Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 26th, '09

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Senate Republicans moved Monday afternoon to prevent the FCC's proposed rules on net neutrality." – Cecilia Kang


"There is no country that does not have prostitutes and criminals but definitely most countries don't have cannibals, and we don't have cannibals in this country. We don't eat human flesh, it is definitely unacceptable." – Dora Akunyili



































September 26th, 2009




F.C.C. Calls Open Internet Rules Vital
AP

Wireless carriers should not be allowed to block certain types of Internet traffic flowing over their networks, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said Monday in a widely anticipated speech that got a cool response from the industry.

Unless this is done very carefully, industry executives said, this extension of regulation risks stifling investment in Internet access.

The F.C.C.’s chairman, Julius Genachowski, said wireless carriers should be subject to the same “open Internet” rules that the agency has begun to apply to home broadband providers. That may mean that a carrier couldn’t, for example, ban the use of file-sharing services on its wireless network, which AT&T does now.

“It is vital that we safeguard the free and open Internet,” he said in his speech, which was Webcast.

The government has been investigating Apple’s process for approving programs for its iPhones, but Mr. Genachowski did not directly address manufacturers’ right to determine which applications run on their devices.

Essentially, Mr. Genachowski wants to codify the principles the F.C.C. has already been applying to wired Internet traffic — and extend them to wireless.

Mr. Genachowski is now proposing to make it a formal rule that Internet carriers cannot discriminate against certain types of traffic by degrading service. That expands on the principle that they cannot “block” traffic, as articulated in a 2005 policy statement.

It is still unclear how the principles would apply in practice. The proposal is the starting point for a process to work out detailed rules. Mr. Genachowski left the door open to treating wireless networks differently than wired networks in the final regulations, even though the same broad principles will be applied to both technologies.

Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s top executive in Washington, said the company would be “very disappointed” if the F.C.C. has already concluded that it needed to “regulate wireless services despite the absence of any compelling evidence of problems or abuse.”

Last year, the agency sanctioned Comcast for secretly hampering file-sharing traffic by its cable-modem subscribers. In that ruling, the agency relied on broad “principles” of open Internet access that hadn’t previously been put to the test. The cable company filed suit, saying the F.C.C. did not have the authority to tell it how to run its network. The case is still in federal appeals court.

Internet service providers, both wired and wireless, are struggling with the question of how to distribute network capacity among their subscribers. Heavy users can overwhelm cellular towers and neighborhood cable circuits, slowing traffic for everyone.

At the same time, consumer advocates and Web companies like Google want to safeguard what has been an underlying “Net neutrality” assumption of the Internet: that all types of data are treated equally. If the carriers can degrade or block traffic, they become the gatekeepers of the Internet, able to shut out innovation, these critics say.

Comcast has already changed its system to one that does not look at what types of traffic subscribers are using. Instead, it throttles back the speed of heavy users if there is congestion on the network. However, there are other companies that might fall afoul of the new principle. Cox Communications, another cable company, has been testing a system that slows traffic that it deems less time-sensitive, like file downloads and software updates, to keep Web pages, streaming video and online games working faster. Cox declined to comment.

In his speech on Monday at the Brookings Institute in Washington, Mr. Genachowski also proposed to make it a formal rule that Internet service providers have to tell customers about how they manage traffic to handle congestion. Some companies might be managing traffic in subtle ways without notifying customers.

David Young, vice president of federal regulatory affairs at Verizon Communications, said he was pleased that Mr. Genachowski said he favored a light touch in setting up the new regulatory framework. He said that Internet carriers were not free to experiment with different ways of treating traffic, development of the technology might be slowed.

“The concern is that it will stifle innovation, investment and growth,” Mr. Young said. “To dramatically change the 15-year policy of the United States government to not regulate the Internet is a pretty radical thing and should be driven by a very real and present need to do so.”

David Cohen, executive vice president at Comcast, said he welcomed the “dialogue” suggested by the F.C.C. chairman, but also said it would be important to figure out first whether there are “actual and substantial problems that may require rules.”

The F.C.C. has four commissioners in addition to its chairman. The two Democratic members said Monday that they supported Mr. Genachowski’s proposal, giving him a majority to push through the proposal. The details of the new rules will be worked out over the coming months.

Ben Scott, policy director at advocacy group Free Press, which complained to the F.C.C. about Comcast’s old network management practices in 2007, said the Internet was of such importance now that government would have to take a role in making sure it worked optimally.

“It is inevitably going to have a regulatory structure around it,” Mr. Scott said. “What we’re deciding is: What is it going to look like?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/te...net/22net.html





FCC Plan for Open Internet 'Perfect,' Lessig Says
Sam Gustin

The U.S. on Monday announced a bold plan designed to keep the internet open and competitive and prevent web-service providers from unfairly discriminating against content that competes with their offerings. "It was perfect. I'm thrilled," Lawrence Lessig, the prominent Stanford law professor and pro-net neutrality advocate, told DailyFinance after the plan was unveiled. "The commission is clearly focused on creating a policy that supports innovation on the internet."

The proposed rules represent a major victory for consumer groups and internet companies, as well as the fulfillment of a key campaign promise by President Obama. Not surprisingly, telecom and cable giants like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast -- the providers who control the very "pipes" that internet traffic travels through -- did not share Lessig's enthusiasm.

"I don't understand the problem we're trying to solve, these so-called barriers to innovation on the internet," said David E. Young, Verizon's vice president for federal regulatory affairs. Verizon, AT&T, Comcast,. and others have lobbied vigorously against increased broadband regulation, as well as against legislation that would stiffen governmental oversight of the industry.

The pro-business Institute for Policy Innovation issued a blistering statement saying the proposed rules will "undoubtedly jeopardize not only the future of new and currently unforeseen innovations in Internet services, but also current services that consumers have come to expect and enjoy."

"'Net neutrality' is nothing more than sweet-sounding words to obscure an attempt to involve the government in directing private sector investment and business models," said Bartlett Cleland, director of the Dallas-based group Center for Technology Freedom. "The discussion regarding where investment should take place should be left to consumers and business owners."

"The sort of aggressive regulation, as proposed today, by making rules out of guidelines even while inserting an expanded menu of regulatory guidelines, is one more step toward dismantling current and discouraging future innovation," Cleland added.

In his speech, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski argued that doing nothing to update U.S. broadband policy would carry an "unacceptable cost."

"It would deprive innovators and investors of confidence that the free and open Internet we depend upon today will still be here tomorrow," Genachowski said. "It would deny the benefits of predictable rules of the road to all players in the Internet ecosystem. And it would be a dangerous retreat from the core principle of openness -- the freedom to innovate without permission -- that has been a hallmark of the Internet since its inception, and has made it so stunningly successful as a platform for innovation, opportunity, and prosperity. This is not about protecting the Internet against imaginary dangers," Genachowski said.

Federal broadband policy may not seem like the most glamorous issue; if you follow FCC business, it can seem incomprehensible. But the issues at stake are critical: how we will use our computers and cellphones, and how businesses will compete in a marketplace undergoing periodic, seismic innovations and disruptions.

Think Netscape, Google, Wikipidia, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, and Skype -- as well as tomorrow's internet-based services and mobile devices that now only live in the minds of brilliant young entrepreneurs and engineers. In years to come, the internet will facilitate innovations in medical science and communications as well smart-grid technology and energy distribution, among many other applications. "In the 21st century, the garage, the basement, and the dorm room remain places where innovators can not only dream but bring their dreams to life," Genachowski said. "And no one should be neutral about that."

Genchowski proposes turning four broadband "principles" established in 2005 during the previous FCC commission into formal rules, as well as adding two more rules.

One addition would prohibit network discrimination. "The great majority of companies that operate our nation's broadband pipes rely upon revenue from selling phone service, cable TV subscriptions, or both," Genachowski said. Such services, he said, "increasingly compete with voice and video products provided over the Internet. The net result is that broadband providers' rational bottom-line interests may diverge from the broad interests of consumers in competition and choice."

The new rule, he said, would mean broadband providers "cannot block or degrade lawful traffic over their networks, or pick winners by favoring some content or applications over others in the connection to subscribers' homes. Nor can they disfavor an Internet service just because it competes with a similar service offered by that broadband provider. The Internet must continue to allow users to decide what content and applications succeed."

The second new rule would require increased transparency by broadband providers of their network-management practices. "The Internet evolved through open standards," Genachowski said. "It was conceived as a tool whose user manual would be free and available to all. But new network management practices and technologies challenge this original understanding. Today, broadband providers have the technical ability to change how the Internet works for millions of users -- with profound consequences for those users and content, application, and service providers around the world."

In a clear win for net neutrality advocates, who argue that the new rules should apply to wireless as well as wireline communications, Genachowski said, "The principles I've been speaking about apply to the Internet however accessed, and I will ask my fellow Commissioners to join me in confirming this."

AT&T expressed cautious support for much of the FCC's plan, but balked at the extension of the rules to the wireless space: "We are concerned, however, that the FCC appears ready to extend the entire array of net neutrality requirements to what is perhaps the most competitive consumer market in America, wireless services."

Shortly after the speech, the CTIA, the wireless industry group, issued a statement saying it is "concerned about the unintended consequences Internet regulation would have on consumers considering that competition within the industry has spurred innovation, investment, and growth for the U.S. economy."

In arguing for a rule on increased network-management transparency, Genachowski cited last year's case over Comcast's web-blocking practices.

"The blocking was initially implemented with no notice to subscribers or the public," Genachowski said. "It was discovered only after an engineer and hobbyist living in Oregon realized that his attempts to share public domain recordings of old barbershop quartet songs over a home Internet connection were being frustrated," he said, referring to Robb Topolski, the engineer who first identified Comcast's traffic interference.

"It was not until he brought the problem to the attention of the media and Internet community, which then brought it to the attention of the FCC, that the improper network management practice became known and was stopped," the chairman said.

Genachowski also addressed the contentious issue of broadband competition, which is less than robust in many markets. "As American consumers make the shift from dial-up to broadband, their choice of providers has narrowed substantially," he said. "I don't intend that remark as a policy conclusion or criticism -- it is simply a fact about today's marketplace that we must acknowledge and incorporate into our policy making."

Now, the FCC will issue an order of proposed rule-making, followed by a period of public comment.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/09/...tandt-verizon/





Republicans Against Net Neutrality
Cecilia Kang

Senate Republicans moved Monday afternoon to prevent the FCC's proposed rules on net neutrality with an amendment to the Interior Appropriations bill that would tie up funding at the agency for new regulatory mandates. Observers said, however, that the move was unlikely to be approved in the Democrat-majority Congress.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), ranking member of Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, said in a release:

"We must tread lightly when it comes to new regulations. Where there have been a handful of questionable actions in the past on the part of a few companies, the Commission and the marketplace have responded swiftly," Hutchison said in the release.

"The case has simply not been made for what amounts to a significant regulatory intervention into a vibrant marketplace. These new regulatory mandates and restrictions could stifle investment incentives," she said. Senators John Ensign (R-Nev.), Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), David Vitter (R-La.), Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and John Thune (R-S.D. co-sponsored the amendment.

Rebecca Arbogast, head of technology policy research at Stifel Nicholas, said the move was a standard vehicle for Congress to block what regulatory agencies were trying to achieve in the executive branch or in a regulatory agency. "But the likelihood of it getting passed it pretty low. This is standard procedure and a time-honored tradition but the Republicans are in the minority."

The two Republican commissioners at the five-member FCC issued a joint statement in response to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's announcement, expressed concern that conclusions have been prematurely drawn about how consumers and businesses are being affected by Web policies.

"We are concerned that both factual and legal conclusions may have been drawn before the process has begun," said Commissioners Robert McDowell and Merideth Baker. "We do not believe that the Commission should adopt regulations based merely on anecdotes, or in an effort to alleviate the political pressures of the day, if the facts do not clearly demonstrate that a problem needs to be remedied."

An official at the agency stressed, however, that Genachowski viewed the proposal as the start of a process to investigate how new rules for the Internet should be approached for different technologies. Some wireless providers have balked at the proposal, with AT&T saying it does not agree that the rules should apply to its giant national wireless network because of capacity constraints. Genachowski said in his speech that the rules would apply to all platforms - which would include wireless - but that such questions would be part of a process that will begin late October to come up with new rules. If approved, final rules could be drawn next spring.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/pos..._push_aga.html





AT&T Looks to Flip Net Rules Debate on Google

AT&T Inc said any new "net neutrality" rules imposed by U.S. regulators need to apply to Web companies like Google Inc as much as to phone companies to ensure a level playing field.

In a letter Friday to the head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau, the biggest U.S. telephone company argued that Google would have an unfair advantage if its Voice service is not subject to the same rules proposed by the FCC on phone operators.

"To the extent 'net neutrality' is animated by a concern about ostensible Internet 'gatekeepers,' that concern must necessarily apply to application, service, and content providers," Robert Quinn, AT&T's senior vice president for federal regulations, wrote to the FCC's Sharon Gillett.

Last week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed new rules requiring operators to open their networks to any legitimate Internet content or service without discrimination.

If adopted, the rules would be a victory for big Internet companies like Google at the expense of network operators like AT&T, Verizon Communications, Sprint Nextel Corp and T-Mobile.

Broadband carriers such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless have argued that existing net neutrality guidelines were sufficient and should not be codified into a rule. They argue that they need the ability to protect their networks from bandwidth-hogging applications.

T-Mobile is a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture between Verizon and Vodafone Group Plc.

A lawyer for Google said the company's Voice service application is a Web software tool and should not be regulated like telephone companies.

"We feel comfortable that it is not a regulated service," Richard Whitt, a Washington D.C.-based lawyer for Google, told Reuters. "It is a service that originates from an online platform."

The FCC said it had received AT&T's letter and was reviewing it.

Voice Advantage Seen

AT&T cited media reports that Google Voice was blocking some calls to phone numbers in certain rural areas in order to cut down on expenses. Phone companies are banned from blocking calls.

"Google Voice thus has claimed for itself a significant advantage over providers offering competing services," AT&T's Quinn said.

USTelecom, a trade group representing service providers, sided with AT&T in a statement, accusing Google of "effectively assuming the power to decide who its customer can call and what content they can access."

AT&T disputed Google's argument that Google Voice is not a traditional phone service and should not be regulated like one. AT&T described Google Voice as a "creatively packaged" offering similar to phone services that are regulated by the FCC.

"As such Google Voice would appear to be subject to the same call blocking prohibition applicable to providers of other telecommunications services," Quinn said in the letter.

The carrier also argued that even if Google Voice is classed as an Internet application, it should still be subject to rules requiring it to embrace competition, according to the FCC's fourth principle in its Internet Policy Statement.

"By openly flaunting the call blocking prohibition that applies to its competitors, Google is acting in a manner inconsistent with the fourth principle," Quinn wrote.

AT&T also argues that Google is flouting the FCC's recently announced non-discrimination principle by blocking calls to local phone operators in certain areas.

Google shares closed 0.9 percent lower at $492.48 on Friday, while AT&T ended 0.3 percent down at $26.96.

(Reporting by John Poirier in Washington and Sinead Carew in New York; editing by Matthew Lewis and Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/...sq=at&t&st=cse





British Pop Divided in File Sharing Debate

Top British pop acts disagreed on Monday over how to tackle illegal file sharers, with singer Lily Allen challenging a new statement from a group of artists that includes Annie Lennox and Radiohead.

At the center of the debate is a British government proposal to block people who repeatedly download music illegally from file-sharing sites from accessing the Web.

The proposals outlined last month included requiring Internet Service Providers to take action against individual repeat offenders, reducing broadband speeds or temporarily suspending an individual's Internet account.

