P2P-Zone  

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

Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 25-06-14, 07:07 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 28th, '14

Since 2002


































"An open Internet is the backbone of a market-driven democracy in the 21st Century. I applaud Mayors Edwin Lee, Paul Soglin, Michael Nutter, Eric Garcetti, Jonathan Rothschild, and Edward Murray for adopting a resolution to preserve a free and open Internet as outlined in the FCC’s original Open Internet Order." –Mayor Bill de Blasio, D-NYC


"Broadcasters now have every incentive to litigate everything." – Jason Buckweitz






































June 28th, 2014




The Secretive Business of Fighting Content Piracy

Private automated systems are sweeping the internet for illegal content—but they sometimes catch legitimate media coverage, too
Sarah Laskow

Nate Glass fell into the takedown business almost by accident. Back in 2008, as a sales and marketing guy in the “adult industry,” he was driving in an RV, showing stores around the country how to market the products his employer was producing. It was, he says, the worst three years of his life; the charms of living out of an RV can wear off quickly. And he kept hearing the same thing from the stores: people just weren’t buying as much product as they used to. Everyone was getting their porn for free, online.

With little to entertain him in the evening, Glass decided to do some research. “I read the whole DMCA act,” he says. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998, was meant to address exactly the problem the adult industry was facing: illegal use of copyrighted content on the internet. The act created a mechanism for copyright holders to send notice to the sites infringing on their rights and demand that the content be taken down. “It seemed like there was a pretty straightforward process,” says Glass.

He convinced his studio let him try fighting back against pirated videos. When it worked, other studios started clamoring for his services, and soon he opened a business, Takedown Piracy, entirely dedicated to providing them. Originally, he would just plug the name of a video into a search engine and send the notices by hand. Now, he says, “You have to automate a big chunk of this. There’s no way you could keep up with how fast things are pirated if you had to look at every single thing.” His company sends notices targeting “at least 100,000 infringements every day.”

Since Glass started his company, the business of policing piracy has exploded. Big content companies increasingly outsource that job to independent companies—enforcement vendors—which depend on a suite of proprietary techniques to seek out and flag pirated content. These are companies few people have ever heard of: Degban, MarkMonitor Anti Piracy, Remove Your Media, DMCA Force, and Digimarc are just a few.

These companies play a key role the churn of the bootleg internet—pirate groups have jiggered up systems that swiftly disperse copyrighted content across the Web, proprietary algorithms seek out those infringing uses and automatically generate DMCA takedown notices, and ISPs and search engines like Google automatically process them.

Much of the time, this system catches pirated material and tries to limit its spread. But it’s also generated takedown notices for sites that aren’t doing anything wrong—including work from newspapers and other media engaged in legitimate criticism and reporting on copyrighted work.

This wasn’t how the DMCA takedown system was supposed to work. “The presumption was that there would be an element of human judgement involved in evaluating if something was infringing. There’s a lot of gray area,” says Joe Karaganis, vice president of Columbia University’s American Assembly, a collaborator on the Takedown Project, which is attempting to better understand this system as it works in practice. “No one knows what the automated system does to that space of judgment and what the practical impact is on freedom of speech, and freedom of expression.”

And, really, outside of pirate groups, enforcement vendors, and ISPs, no one really knows exactly how the automated system works. “What this looks like day to day is still shrouded in mystery,” Karaganis says.

To an extent, what’s happening is clear: These companies write algorithms that search out certain content—on sites that are extremely unlikely to be using this content in any way that qualifies as fair use—and generate takedown notices, which are sent to ISPs. Notices flagging sites that are more likely to be using content legitimately might be reviewed by a human being before being sent on. Some companies create digital fingerprints for content—code that they can search for across the Web and easily flag.
And this automation has increased the volume of takedown notices exponentially.

Back in 2006, nearly eight years after the Digital Millennium Copyright Act passed, legal scholars Jennifer Urban and Laura Quilter thought that “a review of the law seems in order.” Takedown notices aren’t public records, but some recipients—most notably Google—had made a practice of releasing them. Urban and Quilter decided to look at what notices they could and get a sense of how the DMCA was being used. Their project included “all notices submitted to Google Inc.” between March 2002 and August 2005. The total: 734.

In 2012 alone, by contrast, Google received more than 441,000 takedown notices. And a single notice might list dozens of copyright claims and point out hundreds of offending URLs. In the past year, Google says, it has received requests from 4,622 copyright owners to remove 24,440,925 URLs, in 44,078 specified domains.

The number of notices has increased most exponentially in the past few years—after both senders and receivers of notices began automating the process. A study released this spring found that “the year on year increase in the number of Google’s notices is 304% (for 2010), 305% (for 2011) and 524% (for 2012).” Twitter, which also makes takedown notices public, saw an increase of “1,248% (for 2011) and 61% (for 2012),” according to the study. In 2012, the social media company fielded more than 6,600 takedown requests. In 2013, it received almost twice that — a total of more than 12,400.

To some extent, this system does discourage piracy. Data from one enforcement vendor, for instance, showed that takedown efforts increase sales of ebooks. But the automation has also meant that perfectly legal content has been flagged for takedown. This can be amusing when copyright owners flag their own content. But it’s less funny when legitimate work gets caught in automated sweeps. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick flags the example of Warner Bros.’s Wrath of the Titans: Takedown notices went out for the movie’s IMDB page—and also for articles from BBC America and the Charleston Post & Courier.

It’s hard to say how often these sorts of mistakes happen or what sort of impact they’re having on people who are trying to use copyrighted content legitimately online, because there’s little transparency from anyone involved in this system—not from ISPs and search engines, not from content creators and enforcement vendors, and certainly not from content pirates. That’s part of what the Takedown Project—a collaboration led by Berkeley Law School, where Urban now works, and the American Assembly—is meant to address. The project’s researchers are trying to look comprehensively at “the impact of automat[ing] both sending and receiving process of notice and takedown” and to survey online services providers about their half of this system.

On the receiving end, few ISPs have the same incentive as Google to release takedown notices. Some smaller ISPs receive few enough that they continue to process them by hand. Since relatively few companies make these notices public, it’s hard to say how much the increasing volume of notices is a problem for Google alone. It may be that Google receives as many as half of all the notices sent—one vendor told CJR that maybe two-thirds of their notices are Google bound.

Big content companies and the organizations that represent them are quick to point out that there’s a limit to Google’s transparency, too. On other counts—how, exactly, it processes takedown requests, what effect they might have on Google’s search algorithms—the company has been much quieter.

If content creators want transparency from Google, though, Google wants the same from enforcement vendors.

“We need more transparency from…the enforcement vendors community,” Fred von Lohmann, Google’s legal director for copyright said at a government-run conference this spring. “We need to understand their cost structure, their business models and the technical procedures they have in place for generating notices and ensuring accuracy.”

Google does run a “Trusted Copyright Removal Program” which, essentially, speeds up the takedown process for the companies that have made this their business. There’s little information publicly available about this program, but 95 percent of the takedown notices Google receives come from these “sophisticated submitters,” Lohmann said at the conference.

One difficulty for enforcement vendors is dealing with sites like Blogger or WordPress, where, unlike say, moviesdownload24.com or moviesfofree.org, the URL alone doesn’t indicate that any content or links to content are very, very likely to be illegitimate.

“Blogspot is very problematic in terms of catching what’s legitimate and what’s not legitimate,” says Eric Green, who runs Remove Your Content, says. “It’s like going in a war zone to do your business.” (His work hasn’t exactly gone over well with Blogspot users, either.)

How enforcement vendors deal with these greyer areas, though, is itself obscure. Beyond the basics, it’s hard to say how vendors actually do business. They won’t talk much about it, both because the methods they use are proprietary (and sometimes patented) and because, they say, they don’t want to tip off content pirates.

“I don’t want to give out specifics about anything out there that’s proprietary,” says Green. These methodologies, he said, “come from our programmers. Our programmers cost money.”

“We have a different method for each type of piracy”—streaming, file-hosting services, torrents, says Glass, the Takedown Piracy founder. Some of what the company does is “almost like investigatory work,” he says: “Part of what I’m doing is lurking among pirate communities and watching to see what they’re saying and fine-tuning our system to find the stuff that they’re uploading.”

But beyond that, he says, “I can’t show all my cards.”
http://www.cjr.org/cloud_control/tak...automation.php





iiNet: ‘File Sharing Multi-Headed Hydra’
Colin Mann

Steve Dalby, Chief Regulatory Officer at Australian ISP iiNet, has reawakened the anti-piracy debate by questioning the proposed blocking of file-sharing sites, suggesting that the practice is a multi-headed Hydra that government filtering and legal threats will never slay.

Dalby, a regular blogger on copyright and piracy issues, prefaces his latest contribution, by pointing out that the ISP thinks piracy is wrong, and that the blog is not a ‘how to’ session on copyright infringement, more of an attempt to educate people that think in sentences that start with the word ‘just’: “Just block the pirate bay”; “Just make ISPs responsible”; “Just do something”.

He recommends Australia’s elected representatives learn from the experience of other jurisdictions and do that by examining the evidence; the actual, verified, empirical evidence of what works and what doesn’t.

He suggests that rights holders have been in this tussle for years, the file sharing industry is now global, very sophisticated and totally mainstream. “Techniques have evolved, simplified, monetised and diversified, over the last ten to fifteen years, and many options and alternative distribution models have been constructed. The content industry has not kept up,” he argues. “We know the pointlessness of simply blocking sites like The Pirate Bay, when they can change their address in minutes. The Internet has no gate that we can put a padlock on,” he warns, adding that there are many alternative ways for infringers to access their favourite movies and TV shows online.

