative scheme was cooked up the band's manager, Jon Gray, who identified several clear advantages to enclosing the new release in a magazine featuring articles about the band and lyrics to songs on the new album, 'In Full Regalia'.

First off, distribution channels for magazines offer a far wider network than that offered by Sweden's dwindling selection of record stores.

"There are around 80 specialised record outlets and a lot of towns don't have a record store any more. Instead, we'll now have 600 sales outlets, so on Monday April 26th hardly anyone will be more than 500 metres from an Ark CD," Gray told the Svenska Dagbladet daily.

The Ark's flamboyant frontman Ola Salo admitted to some initial scepticism. But eventually he was won over by the managerial masterplan, which involved circumventing a 25 percent sales tax on music. Books and magazines instead qualify for a 6 percent rate.

"Thanks to adverts and the fact that we're only paying the VAT rate for magazines, we're able to set the price of the CD and magazine combined at just 99 kronor ($14). More content at a lower price. In fact, it's half the price of a normal CD," Salo told tabloid Expressen.

Ad sales also meant that the band was able to record its new album without the backing of a record label.

"Recorded music is free these days. It's hard to make enough money from record sales for stage outfits, music videos and a homepage. Maybe we just need to accept that and emphasize new values instead," said Gray.

With 100,000 copies of the album hitting the shelves via 'Artistmagasinet' next week, the band is hoping to rediscover some of the enormous popularity it enjoyed in the previous decade, when all four of its albums topped the Swedish charts.
http://www.thelocal.se/26164/2010041...tm_content=151





Debate on Internet’s Limits Grows in Indonesia
Norimitsu Onishi

Displeased that a statue of a 10-year-old Barack Obama was installed in a park here, Indonesians took their protest not to this capital’s most famous traffic circle but to Facebook. More than 56,000 online protesters later, city officials gave in to arguments that the park should be reserved to honor an Indonesian.

This example of high-tech grass-roots organizing was the direct result of the explosion of social networking in Indonesia. But the boom is prompting a fierce debate over the limits of free expression in a newly democratic Indonesia, with the government trying to regulate content on the Internet and a recently emboldened news media pushing back.

Proponents of greater freedom view social networking as a vital tool to further democratize this country’s often corrupt political system. Skeptics, especially among politicians and religious leaders, worry about mob rule and the loss of traditional values.

In its latest move, the government recently proposed a bill that would require Internet service providers to filter online content but was forced to shelve it after vociferous protest online and in the mainstream media.

Thanks to relatively cheap cellphones that offer Internet access, Facebook, Twitter and local social networking media have rapidly spread from cities to villages throughout Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia and the Philippines. In a little over a year, the number of Indonesian Facebook users has skyrocketed to more than 21 million from fewer than a million — the world’s third largest number of Facebook users.

With tens of millions of people now instantly connected, social networking has quickly become a potent, though sometimes unpredictable, political force.

Protests on Facebook and other sites successfully backed leaders of this country’s main anticorruption agency who, in a long-running feud against the national police and the attorney general’s office, had apparently been set up and arrested on false charges. The online anger prompted President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to intercede; the police and the attorney general’s office, considered among the country’s most corrupt institutions, dropped the case and released the officials in November.

In another cause célèbre, online support was critical in freeing a 32-year-old mother who was jailed after complaining about the poor service at a suburban Jakarta hospital. Prosecutors charged her under a new law governing electronic information and transactions because she had sent an e-mail message to friends detailing her complaints. A court eventually found her not guilty in December.

Tifatul Sembiring, the minister of communication and information technology, said the government would reintroduce the bill to regulate online content after a “cooling down” period.

“We want to limit the distribution of negative content like pornography, gambling, violence, blasphemy,” Mr. Tifatul said, adding that online content should be regulated in such a way as to preserve “our values, also our culture and also our norms.”

Ramadhan Pohan, a member of Parliament and a former newspaper reporter, said those online movements had deeply unsettled politicians, bureaucrats and even hospital administrators unused to such direct — and successful — challenges to their authority.

“The problem is that many officials in government are paranoid about this new online content,” Mr. Pohan said. “They are old-style politicians and bureaucrats who, if you ask them, don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account. They don’t realize that in terms of democracy and freedom of expression, we’ve reached a kind of point of no return.”

In Parliament, Mr. Pohan said that he and other advocates of unregulated online media “are still in the minority.”

According to data from Facebook, Indonesia trails only the United States, with 116 million users, and Britain, with 24 million. What is more, Indonesia has the largest number of Facebook and Twitter users in Asia, according to companies like the Toronto-based Sysomos, that analyze social networking traffic.

The recent availability of smart phones that cost less than $100 and offer access to social networking sites set off last year’s explosion, said Nukman Luthfie, 45, the chief executive of Virtual Consulting, an online marketing company here.

Indonesia’s news media, which was tightly controlled until the fall of President Suharto in the late 1990s, has reacted strongly against any perceived threats against the freedom of expression. In addition to the proposed bill on online content and the new law on electronic information, the news media and human rights organizations point to other recent efforts to rein in freedom of expression. A so-called antipornography law, which was used recently to sentence four women to 75 days in jail for erotic dancing, could also stifle freedom of expression, critics say.

They add that the authorities could use these broad laws to suppress the freedom of the press, particularly online. Violations of the new laws carry heavier punishment compared with equivalent infractions committed offline. For example, a conviction for defamation online could lead to a maximum of six years in prison under the new electronic information law, while the punishment for defamation in the offline media is limited to 14 months under the criminal code.

“People in power are afraid of online media and social networking,” said Megi Margiyono, an official at the Alliance of Independent Journalists. “That’s why penalties for online media are much harsher than those for print media.”

A prominent blogger, Enda Nasution, also said the laws could smother Indonesia’s flourishing blogosphere. When Mr. Nasution, 34, began blogging early in the past decade, he said he could count the country’s bloggers on two hands. Today, according to Virtual Consulting, there are more than one million Indonesian bloggers.

In Singapore, Malaysia and other countries in the region with controlled news media, blogs often tend to be sites for information that cannot be reported in the mainstream media, Mr. Nasution said. In Indonesia, because the news media are free, “bloggers also act as watchdogs or commentators,” he added.

The recent online movements, he said, are a watershed in the evolving role of social media here.

“We don’t know where this is going to lead us,” he said, adding that supporters of regulations “are standing in the way of an online tsunami.”

“You can’t stop it,” he said. “It’s not only about technology. It’s about Indonesia redefining its values.”

But such talk unsettles many in what remains a culturally conservative society.

The information minister, Mr. Tifatul, a former chairman of the Prosperous Justice Party, Indonesia’s largest Islamist party, and a member of President Yudhoyono’s coalition government, said Indonesia had to find its own way of dealing with social media.

Mr. Tifatul uses Twitter to communicate with Indonesians almost every day, but harbors misgivings about an American-style, unfettered access to the Internet. At the same time, he emphatically rejects the model of China, which routinely blocks sites like Facebook and Twitter.

“I think we are between China and the United States,” he said. “Yes, we are free. But with freedom comes responsibility.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/wo...20indonet.html





Fast Forward: For Now, There's Little to do About a Bad Internet Provider
Rob Pegoraro

If your Internet provider jerks you around and slows you down, what are you going to do about it?

Fourteen years ago, the answer was easy: Fire the company and switch to one of dozens of other firms selling dial-up access. Seven years ago, you could choose from a healthy variety of digital-subscriber-line services, thanks in part to "line sharing" rules that forced incumbent carriers to open their infrastructure to competitors.

But over the past few years, your options have shriveled to just one or two companies selling the fastest access.

And two weeks ago, the Federal Communications Commission lost most of its authority to police abuses by Internet providers.

The combination of those two factors explains why the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's April 6 ruling undercutting the FCC's ability to write "net neutrality" regulations has people upset: If we had vigorous competition among broadband providers, we might not need the Feds to referee the market.

Let's look at the competition issue first. The FCC's research shows that 78 percent of American households have access to only two land-based broadband providers and that 13 percent have one.

Don't expect that to improve. Many competing DSL services have left the market, spurred by the end of line-sharing in 2005 and other corporate consolidations. A few months ago, for instance, AT&T elected to close its WorldNet DSL service.

Meanwhile, technologies that were once promoted as alternatives to phone and cable-based services have flopped. City-wide WiFi access, hyped by yours truly and others, turned out to be a business bust. The power-line broadband that then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell lauded as having "great promise" in 2004 fared no better: Last week, Manassas voted to unplug its pioneering service.

Yet another bright broadband hope dimmed last month. Verizon began notifying cities and counties that had been negotiating franchise agreements for its FiOS TV service -- including Alexandria and Baltimore-- that it was done expanding its fiber-optic network to new markets. Spokesman Harry Mitchell wrote that the company had met "our long-stated goal of passing 18 million households" and would turn to filling gaps in its franchise areas.

The FCC's recently announced National Broadband Plan offers little hope of greater competition -- which might explain the desperation you see among cities hoping to be chosen for Google's experiment in deploying 1 gigabit-a-second fiber access to homes.

That brings us to the appeals court's ruling that the FCC could not write net-neutrality regulations without prior congressional authorization (which also threatens the FCC's plans to subsidize rural broadband service). The judgment makes legal sense but leaves Internet providers free to engage in such abuses as slowing customers' access to legal sites and services -- something Comcast was caught doing in 2007.

That is a problem, contrary to what you might hear. Net neutrality isn't a concern just for freeloaders using BitTorrent file-sharing -- a service with legitimate uses -- and it's not a government plot to control the Internet. It's about ensuring that the one or two Internet providers in town can't limit what you do on the Internet.

So if the court ruling has sent the refs off the field, and if the closing of the American broadband market isn't about to be reversed, now what?

At one extreme, we could do nothing. The FCC could publicly scold Internet providers; hopefully, the pain of bad publicity would force them to correct their conduct. Presumably, we can use this tactic on Wall Street next.

Some firms would rather see the Federal Trade Commission take over policing Internet providers, enforcing its rules against false advertising and abuse of market power. But when companies get to shop for a regulator, they have the funny habit of picking the most lenient one.

A third option would be for Congress to pass a law giving the FCC specific net-neutrality authority. You'd just need Congress to pass one bill . . . despite deep partisan divides . . . in an election year.

The hand grenade on the conference table is "Title II reclassification." Here, the FCC could -- without a permission slip from Congress -- decide it erred in 2005 when it classified Internet providers as "information services" to end line sharing.

It would then put them under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, the "common carriers" section requiring nondiscriminatory conduct by phone services, and exempt them from its voice-specific provisions.

But this might not be as straightforward as advocates like the digital-liberties groups Public Knowledge and Free Press suggest. Large, well-connected telecom firms would howl in protest -- not least because a Title II reclassification could allow a renewal of line-sharing rules -- and would probably challenge the move in court.

All these factors don't help a quick resolution. We have a situation full of lawyerly jargon, with risks that can't be dramatized by putting a sick kid on a stage. I hope you like your Internet provider, because you may be stuck with it for a while.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...601316_pf.html





The F.C.C. and the Internet

With the Internet fast becoming the most important communications channel, it is untenable for the United States not to have a regulator to ensure nondiscriminatory access, guarantee interconnectivity among rival networks and protect consumers from potential abuse.

Yet that’s exactly where the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit left us all when it said this month that the Federal Communications Commission didn’t have the authority to regulate the Internet — and specifically, could not force the cable giant Comcast to stop blocking peer-to-peer sites.

The decision, in the words of the F.C.C.’s general counsel, Austin Schlick, undermines the agency’s ability to serve as “the cop on the beat for 21st-century communications networks.” It also puts at risk big chunks of the F.C.C.’s strategy for increasing the reach of broadband Internet to all corners of the country and fostering more competition among providers.

Chairman Julius Genachowski said the commission is not planning to appeal the decision, and is studying its options. The F.C.C. could try to forge ahead with its broadband plan despite the court’s decision. Or Congress could give the F.C.C. specific authority to regulate broadband access.

But the court tightly circumscribed the F.C.C.’s actions. And with Republicans determined to oppose pretty much anything the administration wants, the odds of a rational debate on the issues are slim.

Fortunately, the commission has the tools to fix this problem. It can reverse the Bush administration’s predictably antiregulatory decision to define broadband Internet access as an information service, like Google or Amazon, over which it has little regulatory power. Instead, it can define broadband as a communications service, like a phone company, over which the commission has indisputable authority.

The F.C.C. at the time argued that a light regulatory touch would foster alternative technologies and aggressive competition among providers. It assumed that the Internet of the future would be dominated by companies like AOL that bundle access with other services, justifying its conflation of access and information.

And it claimed that it could still regulate broadband access even if it was classified as a service. All it had to do was convince the courts that it was necessary to further other statutory goals, like promoting the roll-out of competitive Internet services. This legal argument did not hold up.

Any move now by the F.C.C to redefine broadband would surely unleash a torrent of lawsuits by broadband providers, but the commission has solid legal grounds to do that. To begin with, the three arguments advanced by the F.C.C. during the Bush years have proved wrong.

Rather than seeing an explosion of new competition, the broadband access business has consolidated to the point that many areas of the country have only one provider. Broadband Internet has unbundled into a business with many unrelated information service providers vying for space on the pipelines of a few providers.

And most persuasively: broadband access is probably the most important communication service of our time. One that needs a robust regulator.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/opinion/19mon1.html





Why America's Telecom System Stinks

Analysis: Technologist Lawrence Lessig exposes a rigged system of poor service for higher cost.
Paul Venezia

I had a cathartic experience last week courtesy of Lawrence Lessig, legendary open source champion and Harvard law professor. Though the choice of Lessig as keynote speaker at Storage Networking World in Orlando was odd -- he wasn't going to be talking about storage, after all -- he delivered an electrifying speech on broadband, Net neutrality, God, the universe, and everything. Suffice it to say, I was fired up.

After the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its decision last week to overturn the FCC's authority to enforce Net neutrality, I was peppered with requests for a response, probably because I've taken a hard line defending Net neutrality before. I should have had something to say, but a thousand obligatory words decrying the court's decision seemed pointless. I figured a response would come to me eventually, and it did -- about 60 seconds into Lessig's talk.

There's no way to do justice to his presentation in print. Fortunately, you can watch the whole thing for yourself, and I encourage you to do so right now. It's nearly an hour long, but worth every minute -- seriously.

At times, it has seemed like there was no point in assailing the enemies of Net neutrality. Even the FCC itself seemed to believe that Washington wasn't ready for a coordinated effort to free us from the shackles of the carriers. No matter the logic, the proof, or the reality of the situation, the companies who pour buckets of money into Washington seem to have it all locked down so tight there's no room even for discussion.

As Lessig points out, that's true inside the Beltway -- but those of us on the outside can keep pushing the issue. In fact, that may be the only way to turn this tide. And oh, but does that need to happen.

Some of the more shocking points in Lessig's talk revolved around the reality of broadband access speeds, pricing, and openness around the world. Oft-used comparisons between the United States and South Korea or Japan are generally dismissed as non-comparable given the population density of those countries -- so Lessig chose to examine France.

In France, Internet access generally costs $33 a month, provides 20Mbps fixed broadband to the home, and includes unlimited local and long-distance calling to 70 countries, plus HDTV and even wireless voice and data access through cooperative agreements. That's about what AT&T charges just for the 3G data plan on an iPhone in the United States. France also has open network legislation in place. Yeah, that's right: France. (Désolé.)

I added up what I pay for access here in the States. Between HDTV and data through Time Warner, voice through FairPoint, and wireless through AT&T, I pay over $350 a month for slower access, though some of that cost is due to a business-class Internet circuit. If I delete that extra cost (ye
t it's 10Mbps -- half of the French example), I'm still at $275 per month. Worse, the carriers are looking for a way to charge higher rates for certain data and retain carte blanche to do whatever they like with my traffic. That's just insane. Yet it's reality in the United States.

Lessig goes beyond the simple fact that the United States is getting screwed out of the future by the big ISPs: He conjures the specter of an Internet Patriot Act. Just as 9/11 provided the Bush administration with an opportunity to ram through the Patriot Act and gain vast new powers to spy on American citizens, a total crash of the Internet (caused by accident or design) could be a pretext for hurriedly passed legislation that grants the U.S. government sweeping Internet monitoring powers by a fearful and technologically irrelevant Congress.

If that's not enough, he brings it all home by discussing the disturbing Beltway economy that underlies all of these decisions: the lobbyists who pour so much money into politics that it's no longer a matter of right or wrong, only how much.

I realize that assessment goes well beyond tech issues, even for The Deep End. But if there's one thing that all technologists know, it's that fixing the problem at the core is always the best solution. Addressing the symptoms alone won't get us anywhere.
Viva la revolucion!
http://www.pcworld.com/article/19450...em_stinks.html





AT&T's U-verse Now Available In 500,000+ Connecticut Homes
Eric Gershon

AT&T's U-verse Internet-based television service is now available to more than 500,000 residences in Connecticut, the company said, up from a previously announced 400,000.

The expansion means increased competition for traditional cable television providers, such as Comcast and Cox.

AT&T declines to say how many U-verse customers it actually has in Connecticut, but says the service is available in all or part of "more than 100 communities" statewide. AT&T says it has more than 2 million U-verse subscribers nationwide.

U-verse was introduced at the end of 2006.

AT&T says it has invested almost $825 million in its Connecticut networks between 2007 and 2009.
http://www.courant.com/business/hc-a...,6677809.story





Alcatel-Lucent Boosts Broadband Over Copper to 300Mbps

Copper will be able to deliver high-speed broadband while subscribers wait for fiber, the vendor said
Mikael Ricknäs

Alcatel-Lucent has found a way to move data at 300Mbps over two copper lines, the company said on Wednesday. However, so far it is only in a lab environment -- real products and services won't show up until next year.

Researchers at the company's Bell Labs demonstrated the 300Mbps technology over a distance of 400 meters using VDSL2 (Very high bitrate Digital Subscriber Line), according to Stefaan Vanhastel, director of product marketing at Alcatel-Lucent Wireline Networks. The test showed that it can also do 100M bps over a distance of 1,000 meters, he said.

On its own VDSL2 tops out at about 100Mbps over a distance of 400 meters, so to get to three times that capacity Alcatel-Lucent combines a number of different technologies. Alcatel-Lucent's first trick is to use two copper pairs at the same time, a technology called bonding. Next Alcatel-Lucent uses a feature it has developed called Phantom Mode to create a third virtual copper pair that sends data over a combination of the two physical ones.

The problem is that when you use bonding and Phantom Mode you also get a lot of crosstalk, a form of noise that degrades the signal quality and decreases the bandwidth. So instead of 300Mbps you only get about 200Mbps. To solve this Alcatel-Lucent uses vectoring, a technology that works like noise-cancelling headphones, according to Vanhastel. It continuously analyzes the noise conditions on the copper cables, and then creates a new signal to cancel it out, he said.

"It is a really complex technology that requires ... you to process gigabytes of signal data just to calculate the noise patterns," Vanhastel said.

Fiber to the home is the ideal long-term solution for fast broadband, and in 15 to 20 years all homes will have it, according to Vanhastel. But in the meantime operators should be able to use existing copper networks to offer faster speeds to households that don't have a fiber connection, he said.

Currently, copper is the most common broadband medium. About 65% of subscribers have a broadband connection that's based on DSL, compared to 20% for cable and 12% for fiber, according to market research company Point Topic. Today, the average advertised DSL speeds for residential users vary between 9.2Mbps in Western Europe and Asia Pacific and 1.9Mbps in South and East Asia, Point Topic said.

The use of vectoring on VDSL2 is currently being standardized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The final review of the standard ends today, and if there are no further comments it will be approved by the end of April, according to Alcatel-Lucent. At the latest, it will arrive by July, according to Ericsson, which is also working on products that will support vectoring.

Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson expect field trials using vectoring to start during 2010, and the technology will become commercially available in 2011, according to the two vendors.

Even higher speeds than 300Mbps can be achieved by using more copper pairs. However, Alcatel-Lucent settled on two copper pairs because it is a more realistic scenario for when the technology is rolled out to residential users in the future, according to Vanhastel. You might find six pairs in the field, but just for businesses and maybe mobile backhaul applications, he said.

"We could have made an announcement talking about 1Gbps or 2Gbps, but on purpose we chose not to do that because it is not a realistic scenario," said Vanhastel.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...er-copper.html





Escapist Website Mass Bans (Then Unbans And Guilts) Users Who Mention Adblock
from the building-community-and-value-through-uppercuts dept

Chodelord writes in to note that the Escapist website recently decided it would be a good idea to ban users from their forums simply for mentioning Adblock. The thread in question started after a user complained that an add for Time Warner Cable was slowing down his computer. Apparently, users who responded to the poster by suggesting the user "get Firefox and AdBlock" found themselves banned from the forums. Users didn't even need to admit they even used AdBlock to get banned -- they simply had to recommend it as a solution to a seemingly-annoying ad. Looking at the forums recently amended posting guidelines does confirm that the folks at the Escapist believe that giving browsing preference advice is a "non forgivable" offense:

Do not confess, teach, admit to, or promote ad-blocking software that will allow users to block the ads of this site.

Indeed. Users quickly (and justly) started complaining about the fact that friends they'd had for years were suddenly being bashed over the head with the ban hammer simply for mentioning an incredibly popular and legal application. After a lot of complaints, the Escapist ultimately wound up unbanning the users according to a forum post, and instead just settled on trying to make the community feel really guilty:

I truely hope that everyone that reads this will consider turning off their ad-blocker for this site. If we have offended you or you don't deem this site to be worthy (and would like to have it shut down instead), do what you will, but don't pretend to be surprised if the site dies.