Featured Artists Coalition, which counts Robbie Williams and Tom Jones, as well as Lennox and Radiohead, among its dozens of members, said in a statement on Monday that the proposals would cut off an important source of promotion.

"By demanding blanket suspension powers from the government, the industry is in danger of cutting off a promotional tool that is of great use to fledgling artists who seek to create a buzz around themselves yet don't have the financial support of a major label," FAC said.

It added that the government could only enforce its proposals through a "wide-scale invasion of personal privacy."

FAC said it did not condone illicit file sharing, which the music industry and many artists blame for eating into revenues, and described web sites benefiting commercially from the practice as "thieving rascals" who should be prosecuted.

It believes the answer to illegal file-sharing lies in the way the industry remunerates artists and in educating the public about why they should pay singers who make the music they love.

In a new blog site set up to debate the issue of illegal file sharing, Allen, who has won backing from the likes of James Blunt for her stance on the issue, said the FAC's latest statement "just doesn't make sense."

"The FAC seems to be viewing the government's proposed legislation as an attack on freedom and liberty, but stealing's not really a human right, is it?" she wrote on http://idontwanttochangetheworld.blogspot.com.

"The proposal is to look at P2P (peer-to-peer) sites -- which are public anyway -- to identify people who are acting unlawfully, so they can be asked, and then made, to stop. Not really an attack on civil liberties there," she added.

In recent years, pop stars have increasingly turned to live performances and merchandising to make up for financial losses caused by illegal downloading.

But composer Bjorn Ulvaeus, of ABBA fame, argued recently that for many songwriters, performing is not an option.

"Patronizing crusaders for the right to file share say: 'Why don't they go on tour and sing for their supper?'," he wrote in a column for the Times newspaper earlier this month.

"This argument shows a staggering ignorance of the fact that the people who write the songs are, more often than not, not performers. They are producers and songwriters, full stop."

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...092101923.html





Elton John Backs Crackdown on Music Piracy

Illegal filesharing is dividing the music world with Lily Allen and Elton John taking issue with a group called the Featured Artists Coalition, who include Annie Lennox and Billy Bragg

Sir Elton John has come out in support of measures to crack down on music piracy by cutting off the internet connections of persistent illegal filesharers.

In a letter to the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, he said: "I am of the view that the unchecked proliferation of illegal downloading (even on a "non-commercial" basis) will have a seriously detrimental effect on musicians, and particularly young musicians and those composers who are not performing artists."

The letter comes as talks to heal a growing rift in the music industry over piracy broke down today , with a group of artists including Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, Billy Bragg and Tom Jones accusing labels of stubbornness.

The artists are part of the Featured Artists Coalition, whose members also include Annie Lennox and Blur's Dave Rowntree. The FAC took the rest of the music industry by surprise by publicly announcing that it has "agreed to disagree" with labels over government proposals to suspend the internet connections of persistent filesharers.

But the debate is also dividing big-name artists, with Lily Allen, James Blunt and John, all taking issue with the views of the FAC.

Frantic talks over the last week between record companies, music lobby groups and the FAC have failed to reach a consensus on Mandelson's planned law ahead of a consultation deadline for comments next week.

The FAC said in a statement: "We have negotiated in good faith with the labels all week, but they remain wedded to the idea of suspension of accounts. We remain steadfast in our belief that making threats against individual music fans is not an effective way to resolve any problems associated with filesharing."

Many internet service providers and consumer groups share concerns over how such laws would be enforced, with the risk of the penalising innocent internet users. But more and more artists are coming out in defence of legal measures, echoing labels' comments that filesharing is hampering investment in new acts.

There are fears within the industry that the public divisions between artists could derail the long-running fight against piracy just when new laws are close.

Lily Allen has set up a blog titled "It's Not Alright" (in reference to her first album Alright, Still) collating the views of artists after her own comments that "filesharing is a disaster" for new talent.

James Blunt has also now waded in, welcoming government proposals. "Peter Mandelson is looking to engage the internet service providers who, in my opinion, handle stolen goods, and should take much more responsibility," he wrote in a letter to the Times.

"How this legislation pans out, and if it goes through at all, is critical to the survival of the British music business; critical to thousands of jobs; and critical to our ability to nurture and develop great musicians and the songs and albums that we would hope to listen to in the future."

Allen condemned FAC's Mason and fellow coalition member Ed O'Brien from Radiohead, for implying "file sharing music is fine".

She added: "It probably is fine for them. They do sell-out arena tours and have the biggest Ferrari collections in the world."

Allen attacked the FAC's stance: "I want to make it clear that I'm not after a fight with the Featured Artists Coalition – I want us artists to stand together on this – but they've released a new statement which just doesn't make sense. The FAC seems to be viewing the government's proposed legislation as an attack on freedom and liberty, but stealing's not really a human right, is it?"

The FAC said it had been misinterpreted. The coalition described as "maverick" by some in the industry went on record citing "evidence that repeat file-sharers of music are also repeat purchasers of music".

But it argues today that its opposition to broadband suspension for repeat filesharers has been taken to "imply that we condone illicit file-sharing. This is not the case and never has been."

"However, we seriously question the wisdom of seeking to deal with this problem by terminating the internet connections of individual music fans."

They demand government action on websites that make money from illegal filesharing, which they describe as "thieving rascals".

"The focus of our objection is the proposed treatment of ordinary music fans who download a few tracks so as to check out our material before they buy. For those of us who don't get played on the radio or mentioned in the music media … peer-to-peer recommendation is an important form of promotion."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2...y-internetipos





Lily Allen Pirates Music, Is Clueless About Copyright
Ernesto

File-sharing heroine Lily Allen has joined the anti-piracy lobby in its war against illegal downloading, claiming that it bankrupts the music industry. While trying to prove her point, however, she infringed on the rights of several webblogs and newspapers. On top of this, it turns out that she offers some illegal mixtapes on one of her websites.

After we found out that Lily Allen copied an article from Techdirt without attribution or permission to prove why copyright infringement is wring, we called her a hypocrite. Even celebrity guru Perez Hilton agreed with this assessment, and it seems that Lily is more hypocrite than we could have ever imagined.

In a reply to our criticism Lily wrote the following blog entry in which she entirely missed the point we tried to make.

“I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS [sic] THAT I WASNT TRYING TO PASS OF THOSE WORDS AS MY OWN , HERE IS A LINK TO THE WEBSIITE I ACQUIRED THE PIECE FROM.”

Judging from here response it is “quite obvious” that Lily doesn’t have a clue about copyright. Lily seems to argue that we accused her of plagiarism, but we only meant to point out that she infringed on Techdirt’s copyright by copy/pasting their article without attribution.

Also, this is not the only infringement on her blog. While she’s trying to point out how much damage ‘pirates’ do to the music industry she blatantly infringed the copyrights of a number of newspapers by posting scanned articles.

To make things even more absurd Techdirt discovered that Lily is pirating music herself by offering some unauthorized mixtapes (tape 1 and tape 2) on her website LilyAllenMusic.com. The tracklist of one of the mixtapes reveals a list of no less than 19 unauthorized tracks. This means the RIAA can easily sue her for millions.

Please Lily, explain to us why it is okay for you to copy, paste and pirate others work, while you label people who do the same as thieves? Are we missing something here, or do you really think that copyright is limited to your own music?

What about the poor people working at the newspapers who might lose their job because you are pasting scanned articles online? Not to mention the poor artists that ended up on your mixtape who’s lives are ruined because of your selfish actions.
http://torrentfreak.com/lily-allen-p...yright-090923/





Blow for Music Industry as Lily Allen Says Peter Mandelson's Plans too Draconian
Patrick Foster and Dan Sabbagh

The music industry’s battle to have persistent internet pirates disconnected was dealt a huge blow last night after leading musicians including Lily Allen settled their differences and agreed that plans to suspend internet access were too draconian.

The industry has been stricken by infighting since Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, proposed that the connections of those who consistently flouted the law should be suspended temporarily. Supporters of the plans, which at one stage included Allen, became involved in public arguments with the Featured Artists Coalition, which includes the musician Billy Bragg and members of Radiohead and Pink Floyd.

A meeting of nearly 100 leading artists on both sides of the debate including Allen and some from the FAC voted last night to call on Lord Mandelson to instead slow down the connections of persistent law breakers, as was suggested in the Government’s Digital Britain report, published in June.

The artists said: “Our meeting voted to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter, and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringers’ bandwith to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic e-mail and web access functional.”

The group also condemned the vitriol that Allen had faced on an internet blog that she had set up to argue against music piracy. Yesterday, Allen closed the blog, saying that “the abuse was getting too much”.

The statement which the group is expected to turn into a letter to Lord Mandelson added: "We the undersigned wish to express our support for Lily Allen in her campaign to alert music lovers to the threat that illegal downloading presents to our industry."
Bragg said after last night’s meeting: “We are trying to find a proportionate response to a real problem that is damaging our industry. I hope it will convince the record labels that this is a way of sending a message to file-sharers.”

The new unity, which saw previously non-aligned artists such as George Michael also sign up to the statement, seriously damages lobbying efforts by record labels and other areas of the industry to push through Lord Mandelson’s proposals.

UK Music, the umbrella organisation that represents the music industry, last week dropped all mentions of disconnection in public statements in an attempt to find a unified stance.

The rest of the music business, including record labels, royalty collectors and artist managers, will this morning discuss whether to settle for the measures supported by the artists, or to continue to push for disconnection. They are expected to draft a letter to Lord Mandelson setting out their views.

The peer himself gave only lukewarm support to the proposals yesterday, fuelling speculation that the Government will abandon them. Appearing at the Brit School in Croydon, in South London, he said temporary suspension was "an option".

He added: "We are talking about a temporary, possibly short lived, suspension of persistent unlawful file sharers after many written notifications with a chance to appeal. It does not get more modest or more fair than that. But we have a responsibility to put these options forward for people to debate."
http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle6848502.ece





Record Company Lawsuits a 'Threat to Free Culture'
Madeleine Sjöstedt

Are lawsuits and threats the music industry's new money-spinning idea, now that record sales have fallen, asks Madeleine Sjöstedt, Stockholm's Vice Mayor for Culture and Sports and member of the Liberal Party (Folkpartiet).

A new row over copyright has blown up in Sweden. At Stockholm City Theatre (Stockholm stadsteater) one play has been cancelled and another is under threat from music publishers. In both cases, the focus of the disputes is copyright. Are copyright owners advancing into new territory? If so, it could have serious consequences for writers, who have a right to be paid, and for theatres, which want to spread music and which should of course have to pay their way.

The Swedish Music Publishers' Association (SMFF) has written to tell me that I am spreading 'false information' when I argue that music publishers aren't respecting the STIM-agreement, which governs how royalties are paid when music is performed. They also say that I am pointing fingers (at what I'm not sure) in the discussion of Stockholm Stadsteater's production of 'De tre Mustketörerna.' The letter is, like the whole of the music industry's action against Stadsteater, a threat to free culture in Stockholm.

If it hadn't been the case that they had themselves sent their letter to Svenska Dagbladet for publication, I would have sent this response directly to them.

The music publishers describe in their letter their "important role as a link between theatres and copyright owners" and explain that "the publishers have used all available means during the summer and early autumn to try to find a solution in the context of the agreements that the publishers have with their writers."

As the person with political responsibility for Stockholm stadsteater, I interpret the STIM agreement in the same way as the theatres' own organization Svensk Scenkonst. STIM's assertion that the use of the music falls outside the terms of the agreement is not of decisive significance.

STIM does not have the right either to unilaterally interpret the agreement or change the terms of the agreement without prior negotiation with Svensk Scenkonst.

But this is not what the discussion is really about. What it actually centres on is how music publishers act towards theatres that want to use music in their productions.

De Tre Musketörerna quickly became a success following its première this spring. It has played to full houses ever since. During the spring, Universal Music Publishing AB sent a letter to Stadsteater claiming that the music in the play constituted use of their so-called 'grand rights'

Despite the fact that Stadsteater believed and continues to believe that the use of music in De Tre Musketörerna was covered by the STIM agreement, it signed a settlement with Universal with the aim of keeping good relations and avoiding a legal wrangle.

Moreover, Stadsteater has made great efforts during the spring and summer to come to agreement with the music publishers over the issue of extra compensation for copyright owners. This effort has gone unrecognized by a number of publishers despite the fact that, as SMFF itself points out, several of the copyright owners are positive to their work being performed in the play.

By the day of the new première, August 14th, Stadsteatern had still not received any answer to its inquiries from the music companies. Two of the six companies involved had not responded at all.

During this process Universal - at the same time as having an agreement with Stadsteatern - has also declared that they plan to sue the theatre. The first time was at the end of April, and the second time was in August.

Universal also declared in August that the guest performance entitled Sounds of Silence from Riga, in which music by Simon and Garfunkel is played on a grammaphone in the background, should not be played in Stockholm. The play has toured across Europe and has never had any problems before. But suddenly Paul Simon has heard about the lay, and does not want his music being used, Universal claim.

I then wrote a letter to Paul Simon and asked if this really was his opinion, and receive a swift response from his representative Eddie Simon that something must be array here. Universal do not represent Paul Simon in contractual agreements with theatres, he explained. Universal then retracted their demand and said that there were no longer any objections. The Latvian theatre company had however already withdrawn the play, which the Stockholm audience now did not get to see.

If this was an isolated incident then it could be excused as the result of carelessness. Could it be that the threats and writs are the music companies' new business idea when record sales have declined? In the USA this has become a regular practice.

In the spring a court in Boston instructed Jim Tenenbaum to pay $675,000 in compensation to the five music companies - of which Universal was one - which had sued him for downloading 30 songs from the file sharing site Kazaa. This equates to around 160,000 kronor ($23,400) per track.

According to IFPI, which represents the recording industry worldwide, 40 billion music files were illegally copied during 2008. If every track was worth 160,000 kronor it would mean that the total damages would amount to 6.4 billion kronor.

When sales of music peaked in the beginning of the 2000s, total revenues from record sales amounted to $27 billion, according to the same organization. The purported losses incurred by file sharing which the damages claims were based on were thus 30,000 times larger that what record sales had generated. The case against Tenenbaum was thus not about seeking damages for losses incurred, but is part of a new business model for the music companies.

The risk is now that the same practice comes to Sweden. The question is therefore not only about whether Stadsteatern has the right to used the music in accordance with their long-running agreement with STIM, but that the major music companies have to stop with their threats to sue. Then you would stop using music. That would be a catastrophe.

In SMFF's letter to me it states that they want a dialogue. This is not achieved through threats or via the courts.
http://www.thelocal.se/22274/2009092...tm_content=103





Pirate Bay Appeal Judge Faces Ban, Works For Spotify
enigmax

After The Pirate Bay Four were found guilty earlier this year they appealed, and the date for the new trial was set for November. Now it seems that one of the planned lay judges could be disqualified from participation, since he is an employee of Swedish music outfit Spotify – a company partly owned by the plaintiffs.

Following the revelations that judge Tomas Norström from the original trial had connections with pro-copyright lobby groups, there had been hopes that the trial of the Pirate Bay Four could go to a retrial.

However, that eventuality was denied after the Appeal Court investigated the bias issue and ruled that the judge’s ties to these groups did not influence his judgment.

Instead of a retrial an appeal has been granted which will take place in November. The case will be handled by judge Ulrika Ihrfelt who was previously removed from the bias investigation of judge Tomas Norström, because she too was linked to pro-copyright groups.

Today there is yet another question mark hanging over the head of another judge scheduled to play a major part in the appeal.

Launched as an answer to the file-sharing problem and the possible savior of the music industry, Sweden’s Spotify music service has been widely well received by both the industry and hardened pirates. But there is a problem.