“Instead of addressing the reasons why Australians illegally download movies and TV shows, the government instead seems determined to be seen to be ‘doing something’ to ISPs while defending, at all costs, the business model of the Hollywood movie houses. The clear hint from the Attorney General is that his plan includes government-mandated roadblocks for popular BitTorrent search engines like The Pirate Bay, even though these blocks are easy to overcome,” he suggests.

He notes that although it is possible to obtain a minute-by-minute list from the government of all the possible sites, and try and stop the plague of locusts with a can of fly spray, he questions who’s going to keep the list up to date, who’s going to police it, who’s going to pay.

“Search engines have been through their share of legal battles, but they keep bouncing back. Even when a popular BitTorrent search engine does fall, others quickly take its place. Blocking The Pirate Bay and other high-profile BitTorrent search engines will do very little to stop Australians using BitTorrent – file sharing is a multi-headed Hydra that government filtering and legal threats will never slay,” he declares.

He warns that it is simple to bypass whatever roadblocks the government puts in place, with dozens of Pirate Bay proxy services around the world, designed specifically to bypass government-imposed blocks on the popular site, describing using a proxy service as “child’s play, literally. School kids already use proxy services to beat school filtering and access Facebook and YouTube in the classroom. Other people use them at their work desk to outfox their IT department. It may not be right, and we don’t promote it, but let’s take whatever steps we take with our eyes wide open. Let’s not buy into the ‘futility-on-a-stick’ that Hollywood is peddling in Canberra,” he advises. He warns against VPN blocking. “The only way the government could stop this traffic would be to block all encrypted traffic, a Herculean task that even the most determined dictatorships struggle to enforce,” he says, adding that it is “pretty clear” that there is no foolproof way to stop anyone visiting BitTorrent search engines, such as The Pirate Bay. “There’s no possible way the government can block all the ways Australians can access The Pirate Bay and BitTorrent, and truth be told, BitTorrent is only the tip of the file-sharing iceberg,” he admits.

iiNet has positioned itself as a defender of Internet consumer rights, in 2012 winning a High Court battle against a group of 34 film and television companies trying to force the ISP to find and punish users who download illegal content.

Dalby suggests that many people prefer to do the right thing, and they want good service at a reasonable price. “They want to pay for the very desirable content. That’s why many Australians are prepared to sneak into US services like Netflix and hand over their money, even though they might find it all for free elsewhere. The government lumps these people in the same group as BitTorrent users. They want to stop Australians from bypassing geo-blocking, an artificial restraint on trade. Trade covered, ironically, by something called a ‘Free Trade Agreement’, he says.

Noting the ease with which they can bypass geo-blocking, Dalby admits that it is “all but impossible” to police all the ways Australians access foreign content. “Yet the government seems determined to pursue a simplistic and futile content blocking strategy rather than actually addressing the reasons why Australians look elsewhere for their entertainment,” he argues.

“Years of ranting against piracy – while ignoring customer feedback – have got rights holders nowhere. Rather than declaring war on frustrated customers, perhaps we should declare war on the problems which have driven Australians to take their business elsewhere,” he suggests. “And to the content control freaks, we say – start treating your customers as customers, not the enemy, and you might find things improve. It works for us,” he concludes.
http://advanced-television.com/2014/...-headed-hydra/





Kids Don’t Think File-Sharing is ‘Wrong’, Would Pay for Exclusive Content
Chris Cooke

Perhaps showing that the media and entertainment industries still have some way to go in convincing mainstream consumers to pay for digital content, in a new YouGov survey about half of those questioned said people should be allowed to download content they want for free.

The survey of just over 2500 UK customers (with just over 1900 aged sixteen plus and just over 600 under sixteen) found that legit services offering ad-funded free content were particularly popular, while accessing content from non-legit sources via file-sharing sites or networks is also seen as a cost-saving option. Over a half of adults admitted to file-sharing to save money, while a quarter of those aged 16-24 said it was the only way they could afford to access the content they wanted.

Asked about the ethics of accessing illegal sources of content, of the children surveyed only 16% strongly agreed that doing so was “wrong”, while even less, 7%, equated file-sharing with stealing, despite that being a line often rolled out by the anti-piracy brigade. Meanwhile 60% of the 16-24 year olds surveyed said that companies offering access to unlicensed content, rather than they as content consumers, should be punished for piracy (which in the current climate is a lot more likely anyway).

Asked what would make them pay for content, a fifth of the under 16s said brand new or exclusive content was worth paying for, while 13% said they’d try to pay if they were accessing content from an up-and-coming artist who they wanted to support. Suggesting that the digital music market should adopt a model akin to Netflix, with its exclusive content, combined with Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde’s Flattr platform, with its virtual tip jar.

Commenting on the findings, YouGov Research Director James McCoy told CMU: “Children aged 8-15 are the key adopters of digital technology, and are likely to be more familiar with accessing content without paying. File sharing is most common amongst younger adults; cost and availability are key drivers”.

“Children in this generation have grown up with digital material and are used to having access to what they want, when they want it and for some of the time not paying for it. They do not just listen and watch digital content; they consume it by downloading, file sharing, streaming, making playlists and going on recommendations from friends or contacts via social media”.

“Whilst they appreciate the issues surrounding piracy and illegal downloads, if they can get away with it, then they will. Why change the habit of a lifetime? The challenge for the industry is to find ways to engage with this group to change their mind-set about accessing content and to educate them in a relevant and non-condescending way about the issues surrounding this matter”.

You can find out more about the YouGov survey here.
http://www.completemusicupdate.com/a...usive-content/





‘Failed’ Piracy Letters Should Escalate to Fines & Jail, MP Says
Andy

UK ISPs have agreed to send their customers warning letters when they pirate movies, music and TV shows, but before the scheme starts thoughts are turning to its potential failure. The Prime Minister's IP advisor says 'VCAP' needs to be followed by something more enforceable, including disconnections, fines and jail sentences.

Proponents of the Digital Economy Act 2010 believed it had the solutions to deter consumer file-sharing, but four years on and the relevant measures remain dormant. This inactivity led to a new and recently announced solution, the so-called Voluntary Copyright Alerts Program.

VCAP is an agreement between the music and movie industries and several of the UK’s leading ISPs. The idea is that the entertainment companies monitor P2P networks (such as BitTorrent) and identify IP addresses connected to the illegal sharing of infringing content. That data is passed to the ISPs, the IP addresses are linked to customer accounts, and errant subscribers are sent a warning.

The idea behind VCAP is to educate the casual file-sharer about legal alternatives in the hope he will change his ways, but the softly-softly approach has its limitations. A reliable source close to the program told TorrentFreak that the focus of VCAP is the repeat infringer. However, after a customer receives four warnings he will receive no more.

On some level there appears to be some kind of acceptance that little can be done about hardcore file-sharers, an approach mirrored in the U.S. with its Copyright Alerts Scheme. But while there are suggestions that the worst-of-the-worst can simply do whatever they like under the UK program, consideration is already being given to what happens should VCAP fail following its 2015 introduction.

Aside from the Digital Economy Act sitting in the wings, Prime Minister David Cameron’s IP advisor believes that the carrot needs to be backed up by a stick. In a report published yesterday largely detailing the “Follow the Money” approach to dealing with pirate sites, Mike Weatherley MP says now is the time to think about VCAP’s potential failure.

“The Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme (VCAP) is welcomed and will be a good step forward once it is hopefully in operation in 2015, although it is primarily an education tool,” Weatherley says.

“However, we need to start thinking now what to do if these notices are ignored by infringers – will VCAP be followed by something more enforceable?”

Weatherley says that while the IP enforcement “stick” is a “last resort option”, being able to show “teeth” is important. Unsurprisingly, those measures involve hitting persistent pirates harder and harder each time they show defiance.

“It should be a graduated enforcement response,” Weatherley explains.

“Warnings and fines are obvious first steps, with internet access blocking and custodial sentencing for persistent and damaging infringers not to be ruled out in my
opinion.”

These suggestions aren’t new, but this is the second time in a matter of months that the Prime Minister’s closest advisor on IP matters has spoken publicly about the possibility of putting persistent file-sharers in jail.

Earlier this year we reported on comments Weatherley made in the House of Commons on the prison option. Although he never denied using those words, the MP did attempt to dismiss the tone of the ensuing debate as containing “misinformation”.

Not to say though, that jail will be immediately on the cards for pirates. Weatherley says that education has to come first, with an emphasis placed on informing consumers that “piracy and similar illegal activities are not in their best long-term interests and are not socially acceptable.” The second phase will see the onus placed on industry “to get their product right and attractive” to consumers.

“[The third stage] once we have won the ‘hearts and minds’ of consumers and provided suitable content, keeps the option of enforcement of copyright law on the table when all else has been exhausted,” the MP says.

Given Weatherley’s suggested plan for preparing now for VCAP’s failure, the ISPs involved in the scheme (BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media) must be considering the kind of road they’re being led down. While sending out warnings with no mitigation measures sounds reasonable enough today, if that transforms into a cash fine, disconnections and jail sentence model in future, the whole thing could turn into a PR disaster.

Update: Prime Minister David Cameron says he will “closely consider” Weatherley’s report.
http://torrentfreak.com/failed-pirac...p-says-140626/





The Walking Dead Producer Criticises Game of Thrones Executive Over Piracy

Gale Anne Hurd blasts idea that piracy spreads word as ‘really dangerous thinking’, saying Google needs to take more action
Mark Sweney

The executive producer of The Walking Dead has warned that rampant piracy is pushing the TV and film industry “to the precipice”, and called on Google to do more to tackle illegal websites.