While it's nice that the Escapist listened to their community, saw reason, and backed away from their ridiculous decision, that doesn't make the decision any less ridiculous (and while they reversed course, the posting guidelines remain unchanged). It also doesn't justify telling your readers that they're responsible for the failure of your business model should users decide to block annoying ads. As Ars Technica recently found out, mandating what your users can and can't do with their own browsers doesn't exactly foster adoration within your community to begin with, but subsequently telling those users they should take a hike if they don't like your position (or in this case even mention ad blockers) isn't particularly endearing, either.

As we've mentioned previously in great detail, if you've got ads on your website that are annoying your users, that is your fault -- not your users' fault. The failure of your business model is also your problem, not theirs. It's up to you to develop a new model that doesn't involve your users being annoyed. Meanwhile, telling your users (essentially) that they're worthless if they don't directly generate ad revenue is misguided. Site visitors bring value to your website in other ways -- whether they block your advertisements or not -- through conversation, participation and links to your content. Of course none of that will happen if you treat them like escaped felons for simply discussing their browser plugins.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20100420/1042189110.shtml





Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System
John Markoff

Ever since Google disclosed in January that Internet intruders had stolen information from its computers, the exact nature and extent of the theft has been a closely guarded company secret. But a person with direct knowledge of the investigation now says that the losses included one of Google’s crown jewels, a password system that controls access by millions of users worldwide to almost all of the company’s Web services, including e-mail and business applications.

The program, code named Gaia for the Greek goddess of the earth, was attacked in a lightning raid taking less than two days last December, the person said. Described publicly only once at a technical conference four years ago, the software is intended to enable users and employees to sign in with their password just once to operate a range of services.

The intruders do not appear to have stolen passwords of Gmail users, and the company quickly started making significant changes to the security of its networks after the intrusions. But the theft leaves open the possibility, however faint, that the intruders may find weaknesses that Google might not even be aware of, independent computer experts said.

The new details seem likely to increase the debate about the security and privacy of vast computing systems such as Google’s that now centralize the personal information of millions of individuals and businesses. Because vast amounts of digital information are stored in one place, popularly referred to as “cloud” computing, a single breach can lead to disastrous losses.

The theft began with an instant message sent to a Google employee in China who was using Microsoft’s Messenger program, according to the person with knowledge of the internal inquiry, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

By clicking on a link and connecting to a “poisoned” Web site, the employee inadvertently permitted the intruders to gain access to his (or her) personal computer and then to the computers of a critical group of software developers at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Ultimately, the intruders were able to gain control of a software repository used by the development team.

The details surrounding the theft of the software have been a closely guarded secret by the company. Google first publicly disclosed the theft in a Jan. 12 posting on the company’s Web site, which stated that the company was changing its policy toward China in the wake of the theft of unidentified “intellectual property” and the apparent compromise of the e-mail accounts of two human rights advocates in China.

The accusations became a significant source of tension between the United States and China, leading Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to urge China to conduct a “transparent” inquiry into the attack. In March, after difficult discussions with the Chinese government, Google said it would move its mainland Chinese-language Web site and begin rerouting search queries to its Hong Kong-based site.

Company executives on Monday declined to comment about the new details of the case, saying they had dealt with the security issues raised by the theft of the company’s intellectual property in their initial statement in January.

Google executives have also said privately that the company had been far more transparent about the intrusions than any of the more than two dozen other companies that were compromised, the vast majority of which have not acknowledged the attacks.

Google continues to use the Gaia system, now known as Single Sign-On. Hours after announcing the intrusions, Google said it would activate a new layer of encryption for Gmail service. The company also tightened the security of its data centers and further secured the communications links between its services and the computers of its users.

Several technical experts said that because Google had quickly learned of the theft of the software, it was unclear what the consequences of the theft had been. One of the most alarming possibilities is that the attackers might have intended to insert a Trojan horse — a secret back door — into the Gaia program and install it in dozens of Google’s global data centers to establish clandestine entry points. But the independent security specialists emphasized that such an undertaking would have been remarkably difficult, particularly because Google’s security specialists had been alerted to the theft of the program.

However, having access to the original programmer’s instructions, or source code, could also provide technically skilled hackers with knowledge about subtle security vulnerabilities in the Gaia code that may have eluded Google’s engineers.

“If you can get to the software repository where the bugs are housed before they are patched, that’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” said George Kurtz, chief technology officer for McAfee Inc., a software security company that was one of the companies that analyzed the illicit software used in the intrusions at Google and at other companies last year.

Rodney Joffe, a vice president at Neustar, a developer of Internet infrastructure services, said, “It’s obviously a real issue if you can understand how the system works.” Understanding the algorithms on which the software is based might be of great value to an attacker looking for weak points in the system, he said.

When Google first announced the thefts, the company said it had evidence that the intrusions had come from China. The attacks have been traced to computers at two campuses in China, but investigators acknowledge that the true origin may have been concealed, a quintessential problem of cyberattacks.

Several people involved in the investigation of break-ins at more than two dozen other technology firms said that while there were similarities between the attacks on the companies, there were also significant differences, like the use of different types of software in intrusions. At one high-profile Silicon Valley company, investigators found evidence of intrusions going back more than two years, according to the person involved in Google’s inquiry.

In Google’s case, the intruders seemed to have precise intelligence about the names of the Gaia software developers, and they first tried to access their work computers and then used a set of sophisticated techniques to gain access to the repositories where the source code for the program was stored.

They then transferred the stolen software to computers owned by Rackspace, a Texas company. Rackspace, which had no knowledge of the transaction, offers Web-hosting services. It is not known where the software was sent from there. The intruders had access to an internal Google corporate directory known as Moma, which holds information about the work activities of each Google employee, and they may have used it to find specific employees.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/te.../20google.html





McAfee Software Goes Berserk, Misidentifies Harmless File and Locks Up PCs Around the World
Peter Svensson

Computers in companies, hospitals and schools around the world got stuck repeatedly rebooting themselves Wednesday after an antivirus program identified a normal Windows file as a virus.

McAfee Inc. confirmed that a software update it posted at 9 a.m. Eastern time caused its antivirus program for corporate customers to misidentify a harmless file. It has posted a replacement update for download.

McAfee could not say how many computers were affected, but judging by online postings, the number was at least in the thousands and possibly in the hundreds of thousands.

McAfee said it did not appear that consumer versions of its software caused similar problems. It is investigating how the error happened "and will take measures" to prevent it from recurring, the company said in a statement.

The computer problem forced about a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island to postpone elective surgeries and stop treating patients without traumas in emergency rooms, said Nancy Jean, a spokeswoman for the Lifespan system of hospitals. The system includes Rhode Island Hospital, the state's largest, and Newport Hospital. Jean said patients who required treatment for gunshot wounds, car accidents, blunt trauma and other potentially fatal injuries were still being admitted to the emergency rooms.

In Kentucky, state police were told to shut down the computers in their patrol cars as technicians tried to fix the problem. The National Science Foundation headquarters in Arlington, Va., also lost computer access.

Intel Corp. appeared to be among the victims, according to employee posts on Twitter. Intel did not immediately return calls for comment.

Peter Juvinall, systems administrator at Illinois State University in Normal, said that when the first computer started rebooting it quickly became evident that it was a major problem, affecting dozens of computers at the College of Business alone.

"I originally thought it was a virus," he said. When the tech support people concluded McAfee's update was to blame, they stopped further downloads of the faulty software update and started shuttling from computer to computer to get the machines working again.

In many offices, personal attention to each PC from a technician appeared to be the only way to fix the problem because the computers weren't receptive to remote software updates when stuck in the reboot cycle. That slowed the recovery.

It's not uncommon for antivirus programs to misidentify legitimate files as viruses. Last month, antivirus software from Bitdefender locked up PCs running several different versions of Windows.

However, the scale of this outage was unusual, said Mike Rothman, president of computer security firm Securosis.

"It looks to be a train wreck," Rothman said.
http://www.courant.com/business/sns-...,2015989.story





Secure P2P Scheme Leverages Social Networks

Anonymous and unobservable IM and VoIP could be possible under a proposed network architecture called Drac.
Thomas Claburn

Security researchers from Microsoft, The Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, and elsewhere are proposing a novel approach to secure, anonymous instant messaging and voice-over-IP communication that turns the conventional wisdom about social networking privacy on its head.

Drac is a peer-to-peer communication system designed to make IM and VoIP traffic anonymous and unobservable. It achieves this goal by exposing the social connections of the users who make up the nodes of the peer-to-peer network.

"Drac gives away the identity of a user's friends to guarantee the unobservability of actual calls, while still providing anonymity when talking to trusted third parties," explains a paper on the proposed technology.

The paper, "Drac: An Architecture for Anonymous Low-Volume Communications," will be presented at the The 10th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2010) in Berlin, Germany in July.

The paper was written by George Danezis, from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Claudia Diaz and Carmela Troncoso at The Catholic University of Leuven (K.U. Leuven), and Ben Laurie, a computer security researcher.

The authors note that while anonymous online communication may conceal the content of conversations, information about the network addressing, the timing of the messages, and the volume of traffic often reveals as much as the hidden correspondence.

Drac aims to preserve anonymity while also thwarting traffic analysis by using a peer-to-peer relay architecture that routes data through social networking connections.

The Drac system envisions a network of friends who have a strong trust relationship and who share cryptographic keys to maintain secure communication links. Their social networking connections become the possible network data paths for Drac messaging.

In addition, Drac allows users to communicate with contacts outside their network. But while social network connections in Drac are public, contacts sending or receiving messages to or from the network are concealed.

The authors argue that relaying messages over a friend-of-a-friend network makes denial-of-service and related attacks less likely, does not require a central server or trust infrastructure, and avoids network discovery and random sampling attacks that affect other peer-to-peer systems.

The system is not without drawbacks: network paths over social networks tend to be longer, the authors observe, and knowledge of participants' social network connections may be undesirable in some contexts.

The Drac system has been implemented in a limited software simulator, the code for which the authors intend to make available on request. It's merely proof-of-concept code and Drac will have to be refined further before it emerges as a functional product.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=224400759





We Built this On-Demand P2P Transfer Webapp to Help us Move Files Around at Work and Just Opened it up to the Public

Feedback appreciated!

We had trouble moving files from one place to another (everyone uses different IM clients, no one wants to email large files, and it's a pain to upload to a server first), so we built this little app based on the Adobe Stratus tech, pushing files instead of streaming media. It's been very successful at moving data through firewalls and between systems without requiring any software installs (well, except flash).

The first user connects to the Adobe stratus server and they choose a file and are given a URL. The second user goes to that URL and also connects to the Adobe stratus server. The stratus server facilitates connecting the users to each other over UDP even though there might be firewalls/NATs in the way using a technique called UDP hole punching. The gist of how UDP hole punching works (as I understand it) is Stratus tells both users each others IP's and instructs them to send UDP packets to each other on specific ports. When they do this they open up a port for communication to which the other can send to.

Once they have opened up a path for communication, the file is transferred using UDP from the first user to the second user. Some sort of database is kept that associates the URL generated by the first user with the first users stratus ID. When the second user goes to that URL they are given the first user's stratus ID is what allows the second user to tell the stratus server who they want to connect to.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/..._p2p_transfer/





Broadband has no Regulator, BitTorrent CEO Says

The peer-to-peer vendor now has its own protocol to keep file-sharing from hogging networks
Stephen Lawson

The Internet industry has to regulate itself by responding to consumer demands in the wake of the recent U.S. federal court ruling that the Federal Communications Commission didn't have authority to enforce its net neutrality rules, BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker said Monday.

"There is no ambiguity. There is not going to be, at least in the near term, a strong regulator for broadband," Klinker told the eComm conference in Burlingame, California.

Instead, it is the public that will pass judgment on how service and application providers behave, Klinker said. "The public is our regulator."

BitTorrent was at the center of the case that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decided on April 6. The FCC had ordered cable operator Comcast to stop throttling BitTorrent and other file-sharing applications on its network. The high court ruled that the agency could not do so.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer tool for transferring files, including very large ones, and has been called one of the major platforms for sharing of copyright-protected works. Comcast has defended its right to take steps to manage its network so a few users don't take up too much its capacity. The court ruling appears to have seriously hobbled the FCC's ability to enforce its network neutrality principles, which call for nondiscriminatory treatment of different applications traveling over public networks, among other things.

But Klinker told eComm he isn't afraid of carriers creating "walled gardens" of selected content turn the Internet into the equivalent of cable TV. They also would have a hard time selling network management programs based on "discrimination," he said. What consumers really want are steps to ease delays during times of heavy usage, according to Klinker. BitTorrent even has its own mechanism for doing this, called Micro Transport Protocol, and has rolled it out to the users of its software.

Carriers probably won't try to be gatekeepers against certain websites or Internet-based services because the steps they would have to take, he said.

"For example, if (carriers) wanted to extract a rent from Google, one of the carriers in this room is going to have to blink first and block Google," Klinker said. The greater threat to the Internet may be Apple's "feudal" approach to the Internet, he said. Apple has come under fire for controlling access to popular, lucrative platforms of its own creation, such as iTunes and the iPhone App Store.

Most people basically want net neutrality, so it would be hard for carriers to justify network management measures that are seen as discriminatory, Klinker said. What consumers will embrace are moves to ease congestion during busy times.

"Management practices devoted to this problem, I think, are totally defensible," Klinker said. He used the analogy of ambulances traveling quickly through crowded streets because other drivers pull over for them. "Neutral and priority can -- in fact, they do -- coexist," he said.

This is the principle behind Micro Transport Protocol, Klinker said. The system instructs BitTorrent to take up unused capacity on a network so, for example, it will hold back during a busy work day to let more critical applications maintain their performance, he said. When it senses delays, it slows down, helping other applications maintain low latency.

BitTorrent has been developing Micro Transport Protocol for several years. In January, it declared the software stable and provided it as an automatic update to users of the company's own BitTorrent client. (Users who don't choose to update their clients won't get it.) About 60 other companies distribute versions of BitTorrent software, which is open source, but the company has about 70 million users out of a worldwide total of about 100 million, according to Klinker.

The new protocol can benefit carriers by allowing them to run their networks more fully loaded, because BitTorrent will stop itself from overloading the network, he said.
http://www.goodgearguide.com.au/arti...rent_ceo_says/





Super Secure Data Encryption Gets Faster
George Barrow

Researchers at the Cambridge Lab of Toshiba Research Europe have solved the problem of transferring highly sensitive data at high speed across a long distance network.

The team were able to demonstrate the continuous operation of quantum key distribution (QKD) -- a system that allows the communicating users to detect if a third party is trying to eavesdrop on the data communication -- at a speed greater than one megabit/sec over a 50 km fibre optic network, thanks to the use of a light detector for high bit rates and a feedback system which maintains the high bit rates during data transfer.

Having previously been able to only transfer secure data over such a distance at speeds 100 to 1,000 times slower, this development is particularly important as it could extend the real world uses for the system to hospitals, banks or anyone transmitting sensitive data.

Speaking about the research, Dr Andrew Shields -- who directed the development at Toshiba Research Europe -- said, "Although the feasibility of QKD with megabits per second has been shown in the lab, these experiments lasted only minutes or even seconds at a time and required manual adjustments."

Importantly, the technology will now work without user interference, and allows sensitive information to be distributed using "one-time pad" encryption -- a theoretically perfect (uh oh!) system for secure data transfer that requires the key length to be the same character length as the message, and for each encryption key (or pad) to be totally random and unique. Due to the length of the keys and slow transfer speeds one-time pad is only commonly used amongst security forces and the military to transmit short messages.

The faster one megabit/sec data handling will allow the one-time pad to be used for the encryption of video -- a vast step forward over the current ability to only encrypt voice data.

Development of the study will now extend to the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Tokyo where, according to Tokyo QKD network coordinator Dr. Masahide Sasaki, a quantum key distribution demonstrator will test the secure key across a wider "metropolitan network", which may ultimately lead to the technology becoming commercially available.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/...ts-faster.aspx





Security Gone Awry: IE 8 XSS Filter Exposes Sites to XSS Attacks
Ryan Naraine

The cross-site scripting filter that ships with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 browser can be abused by attackers to launch cross-site scripting attacks on websites and web pages that would otherwise be immune to this threat.

According to a presentation at this year’s Black Hat Europe conference, the issue introduces security problems at several high-profile websites, including Microsoft’s own Bing.com, Google.com, Wikipedia.org, Twitter.com and just about any site that lets IE 8 users create profiles.

Microsoft added the anti-XSS feature in IE 8 last August to detect Type-1 (reflection) attacks that can lead to cookie theft, keystroke logging, Web site defacement and credentials theft. However, as the researchers discovered, Microsoft’s filters work by scanning outbound requests for string that may be malicious.

This is where the hiccup exists:

When such a string is detected, IE8 will dynamically generate a regular expression matching the outbound string. The browser then looks for the same pattern in responses from the server. If a match is made anywhere in the server’s response then the browser assumes that a reflected XSS attack is being conducted and the browser will automatically alter the response so that the XSS attack will be unsuccessful.

The exact method used to alter a server’s response is a crucial component in preventing XSS attacks. If the attack is not properly neutralized then a malicious script may stil execute. On the other hand, it is also crucial that benign requests are not accidentally detected.

The researchers figured out a way to use the IE 8’s altered response to conduct simple abuses and universal cross-site scripting attacks.

This document (PDF) explains the scope of the problem and provides some demonstrations.

Jerry Bryant, a spokesman for Microsoft’s security response team, said the bulk of the problems described in the document was fixed with the MS10-002 security patch, which was released for IE users earlier this year.

“Microsoft also added a defense-in-depth change (MS10-018) in March 2010 to provide broader coverage for this type of attack scenario,” Bryant said.

However, not all of the issues have been fixed and the browser’s XSS filter is still introducing security risks on certain web sites.

Until the issue if properly fixed, the researchers recommend the following server-side mitigations:

* Filter all user-generated content so that, even if it is interpreted in a different context, it cannot execute.
* Use site-wide anti-CSRF tokens that prevent any sort of XSS from being exploited in the first place.
* Disable IE8s filters using the response header opt-out mechanism. There are obvious pros and cons to doing this, so consider your options carefully. Despite the serious vulnerabilities discussed in this paper, the filters do go a long way towards protecting IE8 users from traditional XSS attacks. Obviously, once users have upgraded to the patched version we strongly suggest you keep the filters enabled.

End users running IE 8 should consider disabling the filters from within the browser until a comprehensive patch is shipped.

UPDATE: Microsoft’s Bryant e-mailed to point to this August 2008 blog post that provides some additional context on this issue.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=6221





GOP Asks House to Relax Cybersecurity Rules for Skype
Jackie Kucinich

Republicans urged Democratic leaders on Monday to relax cybersecurity rules that restrict the use of certain video conferencing software in House offices.

In a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Administration Chairman Robert Brady (D-Pa.), House GOP leaders argued that the use of Skype, a low-cost video conferencing platform, could eliminate the use of expensive video equipment currently used by Members to connect with their constituents.

“We are certain that Skype, an increasingly relevant communication tool for Americans already widely used in the private sector, could be easily implemented in Congress in a manner that would not reduce the security of the House IT infrastructure,” the letter said.

Republicans hope to incorporate the software into a new Web site that will be used to involve the public in crafting the GOP’s election-year mission statement, titled the “Commitment to America.” Chief Deputy Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), tapped by House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) to head the new initiative, has estimated the Web site would launch within the next few weeks.

However, Democrats indicated Monday the ban on Skype would likely remain. Kyle Anderson, a spokesman for Brady, said Skype’s use of peer-to-peer software — which allows users to share files without a central administrator — makes it unsafe for use inside the House firewall.

“In December of 2009, Speaker Pelosi and Minority Leader Boehner directed the Committee and the Office of the [Chief Administrative Officer] to implement security recommendations as soon as possible to ensure the highest level of data security for House offices,” Anderson said. “The measures recommended included blocking peer-to-peer software within the House firewall. Skype utilizes peer-to-peer protocols.”

House data security was tightened last year after an internal ethics document detailing investigations by the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct and the Office of Congressional Ethics was accidently exposed through file-sharing software.

Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner, said the Minority Leader still supports the cybersecurity measures that were implemented last year, “but he also believes there is a way to allow Members to use this popular tool to communicate with constituents, as well.”
http://www.rollcall.com/news/45356-1.html





Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets

Your Office Copy Machine Might Digitally Store Thousands of Documents That Get Passed on at Resale
Armen Keteyian

Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive - like the one on your personal computer - storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine.

In the process, it's turned an office staple into a digital time-bomb packed with highly-personal or sensitive data.

If you're in the identity theft business it seems this would be a pot of gold.

"The type of information we see on these machines with the social security numbers, birth certificates, bank records, income tax forms," John Juntunen said, "that information would be very valuable."

Juntunen's Sacramento-based company Digital Copier Security developed software called "INFOSWEEP" that can scrub all the data on hard drives. He's been trying to warn people about the potential risk - with no luck.

"Nobody wants to step up and say, 'we see the problem, and we need to solve it,'" Juntunen said.

This past February, CBS News went with Juntunen to a warehouse in New Jersey, one of 25 across the country, to see how hard it would be to buy a used copier loaded with documents. It turns out ... it's pretty easy.