According to an SR.se report today, one of the lay judges in the case has been revealed as an employee of the fledgling streaming music service.

“If the man is not judged to be biased he will be part of the court’s team at the right time,” said judge Ulrika Ihrfelt.

“I would not say there is a problem, but we definitely consider it a factor to which we must draw the attention of the parties, given that Spotify is a company that provides online music,” Ihrfelt added.

But of course, the problem goes just a little bit further than Spotify simply being a provider of online music. It also counts the major music labels – the absolute arch-enemies of The Pirate Bay – as shareholders.

Both the plaintiffs and defendants in the appeal have been notified of the lay judge’s affiliation with Spotify and it will now be down to the court of appeal to decide if there is a conflict of interest.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-a...potify-090921/





Two More Pirate Bay Appeal Judges Accused of Bias
Ernesto

Earlier this week TorrentFreak reported that there had been objections over one of the proposed lay judges set for the Pirate Bay appeal. Now there are yet more claims of possible bias, this time with two of the main judges who have both been members of pro-copyright groups.

On April 17th all four defendants in the Pirate Bay trial were found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and a fine of $905,000. Despite this verdict The Pirate Bay continued to operate while the defense filed for an appeal.

A few weeks ago the Court announced that it has two weeks set aside for the Pirate Bay appeal, starting in November. The appeal will be handled by three judges, and according to defense lawyer Per E Samuelsson, two of them could be susceptible to bias.

“It is profoundly inappropriate that even in the court of appeal we have judges who are or have been members of organizations closely related to the copyright industry,” Samuelson wrote, objecting to the appointment of two of the three judges.

The appeal will be handled by judge Ulrika Ihrfelt who was previously removed from the bias investigation of Pirate Bay judge Tomas Norström, because she was linked to pro-copyright groups herself. Now she is facing the same allegations together with judge Christina Boutz.

Ihrfelt has been a member of the Swedish Copyright Association (SFU) and Boutz is a member of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property (SFIR).

It is doubtful whether the objection will have an effect. After the initial trial Pirate Bay judge Tomas Norström’s objectivity was called into doubt by the defense lawyers because of his ties to national and international pro-copyright lobby groups, but the Appeal Court later ruled that this had not influenced the verdict.

Earlier this week we reported that one of the planned lay judges in the appeal could also be disqualified from participation, since he is an employee of Swedish music outfit Spotify – a company partly owned by the plaintiffs. However, there could be more to this lay judge issue than initially meets the eye.

TorrentFreak has been informed that the man in question is a bright programmer who co-owns a streaming technology patent along with the original developer of uTorrent, so there can be little doubt that he is somewhat of a BitTorrent expert. So far the defendants haven’t objected to him but there is speculation in Sweden that IFPI could be more afraid of this lay judge than their opposition is, partly since his background is at a technical university where support for Pirate Party values is strong.
http://torrentfreak.com/two-more-pir...f-bias-090925/





State Attorney General Threatens to Shut Down Performance of "The Platters"
Dirk Perrefort

The Connecticut state Attorney General has threatened possible legal action against the Ethan Allen Hotel in Danbury unless they can show proof that a group calling themselves "The Platters" set to perform on Saturday have a right to use the name.

Possible legal action, according to state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, could include a court action to stop the show as well as civil penalties.

Blumenthal sent a letter on Wednesday to the hotel and Live Gold Operations, the booking agent for the group, giving a deadline of noon on Thursday to provide proof that at least one member of the group is an original recording artist from The Platters or that they are authorized to use the name.

The hotel, in a press release sent out earlier this month, announced the show as "An Evening With The Platters" that is being presented "under the direction of their famed manager Buck Ram."

Ram, the original manager of the group, died in 1991.

The cost per ticket for the dinner show at the hotel, according to the release, is $90 per person.
http://www.newstimes.com/latestnews/ci_13404218





4G Wireless Evolution - Qualcomm Is Exploring Peer-to-Peer
Carl Ford

Len Lauer, CTO of Qualcomm (News - Alert), discussed here at Mobilize the early experimentation of Qualcomm with peer-to-peer networking. While the discussion was broadly sketched, the interesting point of the discussion was that now mention was made of solutions that are peer-to-peer design today.

At this industry event, in which Stacy Higginboatham interviewed Lauer, the Qualcomm exec did not share where his company is looking to deploy the peer-to-peer functionality. He said that it was experimental and that in the move to 3G, we still have only migrated about 20 percent of the 4 billion worldwide phones to 3G.

The suggestion was made that with the 400 percent growth of data services the off loading of this traffic with services such as Flo.net and the use of femtocells was an important market opportunity. Other wireless backhaul strategies were not discussed.

In the industry, the opportunity to support peer-to-peer networking for wireless often is looked at from the self-organizing network perspective. On the wireline side, bothComcast ( News - Alert) and Verizon have been looking at peer for peer solutions as ways to divert the traffic to maximize the local networks role while minimizing the bottleneck at interconnection points.

The discussion with Lauer did not seem to be oriented to the issues of support peer-to-peer applications but focused on strategies for radio connectivity.

“It’s in the early stages,” was the closing comment from Lauer.
http://4g-wirelessevolution.tmcnet.c...er-to-peer.htm





Microsoft DRM Patent Could Revive Peer-to-Peer Music Nets
Alexander Wolfe

Here's an odd twist that might give new life to the dying horse of music digital-right management. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has just been awarded a U.S. patent for a distributed DRM system -- it works over peer-to-peer networks -- which uses encrypted public and private keys as the licensing mechanism. This is significant because, while centralized music stores like Apple's iTunes have forsaken DRM, the Microsoft patent would enable peer-to-peer networks to reemerge as viable, albeit protected, content sources.

The patent, number 7,594,275, is entitled simply, "Digital rights management system." Granted today (Sept. 22), it was filed in October, 2003, which undercuts the implication in my introduction, about why anyone would bother at this late date.

In 2003, when Microsoft's patent application was filed, the whole "Web wants to be free" versus "evil corporations with their DRM" argument was in full flower. That debate hasn't been resolved -- if you ask me, there's still no justification for people stealing songs.

However, it has been rendered moot, in a paradoxical manner. On the one hand, the RIAA's aggressive legal pursuit of song-downloading grandmas squandered the precious little sympathy the record companies might have had. But at the same time, the marketplace essentially moved beyond DRM. Consumers became more sophisticated, and most slowly became inured to the idea they should pay for their music. The turning point came when Apple's iTunes and Amazon pulled back from DRM.

So sure, there's still music theft, and not just in China (there, it's called the market). But DRM is now more properly spoken of in reference to movies and DVDs, where copyright protection will remain in place until Hollywood's last gasp.

In this context, one would think that Microsoft's new patent might be irrelevant. However, it's not, because of its interesting peer-to-peer angle. Indeed, one can foresee a time when peer-to-peer networks reemerge from their current sub-rosa position and become popular, brand, public-facing methods of distributing content.

When they do, Microsoft may be positioned to reap some serious royalties.

Here's how Microsoft describes the peer-to-peer distributed angle, in the "background" section of the patent:

"In a conventional DRM system, license acquisition requests are processed by a centralized license server. This makes the centralized license server heavy-loaded, complex, and expensive to run and maintain, and makes it a weak link in the DRM system. For example, failure of the centralized license server may disrupt normal DRM services. Additionally, small content providers, such as a peer in a peer-to-peer network, may not be able to afford the cost of providing and/or utilizing the services of the centralized license server.

Peer-to-peer networks have emerged as a popular way to share large amounts of data, such as by peers downloading songs that are referenced as being available for download through a peer-to-peer website. Most peer-to-peer networks, however, do not have digital rights management or access control. Consequently, peer-to-peer networks can be liable for contributing to the infringement of the copyright in works that are referenced as being available for download by the peer-to-peer networks.

Accordingly, there is a continuing need for a distributed public licensing infrastructure for digital rights management systems."

The Microsoft patent uses partial licenses, consisting of both a public and a private key, to provide customers with the right to decrypt the content they access over the peer-to-peer network. Or, as they put it more formally in the patent: "Partial licenses are combinable to form a formal license that may be utilized to output the content."

In closing, the one big thing which strikes me -- and I should note that I'm not a lawyer; I just play one on my blog -- is that, like many patents, this one doesn't seem to be much of a stretch beyond prior art. (My argument on that score would be the notations about key sharing, key redistribution, and asymmetric encryption contained in the "reference" section of the patent. No matter; this is the same deal as with thousands of other patents. We all know the deal with the backlogged and short on examiners USPTO. Namely, you're gonna get your patent, and then you defend it in court later on if you have to.

The second leg of this observation is that Microsoft's lawyer have their eye on the broad-claims prize, and the possible revenue-producing future of this patent, in its very last paragraph. To wit:

"Although the invention has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological acts, it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or acts described. Rather, the specific features and acts are disclosed as exemplary forms of implementing the claimed invention."
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/...KH4ATMY3 2JVN





Watching Your Own TV, Thousands of Miles Away
Ben Berkowitz

So you're moving from the United States to another country and the most important thing you can think of is how you can watch the new season of "American Idol"?

You're not alone -- "placeshifting" is one of the hottest new areas in TV technology. People no longer need to live in a country to see all of their local TV stations. In fact, they don't even need a TV anymore.

There are platforms for watching popular shows on the Internet and there is technology to actually make a full television feed available just like in the living room. Either way, it can be relatively cheap and surprisingly easy to keep up while on an overseas assignment.

Placeshifting

The best-known technology for moving an entire TV feed from one place to another is the Slingbox (www.slingbox.com), which came out a few years ago. Although the developer was later acquired by satellite company EchoStar, the device works with any platform, even an over-the-air antenna.

The Slingbox, which currently comes in two models starting at $180, connects to a video feed and to the Internet, and lets users watch that feed as though they were in the same room. It even offers an on-screen remote control for changing channels, pausing, opening menus, and so on.

The Slingbox is available for Windows and Mac, as well as the BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian and classic Palm mobile platforms.

One downside of the Slingbox, though, is that it does not offer wireless support out of the box, meaning users need to put their Slingbox close to their Internet router or buy a separate wireless or home powerline adapter. Also, it is not designed to let users record video onto computers.

For those who want wireless or who want to record to a PC, Monsoon Multimedia's Hava Media Player (www.myhava.com) offers many of those features. It leverages the Windows Media Center software to turn a PC into a personal video recorder, using a remote video stream from a Hava box. Hava has four models that start at $120.

However, Hava does not offer a Mac version, and its cellular support is limited to Symbian and Windows Mobile. Hava also charges a subscription fee for some services.

The problem with the Slingbox and the Hava is that if something goes wrong overseas -- a power outage, a broken cable, an overly inquisitive cat -- they can be difficult or impossible to fix.

For American expats with money to burn and a need for guaranteed service, there are options like Nationphone & TV. The company will actually sign you up for cable service, put your cable box in their data center and stream the output to you over a fiber-optic connection.

The service costs $99 a month for 65 channels without a digital video recorder, or $199 a month for 200 channels with a recorder and premium movie stations. There is also a one-time set-up fee of $175. (here)

The Internet

Some people are content with just a few shows, though, and don't necessarily need to watch the Sunday morning current affairs program from their local public access channel.

For those TV junkies, there are services like Hulu.com and TV.com in the United States and the BBC iPlayer in Britain. They are, very simply, TV aggregators that offer free streaming of episodes of many new and classic shows.

One problem, though: Unlike placeshifting hardware, you can't watch these services just anywhere. Copyright rules and advertiser demands mean that they are largely unavailable outside their home territories, although they are useful when you're on the road in your home country.

Hulu was founded by NBC Universal and News Corp, and TV.com is owned by CBS Corp.

(Reporting by Ben Berkowitz; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...58M4CY20090923





Premier League Clamps Down on Web Pirates Illegally Broadcasting Matches

Illegal streaming of Premier League football matches threatens broadcast deals worth £1bn a year
James Robinson

A website that illegally streams live television to personal computers and shows English football games each week could be closed down by the Premier League.

The success of MyP2P.eu, which is registered in the Netherlands, illustrates the problems that sports bodies face as they struggle to protect lucrative deals with broadcasters at a time when broadband access is making it easier to watch television programmes illegally.

A host of recent Premier League matches have been shown on the site. MyP2P will also screen Manchester United's Carling Cup tie against Wolverhampton Wanderers on Wednesday. It showed the England cricket team's one-day international matches with Australia last week, along with hundreds of other sporting events, including American football games, rugby and Formula One.

The site uses "peer-to-peer" technology, effectively acting as a conduit for users who want to share content over the internet. Emails sent by the Observer to the site administrator were not answered.

The Premier League makes about £1bn a year from selling the rights to screen its games. Revenues from overseas rights more than doubled to £625m when they were last sold off, but they have been renewed on a staggered basis and that sum is expected to be exceeded this year. The current arrangement includes 81 deals covering 211 territories.

Technological advances mean it is now easy for viewers abroad to make games available online. The Premier League has a policy of not showing any live matches at 3pm on a Saturday, but that rule does not apply to foreign broadcasters. Media industry figures point out that this creates an opportunity for pirates, who act to meet a demand from British audiences for games that cannot otherwise be seen.

Simon Denyer, chief executive of Perform, which works with rights owners to create highlights packages that are shown on dozens of legal websites, including those run by major newspaper groups, said piracy is a growing problem. "If you don't allow someone to watch [games] from an official source, then the pirates do it for you. The biggest problem is the 3pm Premier League kick-offs," he said.

Denyer added that the vast majority of illegally available games were "very low quality, with strange commentary and graphics".

The number of pirated games is likely to grow because broadband take-up in the UK is high and growing. According to the media regulator, Ofcom, 65% of UK homes had a fixed broadband connection in the first quarter of 2009, up from 41% in 2006. Cable companies, including Virgin Media and the telecommunications giant BT, are also offering customers "superfast" broadband packages that enable users to download moving images quickly. Previously, it could take hours to download films or TV shows, but that can now be done in minutes.

The film and TV industries are also suffering as more consumers experiment with illegally acquiring online content, and have been lobbying the government to take action. Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, pledged last month to crack down on the problem, but internet service providers have been engaged in a fierce row with content owners over who should bear the cost.

File-sharing music sites, including LimeWire and Napster, use the same peer-to-peer method, encouraging subscribers to make songs available to fellow users free of charge. Napster began as an illegal site but now operates within the law. The music industry claims illegal file-sharing sites have cost it up to £18m a year in lost revenue.

The Premier League said 1,800 cases of illegal streaming were dealt with last season, more than 90% of them successfully. It employs a company called NetResult to protect its intellectual property and either remove web content or shut down websites that are illegally streaming games.

The league is also embroiled, along with several other companies in the music and film industries, in a long-running legal battle with YouTube, which it accuses of illegally showing Premier League games. It is suing the video-sharing site, which is owned by internet giant Google, in a New York court.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/se...ts-web-pirates





French Court Rules Against eBay in Counterfeiting Case

A French court has found eBay responsible for brand counterfeiting and ordered the online marketplace operator to pay the luxury group LVMH 80,000 euros ($118,000) compensation for damages caused to famous perfume brands like Christian Dior and Kenzo.

The Paris-based LVMH conglomerate had sued eBay, accusing the San Jose company of using its brands as keywords in Internet searches.

The court's ruling late Friday said eBay must pay a 1,000-euro fine for each future infringement.

EBay has run into similar legal trouble with luxury brands in the past. It has given a petition signed by 750,000 people to the European Parliament to ask lawmakers to press for freer retail rules on the Internet.