Gale Anne Hurd said that if consumers want to continue to see shows such as Walking Dead and HBO’s Game of Thrones – which have broken viewing records while also topping the global chart of most-pirated TV shows – then more needs to be done to crack down on piracy.

“The truth is you wouldn’t imagine stealing someone’s car [or] a piece of art they have created,” she said, speaking to the Guardian at the Cannes Lions festival. “We are poised on the precipice in filmed entertainment – TV and movies – because of the prevalence of piracy the content creators will not get a revenue stream to the point that they won’t be able to create. That is the danger of piracy.”

Jeff Bewkes, the chief executive of HBO’s parent, Time Warner, has said that Game of Thrones piracy has been “better than an Emmy” as a publicity machine to help drive TV subscriptions.

Hurd – who co-wrote and produced Terminator and produced classics including Aliens – said that assertion is “really dangerous thinking”, and called on companies that facilitiate piracy to take action.

“First of all if you go on search engines you should be able to filter out pirated websites,” she said.

She cited an example of a search for Netflix and House of Cards, where the website of the US streaming company didn’t appear in the top 50 search results on Google.

“When consumers do go [onto pirate websites] they look legitimate,” she said. “They have advertising from well-known brands, and they take credit cards. How would the consumer know the difference between legitimate sites and illegitimate sites? There is a lot the advertising industry, credit card industry and search industry can do to help protect legit content.”

Last month, Google UK was lambasted for not doing enough to curb online piracy in a report by David Cameron’s intellectual property adviser, Mike Weatherley.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/201...-piracy-google





And The Movie File-Sharing Capital Of The World Is….
Ernesto

New data collected by piracy monitoring firm MarkMonitor shows that the latest Hollywood blockbusters are most frequently shared from Russia, with America and Italy trailing behind. Per capita the results are completely different. Here the United Arab Emirates is in the lead, followed by Israel and Estonia.

It’s no secret that P2P file-sharing services are widely used to distribute pirated movies. However, less is known about the volume of these unauthorized transfers in various countries.

New data published in a Dutch report detailing the impact of unauthorized P2P file-sharing on the movie industry reveals that in the Netherlands alone an estimated 78 million euros are lost due to movie piracy.

The same report also provides some interesting statistics that shed some light o geographical file-sharing differences.

During the first half of the year MarkMonitor, which is also the technology partner for the U.S. six strikes program, tracked 16 popular English language blockbuster movies. The list includes titles such as Frozen, The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug, and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

The movies were monitored via both eDonkey and BitTorrent, with the latter having the largest audience. In total MarkMonitor found that these movies were shared 150,186,156 times without permission.

Despite the focus on English language films, most pirated copies – more than 20 million – were shared from Russia. The bar chart below shows the full top 10 based on the absolute number of infringements that were detected, with the United States, Italy, Brazil and Spain completing the top five.

It is of course no surprise to see these large countries on top. It gets more interesting when we look at the number of file-sharers per capita.

In the United States for example, 12.5 million pirated copies were shared in a population of more than 310 million, which is roughly 4%. In Russia this percentage is much higher at 15% and in Australia it’s more than 16%.

Not surprisingly, the list of countries that share the most pirated movies per capita is quite different.

According to the report, the movies in the sample were relatively most shared in the United Arab Emirates, followed by Israel, Estonia, Greece and Italy. Australia, Qatar, Sweden, Singapore and the Netherlands complete the top 10.

It has to be noted that the findings above are based on a sample that is biased towards Western content. This explains the absence of Chinese downloaders, who tend to share files through other channels. Similarly, the data doesn’t cover direct downloads and streaming sites which may be relatively more popular in other regions.

That said, the numbers do give some more insight into the popularity of P2P movie piracy, or lack thereof, across various countries.
http://torrentfreak.com/and-the-movi...rld-is-140622/





Indie Music’s Digital Drag

Small Music Labels See YouTube Battle as Part of War for Revenue
Ben Sisario

The booze flowed freely in New York last week at the Libera Awards, a three-year-old alternative Grammys for the world of independent music, as awards went to prestige indie acts like Arcade Fire and Arctic Monkeys and executives at small labels congratulated one another about what a great year it was for their music.

But despite the celebratory atmosphere, anxiety about competition and fairness in the digital marketplace runs deep in the independent sector of the music industry. Small labels complain that consolidation by the major record companies has left them squeezed in negotiations with the online music services that now account for a majority of their revenue.

Executives and advocates for the indies say they are vulnerable to strong-arm tactics by Internet giants like YouTube, which has recently threatened to block some labels’ videos unless they sign new licensing deals. Like the standoff between Amazon and the book publisher Hachette, the dispute has crystallized a fear that access to the online marketplace controlled by a few has become a privilege affordable only by the biggest and richest players.

“In the growth of the Internet, what was to be a utopian leveling of the playing field, a democratization for all, what is actually happening is a form of cultural apartheid,” said Alison Wenham, chief executive of the Worldwide Independent Network, an umbrella group for small labels.

The YouTube battle involves a long-delayed effort by the online video giant to develop a paid, advertising-free premium version to compete against subscription music services like Spotify, Rdio and Beats Music. YouTube, a division of Google, has made licensing deals with Universal, Sony and Warner, the three major labels, but it has stalled with the independents, which contend that YouTube has offered them inferior terms.

As the indies tell it, the dispute is typical of their disadvantage in the larger digital sphere. On Wednesday, Darius Van Arman, a co-founder of the Secretly Group, whose acts include indie stars like Bon Iver and Dinosaur Jr., will speak before a House Judiciary subcommittee as part of a hearing on music licensing. In a statement supplied to the subcommittee in advance, Mr. Van Arman said that in the streaming age, “the three major recording companies have become proficient at extracting a disproportionate share of copyright-related revenue from the marketplace.”

In the YouTube negotiations, no label has come forward with specific complaints about the contract terms in dispute. But details published by Billboard magazine and the blog Digital Music News, which purport to be from leaked contracts, reveal sticking points like a “negative most-favored nation clause,” meaning that if YouTube strikes a lower deal with any label, it can reduce all rates accordingly.

Which labels and bands will be affected — and what will happen to their videos — is not clear. According to a number of people who have been engaged in talks with YouTube, the company is threatening to block videos from indie labels’ official channels; videos uploaded by users would remain on the site, but yield no advertising revenue. Yet how much money is at stake is unknown. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, which primarily represents the major labels, YouTube and other so-called on-demand, ad-supported services made $220 million in revenue for the music industry last year, about as much as vinyl records; by comparison, download sales were $2.8 billion.

A YouTube spokesman said the company had already signed deals with 95 percent of its label partners, but declined to comment further on negotiations.

“Our goal is to continue making YouTube an amazing music experience, both as a global platform for fans and artists to connect, and as a revenue source for the music industry,” the spokesman, Matt McLernon, said in a statement. “We’re adding subscription-based features for music on YouTube with this in mind.”

One of the independents’ main complaints about the major labels with which they compete is how market share is computed. According to Mr. Van Arman and Richard Bengloff, president of the American Association of Independent Music, a trade group, the big labels overstate their share of the music market by counting not only recordings that they own, but also those that they distribute and that are owned by independents. Each of the big labels has distribution subsidiaries that handle hundreds of independents, leading to a wide gray area in which both the majors and the indies claim control.

Universal, the world’s biggest music company, sells or distributes 38.9 percent of the music in the United States, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. But measured strictly by copyright ownership, Universal has only about 28.5 percent of the market, while independents collectively hold about 34.6 percent, according to the American Association of Independent Music.

Market share is important leverage in negotiations with digital services over licensing terms, and the independents claim that the majors’ inflated share allows them to demand higher royalty rates as well as other payments like minimum guarantees and large advance payments. Those payments may be unavailable to indies, or available only in much smaller amounts.

The fight with YouTube is only the latest to galvanize the independent sector, as technology companies like Apple, Amazon and Pandora have become the most powerful outlets for music and years of mergers have resulted in a concentration of power among just three major labels.

“Even if the market shares were more accurately measured, we would still have the inescapable fact that the three big labels account for the majority of music sales and the indies only have an impact as a collective,” said Mark Mulligan, a digital media analyst and consultant.

Representatives of the three major labels declined to comment on how market share was used in licensing negotiations.

In some ways, the new digital marketplace has helped the indies flourish. Music on smaller labels tends to perform better on digital outlets like Spotify and iTunes than it did when the market was dominated by brick-and-mortar stores, and the cost of promotion presented a higher barrier. Merlin, an agency that negotiates digital deals for hundreds of indies, said that streaming services brought $89 million in revenue to its members from May 2013 to April 2014.

Yet indie executives say the YouTube and Amazon deals show how fragile access to the marketplace can be. “I don’t have any idea what this business is going to be like in a year, much less five years,” said Bruce Iglauer, the founder of the Chicago blues label Alligator Records who received a lifetime achievement award at the Liberas.

Last week, the dispute spilled out into the streets of New York. On Saturday afternoon, a few dozen supporters of the Content Creators Coalition, an artists’ advocacy group, picketed Google’s office in Chelsea, playing New Orleans-style marches on horns and carrying signs like “Economic justice in the digital domain” and “What YouTube pays? Nothing.”

Marc Ribot, a guitarist who has played with stars like Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, summarized how the larger conflict over streaming revenue affected artists’ careers.