Juntunen picked four machines based on price and the number of pages printed. In less than two hours his selections were packed and loaded onto a truck. The cost? About $300 each.

Until we unpacked and plugged them in, we had no idea where the copiers came from or what we'd find.

We didn't even have to wait for the first one to warm up. One of the copiers had documents still on the copier glass, from the Buffalo, N.Y., Police Sex Crimes Division.

It took Juntunen just 30 minutes to pull the hard drives out of the copiers. Then, using a forensic software program available for free on the Internet, he ran a scan - downloading tens of thousands of documents in less than 12 hours.

The results were stunning: from the sex crimes unit there were detailed domestic violence complaints and a list of wanted sex offenders. On a second machine from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit we found a list of targets in a major drug raid.

The third machine, from a New York construction company, spit out design plans for a building near Ground Zero in Manhattan; 95 pages of pay stubs with names, addresses and social security numbers; and $40,000 in copied checks.

But it wasn't until hitting "print" on the fourth machine - from Affinity Health Plan, a New York insurance company, that we obtained the most disturbing documents: 300 pages of individual medical records. They included everything from drug prescriptions, to blood test results, to a cancer diagnosis. A potentially serious breach of federal privacy law.

"You're talking about potentially ruining someone's life," said Ira Winkler. "Where they could suffer serious social repercussions."

Winkler is a former analyst for the National Security Agency and a leading expert on digital security.

"You have to take some basic responsibility and know that these copiers are actually computers that need to be cleaned up," Winkler said.

The Buffalo Police Department and the New York construction company declined comment on our story. As for Affinity Health Plan, they issued a statement that said, in part, "we are taking the necessary steps to ensure that none of our customers' personal information remains on other previously leased copiers, and that no personal information will be released inadvertently in the future."

Ed McLaughlin is President of Sharp Imaging, the digital copier company.

"Has the industry failed, in your mind, to inform the general public of the potential risks involved with a copier?" Keteyian asked.

"Yes, in general, the industry has failed," McLaughlin said.

In 2008, Sharp commissioned a survey on copier security that found 60 percent of Americans "don't know" that copiers store images on a hard drive. Sharp tried to warn consumers about the simple act of copying.

"It's falling on deaf ears," McLaughlin said. "Or people don't feel it's important, or 'we'll take care of it later.'"

All the major manufacturers told us they offer security or encryption packages on their products. One product from Sharp automatically erases an image from the hard drive. It costs $500.

But evidence keeps piling up in warehouses that many businesses are unwilling to pay for such protection, and that the average American is completely unaware of the dangers posed by digital copiers.

The day we visited the New Jersey warehouse, two shipping containers packed with used copiers were headed overseas - loaded with secrets on their way to unknown buyers in Argentina and Singapore.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/...n6412439.shtml





A Case of Internet Innocence?
Tom Morton

Even hardened, violent criminals hold child pornography convicts in contempt, no matter how much they proclaim their innocence.

So Nathaniel “Ned” Solon, of Casper, probably will live in “The Hole,” or solitary confinement, for his own protection for three more years at the Leavenworth, Kan., federal penitentiary.

A federal jury convicted him in November 2008 of possessing and receiving child pornography on his computer, and the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in February and again April 7.

But it’s not over, for him, his family, and potentially everyone who uses a computer.

The case underscores the vulnerability of Internet users and the legal system’s apparent prejudice against the young field of computer forensics, his expert witness said.

“It can happen to anyone connected to the Internet. Period,” said Tami Loehrs of Tucson, Ariz., who conducts computer forensic examinations of computers alleged to have been involved in child pornography and other crimes.

Solon’s family adamantly asserts his innocence and has spent about $100,000 on legal fees, travel and research in his defense.

“The best way you cope with this is to get angry,” said his mother, Bette Brown, who lives in northeast Ohio.

Solon’s attorney, Megan Hayes of Laramie, said she has one more, and very long, shot: appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court hears very few of the thousands of petitions it receives. But the circuit court’s split decision gives her some hope, Hayes said.

Judge Carlos Lucero asserted that Wyoming U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer prejudiced the jury by berating Loehrs and by abruptly walking out of the courtroom as the defense attorney began his closing arguments. Brimmer did not return phone calls seeking comment.

The lead prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim Anderson, and U.S. Attorney Christopher Crofts declined to comment in light of the 10th Circuit’s decision not to hear the case.

No saint, no sinner

Natalie Hansen, Solon’s sister, does not portray her brother as a saint, nor does she excuse his criminal past, she said.

Solon pleaded guilty in 2000 to possession with the intent to distribute methamphetamine. He was released from prison in October 2004 but violated his probation on a domestic violence charge in January 2006.

Although her brother would look at adult pornography, Hansen said he never had anything to do with child pornography. His mistake, she said, started when he installed the Limewire “peer-to-peer” — or P2P — file-sharing software network.

Peer-to-peer networks connect computers directly with one another instead of going through traditional Internet servers. Their popularity soared a decade ago with the use of Napster and similar programs to illegally download music. P2P networks also became popular with people who trafficked in child pornography because of their anonymity relative to Internet servers.

Solon used it for playing poker over the Internet and downloading games, Hansen said.

But in summer 2006, agents with the Internet Crimes Against Children agency of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation identified Solon’s computer as offering files containing child pornography for downloading, according to court documents.

On Sept. 21 of that year, and after obtaining a federal search warrant, ICAC agent Nicole Balliett and Randy Huff, then an agent for the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, talked to Solon, who said he used the Limewire software to play online poker and had tried to download “Grand Theft Auto” the night before, but his anti-virus software had blocked the download.

During the search of his house, law enforcement conducted an initial check of the hard drive and found files containing only adult pornography, according to court documents.

Meanwhile, Hansen said her brother stood in the doorway of his house and flipped through the pages of the warrant, which detailed the file names of child pornography that had been traced to his computer.

“He tossed the paperwork behind an entertainment center, walked into his bathroom and threw up,” she said.

Huff later conducted a forensic examination at his office and determined Solon’s computer was used to play online poker, and shortly thereafter downloaded a number of digital video files with child pornography to an “incomplete folder.” That number was later determined by the prosecution and defense as five retrievable files and previews containing child pornography, all in “unallocated space” on the hard drive.

On Jan. 18, 2007, Solon was indicted on a single count of possessing child pornography and was taken into custody. The court set the trial for later in 2007.

In October, Solon pleaded guilty and was scheduled to be sentenced in January 2008, according to court documents.

But by then, he began having serious doubts about his decision, Hansen said. He withdrew his guilty plea in April 2008.

He told the court he could not plead guilty to a crime he did not commit and that he felt forced to plead guilty because he could not afford to hire an expert witness, Hansen said.

In September, the court set the trial for November, and prosecutors filed a superseding indictment charging Solon with one count of receiving child pornography and one count of possessing child pornography.

The trial

The trial of USA v. Solon began on Nov. 3, 2008, and ended seven days later.

Balliett, Huff, and representatives of Qwest and the U.S. Postal Service testified for the government.

Solon, Hansen, Loehrs and a few others testified for the defense.

Solon’s computer, Huff said later, had anti-virus software and few viruses and Trojans, incomplete and some complete downloaded files of child pornography — an indication he viewed them, and an indication that he had files available for downloading, Huff said.

The government also showed videos corresponding with the file numbers of known child pornography.

Huff said these videos were on the computer, but Loehrs contended they were not accessible and Solon had not seen them.

Defense attorney Tom Smith unsuccessfully asked Brimmer to prevent the prosecution’s showing of the videos because Loehrs was not able to play the previews to the files during her exam of Solon’s hard drive.

Because of their repulsive content, those videos would prejudice the jury regardless of how Solon’s computer happened to receive them, he wrote.

And Loehrs told the court she did not have the opportunity to finish her work for the defense because Brimmer balked at her first bill of $10,603.90, even though she was authorized to spend up to $20,000, she said.

Brimmer called her a liar and told the jury to ignore her comments. He also abruptly left the courtroom without a recess as the defense began its closing arguments.

Brimmer returned six minutes later and said he had some letters to send because his secretary was playing canasta that afternoon.

“I’ve never dealt with anything as odd as Judge Brimmer” that day, Loehrs said.

During his jury instructions on Nov. 10, Brimmer said, “Nothing that I have said or done during the course of this trial is intended in any way to somehow suggest to you what I think your verdict should be.”

The jury returned its guilty verdicts after deliberating for two hours.

What’s next

Hayes continues to prepare Solon’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

She’s received calls from attorneys nationwide who believe Brimmer’s behavior affected the trial’s outcome, and some have offered to work with her at no cost, she said.

Huff sees no need for an appeal because Anderson and the government proved Solon’s guilt.

“You have to consciously go after that stuff,” he said. “It was beyond the realm of possibly someone else did it.”

He believes Solon claimed the downloads were accidental because he feared returning to prison.

“As a cop for 20 years, I think he’s pulling my leg,” he said.

But Loehrs said investigators and prosecutors have a long way to go before they grasp the details and implications of cyberspace and cybercrime.

“Most of them feel if it’s there, you’re guilty,” Loehrs said.

Investigators have the ability to find illegal computer activity, but many don’t know how to analyze it, she said. “That combination is deadly for people who are innocent.”
http://billingsgazette.com/news/stat...cc4c03286.html





Local Computer Security Expert Investigates Police Practices

An 'urban golf' outing raises civil liberties questions
Eric Nalder

A drunken street golf game with foam balls has led to a serious civil rights issue, pitting computer geeks against police practices.

Eric Rachner, a Seattle cyber security expert and one of the golf players, wasn't satisfied when the city dismissed charges against him after a possibly illegal arrest for refusing to provide identification.

Rachner discovered through sleuthing that police had withheld video-recorded evidence in his case.

Rachner also hired Seattle attorney Cleveland Stockmeyer to look at his case and probably others where arrests might have been illegal or where police claimed to have destroyed valuable arrest videos that weren't, in fact, erased.

"How many people are sitting in jail who asked for their tapes and were told no, they can't have them," says Stockmeyer. "I don't know. But I tell you we're going to freaking find out."

On a Saturday night in October 2008, Rachner was one of a sizeable group of "urban golfers" who were whacking the faux ball from bar to bar on city sidewalks, alleys and parking lots, imbibing more than keeping score.

Near the last "hole" a sliced shot hit a 22-year-old passerby in the face. The 1 ½-inch foam ball caused no harm other than a sting, but when the golfers laughed at and "heckled" the victim he called 9-1-1, the police report said. Seattle police responded in force.

While their colleagues would soon be investigating a shooting across town, the East Precinct sent four officers to spend an hour rounding up golfers.

"Twenty to thirty people are detained over a Styrofoam ball?" said Dan Kaminsky, an internationally famous Internet security expert himself, who was not arrested, but was among those detained for questioning. "This is ridiculous."

Rachner was wearing a faded t-shirt, jeans and leather jacket, and didn't remotely resemble the guy who misfired the ball, who wore English golfing duds, a Tattersall's hat and fake orange sideburns.

Confronted by officer Michele Letizia, Rachner politely declined to state his name. He also indicated where he kept his wallet with ID. The policeman removed the wallet from Rachner's pocket, but both men declined to open it. The officer expressed fear he could be accused of stealing cash.

Letizia threatened to arrest the 32-year-old Capitol Hill reveler for obstruction if he didn't provide his name as others had. The cop told Rachner that booking on a Saturday night could mean cell time until Monday. Rachner remained mum. Letizia arrested him, based on the refusal to provide ID, according to arrest and court documents.

With those facts, the arrest appears to have been illegal based on a 1982 Washington Supreme Court ruling, though a 2004 U.S. Supreme Court case makes the situation less clear-cut.

Custody for Rachner lasted two hours, not days, but a charge was leveled against him in Seattle Municipal Court for obstructing a public officer. Controversial laws known as obstruction, "stop and frisk" and "stop and identify" statutes have been abused in other cities like New York, studies and news stories show. An obstruction case cited in a 2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer investigation ended with a federal jury hitting Seattle police with a six-figure penalty.

Rachner's criminal defense attorney sought dismissal of his gross misdemeanor charge, citing the Washington State Supreme Court decision that says arresting a person for nothing more than withholding identification is unconstitutional. One reason cited by the court: This practice allows police too much discretion to pick targets and punish with arrest. Also, the state constitution is more protective of these rights than the U.S. constitution.

But then-city attorney Tom Carr's office kept the prosecution going for half a year. William Ross, the former assistant city attorney who handled part of the case, acknowledged that it is illegal to arrest someone for nothing more than failure to give ID, but declined to discuss case details other than to say the office didn't abuse its authority.

When the arresting officer was asked recently in an interview whether the ID issue was the only reason he took Rachner into custody, he said "no". But he declined to address why his arrest reported cited ID as the only reason, and refused further comment.
Inconsistent memories are why every Seattle officer has a video camera in the squad car and a microphone on their uniform. Expanding in use nationally, they provide an unblinking witness and are automatically activated when the patrol car's flashing lights are turned on. Cops are often more protected than citizens by these videos, but are the police willing to produce the recordings when they might be in the wrong?

Rachner repeatedly tested that question, asking for the video and audio recordings of that night's arrest as part of pre-trial discovery and, separately, in requests under state public disclosure law. That part of the discovery request wasn't fulfilled and the SPD denied the first disclosure request because the criminal charge was pending, records show.

On the day last May when the city attorney dropped the charges because of unexplained "proof" problems -- nearly six months and more than $3,500 in defendant legal expenses after the incident -- Rachner filed another disclosure request for the recordings.
The department responded: "These recordings are both past our retention period and can no longer be obtained. Please note that the majority of 911 calls and videos are retained for a period of ninety (90) days."

"They just flat out said they didn't have it," said Rachner.

Police were wrong. The recordings weren't destroyed and Rachner -- just starting the next round in his fight -- was the kind of person to discover that.

Reared in Woodinville, self-taught in computers, Rachner, like Kaminsky, is highly skilled in probing cyber systems to protect them against hackers. Once part of a Seattle team that won a legal international hacking contest three years in a row, he is among a very elite group who customers worldwide trust to penetrate their systems.

Rachner didn't hack the police computers, but with attorney Stockmeyer's advice he spent several late nights starting in October poring line-by-line over technical aspects of the video and audio recording system. He examined the Houston-area manufacturer's contracts, specifications and procedures.

Why bother? With charges dropped, Rachner says a major incentive now is protecting his trust-sensitive career in which he is "frequently subject to background checks."

"In this business, even having an accusation on your record has concrete financial implications," said Kaminsky, who became internationally famous in 2008 when he discovered a security hole in the Internet -- the entire Internet -- and helped computer companies worldwide fix it.

Rachner hit pay dirt when a procurement contract and system specs revealed that a computerized log is kept permanently on every video and audio recording, showing when anyone uploads it, flags it for retention, plays it, copies it or deletes it.

He also discovered recordings aren't regularly destroyed every 90 days, but are kept for a variety of reasons. While they can be destroyed after three months, that erasure isn't mandated.

In late November, Rachner filed a public disclosure request for the log of his video and audio recordings. His luck changed. He got the log in early January showing the videos had been flagged for retention after the arrest, viewed and kept. He also received a copy of the first video and audio recording. The second recording arrived in early March while a reporter was talking to him on the phone. No explanation was provided for the earlier SPD claim the tapes could not be obtained.

"The explanation is our servers failed," said Seattle Police spokesman Sgt. Sean Whitcomb. "Data was lost, more than his, and it took some time to recover it."

"There is absolutely nothing in the activity log to support that claim," said Rachner. "Moreover, if the video was unavailable, it was dishonest of them to claim the video could no longer be obtained because it was past the 90-day retention period. It is completely at odds with what they told me in writing."

Play the video and audio recordings of Eric Rachner's arrest. Although Rachner and the officers can be heard clearly on the soundtrack, they were not visible to the camera.

The descriptions of the incident in this story are based on the tapes, police reports, city attorney records and interviews. The microphone picks up Letizia explaining the arrest to Rachner and a police sergeant, citing only the failure to provide identification as the reason Rachner was in handcuffs. No other provocations before the arrest were documented.

Letizia is also heard on the mike starting to tell Rachner that in obstruction situations in the city "we kind of coddle to". He didn't finish the sentence.

The log also revealed that SPD's Office of Professional Accountability viewed the tapes before April 2009 when it exonerated Letizia in an internal investigation spurred by a Rachner complaint shortly after the incident. Capt. Tag Gleason of OPA told Rachner in a letter: "The evidence in the case does not support your perspective of the event and does support the response of the officers to your conduct."

"Why wasn't this an abuse of authority?" asked Rachner.

Whitcomb said he can't comment on a non-sustained internal investigation, or on the underlying incident.

Rachner and his attorney Stockmeyer are investigating circumstances in other cases similar to his. In response to a question about their efforts, current Seattle City Attorney Peter Holmes said his office is willing to examine specific cases where new evidence indicates videos were withheld or arrests were unlawful.

A highly-controversial criminal prosecution against Seattle artist Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes was dismissed in 2005 because the police failed to turn over video and audio from his arrest until three days into the trial. On the audio recording, Alley-Barnes pleads for police to stop kicking him. He later received a $185,000 settlement from SPD after he filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit.

Several lawyers, including prominent Seattle civil rights attorney Lembhard Howell, said they were completely unaware of the video logs, and glad to be informed since they've been denied police videos based on the 90-day excuse. "Now I know what to ask for," said Howell.

Among other ID-refusal obstruction arrests Rachner uncovered were the "bizarre" ordeals of Howard Mulvihill Jr., 26, and his mother Beverly Mulvihill, 61. They spent two nights and one night in custody, respectively, after their September 2008 arrests, records show. The city attorney quickly dismissed both charges.

Police were suspicious because the pair lingered more than an hour in a car watching a movie in a downtown fast food restaurant parking lot, the arrest report said. Mulvihill Jr. said he was waiting that night to report for dock work.

After the man refused to give his identification, officers grabbed him, injured his head and Tased him while the mother objected, the report said. Internal investigations sustained a complaint against one officer, said a March 2009 SPD letter. He received additional training, Whitcomb said.

"At least we know it is supposed to be against the law for them to arrest us for that," said the mother.

Rachner said he was aware of his rights and of Washington case law when he was arrested. He said he is "an amateur civil rights buff", and that's why he stuck to his ID refusal.

Another urban golfer arrested that night for walking away and not identifying himself did eight hours of community service to get his charges dismissed.

The sponge ball victim Gabriel Scott Clark, then a Seattle coffee house worker and now living in Miami, said he was surprised by the multiple arrests: "I didn't think it would be that big of an issue. I was just mad at the one guy."

The cops that night arrested the wrong golfer for the sponge ball assault.

Marcus Johnson of Los Angeles apologetically admitted in an interview that he sliced the ball that hit the victim. Police never detained or identified him, but he and others said Johnson was "in the thick of things" when police arrived.

Arrested instead, based on victim identification, was security researcher and computer cryptologist David Hulton of Seattle. The city attorney dropped the misdemeanor assault charge, but only after Hulton spent $2,500 on a lawyer. Hulton has joined Rachner in his project, helping to pay for attorney Stockmeyer's expenses, because he said, "I want to effect change."
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/418746_video.html





Getting What You Pay for on the Mobile Internet
Kevin J. O'Brien

When TeliaSonera, the Nordic telecommunications operator, switched on the world’s fastest wireless network last December, customers quickly ratcheted up their consumption of mobile data tenfold.

Besides reaffirming the soundness of the operator’s investment in the new technology, called Long Term Evolution, or L.T.E., the data smorgasbord confirmed another truism: the days of flat-rate mobile data rates are probably drawing to a close.

All-you-can-eat plans — as they are known in the industry — were introduced when the mobile Web was in its infancy and demand was profitable and manageable. But with traffic booming, reflecting the growing popularity of smartphones, social networking and downloading music and video, network operators fear that flat-rate plans will eat into profits or even fail to cover costs.

The result is likely to be higher prices for consumers.

“Finding a way to make mobile profitable in the medium and long term is one of the industry’s big priorities,” said Mike Roberts, an analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “We are now at the early stages of figuring out a way forward.”

Even before it spent 500 million Swedish kronor, or $70 million, to switch on its L.T.E. network last year, TeliaSonera began introducing pricing plans with download limits as advances in the third-generation technology that preceded L.T.E. led to an explosion in traffic.

“In 2009, the mobile data on our network in Sweden increased by 200 percent but the number of subscribers increased just 60 percent,” said Anna Augustson, vice president for communications mobility services at TeliaSonera in Stockholm. “Clearly, it was not a sustainable model from a business perspective to have a single, flat rate.”

Last year, TeliaSonera began selling a series of 3G mobile broadband data plans with monthly limits ranging from 2 gigabytes to 20 gigabytes a month, for 39 to 319 kronor.

TeliaSonera is selling an introductory L.T.E. network plan with unlimited downloads for 4 kronor a month. But by July, the operator plans to limit downloads to 30 gigabytes and charge 599 kronor for the service, almost twice the cost of its 20-gigabyte 3G plan.

In exchange, TeliaSonera’s L.T.E. users will get download speeds of 20 to 40 megabits a second, about 10 times those on its 3G network.

“We feel it is important for our customers to have a choice,” Ms. Augustson said. Instead of all you can eat, the new industry mantra, she said, is: “You get what you pay for.”