In a statement Friday, eBay said it is "satisfied" that the French court did not honor LVMH's request for 4 million euros in damages.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_13367829





Crackdown on Fake Software
Mahesh Sharma

MICROSOFT has cracked down on Australians who sell counterfeit software on internet auction sites, and the investigations have resulted in settlements with 10 local sellers for copyright infringement.

Earlier this year, Microsoft investigators posed as buyers interested in "high-quality counterfeit software" -- including versions of Windows XP, Microsoft Office 2003 and Microsoft Office 2007 -- from 10 suspected sellers on internet auction websites such as eBay and Oztion.

Microsoft said the sellers were Jordan Andrews, who trades on eBay as "thebigcoos"; Nicholas Todd Courter, who trades on eBay as "hardpunter"; Rania Elbadar, who trades on Oztion as "bargain-buys4u"; Jack Koncewiczw, who trades on Oztion as "big-mucho" and "matt-coins"; Nessreen Omar, who traded on eBay as "amelia007"; Kelly Gilham, who traded as "Kellymgsheba"; Timothy Inman, who trades on eBay as "in.dvd" and "red.tech"; Matthew Stephen Anderson, who trades on eBay as "quickseller1982"; Nilesh Patel, who traded on eBay as "nileshapatel143"; and Norizan Mohamd, who trades on eBay as "unistore08".

Microsoft's outside counsel sent a letter of demand to each of the sellers, outlining the right to claim for copyright infringement.

All the sellers admitted they had infringed copyright and agreed to settle. Microsoft said it was paid more than $38,000 in damages.

Microsoft Australia intellectual property director Vanessa Hutley admitted the problem was growing and said the software giant had increased its investigations.

"It's an ongoing program because until people stop ripping off consumers we have to keep those programs going," Ms Hutley said.

"Clearly we don't talk about ongoing matters, but I can say Microsoft is actively investing in investigation for people who are ripping off consumers.

"It's not just eBay. We look at all auction sites, and we are looking actively in New Zealand because people can trade across barriers." Microsoft said high-quality counterfeit software was increasingly being sold on internet auction websites.

She would not comment on whether eBay had good processes to prevent the sale of counterfeit software.

The crackdown comes amid complaints from an Australian customer, who was sold a counterfeit version of Microsoft Office 2007, that eBay was slow to move against the counterfeit software seller.

Leigh Thomas purchased the software for $210 from a Queensland eBay seller on June 8 but discovered it was a counterfeit copy when the installation failed because the software was not authenticated by Microsoft's online service.

On June 22, the 54-year-old Mr Thomas complained to eBay that the item was not as described because it was counterfeit.

The complaint was referred to eBay's payment service, PayPal, which charges a fee to process payments on the vast majority of transactions on the auction website.

The PayPal buyer guarantee meant Mr Thomas could be reimbursed for the price of the software if he sent the package back to the seller via an approved delivery service.

However, this outcome did not satisfy Mr Thomas, who is also an eBay seller from Tweed Heads in northern NSW.

He wanted action taken against the seller to stop the sale of counterfeit goods.

"Too many people are getting ripped off by some rogue sellers on eBay, which is in my opinion destroying the value of eBay -- and me being on it as a seller," Mr Thomas said.

To proceed with the complaint, PayPal demanded proof the goods were counterfeit, but according to Mr Thomas it would not accept Microsoft's assessment that the copy was not genuine.

An independent consultant or third party, which had to be hired at Mr Thomas's expense, would need to verify the article was not authentic, PayPal wrote.

"To continue with the investigation of your complaint, we must request documentation to support your claim that the item is not authentic," a PayPal employee wrote to Mr Thomas.

"Please obtain a document from an unbiased third party, such as a dealer, appraiser or an organisation that is qualified in the area of the item in question (other than yourself), which clearly identifies the item as not authentic.

"The document must specifically state how the item received differs from an authentic item and must include a detailed explanation of how the person evaluating the item determined that it is not authentic."

By this stage, Mr Thomas had filed a complaint and signed statement with the police, and the copy of Office had been taken as evidence.

He provided the case number, police station location and name of the investigating officer, and offered to provide a signed police statement, but PayPal would not accept that as proof.

Two weeks ago, PayPal said it would not reimburse any cost for the software.

However, days after PayPal was contacted by The Australian, Mr Thomas was told he would be fully reimbursed and paid an additional $50 for the inconvenience.

PayPal refused to respond to questions about whether the buyer guarantee was being used as a cover to allow counterfeit goods to be sold on eBay.

Ebay's payment service also would not comment on whether action had been taken against the eBay seller.

"In line with federal privacy laws PayPal Australia is unable to discuss individual cases," spokesperwoman Kelly Stevens said. "PayPal co-operates and works with all levels of law enforcement to stamp out illegal activity.

"In rare instances where our dealings or procedures result in a bad customer experience, we would like to apologise. For PayPal our No1 priority is the customer and we are always looking at ways to improve our customer service.

"This situation has now been rectified and I would like to thank you for bringing this to our attention."
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html





Copyright Lawsuit Filed Against Scribd
Greg Sandoval

A legal complaint seeking class action status filed in Houston on Friday accuses social-publishing site Scribd of egregious copyright infringement.

Scribd managers have "built a technology that's broken barriers to copyright infringement on a global scale and in the process have also built one of the largest readerships in the world," the attorneys representing the class wrote in the complaint. "The company shamelessly profits from the stolen copyrighted works of innumerable authors."

While this may sound like a generic copyright case, there's one interesting side note. The attorneys that filed the lawsuit are at the head of Camara & Sibley, the Houston-based firm defending Jammie Thomas-Rasset against copyright claims made by the music industry.

Joe Sibley and Kiwi Camara have made names for themselves largely by representing Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota woman accused by the music industry of copyright violations. In June, a jury found her liable for willful copyright infringement and ordered her to pay $1.9 million in damages. Thomas-Rasset has asked for a new trial.

In an interview for a story published in July, Sibley said he and Camara could see themselves working for copyright owners, if they believed in the issue. He told me that they weren't locked into any legal dogma and would take cases based on their merits. It's not unusual for lawyers to argue both sides of copyright issues.

In their complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, the lawyers wrote that plaintiff Elaine Scott, a book author, found on Scribd in July an unauthorized copy of one of her titles, "Stocks and Bonds: Profits and Losses, A Quick Look at Financial Markets." They claim that the book had been downloaded more than 100 times from Scribd, which her attorneys called the "YouTube for documents."

Neither Scott nor Scribd representatives were immediately available for comment.

The class purports to represent "every author who owns a valid registered copyright in a work infringed by Scribd." Camara & Sibley said the number of infringing material on Scribd was known only to that company but predicted that the size of the class could be huge.

They did note that Scribd has said it would remove infringing documents when notified by a copyright owner, as is required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. San Francisco-based Scribd also has created an automated filtering system designed to prevent the publishing on its system of unauthorized works, once identified, from being uploaded again.

Camara & Sibley say very clearly what they think of Scribd's business model.

"Under the aegis of self-promoting misinterpretations of federal statutes," the lawyers wrote in their complaint, "the West Coast technology industry has produced a number of start-up firms premised on the notion that commercial copyright infringement is not illegal, unless and until the injured party discovers and complains of the infringing activity, and (the) infringer fails to respond to such complaints."

Camara & Sibley added to the complaint, "Apparently (the West Coast start-ups) believe any business may misappropriate and then publish intellectual property, as long as it ceases to use a stolen work when an author complains...Many millions of dollars have been invested in this business plan."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10357108-93.html





CBS Fails to End Rather Suit; Redstone May Testify
Jonathan Stempel

A New York judge on Monday rejected CBS Corp's bid to dismiss former TV news anchor Dan Rather's $70 million lawsuit claiming he was fired over a controversial election-year report on former President George W. Bush's Vietnam War-era military service.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Ira Gammerman set a December 22 hearing in the case and directed that testimony be taken from witnesses including Sumner Redstone, the 86-year-old chairman of Viacom Inc, which once controlled CBS.

"Let's get this case moving," Gammerman said. "I would really like to get this case ready for trial."

Rather, 77, sued CBS in 2007 and has filed a separate fraud case against CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward over his firing from the network, his home for more than four decades.

CBS has acknowledged it could not authenticate documents used in the September 8, 2004, report on Bush's National Guard service, which aired two months before Bush won a second term in the White House.

Rather accused the network in his lawsuit of breaching his contract in part by not giving him enough on-air assignments following his March 2005 removal as anchor of the "CBS Evening News," a job he held for 24 years.

Rather Says Principle At Stake

"It was definitely a positive day for us," said Martin Gold, a partner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP who represents Rather, after Monday's roughly 40-minute hearing.

"They saw their best interest was to abandon the story whether it was accurate or not and to get rid of Dan Rather," he said. "That's what this case is about."

James Quinn, who co-chairs Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP's litigation practice and represents CBS, said he had expected Gammerman to keep the case alive. "If we have to go to trial, we're ready," he said after the hearing.

CBS spokesman said the hearing constituted a "good day," for the company, noting that Gammerman agreed with its request that testimony from Redstone be limited to half a day.

Rather hopes to show Redstone wanted him fired. CBS lawyers argued that Redstone had no such recollection, and that deposing him would as a result accomplish nothing.

A representative for Redstone had no immediate comment.

A Manhattan appeals court is considering CBS' appeal of other rulings and its decision could moot the case.

Speaking outside the courthouse, Rather said the case puts "an important principle" at stake: "Are we going to let big corporations and big government decide what we hear and see on the news?"

He accused CBS of having "buried an important story to curry favor with and protect the powerful politicians who regulate them. That's a big part of this lawsuit."

Contract Dispute

In July, Gammerman reinstated a fraud claim against CBS after Rather's lawyer contended the network's decisions cost his client several million dollars. Rather sued Moonves and Heyward the following month.

"I don't think you can cloak this case in the noble cause of journalism," Heyward said after the hearing. "Underneath it all, it's a contract dispute."

Viacom split off CBS at the beginning of 2006.

Rather now produces a news program, "Dan Rather Reports," for HDNet, a high-definition television channel chaired and co-founded by Mark Cuban, the Internet entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team.

The lawsuit is Rather v. CBS Corp, New York State Supreme Court (Manhattan), No. 603121/2007.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; additional reporting by Phil Wahba; Editing by Andre Grenon and Steve Orlofsky)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...58K57U20090921





Plugged-In Age Feeds a Hunger for Electricity
Jad Mouawad and Kate Galbraith

With two laptop-loving children and a Jack Russell terrier hemmed in by an electric fence, Peter Troast figured his household used a lot of power. Just how much power did not really hit him until the night the family turned off the overhead lights at their home in Maine and began hunting gadgets that glowed in the dark.

“It was amazing to see all these lights blinking,” Mr. Troast said.

As goes the Troast household, so goes the planet.

Electricity use from power-hungry gadgets is rising fast all over the world. The fancy new flat-panel televisions everyone has been buying in recent years have turned out to be bigger power hogs than some refrigerators.

The proliferation of personal computers, iPods, cellphones, game consoles and all the rest amounts to the fastest-growing source of power demand in the world. Americans now have about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just three in 1980.

Worldwide, consumer electronics now represent 15 percent of household power demand, and that is expected to triple over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency, making it more difficult to tackle the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.

To satisfy the demand from gadgets will require building the equivalent of 560 coal-fired power plants, or 230 nuclear plants, according to the agency.

Most energy experts see only one solution: mandatory efficiency rules specifying how much power devices may use.

Appliances like refrigerators are covered by such rules in the United States. But efforts to cover consumer electronics like televisions and game consoles have been repeatedly derailed by manufacturers worried about the higher cost of meeting the standards. That has become a problem as the spread of such gadgets counters efficiency gains made in recent years in appliances.

In 1990, refrigerator efficiency standards went into effect in the United States. Today, new refrigerators are fancier than ever, but their power consumption has been slashed by about 45 percent since the standards took effect. Likewise, thanks in part to standards, the average power consumption of a new washer is nearly 70 percent lower than a new unit in 1990.

“Standards are one of the few ways to cheaply go after big chunks of energy savings,” said Chris Calwell, a founder and senior researcher at Ecos, a consulting firm that specializes in energy efficiency.

Part of the problem is that many modern gadgets cannot entirely be turned off; even when not in use, they draw electricity while they await a signal from a remote control or wait to record a television program.

“We have entered this new era where essentially everything is on all the time,” said Alan Meier, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a leading expert on energy efficiency.

People can, of course, reduce this waste — but to do so takes a single-minded person.

Mr. Troast, of South Freeport, Me., is just the kind of motivated homeowner willing to tackle such a project. His day job is selling energy efficiency equipment through an online business. He was not put off by the idea of hunting behind cabinets to locate every power supply and gadget, like those cable boxes, Web routers or computers that glowed in the dark.

The Troasts cut their monthly energy use by around 16 percent, partly by plugging their computers and entertainment devices into smart power strips. The strips turn off when the electronics are not in use, cutting power consumption to zero.

While Mr. Troast’s experience demonstrates that consumers can limit the power wasted by inactive devices, another problem is not as easily solved: many products now require large amounts of power to run.

The biggest offender is the flat-screen television. As liquid crystal displays and plasma technologies replace the old cathode ray tubes, and as screen sizes increase, the new televisions need more power than older models do. And with all those gorgeous new televisions in their living rooms, Americans are spending more time than ever watching TV, averaging five hours a day.

The result is a surge in electricity use by TVs, which can draw more power in a year than some refrigerators now on the market.

Energy experts say that manufacturers have paid too little attention to the power consumption of televisions, in part because of the absence of federal regulation.

Another power drain is the video game console, which is found in 40 percent of American households. Energy experts — and many frustrated parents — say that since saving games is difficult, children often keep the consoles switched on so they can pick up where they left off.

Noah Horowitz, at the Natural Resources Defense Council, calculated that the nation’s gaming consoles, like the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the Sony PlayStation 3, now use about the same amount of electricity each year as San Diego, the ninth-largest city in country.

Mandatory efficiency standards for electronic devices would force manufacturers to redesign their products, or spend money adding components that better control power use.

Many manufacturers fight such mandates because they would increase costs, and they also claim the mandates would stifle innovation in a fast-changing industry.

The government has never aggressively tackled the television issue because of opposition from the consumer electronics lobby in Washington, experts say. In 1987, before televisions had swelled into such power hogs, Congress gave the Energy Department — which generally carries out the standards — the option of setting efficiency rules for TVs.

But industry opposition derailed an effort in the 1990s to use that authority, according to Steve Nadel of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. A more recent attempt to require home electronics to use no more than one watt of power in standby mode met the same fate. The federal government has moved forward on only two standards for electronics, covering battery chargers and external power supplies.

In the absence of federal action, a few states have moved on their own. The California Energy Commission just proposed new standards for televisions that would cut their power consumption in half by 2013. But that effort has set off a storm of protest from manufacturers and their trade group, the Consumer Electronics Association. (It is still expected to pass, in November.)

A spokesman for the industry said that government regulations could not keep up with the pace of technological change.

“Mandates ignore the fundamental nature of the industry that innovates due to consumer demand and technological developments, not regulations,” said Douglas Johnson, the senior director of technology policy at the association.

Mr. Johnson said that California’s limits on manufacturers, which he called arbitrary, might delay or even prohibit some features of new devices. Instead, he praised the government’s voluntary Energy Star program, which he says encourages efficiency without sacrificing innovation.

“Mandatory limits, such as we see in California, threaten to raise prices for consumers and reduce consumer choice,” he said.

Estimates vary regarding how much a mandatory efficiency program for gadgets would cost consumers. For some changes, like making sure devices draw minimal power in standby mode, experts say the cost may be only a few extra cents. At the other extreme, the most energy-efficient of today’s televisions can cost $100 more than the least energy-efficient. (That expense would be partly offset over time, of course, by lower power needs.)