“If we can’t make enough from digital media to pay for the record that we’ve just made,” Mr. Ribot said, “then we can’t make another one.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/bu...r-revenue.html





Big Broadcasters Vanquish Upstart Aereo at U.S. Supreme Court
Lawrence Hurley and Jonathan Stempel

Broadcast and cable TV are not dead yet.

In a decision that could crimp consumers' hopes to cut the cord from their cable operators, the U.S Supreme Court said Aereo Inc, a video streaming service backed by media mogul Barry Diller, violated copyright law by using tiny antennas to broadcast TV content online to paying subscribers.

Wednesday's 6-3 decision, written by Justice Stephen Breyer, is a victory for traditional broadcasters such as CBS Corp, Comcast Corp's NBC, Walt Disney Co's ABC, and Twenty-First Century Fox Inc's Fox.

It may also make it harder for Internet rivals to provide alternative, a la carte programming at cut-rate prices, and casts Aereo's own future into doubt.

"As convenient and as fun as it is for the consumer, an adverse decision would have completely changed the business model of Hollywood and of movies and TV," said Roger Entner, a telecommunications analyst at Recon Analytics LLC in Boston.

The decision may also raise concern for other technologies, such as cloud computing, that innovation would be stifled by making it too easy to deem use of certain content as theft. The Supreme Court majority played down that issue, saying it would wait for a case that specifically addressed such technologies.

AS SEEN WITH CABLE TV

Started in 2012 and backed by Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, Aereo typically costs about $8 to $12 a month, and lets users stream live broadcasts on mobile devices. Aereo does not pay the broadcasters. The service has operated in 11 U.S. cities, and does not provide subscriber data.

Writing for the majority, Breyer said Aereo is "not simply an equipment provider," but rather bears an "overwhelming likeness" to cable TV companies whose ability to retransmit broadcasts was limited under a 1976 copyright law.

Any differences, he said, "concern not the nature of the service that Aereo provides so much as the technological manner in which it provides the service," which he said constituted a public performance of copyrighted content.

Breyer agreed with the federal government that it was premature to suggest the decision could doom cloud-based services where TV shows, music and other content are stored on the Internet via servers from Google Inc, Microsoft Corp, DropBox Inc and Box Inc, among others.

Joining the majority were Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, dissented, likening Aereo to a "copy shop that provides its patrons with a library card" and lets them decide what to view.

Scalia said he shared the majority's "evident feeling" that Aereo's activities "ought not to be allowed."

But he said the majority distorted copyright law, and should have let Congress fashion a solution better than "the crude 'looks-like-cable-TV' solution the Court invents."

For the networks, the victory protects the estimated $3 billion in so-called retransmission fees that broadcasters get from cable and satellite TV systems. Some broadcasters had threatened to cut off their free signals or create their own low-cost Internet feeds had Aereo won.

The decision also helps professional sports leagues such as Major League Baseball and the National Football League, which have lucrative licensing contracts with broadcasters and said an Aereo victory could force them to move all games to cable TV.

AEREO LAMENTS "MASSIVE SETBACK"

Chet Kanojia, Aereo's chief executive, called the decision "a massive setback" for American consumers, but stopped short of saying it means the end of the service.

"Free-to-air broadcast television should not be available only to those who can afford to pay for the cable or satellite bundle," he said in a statement. "We are disappointed in the outcome, but our work is not done."

Diller, 72, has tried to redefine TV and how people watch it since launching the Fox network in 1986. Four years later, he even scheduled "The Simpsons" cartoon to run against "The Cosby Show," long a ratings powerhouse at NBC.

IAC, which he now chairs, holds assets such as the comedy site CollegeHumor and the video sharing site Vimeo.

In an emailed statement, Diller said about the Aereo decision: "It's not a big (financial) loss for us, but I do believe blocking this technology is a big loss for consumers." Diller is worth about $2.5 billion, Forbes magazine said.

Broadcasters' share prices rose after the decision was announced, and CBS shares closed ___ percent higher.

"This is a terrific victory for anybody who's involved in the content business," and encourages the production of more programming, CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves said on CNBC. "This is a very pro-consumer thing, and frankly for Aereo to say that it isn't, you know, is a little bit of sour grapes."

The decision overturned an April 2013 ruling by the federal appeals court in New York, which had denied the broadcasters' request to shut down Aereo while litigation moves forward.

The case is American Broadcasting Cos et al, v Aereo Inc, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 13-461.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley in Washington and Jonathan Stempel in New York; Additional reporting by Liana Baker, Jeffrey Dastin, Marina Lopes, Christian Plumb, Jennifer Saba and Alina Selyukh; Editing by Howard Goller, Will Dunham and Grant McCool)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0F01NK20140625





US Mayors Unanimously Back Net Neutrality

• Formally adopt “principles of a free and open Internet”
• Call for transparency, non-discrimination and no content blocking

The U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously adopted a net neutrality resolution pushed by San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee and 16 others, calling on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to enshrine principles of transparency and non-discrimination into future regulations on the Internet operations.

The resolution was adopted at the U.S. Conference of Mayors 82nd Annual Meeting in Dallas, Texas.

“Net neutrality is critical for an innovation economy to thrive, because if the broadband companies could choose what web pages you can access, the Internet would lose its power as the most powerful communication tool we’ve ever known,” said Lee.

He thanked his cosponsors “for adopting principles of a Free & Open Internet” as the official policy of America’s Mayors. “There are serious implications for commerce and democracy, and we’re making sure U.S. cities have a voice in this fight,” Lee added.
“An open Internet is the backbone of a market-driven democracy in the 21st Century,” said New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. “I applaud Mayors Edwin Lee, Paul Soglin, Michael Nutter, Eric Garcetti, Jonathan Rothschild, and Edward Murray for adopting a resolution to preserve a free and open Internet as outlined in the FCC’s original Open Internet Order.”

De Blasio added: “We simply cannot afford to allow large Internet Service Providers, which control large segments of the broadband market, like AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon to reserve the fastest loading speeds for those who can pay for it. I wholeheartedly support this resolution and thank my colleagues for their leadership on this critical issue.”

Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh echoed Lee and De Blasio. “An uneven and restricted playing field for tech companies will mean fewer jobs, higher hurdles for newer companies, and less access to the internet for all. None of us want that. Our future depends on a neutral, world-class fiber network that serves all our residents and businesses. I am actively working with mayors across the country to do just that.”

The FCC is in the early stages of rulemaking as they work to enshrine the 2010 Open Internet Order into Federal regulation.
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/106...net-neutrality





Congress to Tackle Merger of AT&T and DirecTV
Edward Wyatt

AT&T has miles of copper wire and fiber-optic lines installed in homes and neighborhoods around the country, a platform with which to provide high-speed Internet service. But it has a paltry offering of video services. DirecTV, in contrast, has a big satellite television business but no broadband offering.

That, according to the companies, is why regulators should approve their $48.5 billion merger, which would make them a formidable competitor to Comcast, which is trying to buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion.

On Tuesday, antitrust panels in the House and Senate will conduct back-to-back hearings to examine the AT&T-DirecTV merger, featuring the chief executives of both companies and an array of public-interest groups, cable television rivals and academics.

The hearings — the House’s in the morning, the Senate’s in the afternoon — follow by a little more than two months similar investigations into the Comcast transaction. If Sprint and T-Mobile announce a rumored but unconfirmed merger this month, a third round of hearings is likely to follow.

The animosity that flared up during the earlier hearings is likely to be more subdued on Tuesday, however. Unlike Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which have two of the lowest customer-satisfaction ratings among TV and Internet service companies, AT&T and DirecTV have not stirred the same passions among those who fear the growing power of cable and broadband behemoths.

But the companies are nevertheless likely to face some opposition. “This proposed deal fails the antitrust test, it fails the public interest test, and it raises many concerns,” John Bergmayer, a senior staff lawyer at Public Knowledge who is a scheduled witness at the House hearing, said in a statement Monday.

“AT&T and DirecTV directly compete in more than 60 local TV markets,” Mr. Bergmayer said. “It's hard to accept AT&T’s claims that buying a direct rival can be good for competition.”

In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, AT&T and DirecTV said that “economic theory predicts that this transaction will put strong downward pressure on prices,” particularly in the bundles of cable-broadband-and-telephone services that are popular with consumers. But they do not promise to lower prices.

“The combined AT&T and DirecTV will be able to offer new and better service bundles, creating a stronger competitor to the cable bundle,” the companies said in the filing. “The savings and synergies made possible by this transaction will fundamentally and permanently increase the incentives of the combined company to expand and enhance its broadband networks.”

A union representing television writers is expected to testify at the Senate hearing that the merger will negatively affect programming by cutting the amount of money available to producers of content.

“It is a stated goal of the merger to reduce affiliate fees,” Christopher Keyser, president of the Writers Guild of America, West, said in his written testimony, referring to the portion of a consumer’s monthly cable payment that goes back to the programmer.

“It is those fees that have fueled the recent boom in creative programming — particularly on cable,” Mr. Keyser said. “Reduce those fees through the outsized power of monopoly — and the result is less creativity, less product, less innovation.”

AT&T has already offered up some concessions in the hope of winning regulatory approval of its deal, which must be approved by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the F.C.C.

The company said it would adhere to the F.C.C.'s Open Internet, or net neutrality, rules for three years after the closing of the merger, even though those rules were struck down by a federal appeals court early this year. The F.C.C. is trying to draft new rules on net neutrality, the concept that all Internet traffic should be treated equally by Internet service providers.

AT&T also offered to sell its retail broadband service and video service as stand-alone offerings, available to consumers without making them buy a more expensive bundle of the services.