At least one major operator is doing likewise. In Spain last November, Vodafone, the largest European carrier, introduced Calidad Oro — Gold Quality — a premium plan for business users for €49, or $66, a month that guarantees fast service without monthly limits on downloads.

The advent of tiered pricing for mobile broadband is new, but, in a sense, it is also a throwback to the early days of the technology, when operators imposed often unrealistically high download fees that scared off consumers and delayed the development of the mobile Web.

Eventually, operators began selling all-you-can-eat plans, first in the United States and then in Europe, to ease consumer angst about running up big bills. The plans attracted users and helped speed the technology’s development. Now, some operators are moving toward sophisticated forms of metered pricing based on speed and consumption, striving to balance profitability and consumer satisfaction.

Soon, the biggest operators are likely to follow with plans that redefine how most consumers purchase wireless data. Top executives at AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica have all recently called on the industry to move away from flat-rate data plans, although only Vodafone so far has attempted a tiered pricing plan.

At AT&T, the No.2 wireless carrier in the United States, after Verizon Wireless, the use of mobile data surged 5,000 percent from 2007 through 2009 after the operator became the exclusive U.S. seller of Apple’s iPhone, which has helped popularize the mobile Web. But it has also strained AT&T’s wireless network at peak times in urban areas in New York and California.

“In light of the limited natural resource of spectrum, we have to look at the ways of conserving spectrum,” said Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman in Atlanta. “We have had to invest billions in our network to keep ahead of this demand. This may also require a different way of looking at pricing on the part of the industry.”

Operators do not disclose whether their mobile data services are profitable, although analysts say they are and point to the industrywide move to build L.T.E. networks, which are essentially mobile broadband networks, as the future for a business where revenue from voice services will play an ever-shrinking role.

Mobile data traffic levels are expected to continue climbing as the use of bandwidth-eating smartphones increases and operators around the world follow TeliaSonera’s example and install their own L.T.E. high-speed networks.

The number of mobile broadband users worldwide is forecast to increase 55 percent this year, to 437.8 million from 282.5 million in December 2009, according to Informa, the telecommunications research firm. By the end of 2014, the number of mobile broadband users is projected to reach 2.1 billion.

Over the same period, the level of mobile data traffic on the networks of the world’s carriers is expected to rise 22 times, to 15.1 billion gigabytes from 674 million gigabytes. But without changes in pricing, operator revenue will rise 12 percent a year through 2014, according to Informa, just a fraction of the 49 percent projected annual increase in subscribers or the 86 percent annual increase in data traffic.

Operators are just beginning to link the price of a service — in this case mobile broadband — to the costs to a mobile network, said Kenneth Frank, the president of solutions and marketing for Alcatel-Lucent, a network equipment maker. “There is going to be so much creativity about pricing. We are only seeing the beginning,” Mr. Frank said.

Steve Smith, an analyst at Coda Research Consultancy in Guildford, England, said unlimited flat rates would not disappear but would become much more expensive. “Operators will have to work hard to get their tiers ‘right,”’ Mr. Smith said.

Over time, consumers will have many options for buying customized wireless broadband plans, said Pat McCarthy, a vice president for global marketing at Telcordia, a maker of bandwidth management software for operators based in Piscataway, New Jersey. Those may not mean higher costs for the average user, but heavy users may face higher bills.

“The problem with mobile broadband so far has been most of the revenue it has generated has gone to over-the-top Internet content services, not to the operators,” said Mr. McCarthy, who is based in Galway, Ireland. “That’s what they are trying to change.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/te...ht-tiered.html





Third of U.S. Teens with Phones Text 100 Times a Day
Dan Whitcomb

A third of U.S. teenagers with cell phones send more than 100 texts a day as texting has exploded to become the most popular means of communication for young people, according to new research.

The study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which offers a glimpse into teen culture and communication, found that texting has risen dramatically even since 2008, eclipsing cell phone calls, instant messaging, social networks -- and talking face-to-face.

The Pew Research Center said that three-fourths of young people between the ages of 12 and 17 now own cell phones and of those that do, girls typically send or receive 80 text messages per day and boys, 30 per day.

"Texting is now the central hub of communication in the lives of teens today, and it has really skyrocketed in the last 18 months," Pew researcher Amanda Lenhart said, attributing the rise in part to payment plans that allow unlimited texting.

The study's authors also say that, unlike phone calls, text messaging can be quietly carried out under the noses of parents, teachers or other authority figures and, unlike computers, it can be done almost anywhere.

"We've kind of hit a tipping point where now teens expect other teens to respond to text messaging and to be available," Lenhart said. "There is definitely an element of text messaging that fits so seamlessly into their lives."

Text messaging has become so much a part of teenagers' lives that 87 percent of those who text said that they sleep with, or next to, their phone.

Study author Scott Campbell said focus groups conducted by Pew also offer insight into the subtleties of teen communication and culture, revealing for example that, while boys don't typically use punctuation, for girls such nuances are critical.

"If a girl puts a period at the end of a text message (to another girl) then it comes across as she's mad," Campbell said, which explains the prevalence of smiley emoticons.

"They have these practices because they've learned that texts can lead to misunderstandings," Lenhart said. "It's a deliberate thing and it's also part of a culture that's interested in differentiating itself from adult culture."

The percentage of teens with cell phones who sent at least one text message a day increased from 38 percent in 2008 to 54 percent in September 2009, according to the study.

Meanwhile 38 percent of teens said they daily make at least one cell phone call, 30 percent said they talk on a landline phone and 24 percent said they used instant messaging.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63J0K220100420





For Chinese, Web Is the Way to Entertainment
David Barboza

The daily Web habits of a typical 18-year-old college student named Li Yufei show why American Internet companies, one after another, have had trouble penetrating what is now the world’s most wired nation.

He writes a blog, downloads Korean television shows, manages two Web sites devoted to music and plays an online game called Rongguang Hospital, at Baidu.com.

“I started doing a lot of this when I was about 11 years old,” says Mr. Li, a freshman at the Shanghai Maritime University. “Now, I spend most of my leisure time on the Internet,” he says. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

Google’s decision last month to remove some of its operations from China has overshadowed a startling dynamic at work in this country, a place where young people complain that there is not a lot to do: the Internet, already a potent social force here, has become the country’s prime entertainment service.

Frustrated with media censorship, bland programming on state-run television and limits on the number of foreign films allowed to be shown in China each year, young people are logging onto the Web and downloading alternatives. Homegrown Web sites like Baidu, Tencent and Sina.com have captured millions of Chinese youths obsessed with online games, pirated movies and music, the raising of virtual vegetables, microblogging and instant messaging.

Even though Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by censors here, Chinese social networking sites like QQ Zone, Tianya.cn and Kaixin001.com are flourishing in surprisingly inventive ways.

A study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group found that people in China (which now has nearly 400 million Internet users) are far more connected than Americans, and that globally only the Japanese spend more time on the Web.

Analysts say Google struggled to gain market share in China partly because the company had failed to build a big enough online community around its search engine, unlike its chief rival here, Baidu.com.

The surprising power of online communities in China has Communist Party leaders worried about the ability of online social networks to spread viral messages that could ignite social movements, and pose a challenge to the party and its leaders. They saw what happened to Han Feng, a midlevel party official in southern China, when his private diary was recently posted online.

In the diary, Mr. Han catalogued not just the hefty bribes he was taking, but detailed his sexual escapades with co-workers and mistresses. The ensuing online uproar led to his sacking and a criminal investigation.

“For the government, the scary part of the Internet is the unpredictable power of its organization,” said Yang Guobin, an associate professor at Barnard College and author of “The Power of the Internet in China” (Columbia University Press, 2009).

“Although people are there socializing, it can provide a platform for lots of other activities, and even turn political,” he said.

But young people in China say they are excited about the Web not because it offers a means to rebellion, but because it gives them a wide variety of social and entertainment options.

One of the more remarkable developments in the Internet in recent years has been the informal network of young people who volunteer to produce Chinese subtitles for popular American television series like “Prison Break” and “Gossip Girl.”

The Chinese subtitles are often translated within hours of the program’s showing in the United States, and then attached to the video and made freely available on Chinese file-sharing sites.

Chinese Internet companies have gleaned a lesson from this: entertainment trumps politics on the Web in China.

“The Web is really a reflection of real life,” says Gary Wang, founder and chief executive of Tudou, one of China’s biggest video-sharing sites. “What people do in real life is they go to karaoke rooms, they go to bars, they get together with friends and they shop. And that’s what they do online.”

Baidu is one of the companies that recognized the link. Founded in 1999, Baidu — which got an early investment from Google — quickly established itself as China’s largest search engine.

By the time Google sold its stake in Baidu and set up its own Chinese-language search engine in 2006, Baidu was already expanding its site in the hopes of building a community that would stick around longer on the site.

One of the company’s most popular offerings is the Baidu Post Bar, an online bulletin board of hot topics that now accounts for nearly 15 percent of the site’s traffic. (Among the most popular topics in recent weeks was a television anchorwoman’s ties to a corrupt official).

There is also Baidu Knows, Baidu Space (for blogs) and Baidu Baike, a Chinese version of Wikipedia.

Now, the company is working on an online video site that would work much like Hulu.com, the site in the United States where several broadcast TV networks present their shows.

Every Chinese Internet company seems to be building its own online conglomerate to offer online games, shopping, blogs and bulletin boards. Few companies want to specialize.

Just like American TV networks, state-run networks in China are worried that entertainment is migrating to the Web and that young people are souring on television. So they are trying to jazz up their offerings with reality shows or programs modeled on “American Idol.”

Sometimes, though, network news divisions get even by investigating the follies of their Web competitors.

In 2008, for instance, China Central Television — the biggest state-run network — ran an exposé on how Baidu accepted money to bolster the search results of unlicensed medical companies.

Baidu reviewed its policies, but also cleverly managed its way through the scandal by paying more than $5 million to be a sponsor of the state network and by courting the Chinese press.

Several Chinese journalists say that soon after Baidu suffered bad publicity, the company offered to fly a group of journalists to Hong Kong for a leisurely weekend at a luxury hotel.

A spokeswoman for Baidu declined to comment on the Hong Kong press outing, but media coverage of Baidu improved.

Google’s late start in China made it difficult to keep pace with Chinese competitors, who were constantly rolling out new things to appeal to young Web users.

Analysts say Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, also has little chance of succeeding. Although Microsoft has spent years building a presence in China and working with the Chinese government, the company’s online offerings have fared poorly.

“I don’t think Bing will come even close to Baidu,” said Lu Bowang, president of China IntelliConsulting in Beijing. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on Bing’s China strategy.

Mr. Li, the Shanghai Maritime University student, says he surfs the Web to find or build his own community. A shy person with no siblings, he now has 300 online buddies, and says he turns to the Web to find what he cannot find anywhere else, particularly on state-run TV, which banned some Korean shows years ago.

“The State Administration shut down a lot of the popular Japanese and Korean series a long time ago,” he says. “So I have to go online to find things like this.”

Chen Xiaoduan contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/te...9chinaweb.html





Redbox Gets Deals with Fox, Universal Movie Studios

Coinstar Inc's Redbox on Thursday ended legal disputes and reached distribution pacts with Universal Studios and Twentieth Century Fox in the latest sign that Hollywood is warming to the DVD kiosk operator that it has accused of depressing prices.

Under the deals with News Corp's Twentieth Century Fox and General Electric Co's Universal, Redbox must wait 28 days after a DVD or Blu-ray disc's release to offer them to its customers.

Redbox struck a similar deal with Time Warner Inc's Warner Bros in February, also ending a legal dispute.

The first Fox release covered under the new agreement is "Avatar," Redbox said in a statement.

Studios have accused Redbox of undercutting DVD sales by renting them for $1 a day from its 22,400 kiosks, and have threatened to withhold titles.

Redbox sued Fox and Universal for restricting access to their new-release DVDs. Renting DVDs from bright-red automated kiosks nationwide helped Coinstar's DVD service revenue double to $774 million last year, from $388 million in 2008.

(Reporting by Sue Zeidler. Editing by Robert MacMillan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63L67W20100422





"Avatar" Sets First-Day Blu-Ray Sales Record
Carl DiOrio

DVDs and Blu-ray Discs of James Cameron's "Avatar" flew off store shelves Thursday, the movie's first day in stores, despite being available in just the 2D format.

An early industry estimate set overall disc sales comfortably north of 4 million units, putting it well on track to become the year's top-selling release to date.

Blu-ray sales -- at 1.5 million copies -- well outpaced first-day sales of previous high-definition top dog "The Dark Knight."

Retailers sold out of 60% of their Blu-ray inventory on average, said a spokesman for distributor 20th Century Fox. He declined to specify unit shipments. Mass merchants moved out roughly 50% of their "Avatar" DVDs, the spokesman added.

Due to the epic's ecological theme, Fox broke with the industry's Tuesday release date norm and scheduled the release to coincide with Earth Day. Cameron and others connected to the film have been participating in a host of green-themed events as part of the movie's home-entertainment campaign.

A 3D version of the picture is expected to hit Blu-ray Disc early next year. Fox and the filmmakers wanted to wait until a greater number of homes were equipped with 3D Blu-ray players. Though 3D-enabled players only recently became available, virtually all new Blu-ray players will boast that capability by year's end. The first DVDs lack even special features of the sort typically included on disc releases. A special edition release is expected to hit stores in November and will include extensive bonus features.

Despite the lean-and-mean nature of the release, Fox figures "Avatar" eventually will surpass "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" as the year's best-selling disc. "New Moon" moved 4 million units in its first two days -- after launching on a Friday, at midnight -- and has sold 6.5 million copies on DVD and Blu-ray to date.

Many Best Buy locations and other retailers stayed open until midnight Wednesday to allow witching-hour early birds to flock to stores and snatch the first "Avatar" discs.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63M1FD20100423





Summer Blockbusters Present Musical Challenges
Jeff Bond

When John Debney came to score "Iron Man 2," he faced a particular challenge: Being consistent with the first outing in the action franchise, while adding his own distinct voice.

"It's quite different from the first score, but it retains a lot of the same cool elements," Debney says. "There's a lot of guitar in it, but most of it is couched with the orchestra, so we never lose sight of that whole thing."

"That whole thing" means the vast enterprise referred to as a tentpole or summer blockbuster. Composers tasked with scoring these movies not only have to contend with super-heated action, rapid-fire editing and overpowering sound mixes; they also have to cope with schedules that can be in flux right up to the end of postproduction -- and convey a sense of bigness that belongs with budgets reaching $200 million and more.

Ramin Djawadi scored the first "Iron Man" with a strong dose of metal guitar, and director Jon Favreau wanted to keep some of that while exploring a new direction. He also wanted to maintain the continuity of the rock guitar aspect that characterized the hell-raising persona of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and his "metal man" alter ego, Iron Man.

"As Iron Man has evolved from his scrappy beginnings, we want to establish him as being more comfortable with the mantle of a superhero," the director says.

Hard Rockers Meet Disney

A blend of classic orchestral film scoring from Debney; rock stylings courtesy of guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine; AC/DC songs -- and even a surprising touch of Walt Disney -- contributed to that.

"What I like about Tom's guitar is that he tunes it down, doubles up, sometimes double-records and triple-records the guitars, and the orchestrations are built around his guitar work," Favreau adds. "It was interesting to see John collaborate with Tom, people who come from two different sides of the music business."

That collaboration extended from the music team to the sound department.

"What Debney brings to the table is how to write music around that (the sound effects), so you're not competing," Favreau notes. "Understanding what range to use, what tones to use, and how to time it so you're reinforcing the effects and you're not muddying things up and the music can be played at a high level without competing with the sound effects -- he's pretty masterful at that."

Debney is also masterful at incorporating the classic songs that will allow the studio to issue a compelling soundtrack when the movie opens. While Sony Classical will put out Debney's "Iron Man 2" score, the lion's share of attention may go to the Columbia Records soundtrack that will consist entirely of AC/DC songs.

"They've never done something like this, with all of their big songs together," says Dave Jordan, music supervisor on all the Marvel Studios productions. "Jon is a huge AC/DC fan and they're an expensive band to use. Here he could use any song in their catalog any way he wanted to. It's a very unique situation."

Negative Reactions

Blockbusters have the budgets to get such songs. But songs can present their own problems.

"At one of our test screenings, we put a rock song over a big action sequence as an exercise and on the cards it got completely trashed," notes Brian Tyler, composer of Sylvester Stallone's upcoming "The Expendables." "People really hated it and asked why were we trying to make this into a rock video. We replaced it with orchestral music and the numbers for the film shot up and the notes on the music were great."

Unless the songs are already classics, Tyler says, the results can seriously date a film. "You can imagine what it would be like watching 'North By Northwest' and having the train go into the tunnel at the end and going into a contemporary song of that period. It just would have destroyed it."

Perhaps to avoid that, for "Iron Man" Favreau and Debney also used the music of Dick Sherman, the prolific songwriter who did a lot of the early Disney theme park material and even "Mary Poppins."

"We brought him onboard and had him write a song for the Stark Expo, which in our movie lore has been going on since the '30s, much like the World's Fair," Jordan says.

Debney interpolated Sherman's song melody into the "Iron Man 2" score, making it play as the theme for Tony Stark's father. The tune's origins will likely be revealed in the new "Captain America" film, set in World War II.

"We're laying a lot of seeds for other films to explore musically as well as in other ways," Jordan continues.

It's easier to lay such seeds when the director has already done one outing on a franchise. But dealing with directors has its own special challenges with blockbusters, whose helmers frequently have to marshall staffs of a thousand or more. Debney was fortunate to have plenty of face time with Favreau; but other key players can also play an important role.

"Even if you're working with the same director, producers may change, film executives may change," Tyler says.

"Bottleneck Mentality"

Schedules may change, too. Trevor Rabin, who scored Jon Turteltaub's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," says the "race to the end" is becoming more prevalent in film. "It's such a bottleneck mentality: You start off, get ideas and kind of relax and then suddenly you've got three weeks left. There are picture changes all the time. You write a cue that you think is really tailored well to the picture, and three days later you see the music editor with the best intentions has chopped it to fit the picture and there goes the music."

In the case of "Iron Man 2," Debney says that while the overall amount of time did not change, the amount given for demo'ing and adjusting to picture changes -- even on the dub stage -- did.

"The process has become more technically oriented," he notes. "We're becoming so concerned with versions of scenes that we're constantly cutting and lengthening and shortening, that we can lose a vision of the overall work. This film is on a scale times five or 10 of what the original film was -- we have a lot of characters, we find out more about Tony and his relationship with his father and there are lot of other plot elements so it's a much more elaborate film than the first one and that presents a lot of challenges."

Tight Budget

At least Debney had the money to do what he needed. Or did he?

"Marvel is very careful with what they want to spend on the music, so it was a rather tight budget," he says. "You can't run off willy-nilly, doing session after session."

"You make budget decisions in a different way," Rabin argues with regard to blockbusters. "It used to be, 'Whatever you need.' But those days are gone. Today, if you say you need a choir, the question is: 'What size choir do you need?' Now there is an increasing request to size down the orchestra and do less days. There's definitely a nip-and-tuck going on."

Rabin also had to budget time for research on "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" in order to musically reference one of the film's inspirations. "Part of the challenge is Jon Turteltaub's done an extraordinary nod to the (Walt Disney's) 'Fantasia' film, and the Paul Dukas piece, which inspired the original, is what I had to look at and utilize within the context of this cue. So it was really exciting going in and analyzing that piece of music. The weird thing is that kind of has nothing to do with the rest of the film -- it's just that one area where they've done this nod to it and it's pretty extraordinary."

With a big budget, however, there is at least time to perfect the details, the kind of details most composers only get time for with commercials.

"I remember doing a Marlboro commercial for Tony Scott years ago and being quite shocked at the amount of detail required and how long it took him to sign off on the music -- something like 10 days or two weeks," says Harry Gregson-Williams ("Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time"). "And I remember thinking, 'How would this be with two hours of music?' I'm still asking myself the same question."

More Time

In the case of "Prince of Persia," the film's release date wound up giving Gregson-Williams more time to hone his work -- far more time than he expected. "It was supposed to come out last summer, and they shot it 18 months ago, and it didn't quite look like it was going to make it. There were a lot of special effects, a lot of reformatting and quite a lot of recutting of the movie. And we made it and had it been a winter-type movie we would have been ready to release it at Christmas last year. But it's a summer blockbuster so they had to put it in a can and wait for the next summer. So with all that extra time they said, 'Well, let's beat up on the composer some more!' To be truthful I was on that picture longer than anything I've ever done. It was a pretty long time to be on a Jerry Bruckheimer film, I can tell you."

A bigger problem for Gregson-Williams is how to contend with big overall sound mixes. Luckily, he says, producer Bruckheimer is "very interested in the whole sonic tapestry, but he's also very supportive of the music, which is good because he invests a lot of his time helping to create the musical soundtrack."

Djawadi ("Clash of the Titans") has his own solution when it comes to dealing with booming special effects. "Sometimes if the sound effects are ready I try to get them into my studio and lay them into the picture in a proper 5.1 sound mix to see what I'm up against," he says. "For 'Clash' there are areas with Medusa where I knew there would be voices in the background, so I tried to stay away from that in the score so we wouldn't clash."

Handling such tasks has become incomparably more difficult than it was in the days of the first big blockbusters -- "Jaws" and "Star Wars" -- not because of all the software but because those films had far fewer minutes of music.