Some types of home electronics are rated under Energy Star, a program that classifies products in more than 60 categories according to their energy consumption. But that program, while a boon to conscientious consumers who buy only the most efficient products, does not prevent the sale of wasteful devices and has not succeeded in driving them off the market.

The lack of regulation of gadgets is a notable contrast to the situation with appliances.

Congress adopted the nation’s first electrical efficiency standards in the 1980s, focusing initially on kitchen and other large appliances. That effort made some steep gains, particularly for refrigerators, which were once among the biggest power hogs in a typical home.

The federal effort lagged during the administration of George W. Bush, and the Energy Department missed a string of deadlines set by Congress. But the Obama administration has vowed to make maximum use of existing law, speeding up the adoption of 26 standards on a host of products that include microwave ovens and clothes dryers. Tougher lighting standards, embraced by both the Bush and Obama administrations, are due to take effect in coming years.

But Congress has never granted any administration the authority to set standards for power-hogging electronic gadgets like game consoles and set-top boxes. Even now, when both the administration and Congress are focused on the nation’s energy problems, no legislation is moving forward to tackle the issue.

Experts like Dan W. Reicher, who directs Google’s energy efforts, argue that the United States must do better, setting an example for the rest of the world.

“If we can’t improve the efficiency of simple appliances and get them into greater use,” Mr. Reicher said, “it’s hard to believe that we’ll succeed with difficult things like cleaning up coal-fired power plants.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/bu...fficiency.html





Battle Looms Over the Patriot Act
Charlie Savage

As Congress prepares to consider extending crucial provisions of the USA Patriot Act, civil liberties groups and some Democratic lawmakers are gearing up to press for sweeping changes to surveillance laws.

Both the House and the Senate are set to hold their first committee hearings this week on whether to reauthorize three sections of the Patriot Act that expire at the end of this year. The provisions expanded the power of the F.B.I. to seize records and to eavesdrop on phone calls in the course of a counterterrorism investigation.

Laying down a marker ahead of those hearings, a group of senators who support greater privacy protections filed a bill on Thursday that would impose new safeguards on the Patriot Act while tightening restrictions on other surveillance policies. The measure is co-sponsored by nine Democrats and an independent.

Days before, the Obama administration called on Congress to reauthorize the three expiring Patriot Act provisions in a letter from Ronald Weich, assistant attorney general for legislative affairs. At the same time, he expressed a cautious open mind about imposing new surveillance restrictions as part of the legislative package.

“We are aware that members of Congress may propose modifications to provide additional protection for the privacy of law abiding Americans,” Mr. Weich wrote, adding that “the administration is willing to consider such ideas, provided that they do not undermine the effectiveness of these important authorities.”

One of the witnesses Democrats have invited to testify at both hearings is Suzanne E. Spaulding, who has worked for lawmakers of both parties as a former top staffer on the House and Senate Intelligence committees. Mrs. Spaulding said she would urge Congress to tighten restrictions on when the F.B.I. could use the Patriot Act powers.

The rapid build-up of domestic intelligence authorities after the Sept. 11 attacks, she said, had overlooked “important safeguards,” which has resulted “in a greater likelihood at a minimum of the government mistakenly intruding into the privacy of innocent Americans, and at worst having a greater capability of abusing these authorities.”

Still, she acknowledged, the public record contains scant evidence that the F.B.I. has abused its powers under the three expiring Patriot Act sections. And it remains to be seen whether a majority in Congress will welcome undertaking a potentially heated debate over national security in the midst of already wrenching efforts to overhaul the nation’s health insurance system.

Republicans invited Kenneth L. Wainstein, a former assistant attorney general for national security for the Bush administration, to testify at both Patriot Act hearings.

“We have to be careful not to limit these tools to the point that they are no longer useful in fast-moving threat investigations,” Mr. Wainstein said. “There is an important place for oversight of national security tools, and that oversight is being exercised by Congress and by the federal judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

The first such provision allows investigators to get “roving wiretap” court orders authorizing them to follow a target who switches phone numbers or phone companies, rather than having to apply for a new warrant each time.

From 2004 to 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation applied for such an order about 140 times, Robert S. Mueller, the F.B.I. director, said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week.

The second such provision allows the F.B.I. to get a court order to seize “any tangible things” deemed relevant to a terrorism investigation — like a business’s customer records, a diary or a computer.

From 2004 to 2009, the bureau used that authority more than 250 times, Mr. Mueller said.

The final provision set to expire is called the “lone wolf” provision. It allows the F.B.I. to get a court order to wiretap a terrorism suspect who is not connected to any foreign terrorist group or foreign government.

Mr. Mueller said this authority had never been used, but the bureau still wanted Congress to extend it.

Several other lawmakers are expected to file their own bills addressing the Patriot Act and related surveillance issues in the next several weeks.

Many of the proposals under discussion involve small wording shifts whose impact can be difficult to understand, in part because the statutes are extremely technical and some govern technology that is classified.

But in general, civil libertarians and some Democrats have called for changes that would require stronger evidence of meaningful links between a terrorism suspect and the person whom investigators are targeting.

In the same way, some are proposing to use any Patriot Act extension bill to tighten when the F.B.I. may use “national security letters” — administrative subpoenas that allow counterterrorism agents to seize business records without obtaining permission from a judge. Agents use the device tens of thousands of times each year.

The Patriot Act section that expanded the F.B.I.’s power to issue those letters is not expiring, but they have become particularly controversial because the Justice Department’s inspector general issued two reports finding that F.B.I. agents frequently misused the device to obtain bank, credit card and telephone records.

Finally, some civil libertarians want lawmakers to revisit a June 2008 law in which Congress granted immunity from civil lawsuits to telecommunications companies that assisted President George W. Bush’s program of surveillance without warrants, and that adjusted federal statutes to bring them into alignment with a form of that program.

As a senator, Mr. Obama voted for that bill, infuriating civil libertarians.

The bill filed Sept. 17 — which is championed in particular by two Democratic senators, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Richard J. Durbin of Illinois — would repeal the immunity provision.

The measure would also tighten statutory restrictions to ban the “bulk collection” of phone calls coming into the United States from overseas. Some security specialists say that they doubt the national security agency has that capability today, but that it could become feasible as classified technology advances.

“Every single member of Congress wants to give our law enforcement and intelligence officials the tools they need to keep Americans safe,” Mr. Feingold said in a statement when filing the bill. “But with the Patriot Act up for reauthorization, we should take this opportunity to fix the flaws in our surveillance laws once and for all.”

But changes to the hard-fought 2008 legislation on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, could provoke fierce opposition from Senate conservatives. Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, strongly objected to revisiting that law.

“Our terror fighters need the tools and legal authorities to track terror suspects quickly, before they strike,” Mr. Bond said. “Unfortunately, this bill would render our critical warning system useless by unraveling the bipartisan FISA provisions Congress passed last year.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/us...20patriot.html





EU Funding 'Orwellian' Artificial Intelligence Plan to Monitor Public for "Abnormal Behaviour"

The European Union is spending millions of pounds developing "Orwellian" technologies designed to scour the internet and CCTV images for "abnormal behaviour".
Ian Johnston

A five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as "agents" to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers.

Its main objectives include the "automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence".

Project Indect, which received nearly £10 million in funding from the European Union, involves the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and computer scientists at York University, in addition to colleagues in nine other European countries.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a "sinister step" for any country, adding that it was "positively chilling" on a European scale.

The Indect research, which began this year, comes as the EU is pressing ahead with an expansion of its role in fighting crime, terrorism and managing migration, increasing its budget in these areas by 13.5% to nearly £900 million.

The European Commission is calling for a "common culture" of law enforcement to be developed across the EU and for a third of police officers – more than 50,000 in the UK alone – to be given training in European affairs within the next five years.

According to the Open Europe think tank, the increased emphasis on co-operation and sharing intelligence means that European police forces are likely to gain access to sensitive information held by UK police, including the British DNA database. It also expects the number of UK citizens extradited under the controversial European Arrest Warrant to triple.

Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect sounded "Orwellian" and raised serious questions about individual liberty.

"This is all pretty scary stuff in my book. These projects would involve a huge invasion of privacy and citizens need to ask themselves whether the EU should be spending their taxes on them," he said.

"The EU lacks sufficient checks and balances and there is no evidence that anyone has ever asked 'is this actually in the best interests of our citizens?'"

Miss Chakrabarti said: "Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society.

"It's dangerous enough at national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling."

According to the official website for Project Indect, which began this year, its main objectives include "to develop a platform for the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence".

It talks of the "construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p [peer-to-peer] networks as well as individual computer systems, building an internet-based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive".

York University's computer science department website details how its task is to develop "computational linguistic techniques for information gathering and learning from the web".

"Our focus is on novel techniques for word sense induction, entity resolution, relationship mining, social network analysis [and] sentiment analysis," it says.

A separate EU-funded research project, called Adabts – the Automatic Detection of Abnormal Behaviour and Threats in crowded Spaces – has received nearly £3 million. Its is based in Sweden but partners include the UK Home Office and BAE Systems.

It is seeking to develop models of "suspicious behaviour" so these can be automatically detected using CCTV and other surveillance methods. The system would analyse the pitch of people's voices, the way their bodies move and track individuals within crowds.

Project coordinator Dr Jorgen Ahlberg, of the Swedish Defence Research Agency, said this would simply help CCTV operators notice when trouble was starting.

"People usually don't start to fight from one second to another," he said. "They start by arguing and pushing each other. It's not that 'oh you are pushing each other, you should be arrested', it's to alert an operator that something is going on.

"If it's a shopping mall, you could send a security guard into the vicinity and things [a fight] maybe wouldn't happen."

Open Europe believes intelligence gathered by Indect and other such systems could be used by a little-known body, the EU Joint Situation Centre (SitCen), which it claims is "effectively the beginning of an EU secret service". Critics have said it could develop into "Europe's CIA".

The dossier says: "The EU's Joint Situation Centre (SitCen) was originally established in order to monitor and assess worldwide events and situations on a 24-hour basis with a focus on potential crisis regions, terrorism and WMD-proliferation.

"However, since 2005, SitCen has been used to share counter-terrorism information.

"An increased role for SitCen should be of concern since the body is shrouded in so much secrecy.

"The expansion of what is effectively the beginning of an EU 'secret service' raises fundamental questions of political oversight in the member states."

Superintendent Gerry Murray, of the PSNI, said the force's main role would be to test whether the system, which he said could be operated on a countrywide or European level, was a worthwhile tool for the police.

"A lot of it is very academic and very science-driven [at the moment]. Our budgets are shrinking, our human resources are shrinking and we are looking for IT technology that will help us five years down the line in reducing crime and combating criminal gangs," he said.

"Within this Project Indect there is an ethical board which will be looked at: is it permissible within the legislation of the country who may use it, who oversees it and is it human rights compliant."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...behaviour.html





Project ‘Gaydar’

At MIT, an experiment identifies which students are gay, raising new questions about online privacy
Carolyn Y. Johnson

It started as a simple term project for an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier.

Two students partnered up to take on the latest Internet fad: the online social networks that were exploding into the mainstream. With people signing up in droves to reconnect with classmates and old crushes from high school, and even becoming online “friends” with their family members, the two wondered what the online masses were unknowingly telling the world about themselves. The pair weren’t interested in the embarrassing photos or overripe profiles that attract so much consternation from parents and potential employers. Instead, they wondered whether the basic currency of interactions on a social network - the simple act of “friending” someone online - might reveal something a person might rather keep hidden.

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.

“When they first did it, it was absolutely striking - we said, ‘Oh my God - you can actually put some computation behind that,’ ” said Hal Abelson, a computer science professor at MIT who co-taught the course. “That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information - because you don’t have control over your information.”

The work has not been published in a scientific journal, but it provides a provocative warning note about privacy. Discussions of privacy often focus on how to best keep things secret, whether it is making sure online financial transactions are secure from intruders, or telling people to think twice before opening their lives too widely on blogs or online profiles. But this work shows that people may reveal information about themselves in another way, and without knowing they are making it public. Who we are can be revealed by, and even defined by, who our friends are: if all your friends are over 45, you’re probably not a teenager; if they all belong to a particular religion, it’s a decent bet that you do, too. The ability to connect with other people who have something in common is part of the power of social networks, but also a possible pitfall. If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t.

“Even if you don’t affirmatively post revealing information, simply publishing your friends’ list may reveal sensitive information about you, or it may lead people to make assumptions about you that are incorrect,” said Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights organization in San Francisco. “Certainly if most or many of your friends are of a particular religious or political or sexual category, others may conclude you are part of the same category - even if you haven’t said so yourself.”

The project, given the name “Gaydar” by the students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us. The applications run the gamut, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy or fat. The idea of making assumptions about people by looking at their relationships is not new, but the sudden availability of information online means the field’s powerful tools can now be applied to just about anyone.

For example, Murat Kantarcioglu, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Dallas, found he could make decent predictions about a person’s political affiliation. He and a student - who later went to work for Facebook - took 167,000 profiles and 3 million links between people from the Dallas-Fort Worth network. They used three methods to predict a person’s political views. One prediction model used only the details in their profiles. Another used only friendship links. And the third combined the two sets of data.

The researchers found that certain traits, such as knowing what groups people belonged to or their favorite music, were quite predictive of political affiliation. But they also found that they did better than a random guess when only using friendship connections. The best results came from combining the two approaches.

Other work, by researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park, analyzed four social networks: Facebook, the photo-sharing website Flickr, an online network for dog owners called Dogster, and BibSonomy, in which people tag bookmarks and publications. Those researchers blinded themselves to the profiles of half the people in each network, and launched a variety of “attacks” on the networks, to see what private information they could glean by simply looking at things like groups people belonged to, and their friendship links.

On each network, at least one attack worked. Researchers could predict where Flickr users lived; Facebook users’ gender, a dog’s breed, and whether someone was likely to be a spammer on BibSonomy. The authors found that membership in a group gave away a significant amount of information, but also found that predictions using friend links weren’t as strong as they expected. “Using friends in classifying people has to be treated with care,” computer scientists Lise Getoor and Elena Zheleva wrote.

The idea behind the MIT work, done in 2007, is as old as the adage that birds of a feather flock together. For years, sociologists have known of the “homophily principle” - the tendency for similar people to group together. People of one race tend to have spouses, confidants, and friends of the same race, for example. Jernigan and Mistree downloaded data from the Facebook network, choosing as their sample people who had joined the MIT network and were in the classes 2007-2011 or graduate students. They were interested in three things people frequently fill in on their social network profile: their gender, a category called “interested in” that they took to denote sexuality, and their friend links.

Using that information, they “trained” their computer program, analyzing the friend links of 1,544 men who said they were straight, 21 who said they were bisexual, and 33 who said they were gay. Gay men had proportionally more gay friends than straight men, giving the computer program a way to infer a person’s sexuality based on their friends.

Then they did the same analysis on 947 men who did not report their sexuality. Although the researchers had no way to confirm the analysis with scientific rigor, they used their private knowledge of 10 people in the network who were gay but did not declare it on their Facebook page as a simple check. They found all 10 people were predicted to be gay by the program. The analysis seemed to work in identifying gay men, but the same technique was not as successful with bisexual men or women, or lesbians.

“It’s just one example of how information could be inadvertently shared,” said Jernigan. “It does highlight risks out there.”

The researchers treated their data anonymously, never using names except to validate their predictions during data analysis. The only copy of the data is on an encrypted DVD they gave to a professor, and they said they got the approval of an ethical review board at MIT. The students, who have since graduated, discussed the paper with the Globe, but did not provide a copy of it because they are hoping to have it published in a journal.