The combined companies also say they would expand broadband offerings to approximately 13 million rural customers who have no wireline service available. They would do so by offering what is essentially a home version of wireless cellphone service.

Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, was the fiercest critic of the Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger during a hearing on that deal before the same Senate subcommittee. He is expected to raise similar misgivings about the AT&T/DirecTV merger.

“We’re moving toward an industry with fewer competitors — where corporations are getting bigger and bigger, and gaining more and more control over the distribution of information,” Mr. Franken said in May, when the AT&T deal was announced. “This hurts innovation, and it’s bad for consumers, who have been getting squeezed by higher bills.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/te...d-directv.html





“Free” Wi-Fi from Xfinity and AT&T Also Frees You to be Hacked

Ars tests how easy it is to spoof big broadband providers to grab data.
Sean Gallagher

If you've traveled and tried to get on the Internet, you've probably seen some pretty suspicious looking Wi-Fi networks with names like "Free Wi-Fi" and "Totally Free Internet." Those are likely access points you'd best avoid. But there's a much bigger threat to your security than somebody randomly fishing for you to connect to them—the networks you've already connected to and trusted, like AT&T and Xfinity.

Mobile broadband providers are eager to get you to connect to their Wi-Fi-based networks while you’re away from home. AT&T has built a network of free hotspots for customers at thousands of places—including train stations, as well as Starbucks and McDonald's locations across the country. Comcast has spread its Xfinity wireless network far and wide as well, turning customers’ cable modems into public Wi-Fi hotspots accessible with an Xfinity account login.

These free Wi-Fi connections are popular, for good reason—they help reduce the amount of broadband cellular data you consume, and they often provide better network speeds than what you can manage over a 4G connection. But they also offer a really easy way for someone to surreptitiously tap into your Internet traffic and capture your account information for less-than-friendly purposes. Millions of AT&T and Xfinity customers could be leaving themselves exposed to surreptitious hacking of their Internet traffic, exposing their personal data as a result.

As we reported in our joint experiment with NPR, AT&T sets smartphones to recognize and connect to “attwifi” hotspots automatically. This can be switched off in iPhones by setting the phone to ask the user before connecting to networks when Wi-Fi is turned on but not associated with a hotspot. But that isn’t an option on many Android devices. (Update: as readers point out, the latest AT&T Android settings allow for auto-connect to be disabled.)

To demonstrate this, I set up my laptop as a Wi-Fi hotspot broadcasting the network name (SSID) “attwifi” (after alerting my neighbors, of course). After killing off the settings for my preferred networks on my iPhone, I turned on the Wi-Fi, and it connected to the fake “attwifi” hotspot without prompting.

When I killed the “attwifi” network after a few seconds, my iPhone promptly demonstrated the further risks of auto-connecting—it automatically reconnected with another network in the list of trusted networks on my phone: a hotspot called “xfinitywifi.” I had used an Xfinity hotspot while waiting for an appointment a few days earlier, and suddenly I was logged into a hotspot running on my neighbor’s cable modem.

Comcast’s Xfinity wireless hotspots present a Web page for login that requests a customer’s account ID and password, and each time you connect to a new hotspot it re-authenticates you. But if you’ve connected once during the day, the hotspot remembers your device and reconnects you without prompting.

That means that if someone were to set up a malicious Wi-Fi access point called “xfinitywifi,” devices that have connected to Xfinity’s network before could automatically connect without alerting the user or asking for the password. Alternatively, using a “honeypot” tool such as PwnStar, an attacker could spoof both the “xfinitywifi” SSID and the Xfinity login page—stealing their Xfinity credentials in the process.

PwnStar includes the ability to redirect devices connecting to a Web page on the attacking system, record credentials, and then pass the victim on to Internet access as if nothing had happened—meanwhile launching man-in-the-middle attacks against the client (as I demonstrated for myself using an SSID called “notxfinity” to deter any of my neighbors from trying to connect to it).

By the way, those Xfinity Wi-Fi login credentials? They’re the same set of credentials used to gain access to Comcast customers’ account billing information, webmail, and other services.

This is not to say that AT&T’s and Xfinity’s networks are insecure in themselves. They are just common enough to give someone with evil in mind a way to cast a wide net for potential victims over Wi-Fi. The same tools I used to spoof Xfinity could be set to automatically respond to a victim’s phone as any Wi-Fi access point they’ve trusted. That’s because of the probe requests generated by smartphones and Wi-Fi—when you turn on your phone’s Wi-Fi adapter, it will seek out any network you’ve ever connected to that it was not told to forget. When I set my attack access point (the laptop) to not connect devices but to respond to all probe requests, my iPhone attempted in turn to connect to every Wi-Fi network I’ve connected to this year. That in itself can be a privacy concern, since the SSIDs and other data associated with those probe requests can be used to essentially map out my movements.

This sort of attack can be played out anywhere you’d normally connect to a public Wi-Fi network. Tools like the ones I’ve tested can be set up to actively go after a user of a public network, force them to disconnect from their existing Wi-Fi network, and then pick up that connection themselves. All of this can be done with something as small as an Android phone as well, using a broadband cellular connection to provide victims with uninterrupted Internet access, as we saw with the PwnPhone.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014...-to-be-hacked/





NSA Fears Prompt Germany to End Verizon Contract
AP

The German government is ending a contract with Verizon over fears the company could be letting U.S. intelligence agencies eavesdrop on sensitive communications, officials said Thursday.

The New York-based company has for years provided Internet services to a number of government departments, although not to German security agencies, said Interior Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate.

While Germany had been reconsidering those contracts for some time, they faced additional scrutiny after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of electronic eavesdropping by the U.S. intelligence agency and Britain's GCHQ.

German authorities were particularly irked by reports that the NSA had targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel. Berlin has also proposed building more secure networks in Europe to avoid having to rely on American Internet companies that manage much of the electronic traffic circulating the globe.

"There are indications that Verizon is legally required to provide certain things to the NSA, and that's one of the reasons the cooperation with Verizon won't continue," said Plate.

The current contract with Verizon will expire in 2015, he said.

The announcement follows reports this week that Verizon and British company Colt also provide Internet services to the German Parliament and to other official entities.

Verizon didn't immediately respond to emails seeking comment on Germany's decision.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Security Researchers Uncover The Tools Governments Use To Spy On Our Phones
John Biggs

Edward Snowden, whistleblower of the decade, has made it consistently clear that he didn’t trust cellphones. While he never described the methods governments and other miscreants used to crack into our handsets, he maintained that eavesdroppers could hear us even if the phone seemed off and everything on our devices was open to a dedicated hacker. But he never said how it was done.

Now we know… at least partially. The app used is called RCS/Galileo by an Italian company, The Hacking Team. The app allows for full control of the data on the phone and allows users to activate the microphone on Android, iOS, and Blackberry devices. In short, this is what Snowden feared.

In two very detailed and independent posts, both Citizen Lab and Kaspersky have produced some very interesting documentation of the program and have even traced a piece of Hacking Team software to a Trojan horse that had been modified to look like an Arabic news reader. The teams traced the command and control servers and found multiples in over 40 countries with the majority appearing in the U.S., Ecuador, and Kazakhstan. The major exploits included access to the following phone features and apps:

• Control of Wi-Fi, GPS, GPRS
• Recording voice
• E-mail, SMS, MMS
• Listing files
• Cookies
• Visited URLs
• Cached web pages
• Address book
• Call history
• Notes
• Calendar
• Clipboard
• List of apps
• SIM change
• Live microphone
• Camera shots
• Support chats, WhatsApp, Skype, Viber
• Log keystrokes from all apps and screens via libinjection

It should be noted that the iOS version requires a jailbroken phone – therefore requiring physical access to the phone – but it was easier to reverse engineer than the Android version. The Android version didn’t require a rooted device but was obfuscated to hide the functionality. All an attacker needed to do for an Android attack was to download an infected app like Qatif Today, a news app. By spoofing a legitimate app source, the attackers were able to install the Hacking Teams applications on phones in Arabic-speaking countries including Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

The proof that these tools are used by the NSA or other governments is still circumstantial – no one has admitted to using the apps to spy on citizens – but the power of the remote control app is clearly disconcerting. An iOS phone left in a hotel room could be easily attacked and compromised at any time and Android phones are especially susceptible.

“This type of exceptionally invasive toolkit, once a costly boutique capability deployed by intelligence communities and militaries, is now available to all but a handful of governments,” wrote the Citizen Lab Researchers. “An unstated assumption is that customers that can pay for these tools will use them correctly, and primarily for strictly overseen, legal purposes. As our research has shown, however, by dramatically lowering the entry cost on invasive and hard-to-trace monitoring, the equipment lowers the cost of targeting political threats.”

Citizen Lab has a full PDF of the manual used to train law-enforcement on use of the RCS program and, although they refused to make the entire document public they did publish some excerpts. Below we see one of the most jarring examples of the Hacking Teams tradecraft: the ability to inject malware into a seemingly innocuous app package and upload it with a single click. While tech-savvy users will claim that this sort of attack would never happen to them, it’s clear that now no one can know for sure.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/25/sec...on-our-phones/





What Your Cell Phone Can’t Tell the Police
Douglas Starr

On May 28th, Lisa Marie Roberts, of Portland, Oregon, was released from prison after serving nine and a half years for a murder she didn’t commit. A key piece of overturned evidence was cell-phone records that allegedly put her at the scene.