"There's so much music (today) that the challenge is to try and prevent it from sounding like wallpaper," Rabin says. "If you look back at 'Psycho,' there was 30 minutes of music. Now it's, 'How long is the picture? Two hours?' Well, that's probably how long the score will be."
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63I0S420100419





James Bond Movie Delayed Due to Studio Auction
Alex Dobuzinskis

The next James Bond movie will be delayed indefinitely due to "uncertainty" from the still unfinished auction of MGM, the movie studio behind the films, producers said on Monday.

The as yet untitled movie, which will be the 23rd in the series about the British spy, had been due for release in 2011 or 2012.

James Bond is MGM's most lucrative franchise. The character known as 007 is currently played by Daniel Craig, and the next installment would be the British actor's third time in the role.

But Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, the producers of the Bond movies, said in a joint statement, "Due to the continuing uncertainty surrounding the future of MGM and the failure to close a sale of the studio, we have suspended development on BOND 23 indefinitely."

The two producers said they do not know when development of the film will resume and when it will be released in theaters.

MGM last year began exploring a potential sale last year.

The 22 James Bond movies have sold $1.6 billion in box office tickets in the U.S. and Canada, putting the series at No. 3 on the list of most successful film franchises, according to tracking firm Box Office Mojo.

The last film in the series, 2008's "Quantum of Solace," racked up a global box office of $586 million, and before that the 2006 movie "Casino Royale" made $594 million and introduced Craig as the new Bond.

Sam Mendes, a director best known for making psychological dramas such as "American Beauty" and "Revolutionary Road," was expected to direct the next James Bond movie.

(Editing by Jill Serjeant)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63I6O120100419





Soldiers in "Wikileaks" Unit Apologize for Violence
Josh Stieber and Ethan McCord

An Open Letter of Reconciliation and Responsibility to the Iraqi People: From Current and Former Members of the US Military

Peace be with you,

To all of those who were injured or lost loved ones during the July 2007 Baghdad shootings depicted in the "Collateral Murder" Wikileaks video:

We write to you, your family, and your community with awareness that our words and actions can never restore your losses.

We are both soldiers who occupied your neighborhood for 14 months. Ethan McCord pulled your daughter and son from the van, and when doing so, saw the faces of his own children back home. Josh Stieber was in the same company but was not there that day, though he contributed to the your pain, and the pain of your community on many other occasions.

There is no bringing back all that was lost. What we seek is to learn from our mistakes and do everything we can to tell others of our experiences and how the people of the United States need to realize we have done and are doing to you and the people of your country. We humbly ask you what we can do to begin to repair the damage we caused.

We have been speaking to whoever will listen, telling them that what was shown in the Wikileaks video only begins to depict the suffering we have created. From our own experiences, and the experiences of other veterans we have talked to, we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region.

We acknowledge our part in the deaths and injuries of your loved ones as we tell Americans what we were trained to do and what we carried out in the name of "god and country". The soldier in the video said that your husband shouldn't have brought your children to battle, but we are acknowledging our responsibility for bringing the battle to your neighborhood, and to your family. We did unto you what we would not want done to us.

More and more Americans are taking responsibility for what was done in our name. Though we have acted with cold hearts far too many times, we have not forgotten our actions towards you. Our heavy hearts still hold hope that we can restore inside our country the acknowledgment of your humanity, that we were taught to deny.

Our government may ignore you, concerned more with its public image. It has also ignored many veterans who have returned physically injured or mentally troubled by what they saw and did in your country. But the time is long overdue that we say that the value of our nation's leaders no longer represent us. Our secretary of defense may say the U.S. won't lose its reputation over this, but we stand and say that our reputation's importance pales in comparison to our common humanity.

We have asked our fellow veterans and service-members, as well as civilians both in the United States and abroad, to sign in support of this letter, and to offer their names as a testimony to our common humanity, to distance ourselves from the destructive policies of our nation's leaders, and to extend our hands to you.

With such pain, friendship might be too much to ask. Please accept our apology, our sorrow, our care, and our dedication to change from the inside out. We are doing what we can to speak out against the wars and military policies responsible for what happened to you and your loved ones. Our hearts are open to hearing how we can take any steps to support you through the pain that we have caused.

Solemnly and Sincerely,
Josh Stieber, former specialist, U.S. Army
Ethan McCord, former specialist, U.S. Army

http://www.truthout.org/soldiers-wik...-violence58714





Justices Block Law Aimed at Animal-Cruelty Videos
AP

The Supreme Court struck down a federal law Tuesday aimed at banning videos that show graphic violence against animals, saying it violates the right to free speech.

The justices, voting 8-1, threw out the criminal conviction of Robert Stevens of Pittsville, Va., who was sentenced to three years in prison for videos he made about pit bull fights.

The law was enacted in 1999 to limit Internet sales of so-called crush videos, which appeal to a certain sexual fetish by showing women crushing to death small animals with their bare feet or high-heeled shoes.

The videos virtually disappeared once the measure became law, the government argued.

But Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said the law goes too far, suggesting that a measure limited to crush videos might be valid. Animal cruelty and dog fighting already are illegal throughout the country.

In dissent, Justice Samuel Alito said the harm animals suffer in dogfights is enough to sustain the law.

Alito said the ruling probably will spur new crush videos because it has ''the practical effect of legalizing the sale of such videos.''

Animal rights groups, including the Humane Society of the United States and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and 26 states joined the Obama administration in support of the law. The government sought a ruling that treated videos showing animal cruelty like child pornography, not entitled to constitutional protection.

But Roberts said the law could be read to allow the prosecution of the producers of films about hunting. And he scoffed at the administration's assurances that it would only apply the law to depictions of extreme cruelty. ''But the First Amendment protects against the government,'' Roberts said. ''We would not uphold an unconstitutional statute merely because the government promised to use it responsibly.''

Stevens ran a business and Web site that sold videos of pit bull fights. He is among a handful of people prosecuted under the animal cruelty law. He noted in court papers that his sentence was 14 months longer than professional football player Michael Vick's prison term for running a dogfighting ring.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010...ll-Videos.html





Henry Luce, the Editor in Chief
Bill Keller

THE PUBLISHER

Henry Luce and His American Century

By Alan Brinkley

Illustrated. 531 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35

Of all the arguments under way these days at the noisy crossroads of the news business, none is quite so basic as the debate over journalistic authority — who has it, and what it is worth.

On one side, to oversimplify just a little, is a view that the democratizing power of the Internet has rendered traditional forms and values of journalism obsolete, and with them, not incidentally, the idea that people should pay for news. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian of London, observed recently that the old world in which journalists were trusted to filter and prioritize the news is now in tension with “a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority.” Among the more utopian partisans of this wisdom-of-the-crowd view, the reliance on professional journalists is seen as elitist and stifling.

On the other side is a conviction that a significant population of serious people feel the need for someone with training, experience and standards — reporters and editors — to help them dig up and sort through the news, identify what’s important and make sense of it. That in no way precludes enlisting the audience as commentators, as contributors and as collaborators. (Witness the splendid hybrid of professional and amateur journalism that has kept alive the stream of news from Iran.) But in this view — which I share — the authority of professional journalists is both a valuable convenience for readers without the time or inclination to manage a tsunami of information on their own, and a civic good, in that a democracy needs a shared base of trustworthy information upon which to make its judgments.

Henry R. Luce can be considered a founding father of the authority school — for better and for worse.

Luce, the creator of Time, Life, Fortune and later of Sports Illustrated, was a media tycoon at a time when, as A. J. Liebling put it, freedom of the press belonged to the man who owned one (rather than, as now, to anyone with an Internet service provider), a time when a lone publisher could aspire to influence the course of world events. Luce used his mighty megaphone to promote leaders he admired, to paint a generally uplifting portrait of middle-class America and to advance the cause of American intervention in the world, up to and including an unrelenting passion for the misadventure in Vietnam. What he called “journalism of information with a purpose” was sometimes hard to distinguish from propaganda, and it won him the scorn of liberal intellectuals.

Alan Brinkley, a scholar of the New Deal and a frequent reviewer in these pages, has a gift for restoring missing dimensions to figures who have been flattened into caricature. “Voices of Protest,” for which he won a National Book Award, revisited the cartoon demagogues Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin and established their important role in forcing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to pay attention to the economic miseries of the Great Depression.

In “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century,” Brinkley performs a similar service. His Luce is a complicated figure, more tragic than malign. That is not to say this is a particularly flattering profile. The book does full justice to Luce’s outsider insecurity, his blind affinity for men of power and his defects as a family man. But it is a humanizing portrayal, and it credits the role his magazines, Time and Life especially, played in a country growing uneasily into the dominant geopolitical force in the world. Luce’s publications served as a kind of cultural adhesive that bound the middle class to a shared understanding of the world and ushered it through periods of war and economic hardship. It’s hard to imagine any outlet playing such a role in today’s dis#aggregated media environment.

For those, like me, whose previous image of Luce came largely from David Halberstam’s book “The Powers That Be,” Brinkley’s biography is not especially rev#elatory, but it is subtler and, in the end, more sympathetic.

“The Powers That Be” depended on many scores of interviews, and it is a propulsive read (or an exhausting one, depending on how you feel about Halberstam’s methamphetamine prose). Brink#ley’s book, written 30 years later, when most of Halberstam’s interview subjects were no longer around, relies instead on voluminous letters and diaries. This is largely successful because his subjects, in the days before Twitter and instant messaging, were prolific and literate #correspondents.

The man who would, in his most famous essay for Life, proclaim the 1900s “the American century” was born and raised 6,000 miles from American shores. His father was a Presbyterian missionary in China, a Yale-educated and enlightened man who saw his task as not merely converting the Chinese to his faith, but raising them to Western standards of education and prosperity so they would gravitate to Christianity on their own. What the boy took from his father was both an ambition to greatness — a missionary sense of his own — and a deep fear that he could never measure up.

As a student at Hotchkiss and Yale, Luce was an outstanding scholar but painfully aware that he did not come from money; his resentful envy of those born to privilege would inform his and his magazines’ ideal of a contented, inclusive middle class. At Hotchkiss, Luce also met one of the two people who would loom largest in his adult life — both of them simultaneously rivals and partners. Briton Hadden was as iconoclastic as Luce was earnest, as untamed as Luce was disciplined, as charismatic as Luce was socially inept. They competed for honors and attention through prep school and university, and a few years after graduation became collaborators in an audacious journalistic start-up.

Luce and Hadden shared a contempt for what is now called the mainstream media, both the sensational tabloids and the serious dailies, which they regarded as dull and bloated. Brimming with precocious self-confidence, they conceived a weekly digest of news and analysis culled from other publications. The journal that was initially to be called Facts (but #morphed into Time before its debut in 1923) promised to scour close to 90 periodicals and amalgamate news from every sphere of life. Its declared mission was to serve “the illiterate upper classes, the busy businessman, the tired debutante, to prepare them at least once a week for a table #conversation.”

“They were nothing if not presumptuous — two 24-year-olds, with almost no money and less than two years of professional journalism experience between them, setting out to start a magazine at the tail end of a severe recession,” Brinkley writes.

The new magazine had the qualities we associate now with blogs. It was concise and informal, with plenty of political topspin, rendered in a prose that inspired much satire. (“Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind,” went a parody in The New Yorker.)

By the time the self-destructive Hadden had caroused himself to death at age 31, Time was a tremendous success, and a new business magazine, Fortune, was on the launching pad. A few years later, Luce was planning a “picture magazine” that would be the immensely popular Life. Time, which had begun as an abstract of other publications, and Life and Fortune all became showcases for original work by some of the best writers and photojournalists ever loosed on the world. A number of them — James Agee, Theodore White, Archibald MacLeish, Margaret Bourke-White — have memorable walk-ons in this book.

The most important supporting character in the narrative, though, aside from Hadden, is Clare Boothe Luce, the media mogul’s second wife — playwright, congresswoman, ambassador to Italy and certifiable fruitcake. Her exploits would have supplied abundant copy for the popular magazine that Time Inc. begat after Luce’s death: People. Theirs was a tempestuous, competitive, heartbreaking relationship, featuring explosive fights, romantic detours, a stunted sex life, experiments with LSD (she loved it; he didn’t), and luridly melodramatic letters that Brinkley puts to good use.

From the beginning, Luce’s magazines did not shy away from opinion, and Luce labored, not always successfully, to assure that those opinions were his own. He insisted on the title editor in chief rather than the one Brinkley has chosen, reflecting a role in the content that was aggressively hands-on.

Halberstam described Luce as part hick, noting that “our best editors have always been at least partly hick, everything is new and fresh and possible for them, they take nothing for granted.” Luce’s almost childish curiosity and wonder was the redeeming genius of his magazines.

But his publications were also characterized by an infatuation with power — for a long time, Brinkley says, Mussolini was treated with a fascination “often indistinguishable from admiration” — and a full-throated, mostly Republican partisanship. Luce urged his magazines to promote politicians he loved. He wrote campaign speeches for Wendell Willkie, adored Eisenhower, paid lavishly for excerpts from Winston Churchill’s memoirs and was a little dazzled by Kennedy’s Camelot. Luce was so myopically devoted to the Chinese Nationalist autocrat Chiang Kai-shek that he overrode his own skeptical correspondents and minimized the surging strength of the Chinese Communists. He called for the United States to “free” China, using nuclear weapons if necessary. Luce despised Roosevelt — in part because Roosevelt failed to flatter him, but mostly because he saw Roosevelt as too passive in world affairs — and he used Time to wage a feud with the president.

Fortune, too, had its agenda, as Brink#ley writes, “to legitimize modernism, to reward those who contributed to the ration#alization of industry and commerce, and to celebrate the sleek new aesthetic that accompanied it.” And Life’s role was to promote an idealized, harmonious middle-#class America:

“In an era blighted by Depression, prejudice, social turmoil and the shadow of war, Life offered the comforting image of a nation united behind a shared, if contrived, vision of the ‘American dream.’ ”

Luce’s abiding cause, forged by World War II and fueled by his loathing of Communism, centered on his activist, paternalistic view of America’s role in the world, and on his disdain for those he saw as isolationists and appeasers. It was articulated in his essay “The American Century” and permeated his publications. At one point he actually contemplated transforming Fortune from a business magazine into the “Magazine of America as a World Power.”

Halberstam pronounced Luce “the most powerful conservative publisher in Ameri#ca, and in the ’50s at least as influential as the secretary of state.”

Brinkley leans a bit more heavily than other biographers on the frustration of Luce’s power — not only his inability to move presidents where they didn’t want to go, but the difficulty he had getting his own editors and writers to follow his line. His hatred of F.D.R. did not seriously dent Roosevelt’s political popularity or distort his policies. His belief that the United States should liberate China got no #traction.

By the time Luce wrote “The American Century,” the fact that America had emerged from the shadow of Europe to become the most powerful nation on earth was both conventional wisdom and plain truth.

“His magazines were mostly reflections of the middle-class world, not often shapers of it,” Brinkley concludes. “Where Luce was most influential was in promoting ideas that were already emerging among a broad segment of the American population — most notably in the early 1940s.”

Nor was Luce all that conservative. He supported the growth of government power, including the welfare state. He championed civil rights for minorities and was less chauvinistic than his peers on the subject of women’s freedom. He favored trade unions. Though zealously anti-#Communist, he was scornful of Joseph McCarthy’s excesses.

“Luce always described himself as a liberal — not a liberal of the left, but a liberal in his openness to new ideas and his embrace of progressive change,” Brinkley says.

And there was a high-mindedness about his endeavors that deserves admiration. Whatever else you think of Luce, he never dived down-market. Whenever his publications flagged, Luce insisted that the way to invigorate them was to make them better, not dumber, more populist, more sensational or more cynical. His objective was never just the expansion of his audience or the demolition of his rivals, but the advancement of what he saw as the greatness of his nation.

In Brinkley’s view, the legacy of Luce lies not in any great influence over American politics or policy, but in the creation of new forms of media that — in their day, before their eclipse by television and then the Internet — “helped transform the way many people experienced news and #culture.”

What does that mean, exactly? Luce’s magazines, and later the comforting network news broadcasts in the era of Uncle Walter Cronkite, provided Americans with a shared knowledge, a unifying sense of the world. Brinkley writes:

“The construction of Luce’s publishing empire is part of a much larger phenomenon of the middle years of the 20th century: the birth of a national mass culture designed primarily to serve a new and rapidly expanding middle class. . . . Part of his considerable achievement was his ability to provide an image of American life that helped a generation of readers believe in an alluring, consensual image of the nation’s culture.”

By the time of his death, in 1967, that consensus had been torn asunder, and today there is no vehicle, no voice with the coherent power of Luce’s magazines in their heyday. The last of his breed of media tycoon is a 79-year-old Australian billionaire whose impact has been more corrosive than cohesive.

It would be a mistake to sentimentalize the previous century’s version of journalistic authority. But it is probably fair to say that the cacophony of today’s media — in which rumor and invective often outpace truth-testing, in which shouting heads drown out sober reflection, in which it is possible for people to feel fully informed without ever encountering an opinion that contradicts their prejudices — plays some role in the polarizing of our politics, the dysfunction of our political system and the increased cynicism of the American electorate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/bo.../Keller-t.html





Netflix Founder Acquires Online Education Start-Up
Claire Cain Miller

Reed Hastings, the founder and chief executive of Netflix, used the Web to make it easier for us to rent movies. Now Mr. Hastings, who is also a former high school math teacher, is using the Web for a less entertaining, more educational cause — teaching math to kids.

On Tuesday, Mr. Hastings will announce that he has financed the acquisition of DreamBox Learning, a start-up that uses online games to teach math, by Charter School Growth Fund, a non-profit investment fund for charter schools.

Mr. Hastings said that he thinks netbooks will be ubiquitous in schools in a few years, creating huge opportunities for online learning software.

“I think we’re on the edge of a real inflection point where the hardware becomes so cheap that Web learning is really throughout the schools,” he said. “But what I noticed is there’s really not that many people working on the software.”

DreamBox was started last year — I wrote about it at the time — and creates personalized lesson plans, hidden in games, based on which concepts children understand or need to work on.

“What makes their product so impressive is it adapts to each student’s learning, and that’s the Holy Grail of this field,” Mr. Hastings said.

He donated the the money to buy the company to Charter School Growth Fund. The acquisition price was not disclosed. He also invested another $10 million in DreamBox to expand to more schools and subjects beyond math. He will become chairman of the DreamBox board, while continuing his role at Netflix, and DreamBox’s co-founder and chief executive, Lou Gray, will leave the company.

Mr. Hastings, who taught high school math in Swaziland with the Peace Corps after college, has been an education philanthropist and charter school advocate since his first company, Pure Software, went public in 1995. He has also served as president of the California State Board of Education. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...ation-start-up





U.S. Students Suffering from Internet Addiction: Study
Walden Siew

Crackberry is no joke.

American college students are hooked on cellphones, social media and the Internet and showing symptoms similar to drug and alcohol addictions, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Maryland who asked 200 students to give up all media for one full day found that after 24 hours many showed signs of withdrawal, craving and anxiety along with an inability to function well without their media and social links.

Susan Moeller, the study's project director and a journalism professor at the university, said many students wrote about how they hated losing their media connections, which some equated to going without friends and family.

"I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening," said one student. "Between having a Blackberry, a laptop, a television, and an iPod, people have become unable to shed their media skin."

Moeller said students complained most about their need to use text messages, instant messages, e-mail and Facebook.

"Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one of the students, who blogged about their reactions. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life."

Few students reported watching TV news or reading a newspaper.

The American Psychiatric Association does not recognize so-called Internet addiction as a disorder.

But it seems to be an affliction of modern life. In one extreme example in South Korea reported by the media, a couple allegedly neglected their three-month-old daughter, who died of malnutrition, because they were on the computer for up to 12 hours a day raising a virtual child.

In the United States a small private U.S. center called ReSTART, located near Redmond, Washington, opened last year in the shadow of computer giant Microsoft to treat excessive use of the Internet, video gaming and texting.

The center's website cites various examples of students who ran up large debts or dropped out of college due to their obsession.

Students in the Maryland study also showed no loyalty to news programs, a news personality or news platform. They maintained a casual relationship to news brands, and rarely distinguished between news and general information.

"They care about what is going on among their friends and families and even in the world at large," said Ph.D. student Raymond McCaffrey who worked on the study. Loyalty "does not seemed tied to any single device or application or news outlet."

(Reporting by Walden Siew; Editing by Patricia Reaney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63M4QN20100423





Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists
Steven Levy Email Author

“It’s funny in a way”, says Bill Gates, relaxing in an armchair in his office. “When I was young, I didn’t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. It’s weird how old this industry has become.” The Microsoft cofounder and I, a couple of fiftysomething codgers, are following up on an interview I had with a tousle-headed Gates more than a quarter century ago. I was trying to capture what I thought was the red-hot core of the then-burgeoning computer revolution — the scarily obsessive, absurdly brainy, and endlessly inventive people known as hackers. Back then, Gates had just pulled off a deal to supply his DOS operating system to IBM. His name was not yet a household word; even Word was not yet a household word. I would interview Gates many times over the years, but that first conversation was special. I saw his passion for computers as a matter of historic import. Gates himself saw my reverence as an intriguing novelty. But by then I was convinced that I was documenting a movement that would affect everybody.