Facebook spokesman Simon Axten could not respond to Jernigan and Mistree’s analysis, since it is not public, but pointed out that it is something that happens every day.

“In general, it’s not too surprising that someone might make inferences about someone else without knowing that person based on who the person’s friends are. This isn’t specific to Facebook and is entirely possible in the real world as well,” Axten wrote in an e-mail. “For example, if I know that someone has certain political views because that person makes them known in some way (say, by putting a bumper sticker on his car), and then I see the person walking out of a movie with friends I don’t know, I might assume those friends also have those political views.”

Privacy has become a growing and evolving concern as social networks learn how to deal with the fact that they provide a resource that brings people together, but also may endanger privacy in ways they did not anticipate. Social networks like Facebook already give people power over that information, with privacy features that allow people to hide their profiles, and even make their list of friends invisible to outsiders, as well as from select friends.

Because the features and services offered on social networks are new, they also evolve in response to user demand that may not always be anticipated by the company. In 2007, for example, Facebook introduced Beacon, a feature that broadcasted friends’ activities - such as buying movie tickets on a specific website - like targeted advertisements. That drew an angry response from users concerned about privacy, and prompted an apologetic blog posting from Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, along with modifications that meant people could opt out.

Computer scientists are identifying the ways in which anyone from a potential employer to an advertiser might be able to make informed guesses about a person. But there are limits to online privacy, and ultimately, say some experts, people will simply have to weigh the costs and benefits of living online.

“You can do damage to your reputation with social networking data, and other people can do damage to you. I do think that there’s been a very fast learning curve - people are quickly learning the dos and don’ts of Internet behavior,” said Jason Kaufman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University who is studying a set of Facebook data. “Potentially everything you ever do on the Internet will live forever. I like to think we’ll all learn to give each other a little more slack for our indiscretions and idiosyncrasies.”
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/id...acy/?page=full





Govt Review: No Privacy Problems in Cyber Security
Mark Sherman

The Justice Department has concluded that a beefed-up surveillance program that monitors federal employees' Internet traffic does not violate their rights or those of private citizens who communicate with them.

But the review of the Einstein 2 program was limited and leaves important questions unanswered, said the vice president of an Internet freedom watchdog group.

Einstein 2 is a second-generation automated program designed to detect cyber attacks on government computer networks.

The review, completed last month and released Friday, said the system addresses potential privacy concerns by warning employees when they log in that their communications may be monitored.

Such warnings "eliminate federal employees' legitimate expectations of privacy" on government computers, acting Assistant Attorney General David J. Barron wrote.

The review reaches the same conclusion as a study undertaken by the Justice Department during the Bush administration.

Jim Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said his group agrees with the report's conclusion, as far as it goes.

"If you send an e-mail to the government, you can't complain that they read it," Dempsey said, after reviewing the two reports.

But the memos do not address how Einstein works in practice, including whether it also monitors communications between private parties and if so, what it does with any information it collects, Dempsey said.

"Those questions haven't been fully answered and they deserve to be," he said.

The memos also do not deal with the next generation program, Einstein 3, which is intended to both detect and stop cyber attacks against government computers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...091802905.html





Now, an Invention Inventors Will Like
Steve Lohr

The world can be a rough place for independent inventors. They can often find themselves in court, battling big corporations, spending piles of money on lawyers and leaving it up to judges and juries to determine the value of their hard-won patents.

That could be changing. Wrangling over patents is beginning to move out of the courtroom and into the marketplace. A flurry of new companies and investment groups has sprung up to buy, sell, broker, license and auction patents. And venture capital and private equity is starting to pour into the field.

The arrival of these new business-minded players, according to patent experts and economists, could lead to a robust marketplace for patents, where value is determined not so much by court judgments but by buyers and sellers, perhaps, someday, like eBay.

And patents, after all, are ideas. Any market mechanisms that speed up the process of figuring out what a patent is worth should hasten the flow of ideas into the economy, accelerating the pace of innovation, policy experts say.

“What you want is a market that can promote innovation and reduce the huge costs of litigation,” said Robert P. Merges, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. “And that market is starting to take shape.”

A classic small-inventor firm, Zoltar Satellite Alarm Systems, is planning to sample that market by auctioning off its patents next month. Professor Merges and other patent experts point to it as an intriguing case to watch.

To date, the Zoltar story has been one of innovation, persistence and litigation. One founder of the company, Dr. Daniel Schlager, got his inspiration nearly two decades ago, crouched in medevac helicopters flying over Northern California. Locating people in distress was often difficult and costly, in time and lives. What was needed, he figured, was some sort of personal alarm device that transmitted a person’s location.

He sought out an old high-school classmate, William Baringer, a computer scientist and telecommunications expert. Using global positioning technology seemed promising, even though it was clunky and expensive at the time. They came up with a solution, and filed their first patent application in 1994 for a “personal alarm” device that used GPS technology. A year later, Zoltar was founded, and it filed for a patent on personal alarms with navigational receivers in cellphones that was granted in 1997.

Zoltar’s prospects got a lift after the Federal Communications Commission in 1996 required most wireless phones to be able to identify their location during 911 calls by 2001. The move opened a large potential market for Zoltar.

The two men designed and built prototypes, hired a patent licensing expert and showed their technology to cellphone equipment makers in the late 1990s in the hopes of licensing it. “It’s an industry with huge companies who crosslicense patents with each other and tell little guys to take a hike,” said Robert Megantz, a former general manager of licensing for Dolby and the consultant who worked with Zoltar in the late 1990s.

Eventually, Zoltar’s founders say, their ideas and designs started to turn up in big companies’ products. They raised money, mostly from friends and family, hired lawyers and went to court.

In 2001, Zoltar sued Qualcomm, the cellphone chip-set maker. After three years, a jury found that Zoltar’s patents were valid, but that Qualcomm was not infringing on them. The two sides settled in 2006.

In 2005, Zoltar sued several handset makers including Motorola, LG and Samsung, and settlements were reached with all of them by 2007.

By now, Zoltar has spent millions in legal fees, and collected millions in settlements. The company is ahead financially, Dr. Schlager said, but some of its 60 investors have not been paid back. Mr. Baringer remains a full-time consultant engineer, and Dr. Schlager is still an emergency-room physician, though he does not practice full time.

Today, the fast-growing makers of smartphones like Research in Motion, Apple, HTC and Nokia have no agreements with Zoltar. Dr. Schlager said he did not plan to sue them. Instead Zoltar will sell its patents in an auction, hoping for a faster, simpler and less risky payoff.

“We felt this was the way to go,” Dr. Schlager said. “It’s an option that wasn’t available a few years ago.”

The auction will be run by Pluritas, a patent broker based in San Francisco. Robert Aronoff, its managing director, says Zoltar has strong, court-tested patents that apply to a huge industry, at a time when there is an increasingly brisk market for intellectual property. “They are entering into this vastly changed marketplace with a hot property,” he said.

Whether the patents will prove to be a hot property is not clear. “They were certainly innovative over the years, but I do think there is a question here if the industry and technology has passed them by,” said Professor Merges of Berkeley.

Mr. Baringer insists this is not the case. “We continue to see our designs and concepts implemented every day” in smartphones, he said.

In an auction, of course, the patents’ value will be judged by bidders, which could be handset makers, but also patent-buying groups like Intellectual Ventures and Rational Patent Exchange and Allied Security Trust, a nonprofit organization.

Other players in the emerging patent marketplace are specialized investment banks, brokers and licensing companies including Acacia Technologies, Altitude Capital Partners, Intertrust, IPotential, Ocean Tomo, Rembrandt IP Management and Thinkfire. Venture capitalists are also interested in this field — Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for example, is backing Rational Patent Exchange, a company that buys reservoirs of patents in crucial fields and charges fees to corporate “members,” who participate as a defensive tactic to limit potential patent litigation costs.

The long-term vision at Rational, said Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner, is to become a marketplace or clearinghouse, perhaps the way Ascap is for copyrighted music, collecting fees and distributing payments to artists.

“The goal is to be a place where the patentholder is fairly compensated, but the corporate users have access to technology with minimal transaction costs,” Mr. Komisar said. “It has the potential to make innovation more efficient and less risky for both sides.”

But some patent experts question how far the marketplace model can be extended to patents. They note that patents are typically trickier to value than financial investments like stocks or bonds.

“Yes, you can move in the direction of trading markets for patents, but these are complicated assets that are individualized and hard to value,” said Josh Lerner, an economist at the Harvard business school. “They are more like works of art than stocks.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/te.../21patent.html





Freecom Outs First Ever USB 3.0 Hard Drive
John E. Dunn

After 8 years of success the USB 2.0 standard has begun its long journey into obsolescence. Dutch storage company Freecom has announced the first mainstream storage product based on ‘SuperSpeed' USB 3.0.

Buyers will be interested to hear that the new external Hard Drive XS 3.0 doesn't cost the earth at £99 (approx $160) for a 1TB drive, even though that excludes the £22.99 for a desktop PCI-bus controller necessary to make it work at its intended throughput. Laptop users can pair it with a £25.99 plug-in PC Card to achieve the same effect.

The company is also supplying drivers to make USB 3.0 work with Vista and XP. Windows 7 should have 'native' drivers from not long after launch, or users will hope so. Apple is not yet supported by the XS 3.0.

As upgrades to 3.5 inch external drives go, this one looks like a good deal. USB 3.0 boosts the theoretical data throughput of USB storage devices to 4.8Gbit/s from USB 2.0's now rather tardy-sounding 480Mbit/s. Even taking in account protocol overhead, that should still dramatically reduce data transfer times at a moment when larger files sizes are starting to become commonplace.

"We now can transfer a 5GB movie in just 38 seconds - it's unbelievably fast," said Freecom's managing director, Axel Lucassen. Assuming that USB 3.0 scales proportionately, USB 2.0 would have transferred the same file in six and a half minutes.

Lucassen also put his finger on another application that should be boosted by the arrival of USB 3.0, namely transparent encryption. "The Hard Drive XS 3.0 also outperforms the competition in terms of security. Our USB 3.0 solution will have high-speed hardware encryption with AES 256 bit - this is not only the fastest but also the safest storage solution on the market," he said.

Built-in encryption is a well-kept secret of many of Freecom's portable external hard drives, but the technology has struggled to fulfil its promise due to worries over throughput. External hard drives using integrated encryption have a deserved reputation for being slow, and the interface is one factor in that.

USB 3.0 is designed to have other advantages such as the ability to power more powerful devices straight off the SuperSpeed bus, getting round the need for a power adaptor for certain classes of device. Power draw is one of the reasons why external SATA hard drives have never taken off. USB 3.0 can also cut power drain when those devices are not in use.

More generally, to permeate every type of computing device, USB 3.0 will need native support at OS level. That is the point of USB of whatever generation. Users can plug in a range of devices and they will just work without extra software being a necessity. Having to load a driver for every USB interface or device is clearly no more than a stop-gap solution.

As far as storage goes, it's been the ‘3.0 week' all round, Seagate having announced the first SATA 3.0 hard drive designed to raise internal hard drive bus performance.
http://news.techworld.com/storage/32...30-hard-drive/





Sony Ericsson Unveils Motion-Activated Headphones
Ian Paul

Sony Ericsson may soon make the play button a thing of the past with its new motion-controlled earbuds. The handset-maker on Monday unveiled its MH907 headphones that allow you to play your music and answer phone calls just by inserting the buds into your ear or taking them out.

How It Works

To listen to music you simply put both earbuds in, and your music starts automatically. To pause, take out one earbud; removing both stops the music entirely. To answer the phone, do the same thing. If you're listening to music when a call comes in, you have to remove both earphones to stop the music, and then put one back in to answer a call.

Sony Ericsson says the MH907 headphones are activated by body contact, so you can't accidentally answer a phone or start your music when the headphones are in your pocket or purse.

Compatible Phones

If you were hoping to pick up a pair of these for use with your iPhone or other smartphone, you can forget it. The MH907 is only compatible with Sony Ericsson's own Fast Port-equipped phones -- Fast Port is SE's proprietary connector on the bottom of its phones. To determine which Sony Ericsson phones support Fast

Sony Ericsson didn't reveal any pricing information, but rumor has it these earbuds will set you back anywhere between $55 and $60. Available colors include yellow and white or titanium chrome. Other features include a built-in microphone, FM antenna, sound-blocking (the MH907's are not noise-cancelling headphones) and stereo sound.

Sony Ericsson says the MH907 headphones will be available worldwide later this week.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/17230...eadphones.html





The Assclown Offensive: How to Enrage the Church of Scientology
Julian Dibbell

In the evening of January 15, 2008, a 31-year-old tech consultant named Gregg Housh sat down at the computer and paid a visit to one of his favorite Web sites, the message board known as 4chan. Like most of the 5.9 million people who visit the site every month, Housh was looking for a few cheap laughs. Filled with hundreds of thousands of brief, anonymous messages and crude graphics uploaded by the site's mostly male, mostly twentysomething users, 4chan is a fountainhead of twisted, scatological, absurd, and sometimes brilliant low-brow humor. It was the source of the lolcat craze (affixing captions like "I Can Has Cheezburger?" to photos of felines), the rickrolling phenomenon (tricking people into clicking on links to Rick Astley's ghastly "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video), and other classic time-wasting Internet memes. In short, while there are many online places where you can educate yourself, seek the truth, and contemplate the world's injustices and strive to right them, 4chan is not one of them.

Yet today, Housh found 4chan grappling with an injustice no Internet-humor fan could ignore. Days earlier, a nine-minute video excerpt of an interview with Tom Cruise had appeared unauthorized on YouTube and other Web sites. Produced by the Church of Scientology, the clip showed Cruise declaring himself and his co-religionists to be, among other remarkable things, the "only ones who can help" at an accident site. For the online wiseasses of the world, the clip was a heaven-sent extra helping of the weirdness Tom Cruise famously showed on Oprah. But then, suddenly, it was gone: Scientologists had sent takedown notices to sites hosting the video, effectively wiping it from the Web.

Housh and other channers knew that Scientology had a long history of using copyright law to silence Internet-based critics. But this time, maybe because the church was stifling not just unflattering content but potential comedy gold, the tactic seemed to inflame the chortling masses. That evening, Housh logged in to an IRC channel frequented by like-minded chuckleheads and started talking with five others about the Cruise video. There was a sense that something must be done, but what? One of them logged out and posted a call to action on 4chan and some similar sites. By the middle of the night, 30 people had joined the chat. Within a couple of days, a consensus emerged: They would take down the main Scientology Web site with a massive distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS.

By the time the attacks started on January 18, Housh and many of the now 200 others on the chat channel were devoting every spare moment to the cause: "We were like, OK, we have 24 hours today. None of us need to sleep. Get your caffeine. What's the next step?"

Someone suggested they create a press release. Housh and four others broke off into a side channel to work on it while the DDoS attacks unfolded. They figured they should explain the goals of their spontaneous uprising, but what exactly were those goals? "We had no fricking clue what we were doing," Housh says. "We didn't mean to do it in the first place." They were still more of a riot than a movement—a faceless, leaderless mob growing daily as new adherents flocked in. None of them knew one another, even by pseudonyms, since as a rule there was only one username throughout the community. In fact, it was a standing in-joke on 4chan and related sites that their collective output was the product of a single hive-mind entity, known by that same username: Anonymous.

Instead of a press release, Housh and the others made a video introduction in the name and voice of the hive mind itself. Thrown together in a few days of furious collaboration, it appeared on YouTube on January 21, titled "Message to Scientology."