Roberts pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2004, after her court-appointed attorney persuaded her that she had no hope of acquittal. The state’s attorney had told him that phone records had put Roberts at the scene of the crime, and, to her lawyer, that was almost as damning as DNA. But he was wrong, as are many other attorneys, prosecutors, judges, and juries, who overestimate the precision of cell-phone location records. Rather than pinpoint a suspect’s whereabouts, cell-tower records can put someone within an area of several hundred square miles or, in a congested urban area, several square miles. Yet years of prosecutions and plea bargains have been based on a misunderstanding of how cell networks operate. No one knows how often this occurs, but each year police make more than a million requests for cell-phone records. “We think the whole paradigm is absolutely flawed at every level, and shouldn’t be used in the courtroom,” Michael Cherry, the C.E.O. of Cherry Biometrics, a consulting firm in Falls Church, Virginia, told me. “This whole thing is junk science, a farce.”

The paradigm is the assumption that, when you make a call on your cell phone, it automatically routes to the nearest cell tower, and that by capturing those records police can determine where you made a call—and thus where you were—at a particular time. That, he explained, is not how the system works.

When you hit “send” on your cell phone, a complicated series of events takes place that is governed by algorithms and proprietary software, not just by the location of the cell tower. First, your cell phone sends out a radio-frequency signal to the towers within a radius of up to roughly twenty miles—or fewer, in urban areas—depending on the topography and atmospheric conditions. A regional switching center detects the signal and determines whether to accept the call. There are hundreds of such regional centers across the country.

The switching center determines the destination of your call and connects to the land lines that will take it to cell towers near the destination. Almost simultaneously, the software “decides” which of half a dozen towers in your area you’ll connect with. The selection is determined by load-management software that incorporates dozens of factors, including signal strength, atmospheric conditions, and maintenance schedules. The system is so fluid that you could sit at your desk, make five successive cell calls and connect to five different towers. During a conversation, your signal could be switched from one tower to the next; you’ll also be “handed off” to another tower if you travel outside your coverage area while you’re speaking. Designed for business and not tracking, call-detail records provide the kind of information that helps cell companies manage their networks, not track phones.

If I make a cell call from Kenmore Square, in my home town of Boston, you might think that I’m connecting to a cell site a few hundred feet away. But, if I’m standing near Fenway Park during a Red Sox game, with thousands of fans making calls and sending texts, that tower may have reached its capacity. Hypothetically, the system might send me to the next site, which might also be at capacity or down for maintenance, or to the next site, or the next. The switching center may look for all sorts of factors, most of which are proprietary to the company’s software. The only thing that you can say with confidence is that I have connected to a cell site somewhere within a radius of roughly twenty miles.

Aaron Romano, a Connecticut lawyer who says that he has seen many cases involving cell records, has done a series of calculations to show how imprecise these locations can be. If you suppose that a cell tower has picked up a signal from ten miles away, you’re looking at a circle with a radius of ten miles, which has an area of three hundred and fourteen square miles. Cell-tower coverage is divided into sectors. Most towers have three directional antennae, each of which covers one third of the circle. Including that factor gives you a sector of 104.67 square miles. “That’s a huge area,” Romano said. “So how can anyone say, with any degree of certainty, that a handset was at the scene of the crime?”

Some technologies can locate you precisely. If you carry an iPhone, you’re also carrying a G.P.S. transmitter, which links to a ground station and then to several satellites, which can find your location to within fifty to a hundred feet. You enable the G.P.S. when you use certain software, such as Google Maps. Similarly, if you make an emergency 911 call, your company will use three towers to triangulate your location; if you’re using a smartphone, it will use G.P.S. to pinpoint where you are. If you’re the target of an ongoing investigation and law-enforcement agencies want to track you, they can ask a phone company to “ping” your phone in real time. (They also use that technique when trying to find a kidnapping victim.) Those methods are not what’s captured by phone-company cell-tower records of the sort that helped put Roberts in prison.

When investigating a crime that occurred in the past, police tend to have two options: seize the G.P.S. chip and download the locations, or obtain the cell records. Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision made it mandatory for police to obtain warrants before searching the cell phones of people they arrest. But the case law on getting cell-tower information is split. In most jurisdictions, police can obtain your call-detail records without a warrant. The disparity in requirements between the two could encourage police to rely increasingly on call-detail records, Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said.

Put another way, if I’m making a cell-phone call from my couch and someone commits a murder in a bar half a mile away, my cell records may serve as corroborating evidence that I took part in the crime. That might be true if I’d claimed to be in another state at the time, but those records cannot place me next to the body. What they don’t show is the precise location of a cell phone. Yet prosecutors often present those records as if they were DNA.

A few years ago, the F.B.I. established a unit specializing in cell records, called C.A.S.T. (Cellular Analysis and Surveillance Team), with the mission of analyzing cell-location evidence. The Bureau declined requests for an interview, but C.A.S.T. agents in recent cases have asserted a different theory of how cell networks operate. Testifying at a trial for murder and robbery in Florida in June, 2013, Special Agent David Magnuson said that the instant a call is received or placed, it’s the phone that decides which tower to go to—not the software that adjusts network load—and that, “ninety-nine per cent of the time, it’s the closest tower.” Although he conceded that cell records can be imprecise, he described them as “like a historical digital fingerprint.”

He added that the F.B.I. checks its information by doing periodic “drive tests,” in which it measures radio-frequency information emitted by cell towers to see if the coverage area agrees with its models. Independent experts I spoke to called this testimony into question—both the accuracy of the estimates and the validity of the drive tests. Conditions are so changeable that, even if a drive test confirms the model on a particular day, it may not on another, and certainly not on a day years in the past. It’s a probabilistic statement, not a scientific one.

In 2012, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ruled that an F.B.I. agent could not testify about the location of a defendant’s cell phone because the analyses did not rise to the level of trusted, replicable science. Other courts have found for the defendant after the defense attorney discredited the prosecution’s expert witness.

Lisa Marie Roberts’s original lawyer wasn’t one of them. There were reasons to suspect her: she had a tumultuous, sometimes violent relationship with the victim, Jerri Williams. Cell records showed that at 10:27 on the morning of the murder, Roberts’s phone connected to a tower within 3.4 miles of Kelley Point Park, where Williams’s body was discovered. Her attorney felt that was enough to convict her.

But she was making that call while driving a red pickup truck more than eight miles away, as confirmed by a witness. The system had simply routed her call through the tower near the park. It also emerged that new DNA evidence placed another suspect, a man, at the crime scene. And another piece of evidence helped: moments earlier, Roberts had received another call that came through a different site. The two towers were 1.3 miles apart. She could not have traveled that distance in the forty seconds between the calls. And so her cell records, in a sense, helped to save her.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...he-police.html





Supreme Court Cellphone Ruling Hints at Broader Curbs On Surveillance
Craig Timberg

The words “National Security Agency” appear nowhere in the Supreme Court’s opinion Wednesday prohibiting cellphone searches without a warrant. But the unanimous ruling makes clear that the nation’s most important jurists are tuned in to the roiling debate about high-tech surveillance and concerned about government officials going too far.

In broad, passionate language — spiked with the occasional joke — the ruling by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asserts that the vast troves of information police can find in modern cellphones are no less worthy of constitutional protection than the private papers that Founding Fathers once kept locked in wooden file cabinets inside their homes.

Roberts even chides the government for arguing that searching a cellphone is “materially indistinguishable” from searches of other items that can be seized at the scene of an arrest, such as a pack of cigarettes or a handwritten note. “That is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon. Both are ways of getting from point A to point B, but little else justifies lumping them together,” he wrote.

Such declarations, experts said, suggest a willingness to reconsider legal rulings long used to justify modern surveillance tools. That includes some spying technologies that were unimaginable when courts first articulated those arguments but that now are routinely used by a range of government agencies, including the NSA, the FBI and many state and local police forces.

A footnote in Wednesday’s ruling cautions against assuming too much about the court’s views on data collection “under other circumstances.” But legal experts on both sides of the privacy debate took notice of the unanimity of the ruling and the uncommonly strong language Roberts used when describing the privacy risks in modern technologies.

“It’s just a big, forceful, bold decision,” said Orin S. Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former Justice Department lawyer specializing in technology issues. “If you’re at the [American Civil Liberties Union], you’re popping a champagne bottle. If you’re at the FBI, you’re scratching your head and thinking of what you’re going to do next.”

Many observers date the Supreme Court’s reconsideration of high-tech surveillance to the United States v. Jones decision in 2012, which ruled that police had trespassed when placing an electronic tracking device on a suspect’s car. In applying a traditional constitutional protection to new technology, the court expressed concerns about the need to update the Fourth Amendment for the modern world.

The ruling on cellphone searches, experts said, suggested that the court’s consensus has grown on such issues over the past two years, a period in which the revelations made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have sparked international controversy over the privacy implications of high-tech government spying.

The Supreme Court ruling, said former NSA general counsel Stewart A. Baker, “shows that the judges have the same technology panic that the rest of us do.”

Baker, now a partner at a private law firm, added, “That means that in other areas they also will be alive to that risk and open to arguments that the rules should be changed.”

Privacy advocates are likely to cite the ruling in seeking to limit the ability of the government to conduct searches in border areas, where constitutional standards typically are lower. Even the “third-party doctrine,” which says that users have no reasonable expectation of privacy when they share information with a company or other third party, could be put in peril.

In Wednesday’s ruling, Roberts notes that cellphones aren’t exclusively — or even mainly — devices for talking, given their ability to also shoot video, browse the Web, send and receive e-mail, store gigabytes of information and access even more of it through remote “cloud” services. He even makes a quip about how frequently people gaze at or touch the devices, saying that they are “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.”