The book I was writing, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, came out just over 25 years ago, in the waning days of 1984. My editor had urged me to be ambitious, and so I shot high, crafting a 450-page narrative in three parts, making the case that hackers — brilliant programmers who discovered worlds of possibility within the coded confines of a computer — were the key players in a sweeping digital transformation.

I hadn’t expected to reach that conclusion. When I embarked on my project, I thought of hackers as little more than an interesting subculture. But as I researched them, I found that their playfulness, as well as their blithe disregard for what others said was impossible, led to the breakthroughs that would define the computing experience for millions of people. Early MIT hackers realized it was possible to use computers for what we now call word processing. (Their initial program was called Expensive Typewriter, appropriate since the one machine it ran on cost $120,000.) They also invented the digital videogame. The rebel engineers of the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley were the first to take advantage of new low-cost chips to build personal computers. They may have begun as a fringe cohort, but hackers alchemized the hard math of Moore’s law into a relentless series of technological advances that changed the world and touched all of our lives. And most of them did it simply for the joy of pulling off an awesome trick.

But behind the inventiveness was something even more marvelous — all real hackers shared a set of values that has turned out to be a credo for the information age. I attempted to codify this unspoken ethos into a series of principles called the hacker ethic. Some of the notions now seem forehead-smackingly obvious but at the time were far from accepted (”You can create art and beauty on a computer”). Others spoke to the meritocratic possibilities of a digital age (”Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position”). Another axiom identified computers as instruments of insurrection, granting power to any individual with a keyboard and sufficient brainpower (”Mistrust authority — promote decentralization”). But the precept I perceived as most central to hacker culture turned out to be the most controversial: “All information should be free.”

Stewart Brand, hacker godfather and Whole Earth Catalog founder, hacked even that statement. It happened at the first Hackers’ Conference, the week my book was published, during a session I moderated on the future of the hacker ethic. “On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable,” he said. “On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” His words neatly encapsulate the tension that has since defined the hacker movement — a sometimes pitched battle between geeky idealism and icy-hearted commerce.

Though Hackers initially landed with a bit of a thud (The New York Times called it “a monstrously overblown magazine article”), it eventually found an audience greater than even my overheated expectations. Through chance encounters, email, and tweets, people are constantly telling me that reading the book inspired them in their careers. Thumbing through David Kushner’s Masters of Doom, I learned that reading Hackers as a geeky teenager reassured Doom creator John Carmack that he was not alone in the world. When I recently interviewed Ben Fried, Google’s chief information officer, he showed up with a dog-eared copy of the book for me to sign. “I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t read this,” he told me.

But it was the hackers themselves who inspired a generation of programmers, thinkers, and entrepreneurs — and not just fellow techies. Everyone who has ever used a computer has benefited. The Internet itself exists thanks to hacker ideals — its expansion was lubricated by a design that enabled free access. The word hacker entered the popular lexicon, although its meaning has changed: In the mid-’80s, following a rash of computer break-ins by teenagers with personal computers, true hackers stood by in horror as the general public began to equate the word — their word — with people who used computers not as instruments of innovation and creation but as tools of thievery and surveillance. The kind of hacker I wrote about was motivated by the desire to learn and build, not steal and destroy. On the positive side of the ledger, this friendly hacker type has also become a cultural icon — the fuzzy, genial whiz kid who wields a keyboard to get Jack Bauer out of a jam, or the brainy billionaire in a T-shirt — even if today he’s more likely to be called a geek.

In the last chapters of Hackers, I focused on the threat of commercialism, which I feared would corrupt the hacker ethic. I didn’t anticipate that those ideals would remake the very nature of commerce. Yet the fact that the hacker ethic spread so widely — and mingled with mammon in so many ways — guaranteed that the movement, like any subculture that breaks into the mainstream, would change dramatically. So as Hackers was about to appear in a new edition (this spring, O’Reilly Media is releasing a reprint, including the first digital version), I set out to revisit both the individuals and the culture. Like the movie Broken Flowers, in which Bill Murray embarks on a road trip to search out his former girlfriends, I wanted to extract some meaning from seeing what had happened to my subjects over the years, hoping their experiences would provide new insights as to how hacking has changed the world — and vice versa.

I could visit only a small sample, but in their examples I found a reflection of how the tech world has developed over the past 25 years. While the hacker movement may have triumphed, not all of the people who created it enjoyed the same fate. Like Gates, some of my original subjects are now rich, famous, and powerful. They thrived in the movement’s transition from insular subculture to multibillion-dollar industry, even if it meant rejecting some of the core hacker tenets. Others, unwilling or unable to adapt to a world that had discovered and exploited their passion — or else just unlucky — toiled in obscurity and fought to stave off bitterness. I also found a third group: the present-day heirs to the hacker legacy, who grew up in a world where commerce and hacking were never seen as opposing values. They are bringing their worldview into fertile new territories and, in doing so, are molding the future of the movement.

The Titans

Real hackers don’t take vacations. And by that standard, Bill Gates is no longer a real hacker.

Gates himself admits as much. “I believe in intensity, and I have to agree totally; by objective measures my intensity in my teens and twenties was more extreme,” he says. “In my twenties, I just worked. Now I go home for dinner. When you choose to get married and have kids, if you’re going to do it well you are going to give up some of the fanaticism.”

Indeed, looking back, Gates says that the key period of his hackerhood came even earlier. “The hardcore years, the most fanatical years, are 13 to 16,” he says.

“So you were over the hill by the time you got to Harvard?” I ask.

“In terms of programming 24 hours a day? Oh yeah,” he says. “Certainly by the time I was 17 my software mind had been shaped.”

He still seemed plenty intense when I met him as a 27-year-old, brash but not given to making direct eye contact. For half of the interview, he stared at a computer screen, testing software with one of those newfangled mouses. But he engaged fully with my questions, rattling off his highly opinionated take on some of the people he worked with — and against — in the early days of the PC. That intensity would inform his work and his company, helping him turn Microsoft into a software behemoth and himself into the richest human being on the planet (for quite a while, anyway). Gates’ faith in hacking underscored everything he did, right down to his staffing decisions. “If you want to hire an engineer,” he says, “look at the guy’s code. That’s all. If he hasn’t written a lot of code, don’t hire him.”

Gates occupies a special place in the history of hacking. Most consider him one of the best coders ever. His first version of Basic, written so efficiently that it could run in the 4-KB memory space of the Altair, was a marvel. (Yes, that’s 4 kilobytes, not mega, giga, or today’s darling, tera.) When people picture a computer geek, they typically think of someone like the young Gates. And yet Gates, along with several other subjects of my book, went on to transcend his hacker roots. This group helped turn hacking from an obscure vocation into a global economic and cultural force and then reaped the rewards of that transition: money, influence, and even fame.

This wouldn’t have happened if Gates had been just another hacker. Indeed, it was only by discarding key aspects of the hacker ethic that he was able to embrace computing’s commercial potential and bring it to the masses. Pure hackers encouraged anyone to copy, examine, and improve any piece of code. But Gates insisted that software was no different from other intellectual property and that copying a digital product was just as illegal as swiping a shirt from Kmart. In 1976, he wrote an open letter to computer hobbyists who copied his software, accusing them of theft. His missive was considered blasphemous by some hackers, who believed that Gates was polluting their avocation by introducing commercial restrictions that would stifle knowledge and creativity. Gates found these arguments ludicrous — this was a business, after all. “I raised the issue in the sense of, jeez, if people paid more for software, I’d be able to hire more people,” he says more than 30 years later.

That conflict continues to rage. Gates puts the argument in perspective by pointing out that centuries ago, European publishers printed American writers’ works without compensation. “Benjamin Franklin was so ripped off — he could have written exactly what I wrote in that letter,” he says. Today, journalists are trying to figure out how to sustain their business when their product can be copied and distributed so easily — it’s the same dynamic. Gates seems to take some satisfaction in this turn of events. “Maybe magazine writers will still get paid 20 years from now,” he says to me. “Or maybe you’ll have to cut hair during the day and just write articles at night. Who knows?”

Gates had to stray from the hackers’ rigid moral code to become a mainstream success. All Steve Wozniak had to do was don a pair of dancing shoes: While Woz is a hacker legend, best known for designing the original Apple computer, he has become an unlikely pop culture icon, turning up last year on Dancing With the Stars. When I met up with him, he had just reunited with the other contestants for the season finale. “I was dancing against Jerry Springer and Cloris Leachman,” he says over chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant in Fremont, California. His early elimination in no way dampened his spirits. Very little dampens Woz’s spirits, even the fact that reality TV celebrity is overshadowing his genuine accomplishments in technology: “People come up to me and say, ‘Omigod, I saw you on Dancing With the Stars!’ I have to say, ‘Well, I did computers, too.’”

Casual fans can be forgiven for overlooking Woz’s tech cred. These days, he’s more likely to get attention for his unique hobbies (Segway polo, anyone?) or love life (he had a sign-of-the-apocalypse romance with comedian Kathy Griffin, although he has since married a woman he met on a geek cruise) than for any new innovation. Snarky Web sites have mercilessly mocked Woz’s celebrity-mag turns and frequent appearances in an Apple store’s first-day lines as indications of sad irrelevance. But Woz shrugs off the ribbing. He recalls the instruction he gave to Griffin a few years ago: “Hey, you can embarrass me, you can abuse me, you can ridicule me as much as you want — if it makes people laugh it’s worth it.” When I profiled Woz in my book, he was a socially awkward and insecure millionaire. Now he is a confident and widely loved mascot for hacking culture at large.

From time to time, Woz still appears in the news as a force behind a startup with potentially groundbreaking technology. CL 9 was going to devise superpowerful remote controls. Wheels of Zeus promised to let users track their possessions through wireless technology. But the first never lived up to expectations, and the second never released a product. Now he works as chief scientist for a storage company called Fusion-io. “I’m doing a lot of sales-marketing work,” he says. “But I’m also looking at technologies that might be competitive in the future.”

But even Woz doesn’t expect to create another Apple II. In 2010, his greatest contribution is as a role model. His universal renown is a continuing reminder that brains and creativity can trump traditional notions of coolness. He’s the nerd in the computer room whose stature — and happiness — far eclipses that of aging prom kings. And that’s an inspiration for nerds everywhere.

Indeed, one of his protégé, Andy Hertzfeld, remains inspired by hacking. Hertzfeld wasn’t a major figure in my book, but as one of Apple’s early employees and a designer of the Macintosh operating system, he could have been. Today he’s at Google, where his most visible contribution thus far is a feature that creates chronologies for Google News queries, so users can see how a story has developed over time. But hacking in your fifties isn’t as easy as it is in your twenties. “When I was hacking on the Mac, I’d be working away and think an hour had passed; then I’d look up, and it had been four hours,” Hertzfeld says. “Now when I think an hour has gone by, I look up and it’s an hour.”

It’s not just the passage of years that has changed Hertzfeld’s experience. He has also had to adapt his individualistic approach to serve the geek-industrial complex that is Google. On one hand, Google is a hacker mecca. It values engineers as its most important assets. “You are expected to work out of your passion,” Hertzfeld says — definitely a hacker-friendly value. And the company supports open source software. But Hertzfeld can’t duck the fact that Google is also a big company with rigid standards and processes for designing products, which makes the experience more formal and less fun. “My relationship to my work is that of an artist to his work,” he says. And at Google, he adds, “I can’t exercise my creativity in a way that gives me joy, which is my basic approach.”

But while he has lost some personal control, he has gained an unprecedented ability to make a mark on the world. Someone at Google can affect the lives of millions with a few lines of code. And that makes for a different kind of thrill than Hertzfeld experienced during Apple’s early days, when the potential of every product was unknown and limitless. “There’s so much more leverage now to make a big impact,” he says. “This stuff is as mainstream as can be. Google, the iPhone — these move the culture more than the Beatles did in the ’60s. It’s shaping the human race.”

The Idealists

Richard Greenblatt tells me he has a rant to deliver. Uh-oh. Greenblatt was the canonical hacker of MIT’s Project MAC — the forerunner to the school’s legendary AI Lab — in the early ’60s. In my book, I described how his fellow MIT hackers, appalled at his hygiene, used the term milliblatts to gauge olfactory unpleasantness. It wasn’t exactly flattering. Was he finally going to unload on me after all these years?

To my relief, Greenblatt is more concerned with what he views as the decrepit state of computing. He hates how the dominant coding languages, like HTML and C++, are being implemented. He misses LISP, the beloved language that he worked with back at MIT. “The world is screwed up,” he says before launching into a technical analysis of the current condition of programming that I can’t even hope to follow.

But coding is just the beginning. The real problem, Greenblatt says, is that business interests have intruded on a culture that was founded on the ideals of openness and creativity. In Greenblatt’s heyday, he and his friends shared code freely, devoting themselves purely to the goal of building better products. “There’s a dynamic now that says, let’s format our Web page so people have to push the button a lot so that they’ll see lots of ads,” Greenblatt says. “Basically, the people who win are those who manage to make things the most inconvenient for you.”

Greenblatt is not one of those people. He belongs in a different group: the true believers, who still cling to their original motivations — the joy of discovery, the free exchange of ideas — even as their passion has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry. Despite their brilliance and importance, they never launched million-dollar products or became icons. They just kept hacking.

I am surrounded by similar idealists here at the 25th Hackers’ Conference, an annual gathering that celebrates the thrill of building something really cool. It has been a few years since I last attended, but it’s just as I remember it: 48 hours of hackers meeting deep into the night at a Northern California resort, discussing everything from economic theory to data storage. The crowd is somewhat long in the tooth, despite an overdue effort to bring in more attendees under age 30. The tech industry may be filled with young geniuses, but the old guys are still going at it, even if most of their efforts remain blithely obscure.

Greenblatt is a regular here, a link to the Mesopotamia of hacker culture: MIT. He arrived at the school just after the members of its Tech Model Railroad Club gained access to a rare interactive computer. Greenblatt became one of the best, a brilliant coder whose accomplishments include a sophisticated LISP compiler and one of the first autonomous computer chess programs. At MIT, he was known as a hacker’s hacker.

But unlike Gates, Wozniak, or Hertzfeld, Greenblatt’s work never went mainstream. In the 1980s, he started a company to build LISP machines. It didn’t pan out. He wasn’t much of a businessperson. These days, he describes himself as an independent researcher. He moved into his mother’s house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take care of her and has lived there alone since she died in 2005. “The main project I’ve been working on for 15 years is called thread memory, and it has something to do with English-language comprehension stuff,” he says. “It’s basic research. It’s not something that works today, but it’s something.”

When Greenblatt looks at the current state of hacking, he sees a fallen world. Even the word itself has lost its meaning. “They stole our word,” he says, “and it’s irretrievably gone.”

Greenblatt is far from alone in his wistful invocation of the past. I first met Richard Stallman, a denizen of MIT’s AI Lab, in 1983. Even then he was bemoaning the sad decline of hacker culture and felt that the commercialization of software was a crime. When I spoke to him that year, as the computer industry was soaring, he looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t believe that software can be owned.” I called him “the last of the true hackers” and assumed the world would soon squash him.

Was I ever wrong. Stallman’s crusade for free software has continued to inform the ongoing struggles over intellectual property and won him a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” He founded the Free Software Foundation and wrote the GNU operating system, which garnered widespread adoption after Linus Torvalds wrote Linux to run with it; the combination is used in millions of devices. More important, perhaps, is that Stallman provided the intellectual framework that led to the open source movement, a critical element of modern software and the Internet itself. If the software world had saints, Stallman would have been beatified long ago.

Yet he is almost as famous for his unyielding personality. In 2002, Creative Commons evangelist Lawrence Lessig wrote, “I don’t know Stallman well. I know him well enough to know he is a hard man to like.” (And that was in the preface to Stallman’s own book.) Time has not softened him. In our original interview, Stallman said, “I’m the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don’t really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.” Now, meeting over Chinese food, he reaffirms this. “I have certainly wished I had killed myself when I was born,” he says. “In terms of effect on the world, it’s very good that I’ve lived. And so I guess, if I could go back in time and prevent my birth, I wouldn’t do it. But I sure wish I hadn’t had so much pain.”

That pain came in part from loneliness, once a common complaint among the tiny and obsessive cadre of computer fans. (A 1980 commentary by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo implied that hackers were antisocial losers who turned to computers to avoid human contact.) But as hacker culture has spread, so has its social acceptability. Today, computer geeks are seen not as losers but as moguls in the making. They tend not to suffer the intense isolation that once plagued Stallman — thanks, ironically, to the commercialization he so bemoans.

As much now as 25 years ago, Stallman is a fundamentalist, a Hutterite of hackerism. His personal Web site is a grab bag of appeals for people to boycott various enemies of the cause, from Blu-ray to J. K. Rowling. He even feuds with his former allies, including Torvalds. (”He doesn’t want to defend users’ freedom,” Stallman says.) He has particular contempt for Apple, with its closed systems and digital rights software. He refers to their products using Mad-magazine-style puns. The music player is an iScrod. Its mobile device is an iGroan. The new tablet computer is the iBad. And he is an equal-opportunity kvetcher. When I tell him that Hackers will soon be available for the Kindle — which Stallman, predictably, calls a Swindle — his dour demeanor evaporates as he energetically encourages me to resist the e-reader’s onerous DRM. “You have to believe that freedom is important and you deserve it,” he says. Despite his disillusionment, the fire still burns within him.

Lee Felsenstein is keeping the flame alive as well. Felsenstein was the subversive moderator of the Homebrew Computer Club, the PC industry launchpad whose members — including Woz — were the target of Gates’ letter. A veteran of the Berkeley free speech protests, Felsenstein thought that putting cheap computers in the hands of “the people” would allow everyone to take information, manipulate it to better reflect the truth, and distribute it widely. He was right about the rise of the PC, but he says he’s still waiting for its democratizing effect. “Lincoln Steffens once commented, ‘I have seen the future, and it works,’” Felsenstein says. “But I’m with the guy who changed that to ‘I have seen the future, and it needs work.’” On a personal level, Felsenstein’s career has been checkered. He was celebrated for the Osborne 1 computer, but the company went bust. So did Interval Research, where Felsenstein worked for eight years. “If I wanted to, I could be bitter about it,” he says. “But I don’t want to.”

Instead, Felsenstein is putting the next generation of geeks on the path of the righteous. He recently helped establish a workspace in Mountain View, California, called the Hacker Dojo, which charges each of its 80 members $100 a month for access to a fully stocked, 9,500-square-foot DIY shop with an in-house network. It’s one of several “hacker spaces” across the country — outposts devoted to empowering formerly isolated and underequipped gearheads. “I am a sensei of the dojo,” he says, a wide grin on his face. “Felsenstein sensei.”

The Next Generation

Greenblatt, Stallman, and Felsenstein see hacking as a set of ideals. But Paul Graham sees it as a humming economic engine. The 45-year-old Internet guru, himself a fanatic engineer in his day, is a cofounder of Y Combinator, an incubator for Internet startups. Twice a year, his company runs American Idol-style contests to select 20 to 30 budding companies for seed funding and attendance at a 10-week boot camp, culminating in a Demo Day packed with angel investors, VCs, and acquisition-hungry corporations like Google and Yahoo.

How does Graham pick the most promising candidates? Easy. He looks for the hackers. “We’re pretty hackerly, so it’s easy to recognize a kindred spirit,” says Graham, who in 1995 cocreated Viaweb, the first Web-based application. “Hackers understand a system well enough to be in charge of it and make it do their bidding — and maybe make it do things that weren’t intended.” The best prospects, he says, are “world hackers,” people “who understand not only how to mess with computers but how to mess with everything.” Indeed, Graham says that today, every business is looking to hire or invest in firms run by hackers. “We tell founders presenting at Demo Day, ‘If you dress up too much, you will read to the investors as a stupid person.’ They’re coming to see the next Larry and Sergey, not some junior MBA type.”

Stallman would recoil in horror at Graham’s equating hacking with entrepreneurial effectiveness. But Graham has found that hacking’s values aren’t threatened by business — they have conquered business. Seat-of-the-pants problem-solving. Decentralized decisionmaking. Emphasizing quality of work over quality of wardrobe. These are all hacker ideals, and they have all infiltrated the working world.

A new generation of hackers has emerged, techies who see business not as an enemy but as the means for their ideas and innovations to find the broadest audience possible. Take Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has lured 400 million users to share their personal lives online. At 25, he has proven to be a master of the art of business development — unabashedly opening his site to advertisers and marketers. Yet he clearly thinks of himself as a hacker: Last year he told the audience at an event for would-be Internet entrepreneurs, “We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture.”

To find out what he meant by that, I visit him at Facebook headquarters, a large building on California Avenue in Palo Alto — the same street where in 1983 I rented a room to use as a base while researching Hackers. Surprisingly, Zuckerberg, best known for wearing North Face fleece, is sporting a tie. He explains that he is nearing the end of a year in which he promised his team that he would show up for work in neckwear every day. It turned out to be a good year for Facebook — despite the recession, the site more than doubled its user base and finally turned a profit. “Maybe it’s a charm,” he says of the tie. “But I think it mostly just chokes me.”

Zuckerberg’s adopted style may not come from the golden age of hacking, but his work ethic does. “We didn’t start with some grand theory but with a project hacked together in a couple of weeks,” Zuckerberg says. “Our whole culture is, we want to build something quickly.” Every six to eight weeks, Facebook conducts “hackathons,” where people have one night to dream up and complete a project. “The idea is that you can build something really good in a night,” Zuckerberg says. “And that’s part of the personality of Facebook now. We have a big belief in moving fast, pushing boundaries, saying that it’s OK to break things. It’s definitely very core to my personality.”