"Hello, leaders of Scientology. We are Anonymous," the clip began in a robotic, software-generated voice-over accompanied by stock footage of clouds rolling over desolate cityscapes. "Your campaigns of misinformation, your suppression of dissent, your litigious nature: All of these things have caught our eye," the voice explained. "For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind—and for our own enjoyment—we shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form." The message ended, as it had begun, on a pitch-perfect note of sci-fi comic book menace: "We are Legion," the robot voice intoned. "We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."

The anonymous campaign against Scientology, better known among its participants as Project Chanology, continues to this day. In the months since it launched "Message to Scientology," Project Chanology has employed a variety of tactics, including pickets, pranks, and propaganda that ranges from the purely informative to the ferociously satirical. It has waxed and waned and waned some more, and yet, improbably, it has endured, evolving into a peculiarly instructive case study in the dynamics of online protest. Project Chanology may well be the first movement to realize the kind of ad hoc, loosely coupled social activism that many have hoped the ad hoc, loosely coupled architecture of the Internet would engender. But it's also the first one founded on the principles of the most obnoxious innovation that architecture ever produced: trolling.

To troll is to post deliberately incendiary content to a discussion forum or other online community—say, kitten-torture fantasies on a message board for cat lovers—for no other reason than to stir up chaos and outrage. Trolling is (for the troll, at least) a source of amusement. But for Anonymous it has long been more like a way of life. Study the pages of the Encyclopedia Dramatica wiki, where the vast parallel universe of Anonymous in-jokes, catchphrases, and obsessions is lovingly annotated, and you will discover an elaborate trolling culture: Flamingly racist and misogynist content lurks throughout, all of it calculated to offend, along with links to eye-gougingly horrific images of mutilation, sexual perversity, and, yes, kittens in blenders. Here, too, are chronicled the many troll invasions, or "raids," that Anonymous has inflicted on unsuspecting Web communities—like the Epilepsy Foundation's online forums, which were attacked with flashing, seizure-inducing animations.

So, after the Tom Cruise video vanished and that first call to arms went out, the nameless multitudes of Anonymous—steeped in the theory and practice of trolling—were well prepared to answer it, even if some weren't convinced that they were up to the task. "Anonymous will never take down a massive multimillion-dollar corporation like Scientology," one Channer wrote. "You're not shutting down a fucking corporation with prank phone calls."

Indeed, the inherent challenges faced by an activist movement made up of trolls emerged almost as soon as Project Chanology got under way. In the IRC war rooms where the DDoS attacks were being coordinated, one Anonymous member redirected the fire of an entire raid onto what he said was a hidden Scientology IP address but turned out to be the Web site of a primary school in the Netherlands. A few days later, a middle-aged couple in Stockton, California, misidentified as Scientology counterhackers, woke in the middle of the night to harassing phone calls and death threats.

As news of the raid filtered out into the world beyond Anonymous, these blunders didn't do much for its public image. Not that Anonymous tended to care what others thought. In trolling, as a rule, the more people you piss off, the better; what matters are the lulz—the laughs you get from trashing someone's peace of mind. But this was a new game, in which public opinion seemed to matter, and so far Anonymous wasn't on top of it. A reflective mood seeped into the IRC channels; fingers were pointed. One participant said they could have done a lot more if they "weren't just a bunch of unorganized brats."

With the lulz wearing thin, Project Chanology was approaching that moment when a typical raid calls it quits. What Anonymous did next, however, was unprecedented in the annals of not just trolling but online activism in general: It executed a major midcourse correction. The site hacking stopped, and a new tactic was announced: A worldwide "RL raid" (real-life protest) on Scientology's offices would take place on February 10, 2008. When the day arrived, thousands of Anonymous members, many with their faces obscured by scarves or Guy Fawkes masks, turned out in scores of cities to protest lawfully and nonviolently (depending, of course, on your definition of nonviolence: In London, an Anonymous crowd carrying boom boxes subjected staffers in a Scientology building to a day of real-life rickrolling). A second protest followed in March, with numbers matching the original.

Now looking less like a swarm and more like a network, Project Chanology moved onto message boards of its own. Housh and others set up a site called Why We Protest, which has become a hub for planning and discussion, ruled by the time-honored hacker protocols of rough consensus. "It's the hive mind at work," Housh says. A new idea or call to action can come from anyone but is vetted by everyone: "If it's bad, we laugh and make fun of you because that's what we do," Housh says. "But if it's good, it sticks." And as the movement's tactics evolved, so did its goals, narrowing from the destruction of Scientology to more realistic aims, focused on broadly exposing the church's alleged fraud and abuse.

Meanwhile, Scientology was hitting back. Working with law enforcement, the church pressed charges where it could. A New Jersey 18-year-old named Dmitriy Guzner was indicted for taking part in the Chanology DDoS attacks; he pleaded guilty this May. Housh was barred from coming within 500 feet of Boston-area Scientology buildings for a year (he cheerfully attends demonstrations in other cities now). But on their own, Scientologists have mounted a more personal countercampaign. Volunteer "handlers" have taken it upon themselves to monitor the actions of Anonymous, standing amid protesters and using video cameras to record anything incriminating or embarrassing. Private detectives and law enforcement have named hundreds of the most active Chanologists, lawyers have sent warning letters not only to their homes but also to their parents, and Anons claim that church members have papered their neighborhoods with flyers identifying them by name and face as members of a "terrorist organization."

"They are a terrorist organization," says Tommy Davis, a church spokesperson. "Their intention is to instill fear and incite hate. There is no other explanation." Leaning back into a cushioned chair in a suite of the church's posh Celebrity Centre in Hollywood, Davis holds in his lap a 2-inch-thick binder of Anonymous-related material. He has just finished reciting a litany of the bomb threats, death threats, arson threats, and acts of vandalism that were directed at Scientology churches and employees, including himself, in the first year of Project Chanology's existence. But he claims that, thanks largely to the church's vigorous response, the protest movement is "in its death throes."

If Chanology is dying, however, it's being awfully leisurely about it: After an early falloff, the numbers at the monthly protests have been roughly stable. The question, it seems, is no longer how a half-baked mob of Internet jackasses ever thought they could take on an organization as powerful and vindictive as Scientology but how Scientology could have failed to squash them long ago. And the answer may be that the church is incapable of following one simple bit of Internet wisdom: Don't Feed the Trolls. By taking Anonymous as seriously as it has, Scientology has nurtured the one thing Chanology depends on above all: the lulz.

That's not to say Anonymous hasn't faced some grave opposition, just that its toughest foe has turned out to be not Scientology but Anonymous itself.

It was early afternoon on January 8, 2009, almost a year after the birth of Project Chanology, when 18-year-old Anonymous member Agent Pubeit emerged from a subway station in New York City's Times Square clothed in nothing but a ski mask, shorts, sneakers, and surgical gloves. The temperature was just above freezing, but it's doubtful Pubeit felt the cold: A thick layer of petroleum jelly covered his exposed upper body, and this was thickened further by a generous admixture of pubic hairs and toenail clippings.

Pubeit was not alone. As he walked along the crowded sidewalk toward his destination—a Church of Scientology center on nearby West 46th Street—he was filmed by an accomplice with a video camera, and the two were in radio contact with more coconspirators. As Pubeit got closer to his target, the remote team unleashed a rolling barrage of distractions on the Scientology center, tying up phone lines with prank calls and faxes. In the midst of this, Pubeit burst into the center's reception area and jogged around for a moment or two, leaving traces of hairy lube on whatever surfaces he could get close to. From there he proceeded to a nearby Scientology management office. Just inside the doorway, he found church materials loaded onto a cart, which he mounted for a few seconds of simulated man-cart love before fleeing into the city's streets.

"Greasy Vandal in Hate Crime vs. Scientology," read the New York Daily News headline. Two weeks later, Davis was citing the stunt as proof that Project Chanology is no more legitimate a protest movement than the KKK. "To have a man slathered in Vaseline and covered in pubic hair and toenail clippings storm in and begin desecrating a place of worship," Davis said with quiet outrage. "That puts it in perspective."

But the main target of Operation Slickpubes, frankly, wasn't Scientology at all. It was Chanology. Or more precisely, it was anyone in Chanology's ranks who had forgotten this was a movement created by and for trolls. Since the beginning of the campaign, there'd been a tension between its "lulzfags," who held that Anonymous must have no higher cause than its own cruel amusement, and the "moralfags," for whom the cause of fighting an oppressive cult was an end in itself. (Neither term is necessarily an insult. In channer culture, the "fag" tag can be pejorative, neutral, or practically a term of endearment.) The tensions deepened after publicity attracted an influx of people unfamiliar with the rules of Anonymous. Not that these "newfags" turned the movement into a Boy Scout cookout. (Some Chanologists who asked to remain unidentified for this article said it was less for fear of Scientology than of their fellow Anons: "They'll call us 'egofags' and fuck with us relentlessly.") But Chanology's drift toward respectability has been more than some Anonymous traditionalists can bear.

Enter Operation Slickpubes, which, according to Michael Vitale, one of the New York City Anons who instigated the prank, was aimed squarely at reversing that drift. Anonymous members, he says, are "the assholes of the Internet" and should play that up, because ultimately the movement survives on attention—from the media, from potential recruits—and only one thing is sure to keep the attention coming: Anonymous' willingness to undertake what Vitale calls "any sort of motherfuckery." For him, it's not that the movement's ethical objectives don't matter. It's that taking them too seriously may, paradoxically, kill Project Chanology before it has a chance to attain them.

"What is the public fascination with our war?" Vitale asks. In other words, why should anyone care about a struggle between a few thousand masked rickrollers and the adherents of a religion founded by a sci-fi writer? "It isn't because you have one group that's right and one group that's wrong. It's because you have two groups that are nut jobs for different reasons, and they are fighting each other in the streets." If Vitale is right, Chanology's greatest strength may be the other conflict—the tension between the pursuit of justice and the pursuit of lulz.

That is, of course, if that conflict doesn't end up being its fatal flaw.

On a Tuesday last winter, a Chicago Zoning Council committee met in a hearing room at City Hall. Among the attendees were representatives of the Church of Scientology seeking permission to build a new facility in the South Loop neighborhood. Opponents of the zoning change were also present, including seven Anons, decidedly out of their element. They had hoped to testify while masked but were informed that it was against the rules.

Their testimony was hit or miss, but mostly miss. They mumbled, they hemmed, they hawed. They tried to raise the church's record as a building owner in other locales, but the committee chair said it had no bearing on the question at hand. The zoning change passed.

The Anons filed out of the hearing room in an unusually contemplative mood and were surrounded instantly by gleeful Scientologists. Some church members were familiar to the Anons from previous encounters at Chanology protests, where they'd stood duty as impassive, cam-wielding handlers surrounded by the protestors' joyously obnoxious placards and chants. The Scientologists seemed delighted to be dishing out the smack this time around.

"Need a fire extinguisher?" one asked.

"For what?" an Anon replied tentatively.

"Down in flames!" the handler crowed.

All in all, the episode was not a bucket of lulz. It foregrounded a question that the typical troll need never concern himself with but that the troublemakers of Project Chanology must sooner or later confront: What meaningful difference are their actions making?

The Chicago zoning fight is not the only arena in which Chanology has groped toward conventional political activism. The revocation of Scientology's US tax-exempt status has long been a central goal of the movement. But efforts on this front remain nascent. Meanwhile, though Anons are fond of saying that their protests and propaganda have already hurt Scientology, this is no easier to verify than the church's claim that business has never been better. "Scientology has expanded more in the past year than the past five years," Davis says, "more in the past five years than the past five decades."

But if Project Chanology fails to upend Scientology in particular, it may yet change the landscape of political activism in general. Already some Anons are applying the Chanology formula to other targets. Operation Didgeridie and Project Cntroll are gearing up to troll the Australian and Chinese governments, respectively, for their Internet censorship policies. And when post-election unrest broke out in Iran in June, Why We Protest dedicated a whole wing of its forums to online activism in support of the Iranian opposition.

Then again, Chanology may turn out to be the sort of thing that can't be duplicated. It's unlikely that Anonymous will ever face an opponent more exquisitely matched than Scientology—a strictly disciplined, hierarchical organization founded on the exact reproduction of relentlessly earnest, fiercely copyright-protected words. Here the assclowns of Anonymous found the perfect antithesis of their own radically authorless, furiously remixed, compulsively unserious culture. Scientology was a target so ideal that there is now almost no point in looking for another. Perhaps this, then, is how Project Chanology will be remembered: not as the first of a new breed of online protest movements, but as the last of the epic trolls.
http://www.wired.com/culture/culture...0/mf_chanology





For Writing Software, a Buddy System
Patricia R. Olsen

I’M a programmer at Hashrocket, a Web development firm in Florida. Our style of working is called pair programming, which has been popular for years in some software design companies. Two of us sit side by side at a computer workstation to develop a program that is the backbone of an interactive Web site.

One person does the actual writing, or coding, and the other person checks it, corrects it and offers suggestions as it’s being written. Programmers, or software developers, refer to these roles as driver and navigator.

It might sound as if the person writing the programming code would find it distracting to work this way, but it’s not. It’s a collaborative effort, and that’s the beauty of it. Proponents believe it saves a company time and money. Bugs can be found more quickly, and the code is written more efficiently when two people create it simultaneously. In this case, two heads are definitely better than one.

Consider the game “Where’s Waldo,” in which a cartoon character is hidden in an intricate design. Most people can eventually find Waldo after poring over the drawing. Similarly, when programmers check code for errors, it takes time to examine the logic and find mistakes.

Now imagine if someone sat next to the artist from the very beginning. Obviously, the onlooker should be able to find Waldo more easily. The character would stand out. In the same way, one programmer looking for errors in code as another writes it can follow the logic in real time. Ideally, the navigator immediately catches anything that is incorrect. My colleagues agree with this analogy.

Part of our job is to attend design meetings with new clients so we understand what they want, but when we’re developing software programs we work in pairs 100 percent of the time. Teams are assigned at our daily 9 a.m. meeting.

We try to work together at least one full day and we often spend several days together. We switch roles, too, and we constantly change partners, which is called promiscuous pairing. People have different talents, and this way the expertise is spread around.

To me, pair programming is the only way to work. Writing code is not only scientific, it’s also a creative process. I get writer’s block sometimes. To be able to collaborate with someone is great.

When senior and junior developers are paired, junior programmers might feel intimidated. If this happens, the junior programmer might be asked to start as the driver, which may encourage the senior person to become a better teacher. It’s also a way to bring junior programmers up to speed quickly, because they benefit from the more senior employee’s knowledge.

When programmers interview for a job here, we ask that they spend a week with us, and we pair them with as many people as possible. Besides checking their skill level, we want to see if we could all work side by side with them for weeks at a time and if they’re a fit with the company. It gives them a chance to check us out, too.

Our programmers exhibit idiosyncrasies that might be found in any workplace, such as one person leaving a work area messy, and the germaphobe who disinfects everything. On certain days, people may not be the best partners, like the day I was preoccupied because my dog was at the vet. If that occurs, the other person can usually snap their partner back to center line.

People working so close have occasional personal conflicts, too. Hashrocket provides our workspace, office furniture, mouse pads and anything else we need, but we use our own laptops.

Once two of our programmers had a falling out over a keyboard function. The navigator wanted to remap the caps lock key as a control key for when they switched roles. But it was the driver’s laptop, and he didn’t like that idea. When the driver went to the restroom, the navigator changed the key anyway, and the two had a disagreement. They came to terms when the navigator agreed that the person who owns the laptop gets to decide the computer key function.

The ability to pair program all the time was a selling point for my taking this job. Previously, I worked for an I.T. group at a government agency in another state. I tried to get buy-in for pair programming there, but we were allowed to do it only occasionally because of the perceived drawbacks. State governments have tight budgets, so it was a hard sell. Some people can’t believe it saves money for two people to do a job one person can do.