The legal consequences of the ruling stand to go far beyond cellphones and into the increasingly broad array of devices that carry or can access personal information through digital means — computers, cars, e-readers, wearable devices such as Google Glass and even some newer appliances that track usage and can be accessed remotely over the Internet.

More than anything, legal experts said, the ruling offers a reminder that Supreme Court justices live in the real world and almost certainly use cellphones in ways that make them aware of their privacy risks.

“These are highly intelligent individuals who are engaged in the world around them,” said Brian Owsley, a former magistrate judge from Texas who repeatedly wrestled with technology and privacy issues during his years on the bench. “Any time you get nine people on the Supreme Court saying something in one direction, that’s pretty impressive. . . . They’re all clearly taking a stand for the Fourth Amendment in light of privacy concerns.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...5f1_story.html





Police Can Get Access to Your Cellphone Data Even After the Supreme Court Ruling
Hayley Munguia

A Supreme Court ruling on the search and seizure of cellphones is being hailed as a victory for digital privacy, but technology can still put your private data in law enforcement’s hands.

On Wednesday, the justices unanimously ruled in Riley v. California that warrants are required for cellphone searches at the time of arrest. Such warrantless searches have been a point of controversy, and only six states have declared them illegal. But how exactly will the court’s decision change what takes place in jurisdictions across the country?

We couldn’t find data on how often warrantless cellphone searches on arrest occur, but the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) did obtain a copy of an extraction report that shows which types of data law enforcement was accessing. The information included call logs, text messages, photos, videos, contacts and web history, as well as data on location history (based on cell towers and Wi-Fi networks), passwords and content that had been manually deleted.

But the high court’s decision doesn’t prohibit warrantless cellphone tracking by police. The ACLU conducted a study in 2012 in which it filed more than 380 public record requests to local law enforcement agencies across the U.S. Of the roughly 250 agencies that responded, 92 reported engaging in cellphone tracking, and only 10 reported that they did not track cellphones. (The remainder provided a vague statement or no statement at all about phone tracking.) Only six of the agencies that tracked cellphones said warrants were required by local or state law.

This is the crux of the Supreme Court ruling — law enforcement agencies now need a warrant to search anyone’s cellphone at the time of arrest, but they can obtain similar information by using their own cellphone-tracking technology or by obtaining data from cellular-service providers. Through tracking, law enforcement agencies can determine whether a phone has been in any given area at any given time. Additionally, they can access further information, such as call logs and text messages.

It appears law enforcement makes use of this ability. The New York Times reported in 2012 that cellphone carriers responded to 1.3 million requests from law enforcement agencies for this kind of subscriber information in the previous year. A single agency, California’s San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, provided the ACLU with 283 pages of invoices from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and other cellphone carriers, which accounted for just one year of its surveillance operations.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/p...-court-ruling/





The SCOTUS Privacy Ruling is Accelerating Lawmakers’ Push for E-Mail Protections
Brian Fung

Privacy-minded lawmakers are already capitalizing on an opening created yesterday by the Supreme Court when it unanimously ruled that police must have a warrant to search your cell phone.

Members of Congress who back stronger protections for e-mail and other electronic communications have begun citing the Court's landmark privacy endorsement, in an attempt to add momentum to their own privacy legislation.

The push to reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a decades-old law that allows cops to read your e-mails if they've lain dormant for more than 180 days, has the support of the Justice Department and 220 cosponsors of a House bill known as the Email Privacy Act. The proposal would force police to get a warrant if they want to look at a suspect's e-mail. Today, that type of inspection requires little more than a subpoena.

"Even the Supreme Court of the United States, with an average age of 67, has moved ahead of Congress on technology issues," Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), one of the cosponsors, told the Washington Post. "The Court has put new wind in the sails of EPCA reform. This same standard [Fourth Amendment protections for cell phone contents] should apply to electronic communications."

The Email Privacy Act reached a milestone last week when the bill secured its 218th cosponsor — a "magic number" that would allow the measure to pass the House, if it were brought to the floor.

In the Senate, Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) also drew an explicit connection between the Supreme Court's ruling and ECPA reform.

"Just as the government must now obtain a warrant to look through the contents of our cell phones, I believe the same standard should apply when the government wants to look through our emails," Leahy said in a statement. "That is why I have authored bipartisan legislation to provide a much needed update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act."

The contents of a cell phone may be different from the contents of an e-mail account. But what's become available to law enforcement has generally expanded over the years with advances in technology, the Court held in its ruling Wednesday.

"Cell phones … are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy," the decision read.

At 290 cosponsors, the Email Privacy Act in the House would have the support of two-thirds of the chamber, meaning it could move to the floor under a shortcut process known as "suspension of the rules." Doing so would effectively bypass the House Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), is not a cosponsor.

While Goodlatte again declined to say whether Fourth Amendment protections should be applied to e-mail, he said he was "pleased" by the Supreme Court's decision on cell phone privacy and vowed to keep working to "identify ECPA reform priorities" with lawmakers and advocates.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...rotect-e-mail/





Massachusetts Supreme Court Rules Defendant Must Decrypt Data
Dennis Fisher

Encryption software has been enjoying a prolonged day in the sun for about the last year. Thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden about the NSA’s seemingly limitless capabilities, security experts have been pounding the drum about the importance of encrypting not just data in transit, but information stored on laptops, phones and portable drives. But the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court put a dent in that armor on Wednesday, ruling that a criminal defendant could be compelled to decrypt the contents of his laptops.

The case centers on a lawyer who was arrested in 2009 for allegedly participating in a mortgage fraud scheme. The defendant, Leon I. Gelfgatt, admitted to Massachusetts state police that he had done work with a company called Baylor Holdings and that he encrypted his communications and the hard drives of all of his computers. He said that he could decrypt the computers seized from his home, but refused to do so.

The MJSC, the highest court in Massachusetts, was considering the question of whether the act of entering the password to decrypt the contents of a computer was an act of self-incrimination, thereby violating Gelfgatt’s Fifth Amendment rights.

The court ruled that merely entering the password does not imply that Gelfgatt created the documents on the encrypted machines.

The court ruled, in a 5-2 decision, that merely entering the password does not imply that Gelfgatt created the documents on the encrypted machines or had sole control of them at all times and was not “testimonial”. The ruling reversed a lower court’s decision.

“Based on our review of the record, we conclude that the factual statements that would be conveyed by the defendant’s act of entering an encryption key in the computers are ‘foregone conclusions’ and, therefore, the act of decryption is not a testimonial communication that is protected by the Fifth Amendment. The investigation by the corruption, fraud, and computer crime division of the Attorney General’s office uncovered detailed evidence that at least two mortgage assignments to Baylor Holdings were fraudulent,” the MJSC’s ruling says.

“During his postarrest interview with State police Trooper Patrick M. Johnson, the defendant stated that he had performed real estate work for Baylor Holdings, which he understood to be a financial services company. The defendant informed Trooper Johnson that he had more than one computer at his home, that the program for communicating with Baylor Holdings was installed on a laptop, and that ‘[e]verything is encrypted and no one is going to get to it.’ The defendant acknowledged that he was able to perform decryption. Further, and most significantly, the defendant said that because of encryption, the police were ‘not going to get to any of [his] computers,’ thereby implying that all of them were encrypted.”

Although the MJSC’s ruling only applies in Massachusetts, it’s a tough blow for privacy advocates and others who have asserted the right to refuse to decrypt digital devices. Full disk encryption software is considered a valuable defense against both attackers and spot searches at international borders and in other situations. In its opinion, the MJSC acknowledged that without the password, it would have been extremely difficult for investigators to access Galfgatt’s data.

“According to the Commonwealth, the encryption software on the computers is virtually impossible to circumvent. Its manufacturer touts the fact that it does not contain a ‘back door’ that would allow access to data by anyone other than the authorized user. Thus, the Commonwealth states, the files on the four computers cannot be accessed and viewed unless the authorized user first enters the correct password to unlock the encryption,” the ruling says.

Still, not all of the MJSC justices supported the ruling. Justice Barbara Lenk, writing the dissenting opinion, said that the court’s holding that by entering the password the defendant isn’t asserting that he owned the computers or created the documents on them is incorrect.

“On this view, he would not be asserting that he owned them, had exclusive use and control of them, or was familiar with any of the files on them; that certain files contained the incriminating evidence sought; or that the documents were authentic. Such is far from the case,” Lenk wrote.

“In taking this view of the matter, the court maintains that the defendant merely would be entering a password, which he would not disclose to the Commonwealth, into the encryption program, and would not thereby be selecting and producing any documents. Such an artificial distinction between the act of entering the decryption key and the inevitable result of decrypting the devices, and thereby producing the files for inspection, obfuscates the reality of what the defendant is being compelled to disclose.”
https://threatpost.com/massachusetts...pt-data/106874





Uh Oh, Aereo
John Bergmayer

The Aereo decision is bad news for consumers, since it could take away a promising new model for watching free over-the-air television. Cord-cutters still have options. They can still access other online video services—and maybe some reconfigured version of Aereo—and watch broadcast TV with an antenna. But there’s no doubt that today’s opinion (especially when considered alongside ivi and Sky Angel) is good for the network/affiliate/cable status quo.