In the ongoing competition for talent, Zuckerberg believes that the company with the best hackers wins. “One good hacker can be as good as 10 or 20 engineers, and we try to embrace that. We want to be the place where the best hackers want to work, because our culture is set up so they can build stuff quickly and do crazy stuff and be recognized for standout brilliance.”

Unlike the original hackers, Zuckerberg’s generation didn’t have to start from scratch to get control of their machines. “I never wanted to take apart my computer,” he says. As a budding hacker in the late ’90s, Zuckerberg tinkered with the higher-level languages, allowing him to concentrate on systems rather than machines.

For instance, when he played with his beloved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Zuckerberg wouldn’t act out wars with them, like most other kids. He would build societies and pretend the Turtles were interacting with one another. “I was just interested in how systems work,” he says. Similarly, when he began playing with computers, he didn’t hack motherboards or telephones but entire communities — manipulating system bugs to kick his friends off AOL Instant Messenger, for instance.

Like Gates, Zuckerberg is often accused of turning his back on hacker ideals, because he refuses to allow other sites to access the information that Facebook users contribute. But Zuckerberg says that the truth is just the opposite; his company piggybacks — and builds — on the free flow of information. “I never wanted to have information that other people didn’t have,” he says. “I just thought it should all be more available. From everything I read, that’s a very core part of hacker culture. Like ‘information wants to be free’ and all that.”

A previous generation of hackers — and I — worried that the world of commerce would choke innovation and stymie a burgeoning cultural movement. But hackerism has survived and thrived, a testament to its flexibility. According to computer-book publisher Tim O’Reilly — who fosters hackerism through his Foo Camp “unconferences” — hacking culture will always find new outlets. Big business may stumble upon and commodify their breakthroughs, but hackers will simply move on to unexplored frontiers. “It’s like that line in Last Tango in Paris,” O’Reilly says, “where Marlon Brando says, ‘It’s over, and then it begins again.’”

The current frontier for hackers, O’Reilly says, is not the purely mathematical realm of 1s and 0s but actual stuff — taking the same tear-it-down-and-build-it-anew attitude that programmers once took to compilers and applying it to body parts and wind-energy-harnessing kites. (O’Reilly Media publishes Make magazine and runs the Maker Faire festivals, celebrations of the DIY spirit.) But even this area, he says, has begun the shift toward entrepreneurship. The pure hackers — the ones who do things for the sheer pleasure of it and are turned off by investors and spreadsheets — are looking elsewhere. O’Reilly says most of the action is in DIY biology — manipulating genetic code the way a previous generation of hackers manipulated computer code. “It’s still in the fun stage,” he says.

Just ask Bill Gates. If he were a teenager today, he says, he’d be hacking biology. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of machine-language programming,” says Gates, whose work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led him to develop his own expertise in disease and immunology. “If you want to change the world in some big way, that’s where you should start — biological molecules.” Which is why the hacker spirit will endure, he says, even in an era when computers are so ubiquitous and easy to control. “There are more opportunities now,” he says. “But they’re different opportunities. They need the same type of crazy fanaticism of youthful genius and naèFvetè9 that drove the PC industry — and can have the same impact on the human condition.”

In other words, hackers will be the heroes of the next revolution, too.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/ff_hackers/all/1





Steve Jobs Reiterates: “Folks Who Want Porn Can Buy an Android Phone”
MG Siegler

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is on a roll. While he’s probably had better days than today, he’s lately been shooting off emails left and right in response to customers’ concerns. We just were sent what appears to be one such Jobs response, sent last week surrounding the whole Mark Fiore situation. And it’s a good one.

When questioned about Apple’s role as moral police in the App Store, Jobs responds that “we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone.” Better, is what he said next: “Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone.“

Last week, another Jobs email about the Fiore situation was published in which Jobs called the situation a “mistake.” He noted the same thing in this email, but the porn/Android link is the key here. Assuming this email is legit, this isn’t the first time Jobs has suggested users try Android if they want porn. Earlier this month, during a Q&A session after the iPhone 4.0 OS event, Jobs said:

You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there.

This is noteworthy both because it’s funny, and because Apple and Google are in the early stages of a war that’s brewing between the iPhone and Google’s Android platform. Jobs is apparently going to keep taking these jabs from what he considers to be the moral high-ground.

Read the full back-and-forth below:

Matthew Browing, an Apple customer wrote the following to Jobs:

Steve,
I was converted to Apple products with the announcement of the iPhone 3G. (My friends have been trying to convince me for years.) Since then I’ve purchased 4 iPhones, 2 computers, several routers, and miscellaneous other items. Unfortunately, I’m really starting to have a philosophical issue with your company. It appears that more and more Apple is determining for it’s consumers what content they should be able to receive. For instance, the blocking of Mark Fiore’s comic app (due to being political satire) or blocking of what Apple considers to be porn.

I’m all for keeping porn out of kids hands. Heck – I’m all for ensuring that I don’t have to see it unless I want to. But… that’s what parental controls are for. Put these types of apps into categories and allow them to be blocked by their parents should they want to.

Apple’s role isn’t moral police – Apple’s role is to design and produce really cool gadgets that do what the consumer wants them to do.

Thanks for listening

-Matthew

In response, Jobs replied:

Fiore’s app will be in the store shortly. That was a mistake. However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy and Android phone.

Yes, Jobs apparently made a typo (and -> an), but we checked the IP headers on the email and they are legit. Of course, these can be faked, but it seems hard to believe that someone would go to all the work of sending us an email in which they changed all the IPs or manipulated all the time elements only to attach their real name and real email address to send it to us.

And no, the email doesn’t end with the usual “sent from my iPhone” or the new favorite, “sent from my iPad,” but again, looking at the header information, that’s because it was sent using Apple Mail. Jobs has been known to do this in the past (and recently) as well.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/19/ste...-android-porn/





Google Street View Logs WiFi Networks, Mac Addresses

Why are you doing this?, ask Germans
Andrew Orlowski

Google's roving Street View spycam may blur your face, but it's got your number. The Street View service is under fire in Germany for scanning private WLAN networks, and recording users' unique Mac (Media Access Control) addresses, as the car trundles along.

Germany's Federal Commissioner for Data Protection Peter Schaar says he's "horrified" by the discovery.

"I am appalled… I call upon Google to delete previously unlawfully collected personal data on the wireless network immediately and stop the rides for Street View," according to German broadcaster ARD.

Spooks have long desired the ability to cross reference the Mac address of a user's connection with their real identity and virtual identity, such as their Gmail or Facebook account.

Other companies have logged broadcasting WLAN networks and published the information. By contrast Google has not published the WLAN map, or Street View in Germany; Google hopes to launch the service by the end of the year.

But Google's uniquely cavalier approach to privacy, and its potential ability to cross reference the information raises additional concerns. Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said internet users shouldn't worry about privacy unless they have something to hide. And when there's nowhere left to hide...?

More from ARD here and Der Spiegel, here. The latter describes Google as a "data octopus".
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04...ew_logs_wlans/





Legal Spying Via the Cell Phone System

Two researchers say they have found a way to exploit weaknesses in the mobile telecom system to legally spy on people by figuring out the private cell phone number of anyone they want, tracking their whereabouts, and listening to their voice mail.

Independent security researcher Nick DePetrillo and Don Bailey, a security consultant with iSec Partners, planned to provide details in a talk entitled "We Found Carmen San Diego" at the Source Boston security conference on Wednesday.

"There are a lot of fragile eggs in the telecom industry and they can be broken," Bailey said in an interview with CNET. "We assume the telecom industry protects our privacy. But we've been able to crack the eggs and piece them together."

The first part of the operation involves getting a target's cell phone number from a public database that links names to numbers for caller ID purposes. DePetrillo used open-source PBX software to spoof the outgoing caller ID and then automated phone calls to himself, triggering the system to force a name lookup.

"We log that information and associate it with a phone number in a (caller ID) database," DePetrillo said. "We created software that iterates through these numbers and can crawl the entire phone database in the U.S. within a couple of weeks... We have done whole cities and pulled thousands of records."

"It's not illegal, nor is it a breach of terms of service," Bailey said.

Next up is matching the phone number with a geographic location. The SS7 (Signaling System) public switched network routes calls around the world and uses what's called the Home Location Register to log the whereabouts of numbers so networks can hand calls off to one another, DePetrillo said. Individual phones are registered to mobile switching centers within specific geographic regions and they are logged in to that main register, he said.

Only telecom providers are supposed to have access to the location register, but small telcos in the EU are offering online access to it for a fee, mostly to companies using it for marketing data and cost projections, according to DePetrillo.

"Using previous research on the subject as a starting point, we've developed a way to map these mobile switching center numbers to caller ID information to determine what city and even what part of a city a phone number is in" at any given moment, he said. "I can watch a phone number travel to different mobile switching centers. If I know your phone number, I can track your whereabouts globally."

For instance, the researchers were able to track a German journalist talking to a confidential informant in Serbia and follow his travels back to Germany, as well as obtain the informant's phone number, Bailey said.

Bailey said he had contacted telecom providers with the information on how industry outsiders were able to get to information believed to be privileged to the providers, but said the hands of GSM providers in the U.S. are tied.

"The attack is based on the assumption of how the networks work worldwide," he said. "For interoperability and peer sake, the larger providers in the U.S. have to hand out the information to other providers."

Asked what cell phone users can do to protect themselves, Bailey said, "people are just going to have to be made aware of the threat."

It's also relatively easy to access other people's voice mail, a service that's been around for years from providers like SlyDial. They operate by making two nearly simultaneous calls to a target number, one of which disconnects before it is picked up and another that goes straight into voice mail because of the earlier call. This enables the caller to go directly to voice mail without the phone ringing. DePetrillo and Bailey re-created that functionality for purposes of their legal spying scenario.

"If I want to find Brad Pitt, I find his number using the caller ID database, use Home Location Register access to figure out what provider he has. T-Mobile is vulnerable to voice mail spoofing so I get into his voice mail and listen to his messages," said DePetrillo. "But I can also have the system tell me the numbers of the callers and I can take those numbers and look them up in the caller ID database and use the Home Location Register system to find their providers and break into their voice mail, and so on."

This can allow someone to make a social web of people, their cell numbers, the context of their voice mail, and their relationships to others, he said.

"These attack scenarios are applicable to corporations and individual users alike," DePetrillo said. "Corporations specifically should start to take a look at their security policies for executives as this can impact a business very hard, with insider trading, tracking of executives, etc."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20002986-245.html





For Web’s New Wave, Sharing Details Is the Point
Brad Stone

Mark Brooks wants the whole Web to know that he spent $41 on an iPad case at an Apple store, $24 eating at an Applebee’s, and $6,450 at a Florida plastic surgery clinic for nose work.

Too much information, you say? On the Internet, there seems to be no such thing. A wave of Web start-ups aims to help people indulge their urge to divulge — from sites like Blippy, which Mr. Brooks used to broadcast news of what he bought, to Foursquare, a mobile social network that allows people to announce their precise location to the world, to Skimble, an iPhone application that people use to reveal, say, how many push-ups they are doing and how long they spend in yoga class.

Not that long ago, many were leery of using their real names on the Web, let alone sharing potentially embarrassing personal details about their shopping and lifestyle habits. But these start-ups are exploiting a mood of online openness, despite possible hidden dangers.

“People are not necessarily thinking about how long this information will stick around, or how it could be used and exploited by marketers,” said Chris Conley, a technology and civil liberties fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union.

The spirit of sharing has already run into some roadblocks. Amazon.com was so wary of the security ramifications of Blippy’s idea of letting consumers post everything they bought that, for several months, it blocked the site from allowing people to publish their Amazon purchases.

In March, Blippy sidestepped Amazon by asking its customers for access to their Gmail accounts, and then took the purchase data from the receipts Amazon had e-mailed them. Blippy says thousands of its users have supplied the keys to their e-mail accounts; Amazon declined to comment.

There is no way to quantify the number of these start-ups, but they are the rage among venture capitalists. Although some doubt whether the sites will gain true mainstream popularity — and whether they will make any money — the entrepreneurs involved think they are on to something.

Blippy, which opened last fall, was the first site to introduce the notion of publishing credit card and other purchases. Last month it attracted around 125,000 visitors and closed an investment round of $11 million from venture capitalists. It hopes to one day make money by, among other things, taking a commission when people are inspired to imitate their friends’ purchases posted on the site.

The people behind Swipely, a site soon to arrive and similar to Blippy, are also optimistic.

“We will help people discover a great restaurant or movie through their friends and make it easy to recommend their own purchases,” said Angus Davis, 32, a veteran of Netscape and Microsoft who is testing Swipely with a limited group of users. “I really believe that the lens of your friends is fast becoming the most powerful way to discover things on the Internet.”

Mr. Brooks, a 38-year-old consultant for online dating Web sites, seems to be a perfect customer. He publishes his travel schedule on Dopplr. His DNA profile is available on 23andMe. And on Blippy, he makes public everything he spends with his Chase Mastercard, along with his spending at Netflix, iTunes and Amazon.com.

“It’s very important to me to push out my character and hopefully my good reputation as far as possible, and that means being open,” he said, dismissing any privacy concerns by adding, “I simply have nothing to hide.”

This new world owes its origin to the rampant sharing of photos, résumés and personal news bites on services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, which have acclimated people to broadcasting even the most mundane aspects of their lives.

To Silicon Valley’s deep thinkers, this is all part of one big trend: People are becoming more relaxed about privacy, having come to recognize that publicizing little pieces of information about themselves can result in serendipitous conversations — and little jolts of ego gratification.

DailyBooth, founded in London but moving to San Francisco, asks users to publish a photograph of themselves every day. “It’s the richest and quickest way to share how you are doing and what you are feeling,” said Brian Pokorny, a Silicon Valley investor who recently became the company’s chief executive.

While the over-30 set might recoil from this type of activity, young people do not seem to mind. The site, which gets around 300,000 visitors a month, according to the online research company Compete.com, appears to be largely populated with enthusiastically exhibitionist teenagers.

Still, only two years ago, Facebook members rebelled when the site introduced its notorious Beacon service, which published members’ online transactions back to the site — essentially the same concept as Blippy and Swipely.

A decade ago, Dennis Crowley was trying to get people to share information about their geographic location with a service called Dodgeball. For years, he said, he faced a barrage of questions about why anyone would want an update on where someone was having a beer.

“After we sold the company to Google and they shut it down, we left those questions to Twitter, and they did a great job of answering them,” said Mr. Crowley, who went on to create Foursquare, which Silicon Valley venture capitalists are competing to finance. “This kind of sharing makes people feel connected to each other,” he said.

But there is the worry about identity theft.

“Ten years ago, people were afraid to buy stuff online. Now they’re sharing everything they buy,” said Barry Borsboom, a student at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who this year created an intentionally provocative site called Please Rob Me. The site collected and published Foursquare updates that indicated when people were out socializing — and therefore away from their homes.

“Times are changing, and most people might not know where the dangers lie,” Mr. Borsboom said.

The business plans for these start-ups are no sure thing, either.

“These companies are betting they take this data, monetize it or resell it,” said John Borthwick, an entrepreneur based in New York who advises companies like DailyBooth and Hot Potato, which lets people share plans and experiences of live events. “But the assumption that every scrap of data is actually useful to individuals, or even companies, will be tested.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/te...y/23share.html





Wikileaks Claims Facebook Deleted Their Fan Page Because They "Promote Illegal Acts"

Wikileaks Claims Facebook Deleted Their Fan Page Because They "Promote Illegal Acts"Secret-sharing website Wikileaks is at it again, tweeting allegations against people who have pissed them off. Previously, it was Robert Gates, whom they called a "liar". Tonight, it's Facebook, which Wikileaks claims deleted its 30,000 member-strong fan club.

Wikileaks—which was, of course, the outfit which leaked that infamous helicopter video—tweeted this a few moments ago.

However, a visit to Facebook.com/wikileaks shows that the "Official Facebook Page" of Wikileaks is up. So what's the big deal? It appears the page that was deleted was a user-run fan page, which Wikileaks tweeted about earlier this month.

Visiting the link there leads nowhere now.

Wikileaks and Facebook have clashed in the past. When they released their helicopter video earlier this month, Wikileaks accused Facebook of "censoring" links to it. (Facebook denied this.)

But the most interesting Facebook-Wikileaks episode occurred in 2008, when Wikileaks was sued by Swiss bank Julius Baer over posting stolen documents relating to one of its clients. In the course of the trial, Julius Baer subpoenaed an officer of a Wikileaks Facebook page, mistaking him for an officer of Wikileaks itself. According to Network World, Julius Baer's lawyer sent the following to the guy—a Stanford student named Daniel Matthews:

Wikileaks lists you as an officer of the company on its Facebook page. As an officer of a defendant in this action, my client is entitled to serve you a copy of the summons and complaint pursuant to Rule 4(h)(1)(B) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

Since Julius Baer wasn't able to get hold of a real Wikileaks employee—scattered worldwide as they are—some random Stanford student had to go to trial on their behalf in a high profile lawsuit. (He was listed as the "Stanford representative" of Wikileaks on the page.) He was not pleased. And the possibility of Facebook users being sued simply for belonging to groups probably gave Facebook headaches, too. (The suit resulted in Wikileaks being shut down for a bit by a judge, before the bank ultimately withdrew their case.)

It's possible that, having been burned by this previous episode, Facebook is looking to head off any other possible legal complications for its users. That, or Facebook is WORKING FOR THE CIA.
http://gawker.com/5520933/wikileaks-...e-illegal-acts





Taboo Words in China

From ‘adult’ to ‘yellow,’ words the government does not want you to search for on the Internet.

It's something of a parlor game among Chinese Internet users to figure out what terms and words really are taboo.

Chinese users of the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing application eMule found that the company is blocking searches of the following terms and words in China. (Some of these words are still searchable on some sites.)

adult

adultery

brainwash

censorship

civil movement

core principles

corruption

credit crisis

Cultural Revolution

Dalai Lama

demonstration

dissident

economic bubble

Edgar Snow

evil

exile

fraud

genocide

impeachment

June 4

lust

mafia

mainland

mistress

Mongolian independence

multiparty

national secret

nurse

naked

one-party

overthrow

princeling

rape

Rebiya Kadeer

revolution

riot

scripture

sperm

state security

Taiwan independence

temptation

Tiananmen

Tibet independence

truth

yellow

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...,6483438.story





ACTA Arrives (Still Bad, But a Tiny Bit Better)
Nate Anderson

ACTA arrives (still bad, but a tiny bit better)

We've been covering the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) for two years now, and in that entire 24 month period no official text of the agreement has been released. Remarkable, really, given the intense scrutiny, but there you have it.

Today, that all changed as the countries behind ACTA finally released a consolidated draft text (PDF) of the agreement. Though billed as a "trade agreement" about "counterfeiting," ACTA is much more than that: it's an intellectual property treaty in disguise.

Tucked inside the draft are provisions that will prevent people from bypassing digital locks on the items they buy, that will force ISPs to shoulder more of the burden in the fight against online piracy, and that bring US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules to the world.

Well, not to the world, exactly. ACTA is more like a select club of countries: Australia, Canada, the European Union countries, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States of America. But the treaty it develops is really just the next rung on a ladder stretching back to 1886, and it will certainly be wielded like a weapon on the rest of the world in the future.

The text is not final—that is due to happen later this year—so if you want to see changes made, the time to act is now. After a year of partial leaks and finally complete leaks, ACTA's basic outlines are familiar.

We'll start our ACTA deep dive with an overview of the key provisions, especially as they relate to the Internet. Stick around afterwards to understand how and why we have ACTA at all, some likely effects of the treaty, and thoughts on the negotiating endgame.

A quick word of thanks to the negotiators who finally heard the dull but growing roar of a disenchanted public and released the ACTA text: it's too late to qualify as "transparency," exactly, but it does inaugurate a new stage and a new start. It's now time for the real arguments to begin.

The EU has already made its case that ACTA won't affect ordinary citizens. And it takes particular aim at the groups which have loudly condemned ACTA: "The negotiation draft shows that specific concerns, raised in particular by the civil society, are unfounded. No party in the ACTA negotiation is proposing that governments should introduce a compulsory '3 strikes' or 'gradual response' rule to fight copyright infringements and internet piracy. Similarly, ACTA will not hamper access to generic medicines."

Our own investigation shows that several of the most controversial provisions have been tweaked for the better, though problems remain. Let's take a look.
ISP immunity/three strikes

Under ACTA, ISPs are protected from copyright lawsuits as long as they have no direct responsibility for infringement. If infringement merely happens over their networks, the infringers are responsible but the ISPs are not. This provision mirrors existing US and European law.

Two key points need to be made here, however. First, the entire ISP safe harbor is conditioned on the ISP "adopting and reasonably implementing a policy to address the unauthorized storage or transmission of materials protected by copyright." (This is much like existing US law.)

An earlier footnote found in a leaked draft provided a single example of such a policy: "Providing for termination in appropriate circumstances of subscriptions and accounts in the service provider's system or network of repeat infringers." In other words, some variation of "three strikes." That footnote is now gone from the text entirely.

New to this draft is an option, clearly targeting European law, that would explicitly allow Internet disconnections. Countries will be allowed to force ISPs to "terminate or prevent an infringement" and they can pass laws "governing the removal or disabling of access to information. So, basically, Internet disconnection and website blocking.

The option also allows rightsholders to "expeditiously obtain from that provider information on the identity of the relevant subscriber" and it encourages countries to "promote the development of mutually supportive relationships between online service providers and right holders." This option has not been approved by all ACTA members.

The ACTA draft also makes clear that governments cannot mandate Internet filtering or affirmative action to seek out infringers.

Second, the ISP immunity is conditioned on the existence of "takedown" process. In the US, this is the (in)famous "DMCA takedown" dance that starts with a letter from a rightsholder. Once received, an ISP or Web storage site (think YouTube) must take down the content listed in order to maintain its immunity, but may repost it if the uploader responds with a "counter-notification" asserting that no infringement has taken place. After this, if the rightsholder wants to pursue the matter, it can take the uploader to court.

This will strongly affect countries like Canada, which have no such system.

Anti-circumvention/DRM

While the ACTA draft adopts the best part of the DMCA (copyright "safe harbors"), it also adopts the worst: making it illegal to bypass DRM locks.

ACTA would ban "the unauthorized circumvention of an effective technological measure." It also bans circumvention devices, even those with a "limited commercially significant purpose." Countries can set limits to the ban, but only insofar as they do not "impair the adequacy of legal protection of those measures." This is ambiguous, but allowing circumvention in cases where the final use is fair would appear to be outlawed.

Fortunately, a new option in this section would allow countries much greater freedom. The option says that countries "may provide for measures which would safeguard the benefit of certain exceptions and limitations to copyright and related rights, in accordance with its legislation."
iPod-scanning border guards?

Early ACTA commentators often complained that the agreement might give customs officials the right to rifle through your bags and search your iPod, confiscating it if they determined that it contained any infringing songs. Border guards might become copyright cops, turning out the bags of anyone who has visited China, say, to see if they might be bringing home any illicit copies of movies or software.

This was always a strange idea; ACTA's backers are hunting bigger game than iPods. The draft text contains a "de minimis" provision that allows countries to exclude from ACTA enforcement "Small quantities of goods of a noncommercial nature contained in travelers' personal luggage."

The real copyright cops

ACTA contains "ex officio" language that allows customs officials and border agents to hold infringing shipments of goods without needing a rightsholder to complain first. Several options are still being considered in the draft, but all give the authorities the right to "act upon their own initiative" in releasing suspected goods at customs checkpoints.

Camcording rips

Think twice about camcording a movie off the big screen. ACTA now requires all signatories to make this practice a criminal act, not merely a civil matter. The draft does note that "at least one delegation has asked for the deletion" of this section, though, so it may be an easy target for removal before the final version.

Imminent infringement

Several sections of the ACTA draft show that rightsholders can obtain an injunction just by showing that infringement is "imminent," even if it hasn't happened yet.
P2P without financial gain

ACTA requires criminal penalties against "willful copyright infringement" when done "on a commercial scale." Early drafts explicitly mentioned online piracy, and that still seems to be in view. Though this section remains under negotiation, the draft shows that this may apply to infringements "that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain."

In other words, P2P distribution, where this exact issue of financial gain has come up in numerous court cases.

Proportionate penalties

At least one enterprising ACTA country has managed to insert this interesting line into the section on "enforcement procedures in the digital environment":

"Those measures, procedures, and remedies shall also be fair and proportionate." A dig at Internet disconnections and three strikes remedies, which are often criticized on these grounds? Who knows—and it's still under debate.

Now: how did we get here?

The long road to ACTA

ACTA began in Berne, Switzerland on September 9, 1886. European countries came together and signed one of the first major copyright treaties, the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, in part due to the influence of French novelist Victor Hugo.

Berne was revised many times over the next few decades, but it largely stuck to its original mission of dealing with copyright in books and artwork. In 1961, the Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations added a major new set of copyright guidelines to address the needs of TV and record producers and actors—a case of the law changing with the times.

When the Internet crashed in upon the analog world of copyright in a terrifically disruptive wave, rightsholders wanted Berne and Rome updated for this strange new digital era. It was an era when merely saying "Don't do it!" and relying on the great expense of reproduction equipment was good enough; any commercial pirates were of necessity large operations that were easier to find and prosecute.

But this new digital world put copying technology into the hands of the public, and the public went to town. As Columbia law professor Jane Ginsburg describes the moment in a 2005 paper (PDF):

"When digital media changed the technological balance, they also altered legal relationships, for now economically significant infringing acts were no longer the sole province of entities higher up the distribution chain. To redress the shift, it might be necessary to reinforce the legal prohibition with a layer of technological protection, disabling end users from availing themselves of some of the copying technology’s potential for reproducing and redistributing copyrighted works."

Users could find crafty ways around these digital locks, and the logic of the situation led, inexorably, toward the idea of "anti-circumvention." Now it would be illegal to perform certain computational operations on certain collections of bits—an odd philosophical concept in one way, but something that had precedent in US law. 1992's Audio Home Recording Act brought the wonders of SDMI to digital tape, for instance, and the war against satellite descramblers has a long and fascinating history, along with plenty of colorful characters.

But who would pass such anti-circumvention rules into law? Going country by country was a huge amount of work; much better for rightsholders to write the idea into an international agreement, get the world to sign on, then sit back as countries around the globe began enforcing anti-circumvention rules and DRM proved (ahem) its worth.

Thus, the WIPO "Internet treaties" of 1996. The organization that administered the Berne Convention, a group with the unfortunate acronym BIRPI, eventually joined the United Nations and became WIPO—the World Intellectual Property Organization.

In 1996, WIPO oversaw the approval of two treaties that continued the process of adapting copyright law to the times—in this case, to the Internet. The Berne Convention was updated and supplemented by the WIPO Copyright Treaty, while the Rome Convention was updated and supplemented by the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty.

Both treaties include language on anticircumvention, under the reasoning that this was the necessary protection rightsholders needed in order to offer their work on the Internet at all (the later example of the music industry would put the lie to this argument, but it sounded good at the time). There was just one hitch: the countries at WIPO weren't willing to go along with the super-strict rules that some rightsholders wanted.

Pam Samuelson, a prominent law professor at the University of California-Berkeley, describes the moment this way:

"The Clinton Administration was proposing that a virtually identical anti-circumvention rule be included in a draft treaty on digital copyright issues scheduled for consideration at a diplomatic conference in December 1996 at the headquarters of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva. Even though the draft treaty included a White Paper-like anticircumvention rule, shortly before the diplomatic conference commenced, the Clinton Administration decided not to support the draft treaty proposal because there was such strong domestic opposition to the White Paper-like provision.

"US negotiators to the WIPO diplomatic conference were under instructions to support a more neutral anticircumvention rule which called upon nations to provide 'adequate protection' and 'effective remedies' to deal with circumvention of technical protection systems used by copyright owners to protect their works. The WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) adopted this approach to anti-circumvention regulation."

The final treaty text said, "Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law."

Clearly, much would depend on how each country implemented this, as it allowed for circumvention in any way "permitted by law." This was hardly the ironclad anti-circumvention rule that rightsholders wanted.

The US implementation of these treaties was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, the law that brought anticircumvention from WIPO's Geneva HQ into your living room. Bypassing DRM was forbidden to most Americans (as were the devices that could help), but again, rightsholders had to accept a host of limitations: a bunch of targeted exceptions for security researchers and others, and a triennial DMCA review by the Library of Congress that could approve more exceptions. Again, a blanket ban was out of reach.

In addition, the DMCA got huge pushback from the growing ISP industry. We can't possibly be responsible for what users do with our pipes! they argued—and managed to stall the bill in Congress. The Clinton administration had originally argued for ISP liability for user infringement, but it eventually had to accept the major new "safe harbor" principle: if you don't know anything about the infringement and don't encourage it, you're not liable.

Samuelson again: "Once the [ISP] compromise broke the legislative logjam, it was clear that the DMCA was going to be enacted. Although the anti-circumvention regulations continued to breed controversy, telcos and OSPs had spent virtually all of their political capital on the safe harbor provisions."

And those "safe harbors" did include the provision that ISPs create "a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network who are repeat infringers." We'll return to this point in a moment.

The DMCA passed in 1998, but to understand why it wasn't enough for some rightsholders, look at the 12 years since. While the EU passed a wide-ranging anti-circumvention law, some nations did not; Canada has yet to even ratify the 1996 treaties.

And the WIPO treaties remain ambiguous. As Canadian law prof Michael Geist argued in a February 2010 speech, Canada could well ratify the treaties—but still allow circumvention where the intended use was legal. "The WIPO treaties offer considerable flexibility in how to implement anticircumvention rules," he said, and supported the idea of a "cleaner, simpler, more balanced approach that linked circumvention to copyright infringement. With that approach, we would comply with WIPO (the Liberal bill passed muster with the Department of Justice), no need for specific references to technology, no long list of exceptions, and we would still target clear cases of infringement."

But that's an exception that Hollywood et al. simply won't countenance; it's big and messy. So the challenge remains for rightsholders: how to get countries like Canada to go along with the WIPO treaties and to do so in a way that prevents expansive interpretations?

Well, you could pass another international treaty with tougher terms. But WIPO—why, there's too many nations who won't go along with further copyright restrictions, the whole process is (relatively) open and involves NGOs, and it's slow. These are all drawbacks. Instead, what about a smaller and separate process, with no unnecessary oversight, little transparency, and a "coalition of the willing"? Oh, and if you can set it up in such a way to avoid legislatures in countries like the US, that would be a big bonus.

Welcome to ACTA.

The above history helps to explain why, when the ACTA Internet chapter leaked, it didn't just repeat the WIPO formulation on anticircumvention. Instead, it would ban "the unauthorized circumvention of an effective technological measure that controls access to a protected work, performance, or phonogram." It also banned circumvention devices, even those with a "limited commercially significant purpose."

Countries could set limits to the ban, but only insofar as they do not "impair the adequacy of legal protection of those measures." This is ambiguous, but allowing circumvention in cases where the final use is fair might well be outlawed. In other words: forget it, Michael Geist!

"ACTA is therefore viewed as a mechanism to win the policy battle lost in Geneva in 1996," wrote Michael Geist recently. " It would force countries like Canada to adopt the US approach, even though the treaty explicitly envisioned other possibilities." (Fortunately, one of the options in the new treaty waters this down quite a bit and gives countries more flexibility; we'll have to see if it is actually adopted.)

ACTA also could be used to push the DMCA's balance between safe harbors and "terminations." Though this hasn't yet led to massive Internet disconnections in the US, it certainly wouldn't hurt rightsholders to have such language stuck into legal codes around the world; it would definitely help convince judges that such terminations were legal when these cases arise, and it could be used to pressure ISPs who aren't doing what the big copyright industries want. (Again, the current draft has toned this down a bit, though countries are still explicitly allowed to disconnect users and block websites.)

And it could be done in a more secretive environment, a benefit given that the public always seemed to balk at super-strict anticircumvention rules. I asked Pam Samuelson about the results of this process. She characterized it as the latest battle in a long-running war waged by those with a "high protectionist agenda."

"Ever since that [WIPO] treaty was concluded," she said, "US officials and US copyright industry groups have been trying to persuade legislatures and trade officials around the world that the treaty requires a high level of protection versus circumvention and no limiting rules—although several limits are built into US law. Not having been able to succeed through the democratic process, the high protectionist forces are using backroom negotiations at ACTA to accomplish the restrictions the entertainment industry says it needs.

"The process is rotten and illegitimate, yet there is a risk it will succeed unless the IT industry and user base find a way to bring its unbalanced agenda to light." Given the changes already made to ACTA in the last several months, that pressure appears to have had some effect.

ACTA's effects

How will ACTA be used? Probably in the same way that the DMCA has been used: as a worldwide stick to beat through a US-centric version of copyright and IP law. This is especially true of the Internet section, which the US drafted.

When the DMCA was considered back in 2005, its lead architect Bruce Lehman appeared before Congress to explain how the law could be used.

"When that legislation is in effect, then we will have a template that we can use, that the Trade Representative can use, that we in the Commerce Department can use, the State Department can use, when we are in negotiations with other governments to advise them as to what they need to do to implement their responsibilities in these treaties to provide effective remedies... the moment we pull up on the pressure, usually, there's a sliding back."

He later commented, "I should say that for the most part these treaties will cause other countries to bring their laws up to US standards even, for example, in countries that have fairly extensive protections, such as European countries. They have concepts in their law that make it easier in a digital environment to make unauthorized use of a copyrighted work."

ACTA will certainly be used the same way. It's being considered by a handful of countries and does not even include the main sources of "counterfeiting." But with the agreement in place and a permanent ACTA committee set up to administer it and accept new members, the treaty will be extended to the rest of the world—prenegotiated.

As the group IP Justice warned back in 2008, "After the multilateral treaty's scope and priorities are negotiated by the few countries invited to participate in the early discussions, ACTA's text will be 'locked' and other countries who are later 'invited' to sign-on to the pact will not be able to renegotiate its terms. It is claimed that signing-on to the trade agreement will be 'voluntary,' but few countries will have the muscle to refuse an 'invitation' to join, once the rules have been set by the select few conducting the negotiations."

That's not all bad; ACTA's process issues have been well-documented, but at least it's not totally one-sided. The ISP safe harbor provisions have been terrifically useful in the US, and the negotiators have worked to develop de minimis provisions that will keep border guards from confiscating your iPod if they suspect it to hold an infringing song. "Three strikes" isn't mandated. But problems remain.

Take Internet disconnections, for instance. Although the three strikes rules are not mandated by ACTA, early leaked drafts of the Internet chapter showed a footnote in which Internet disconnections were the only suggested way of implementing the the provisions. They aren't required, but they were clearly in view; even in the current draft, ACTA does force ISPs to get more involved in the process of dealing with online infringement. In some countries, that's a big change.

As we've already mentioned, the anticircumvention rules in ACTA still may be more strict than those in the earlier WIPO treaties, and leave countries with less wiggle room in implementation.

And provisions like the notice-and-takedown rule will certainly change the practice in countries like Canada, where no such requirement exists and "notice-and-notice" (an infringement notice is forwarded on to the alleged infringer, not simply acted upon) is the current standard.

But let's step back for a minute and look at the larger view. Yes, in general the Internet provisions are an attempt to standardize the world on the DMCA approach to copyright issues online. The law does have problems, but it has certainly not put an end to Internet innovation in the US.

ACTA doesn't export all of US law in this area, though; the world doesn't get huge principles like fair use (which many countries don't have) and key judicial decisions (like the Sony Betamax case which found that a device with "substantial non-infringing uses" could be sold so long as the manufacturer was not inducing infringement). Countries could adopt these, but they aren't requirements.

David Sohn, a lawyer with the Center for Democracy & Technology, describes it to me this way: ACTA is about "exporting all the liability, but not exporting any of the limitations on that liability."

In his view, there's a big risk involving secondary liability. Even ACTA's vaunted safe harbors are a bit sketchy. Leaked drafts required signers to provide "limitations" on the scope of civil remedies. This is apparently intended as an analog to the DMCA's safe harbor rules, but "what the DMCA safe harbor says is that there shall be no monetary liability" for ISPs. ACTA merely says that there must be limits on that liability. What limits? It's up to the countries.

Even exporting more US law, like fair use, wouldn't solve the problem, since many key copyright provisions are judicially defined. "What keeps secondary liability law in the US in check are a set of judicial decisions," says Sohn, but those are difficult to export.

Gary Shaprio, head of the Consumer Electronics Association, said last week, "Perhaps ACTA's most unfortunate provision is the imposition of 'secondary liability'... [ACTA] contains no protections for substantial non-infringing uses, meaning a manufacturer of an MP3 player could be liable for copyright infringement by a single user, even if 3 million other users committed no infringement at all. This is a business-threatening concern for the 2,000 consumer technology companies who are members of CEA."

Though the US does have existing protections in this area, signing onto ACTA may now limit our own ability to change course. For instance, altering the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions currently requires Congress to look at the 1996 WIPO laws and make sure any change is compliant with our obligations; a more restrictive ACTA approach to anti-circumvention might mean that Congress could no longer allow circumvention in cases where the intended use is legal—like format-shifting your DVD collection to your iPod.

As Shapiro put it, "ACTA end-runs Congress by changing US copyright law and stripping Congress of authority to fix problems with copyright statutes."

But the real effects will be felt in other countries, which can now look forward to stricter anti-circumvention rules, the possible requirement for statutory damages (still being debated in the ACTA draft), notice-and-takedown, and more.

The endgame

ACTA hasn't passed yet, though. Negotiators have publicly said they hope to wrap it up in 2010; the next round of talks happens this summer, in Switzerland, but with the release of the draft text, it's clear that the process is well advanced.

Is there enough time left to make any substantive changes, or did the negotiators run out the clock on the public, going "transparent" when it was too late to make real changes?

In the US, ACTA is being negotiated as an executive agreement rather than a treaty. This avoids the need for Senate ratification, but it does put dramatic limits on what can be negotiated. Some concern from Congress has been visible, but with two wars, a recession, and financial reform on its plate, ACTA has not yet become a major issue.

The situation is different in Europe, though, where institutional dissent has flourished. The European Parliament has loudly resisted the ACTA process and is demanding input into the agreement. The resolution passed overwhelmingly.

European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx recently issued an extraordinary opinion in which he "regrets that he was not consulted by the European Commission on the content" of ACTA.

Hustinx goes on to say that Internet disconnections are "disproportionate" and "highly invasive in the individuals' private sphere. They entail the generalised monitoring of Internet users' activities, including perfectly lawful ones. They affect millions of law-abiding Internet users, including many children and adolescents. They are carried out by private parties, not by law enforcement authorities."

I contacted Jérémie Zimmermann, who heads French advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, to get his perspective. Zimmermann was a key figure in the French battle over "three strikes" rules (the HADOPI law that goes into effect later this year), and he has taken a keen interest in ACTA. In fact, his group leaked the first complete ACTA draft the world had ever seen.

While admitting that transparency is "an important step," Zimmermann says that "all previous leaks showed provisions incredibly dangerous for our fundamental rights, the rule of law, the internet, access to medication, and innovation." And he loathes the fact that such changes are being pushed through a trade agreement, not the Parliament.

Christian Engström, a Pirate Party MEP from Sweden, calls the release of the ACTA text "a step in the right direction, and should be welcomed... But many battles still remain. Once we have access to the text, we can start discussing the content in earnest. And on the content of the ACTA agreement, we have no reason to think that it will be anything near acceptable."

Indeed, the real discussions can finally begin. Up until now, those who knew what ACTA contained were bound by NDAs, or they little light on leaks that were already outdated when they appeared. Negotiators from each country would say nothing of importance on the record, responding only to the most general inquiries.

Now, with the "transparency" arguments out of the way, real public debate can begin at last. Negotiators can finally explain to a skeptical public what they've been up to and make their best pitch for why ACTA is needed—and the public can do some "explaining" of its own.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ta-is-here.ars





Everyone Who’s Made a Hitler Parody Video, Leave the Room
Commentary by Corynne McSherry

One the most enduring (and consistently entertaining) Internet memes of the past few years has been remixes of the bunker scene from the German film, The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich (aka Der Untergang). EFF Boardmember Brad Templeton even got in on it, creating a very funny remix with Hitler ranting about troubles with DRM and the failure of DMCA takedowns to prevent fair uses. (Ironically enough, that video resulted in the Apple Store rejecting an EFF newsfeed app.)

In a depressing twist, these remixes are reportedly disappearing from YouTube, thanks to Constantin Film (the movie’s producer and distributor) and YouTube’s censorship-friendly automated filtering system, Content I.D. Because the Content I.D. filter permits a copyright owner to disable any video that contains its copyrighted content -- whether or not that video contains other elements that make the use a noninfringing fair use -- a content owner can take down a broad swath of fair uses with the flick of a switch. It seems that’s exactly what Constantin Film has chosen to do.

This is hardly the first time that Content I.D., has led to overbroad takedowns of legal content. Copyright owners have used the system to take down (or silence) everything from home videos of a teenager singing Winter Wonderland and a toddler lip-syncing to Foreigner’s Juke Box Hero to (and we’re not making this up) a lecture by Prof. Larry Lessig on the cultural importance of remix creativity.

YouTube users do have options for response (read our "Guide to YouTube Removals" for details.) But YouTube's procedures for "removing" videos have created considerable confusion among users, and it's a fair bet that most YouTube users aren't aware of their ability to "dispute" these removals. Others may be leery of exercising the dispute option. While the risks may be low, our broken copyright system leaves users facing the prospect of paying outrageous statutory damages and even attorneys' fees if they stand up, fight back and, despite overwhelming odds in their favor, lose. It’s a gamble many people just aren’t willing to take, even when their works are clear fair uses.

If copyright owners want to block remix creativity, they should have to use a formal DMCA takedown notice (and be subject to legal punishment if they fail to consider fair use), rather than a coarse automated blocking tool. That is one reason we called on YouTube to fix the Content ID system so that it will not automatically remove videos unless there is a match between the video and audio tracks of a submitted fingerprint and nearly the entirety (e.g, 90% or more) of the challenged content is comprised of a single copyrighted work. That was over two years ago, and YouTube told us then that they were working on improving the tool. If YouTube is serious about protecting its users, it is long past time for YouTube to do that work.

UPDATE: Templeton's video was also targeted; check out his discussion on his personal blog.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04...ody-leave-room

















Until next week,

- js.



















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