The outcome is not surprising, given the tenor of questions at oral argument. People are always asking me for my predication as to the outcome of a case where Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief, which is a bit awkward. Of course if you asked me on the record before today I would have told you that I was optimistic that a unanimous Supreme Court would simply adopt our brief. But like most observers I concluded that the Court was looking for a way to rule against Aereo but limit the collateral damage agains the tech industry as a whole. However, I thought that the Court would do a better job. Instead, the Court uses reasoning that could apply very easily to any number of online services—file hosting, cloud lockers, even VPNs—as well as services that no one has even come up with yet. It then simply declares that Aereo is different, because it looks so much like cable. Unfortunately, only the Supreme Court’s actual legal reasoning is binding on future courts—the rest of the opinion just “dicta.” Judges can quote poetry and make jokes in their decisions, too. None of that is binding either. Dicta has the same legal status as legislative history—which is to say, it’s as binding as lower courts want it to be. A lower court is bound by a higher court’s legal holdings, not its stated intent.

On to a few of the legal specifics. Remember, the question the Court had to decide was whether Aereo was engaged in a public performance, when it provided each of its subscribers with an individual antenna that separately transmits broadcast programming to just that user. If Aereo is not the one “performing”—if it was the Aereo subscriber, instead—then Aereo wins. And even if Aereo is the one doing the performing, it would win if the performance was not “to the public.”

Many of the briefs in this case were worried that a ruling that says that Aereo “publicly performs” works could be applied to other online services, as well, which until recently everyone assumed were legal. They were right to worry because much of what the Court said today could easily apply to other kinds of services. This case gets very technical very fast and will give law professors a lot to do in years to come. The easiest way to see why the Supreme Court’s attempt to limit its holding to Aereo-like services is just to comment on the actual language it uses in the attempt. I’m not confident that the various ways it tries to distinguish Aereo from other services will work very well.

Here’s the Court:

We agree that Congress, while intending the Transmit Clause to apply broadly to cable companies and their equivalents, did not intend to discourage or to control the emergence or use of different kinds of technologies. But we do not believe that our limited holding today will have that effect.

Fair enough.

For one thing, the history of cable broadcast transmissions that led to the enactment of the Transmit Clause informs our conclusion that Aereo “perform[s],” but it does not determine whether different kinds of providers in different contexts also “perform.”

Here, the Court is addressing the concept of “volitional action.” Making a copy of a work might infringe copyright—but it matters who is doing the copying. The Court (and the dissent) use the copy shop example—the customers of a copy shop, not the copy shop itself, are the ones making copies. So if there’s copyright infringement, it’s the customers, not the copy shop, that are liable. (You can get to the copy shop via some theory of secondary liability, but first you need to establish who the direct infringer is.

But the Court does not offer any clear test for how to figure out who the “actor” is in a given circumstance. Instead, it suggests that future courts will have to undertake a historical analyses of some kind. It has answered the “volition” question for Aereo but hasn’t provided any certainty for other kinds of services.

For another, an entity only transmits a performance when it communicates contemporaneously perceptible images and sounds of a work.

I don’t see how this excludes many online services. A cloud locker service that allows people to store and stream back their own music or movies “communicates contemporaneously perceptible images and sounds.” Heck, if multiple people store and play back copies of the same work at the same time, they’re even simultaneously contemporaneously perceptible images and sounds! While this language may be comforting to some kinds of online services many others appear to meet this test.

Further, we have interpreted the term ‘the public’ to apply to a group of individuals acting as ordinary members of the public who pay primarily to watch broadcast television programs, many of which are copyrighted. We have said that it does not extend to those who act as owners or possessors of the relevant product.

The Court is suggesting that a whether people count as the “public” for copyright purposes depends on the nature of their relationship to the work. This logic was in many of the briefs—notably, the Solicitor General’s. But it’s a circular argument.

When I record a TV show off the air, then that copy is lawful. You don’t need a license to tune in to a broadcast, and home recordings of broadcast content are accepted fair uses. So why is it any different if I use the antenna that Aereo provides to record a program from the airwaves?

If you assume for the sake of argument that Aereo is legal, then Aereo subscribers are in fact lawful “possessors” of the programming in question—just like the home viewer. Only if you start by assuming that Aereo is illegal does Aereo fail this test. In other words, the Court’s test is that “Illegal services are illegal. But legal ones are legal.” This is not very helpful.

The Court appears to have a reasonable policy position: That Aereo ought to be treated like other services that help users watch broadcast content. (“Aereo ought to be treated like other antenna sellers” is another reasonable policy position, of course.) But the way it got there is troubling, because it adopts reasoning that could be used against many different kinds of services, and its attempt to distinguish them from Aereo has many failings. The most likely outcome of this case is more litigation, and perhaps future trips to the Supreme Court. The Court should have ruled in favor of Aereo, and perhaps sent a stern note to Congress to write better laws. Instead, it’s issued a decision that decides very little—and that will provide ample ammunition for litigants on both sides of future copyright fights.

I will grant the Court one thing: The statute is not very clear. As the opinion states at one point, “the language of the Act does not clearly indicate when an entity ‘perform[s]’ (or ‘transmit[s]’) and when it merely supplies equipment that allows others to do so.” I think when copyright laws are ambiguous the tie ought to go to the public’s right to use and access content—particularly when, as here, the content is already available for free to anyone with an antenna. The Court decided, instead, that the tie ought to go to how it imagined that Congress (in 1976) would have thought about Aereo if anyone had asked it. This was probably the wrong call. Like in the Brand X case, I join Justice Scalia in dissent.
http://bergmayer.info/post/89884947355





Fox Moves to Use Aereo Ruling Against Dish Streaming Service

Fox has cited Wednesday’s ruling – which found Aereo to be operating illegally – to bolster its claim against Dish
Dominic Rushe

A day after a surprise US supreme court decision to outlaw streaming TV service Aereo, US broadcaster Fox has moved to use the ruling to clamp down on another internet TV service.

Fox has cited Wednesday’s ruling – which found Aereo to be operating illegally – to bolster its claim against a service offered by Dish, America’s third largest pay TV service, which streams live TV programming over the internet to its subscribers and allows them to copy programmes onto tablet computers for viewing outside the home.

The move has fueled criticism of Wednesday’s ruling from groups that have argued the decision will limit consumer choice, hand more power to broadcasters and stifle innovation.

Immediately after Wednesday’s ruling, Fox’s legal team submitted the supreme court’s Aereo decision to bolster its case against Dish. Oral arguments in the case are scheduled before the ninth circuit court of appeals on 7 July in Pasadena, California.

Dish and Fox have clashed over several services offered by the satellite TV provider including Hopper, a service that allowed customers to record all of a prime time broadcasters schedule and AutoHop, which allowed them to skip all of a broadcaster's ads.

The ninth circuit denied Fox’s attempts to close down Hopper in 2013 and refused to rehear the case in January this year. Fox will challenge that decision at an oral hearing in Pasadena.

The clash centres on Dish’s Dish Anywhere streaming service and its Hopper DVR “sideloading” feature. Dish Anywhere allows customers to watch live TV or the content of their DVR on mobile devices, laptops and desktop computers. The sideloading feature allows content from a DVR to be transferred to an iPad. Dish uses technology developed by Slingbox, which makes devices that allow customers to remotely stream their TV service. Slingbox is owned by Dish’s former parent company and current technology partner EchoStar.

Fox’s lawyers believe the Aereo ruling strengthens their case against Dish. In a letter to the court Richard Stone, partner at Jenner & Block, wrote that the supreme court had ruled Aereo’s service constitutes an “unauthorized public performance of Fox’s copyrighted works.”

“Dish, which engages in virtually identical conduct when it streams Fox’s programming to Dish subscribers over the internet – albeit also in violation of an express contractual prohibition – has repeatedly raised the same defenses as Aereo which have now been rejected by the supreme court,” he wrote.

Stone highlighted that the court had specifically rejected Aereo’s assertion that it is “merely and equipment provider” and that Aereo’s subscribers were the ones transmitting content.

The supreme court decision was praised by broadcasters who argue that Aereo undermined their business and would force them to introduce a paywall for their channels. The major broadcaster receives hundreds of millions of dollars per month in retransmission fees from cable companies for their channels whereas Aereo was retransmitting them for free.

But consumer groups attacked the decision. Gene Kimmelman, president and CEO at Public Knowledge, which had submitted a brief with the court in favour of Aereo, said: “It is very unfortunate for consumers that the supreme court has ruled against Aereo, which has provided an innovative service that brings consumers more choices, more control over their programming, and lower prices."

"We're concerned that the court's misreading of the law leaves consumers beholden to dominant entertainment and cable companies that constantly raise prices and gouge consumers.

"This decision, endangering a competitive choice for consumers, makes it all the more important for the Department of Justice and Federal Communications Commission to guard against anti-competitive consolidation, such as the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger."

Jason Buckweitz, associate director for the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, said the Dish case had many differences to Aereo, not least that Dish has a license to broadcast Fox and is not just taking its programming. But he said the Aereo case was likely to be cited by broadcasters looking to reach better terms or shut down new services they believe harm their businesses.

“They do not want to let go of what works for them,” he said. “What’s sad is that the brakes are going to be put on innovation. Do you want to be a company that tries new things or do you want to play it safe?”

He said the 6-3 ruling by the supreme court was likely to embolden broadcasters just as it would scare off innovations. “Broadcasters now have every incentive to litigate everything,” he said.

Fox declined to comment. Dish did not return calls for comment.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/201...dish-streaming

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

June 21st, June 14th, June 7th, May 31st


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


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


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

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

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

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 16th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-07-11 06:43 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 9th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 06-07-11 05:36 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 30th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-01-10 07:49 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 16th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-01-10 09:02 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 5th, '09 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 02-12-09 08:32 AM






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 11:39 AM.


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