THIS style of programming all day every day is exhausting, but it makes me more disciplined. It’s easy for a programmer working alone to give in to distractions — to check e-mail, Twitter or Facebook, for example — when confronted with a problem. We’re on social media a lot anyway, because we need to stay current, but many people take five-minute breaks every half hour, and that’s the recommended time for accessing Twitter or the Internet.

That schedule of working 25 minutes and then taking a 5-minute break is a time management technique called Pomodoro, which means “tomato” in Italian. Every once in a while a programmer won’t stop after 25 minutes and we’ll hear someone say, “Respect the tomato.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/jobs/20pre.html





French Court Hands GPL Victory
Sam Varghese

What's more, the ruling (PDF in French) came following a submission by a user, not the copyright holder, according to a statement by the Free Software Foundation's branch in France.

Last week, the Paris Court of Appeals decided that a company named Edu4 violated the GPL by distributing binary copies of VNC, a remote desktop access application, and denying users access to the source code.

The lawsuit was brought by an organisation dedicated to education, Association pour la Formation Professionnelle des Adultes (AFPA).

In the year 2000, Edu4 was given the job of providing new computer equipment for the AFPA's classroom use.

When AFPA found that VNC was provided with the hardware, it asked for the source code. But, despite asking again and again, and even attempting to mediate the situation with the help of the FSF France, Edu4 just refused to provide the source.

Later it came to light that Edu4 had removed the copyright and licence notices in the software, something that violates the terms of the GPL as well.

With no other way of gaining recourse, AFPA filed a suit in 2002 to protect its rights and obtain the source code.

"We've long said the GNU GPL is enforceable, and of course we're pleased to see another court reaffirm that fact," said Loic Dachary, president of FSF France.

"But what makes this ruling unique is the fact that the suit was filed by a user of the software, instead of a copyright holder.

"It's a commonly held belief that only the copyright holder of a work can enforce the license's terms - but that's not true in France. People who received software under the GNU GPL can also request compliance, since the license grants them rights from the authors."

The FSF's attorney, Olivier Hugot, said: "This decision should raise awareness about free software licensing for everyone involved with it.

"Companies distributing the software have been given a strong reminder that the license's terms are enforceable under French law. And users in France can rest assured that, if need be, they can avail themselves of the legal system to see violations addressed and their rights respected."
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/28000/1090/





A $1 Million Research Bargain for Netflix, and Maybe a Model for Others
Steve Lohr

Even the near-miss losers in the Netflix million-dollar-prize competition seemed to have few regrets.

Netflix, the movie rental company, announced on Monday that a seven-man team was the winner of its closely watched three-year contest to improve its Web site’s movie recommendation system. That was expected, but the surprise was in the nail-biter finish.
The losing team, as it turned out, precisely matched the performance of the winner, but submitted its entry 20 minutes later, just before the final deadline expired.

Under contest rules, in the event of a tie, the first team past the post was the winner. “That 20 minutes was worth a million dollars,” Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, said at a news conference in New York.

Yet the scientists and engineers on the second-place team, and the employers who gave many of them the time and freedom to compete in the contest, were hardly despairing.

Arnab Gupta, chief executive of Opera Solutions, a data analytics company based in New York, took a small group of his leading researchers off other work for two years. “We’ve already had a $10 million payoff internally from what we’ve learned,” Mr. Gupta said.

Working on the contest helped the researchers come up with improved statistical analysis and predictive modeling techniques that his firm has used with clients in fields like marketing, retailing and finance, he said. “So for us, the $1 million prize was secondary, almost trivial.”

Indeed, since it began in October 2006, the Netflix contest was significant less for the prize money than as a test case for new ideas about how to efficiently foster innovation in the Internet era — notably, offering prizes as an incentive and encouraging online collaboration to tap minds worldwide.

The lessons of the Netflix contest could extend well beyond improving movie picks. The researchers from around the world were grappling with a huge data set — 100 million movie ratings — and the challenges of large-scale modeling, which can be applied across the fields of science, commerce and politics.

The prize model is increasingly being tried on work like new science and freelance projects in design and advertising. The X Prize Foundation, for example, is offering multimillion-dollar prizes for path-breaking advances in genomics, alternative energy cars and private space exploration.

InnoCentive is a marketplace for business projects, where companies post challenges — often in areas like product development or applied science — and workers or teams compete for cash payments or prizes offered by the companies. A start-up, Genius Rocket, runs a similar online marketplace mainly for marketing, advertising and design projects.

“The great advantage of the prize model is that it moves work away from the realm of the beauty contest to being performance-oriented,” said Michael Schrage, research fellow at the Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s the results produced that matters.”

The emerging prize economy, according to some labor market analysts, does carry the danger of being a further shift in the balance of power toward the buyers — corporations — and away from most workers.

Thousands of teams from more than 100 nations competed in the Netflix prize contest. And it was a good deal for Netflix. “You look at the cumulative hours and you’re getting Ph.D.’s for a dollar an hour,” Mr. Hastings said in an interview.

Netflix, Mr. Hastings said, did not do a crisp cost-benefit analysis of its investment in the contest. But several crucial techniques garnered from the contest have been folded into the company’s in-house movie recommendation software, Cinematch, and customer retention rates have improved slightly. Better recommendations, Netflix says, enhance customer satisfaction.

“We strongly believe this has been a big winner for Netflix,” Mr. Hastings said.

The prize winner was a team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel, calling itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos. The group was actually a merger of teams that came together late in the contest.

In late June, the team finally surpassed the threshold to qualify for the prize by doing at least 10 percent better than Cinematch in accurately predicting the movies customers would like, as measured against actual ratings. Under the contest rules, that set off a 30-day period in which other teams could try to beat them.

That, in turn, prompted a wave of mergers among competing teams, who joined forces at the last minute to try to top the leader. In late July, Netflix declared the contest over, and its online leader board showed two teams had passed the 10 percent threshold: BellKor and the Ensemble, a global alliance with some 30 members.

Netflix said the contest was too close to call, and the leader board showed a slight edge to the Ensemble. However, the teams’ software had to go through two data sets — one public, which was the basis for the leader board, and another hidden one, which determined the outcome of the contest.

The second data set was there to ensure that the winning solution really was the best at making better movie recommendations in general, and was not just tailored to get the best score from the public data set.

Win or lose, researchers agreed that they entered the contest in good part to get access to the Netflix data. “It was incredibly alluring to work on such a large, high-quality data set,” said Joe Sill, an independent consultant and machine-learning expert who was a member of the Ensemble.

Chris Volinsky, a member of BellKor, who is a scientist at AT&T Research, said Netflix “made a brilliant move by realizing that there was a research community out there that worked on these kinds of models and was starving for data.

“Netflix had the data, but only a handful of people working on the problem.”

Netflix was so pleased with the results of its first contest that it announced a second one on Monday. The new contest will present contestants with demographic and behavioral data, including renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes, genre ratings and previously chosen movies — but not ratings. Contestants will then have to predict which movies those people will like.

Unlike the first challenge, the contest will have no specific accuracy target. Instead, $500,000 will be awarded to the team in the lead after the first six months, and $500,000 to the leader after 18 months.

The winners of the first contest said the money would be split seven ways, according to a formula they declined to disclose. The amounts each received, they said, would certainly help with a car, house payments or children’s college educations — but were not life-changing.

When asked if he planned to take on the second Netflix prize, Bob Bell, a scientist at AT&T Research, said, “I like the notion, but I think I’m too tired.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/te...22netflix.html





In Wake of Disney-Marvel Deal, Cartoonist’s Heirs Seek to Reclaim Rights
Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes

The Walt Disney Company’s proposed $4-billion acquisition of Marvel Entertainment may come with a headache: a brand-new superhero copyright dispute.

Heirs to the comic-book artist Jack Kirby, who has been credited as the co-creator of characters and stories behind Marvel mainstays like the “X-Men” and “Fantastic Four,” among many others, last week sent 45 notices of copyright termination to Marvel, Disney, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures and others who have been making films and other forms of entertainment based on the characters.

The legal notices expressed an intent to regain copyrights to some creations as early as 2014, according to a statement from Toberoff & Associates, a Los Angeles firm that helped win a court ruling last year returning a share of the copyright in Superman to heirs of the character’s co-creator, Jerome Siegel.

Reached by telephone on Sunday, Mr. Toberoff declined to elaborate on the statement. A spokeswoman for Marvel had no immediate comment. Disney said in a statement, “The notices involved are an attempt to terminate rights seven to 10 years from now, and involve claims that were fully considered in the acquisition.” Fox, Sony, Paramount and Universal had no comment.

Marvel shareholders must still approve the sale of the company to Disney, which is already battling criticism from some Wall Street analysts that Marvel comes with too messy an array of rights agreements. The worry is that Disney will have a hard time immediately executing a coordinated exploitation of Marvel’s various brands.

Sony has the film rights to Spider-Man in perpetuity, for instance, while Fox has the X-Men and Fantastic Four. Paramount has a distribution agreement for Marvel’s next few self-produced movies, including a second “Iron Man” film. Meanwhile, Hasbro has certain toy rights and Universal holds Florida theme park rights to Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, among other characters.

Mr. Kirby, who died in 1994, worked with the writer-editor Stan Lee to create many of the characters that in the last decade have become some of the most valuable in a Hollywood that hungers for super-heroes. Mr. Kirby was involved with “The Incredible Hulk,” “The Mighty Thor,” “Iron Man,” “Spider-Man,” and “The Avengers,” among others.

The window for serving notice of termination on the oldest of the properties opened several years ago, and will remain open for some time under the law. But Disney’s announced purchase gives a new reason for anyone with claims on Marvel to stake out a position.

Under copyright law, the author or his heirs can begin a process to regain copyrights a certain period of years after the original grant. If Mr. Kirby’s four children were to gain the copyright to a co-created character, they might become entitled to a share of profits from films or other properties using it. They might also find themselves able to sell rights to certain characters independently of Marvel, Disney, or the various studios that have licensed the Marvel properties for their hit films.

In July, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that Warner Brothers and its DC Comics unit had not violated rights of the Siegel heirs in handling internal transactions related to Superman, but an earlier ruling had already granted the heirs a return of their share in the copyright. In the late 1990s, Mr. Toberoff represented a television writer, Gilbert Ralston, who sued Warner over the rights to the film “Wild, Wild West.” The suit was ultimately settled.

Copyright issues have become increasingly difficult for Hollywood, as it continues to trade on characters and stories that were created decades ago, but are now subject to deadlines and expiration dates under federal copyright law.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...aim-rights/?hp





‘Meatballs’ Is the Box-Office Choice
Julie Bloom

A big glop of spaghetti fell on the heads of Matt Damon, Jennifer Anniston and Megan Fox at the weekend box office. “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” left, an animated adaptation of the children’s book, sold about $30.1 million in tickets at North American theaters, a robust total fueled partly by a marketing campaign involving images of raining noodles. Imax and 3-D screenings also boosted sales. The $90 million “Meatballs” trampled three star-driven pictures. “The Informant!,” a $22 million dramedy directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Mr. Damon, was a weak second with about $10.5 million in sales, according to box-office tracking services. A holdover from the previous week, “Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All by Myself,” was third with about $10.1 million (and a cumulative total for Lionsgate of $37.9 million). Ms. Anniston and Aaron Eckhart, starring in the $18 million “Love Happens” from Universal and Relativity Media, were fourth with about $8.5 million. Ms. Fox, from the “Transformers” movies, failed as a solo draw. Her “Jennifer’s Body,” a horror comedy written by Diablo Cody and produced by Fox for about $16 million, opened fifth with an estimated $6.8 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/mo...LSIST_BRF.html





The Godfather: 'Nobody Enjoyed One Day of it’

Just like the film, the making of 'The Godfather’ was an ugly story of fear and dysfunction.
Philip Horne

What was the formula that made The Godfather one of the most successful films of all time? Surely it would take an unusually harmonious combination of talents working in concert, a rare balance of commercial entertainment and artistic challenge, a run of luck those involved couldn’t miss.

But all wasn’t plain sailing on Francis Ford Coppola’s film in 1972. It was nominated for 11 Oscars, winning three, and on its $6 million budget grossed $101million for Paramount within 18 weeks of release. As the film gets a welcome cinematic re-release in a beautiful restoration, it is timely to dive into the swirling mists of legend and recall how far it was from a sure thing.

“It was the most miserable film I can think of to make,” declares its producer, Al Ruddy. “Nobody enjoyed one day of it.” Coppola agrees: “It was just non-stop anxiety and wondering when I was going to get fired.” The novel by Mario Puzo could easily not have been written: eight publishers passed on the outline for a would-be best-seller pitched by a middle-ranking, mid-forties writer with a bad gambling habit and big debts. Only bumping into a friend had led to his actually writing The Godfather. Its 67 weeks topping the New York Times best-seller list surprised everyone.

Paramount bought an option when Puzo had only written 100 pages, for a mere $12,500, rising to $50,000 if the novel was filmed. But maybe – if we’re to credit Paramount’s head of production Robert Evans – Paramount very nearly didn’t acquire it. There was a bidding war: they were “one day away from Burt Lancaster buying The Godfather, and Burt wanted to play the Don”.

Coppola was no one’s first choice. A pack of others were considered: Arthur Penn, Peter Yates, Costa-Gavras, Otto Preminger, Richard Brooks, Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann, Franklin J Schaffner, Richard Lester… All said no. Finally, Evans decided Mafia movies hadn’t worked because, “they were usually written by Jews, directed by Jews and acted by Jews” – and the only Italian-American director with any track record was the up-and-coming Coppola. He almost said no, too, thinking Puzo’s opus “a popular, sensational novel, pretty cheap stuff”.

But Coppola relented, partly because his company American Zoetrope was broke. Once aboard, he saw in this blockbuster the profound story of “a king, almost Greek – a king with three sons”. Puzo liked him. Henceforth, though, everything was a fight. The studio wanted to keep costs down by setting the film in present-day Kansas City; Coppola refused, demanding and getting a $5million budget. He demanded an 80 day shooting schedule; Paramount gave him only 53.

Then there was the question of who would play Don Vito Corleone? Paramount had sounded out Anthony Quinn; but also on their list were Laurence Olivier – who was ill – George C Scott, Jean Gabin, Vittorio De Sica, John Huston, Paul Scofield, Victor Mature… Coppola wanted Marlon Brando, whose name was then dirt with the studios due to unreliability and a string of flops. Paramount president Stan Jaffe declared, “Marlon Brando will never appear in this picture”, even forbidding further discussion. But Coppola pleaded to the bosses that Brando was the greatest living screen actor, and finally, extravagantly, collapsed on the carpet before their eyes. They thought he’d had a heart attack brought on by an excess of sincerity and gave in, though on tough terms.

The rest of the casting was problematic, too. Paramount wanted Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal as Michael, the Don’s son; happily the Redford deal fell through. Rod Steiger wanted to do it. Warren Beatty turned it down. Martin Sheen, David Carradine and Dean Stockwell were considered. Even Robert De Niro tested for it: the footage that survives is remarkable. Only Coppola saw Al Pacino’s depths; casting director Fred Roos found him “this sort of runty little guy”. Coppola prevailed. Pacino was paid only $35,000, but came through.

James Caan, already a name, was tested for Michael, but was best suited for the part he got, Sonny. John Cazale as Fredo was perfect. For Robert Duvall’s part as the consigliere Tom Hagen, both John Cassavetes and Peter Falk approached Coppola. Coppola objected to casting his sister, Talia Shire, as Connie Corleone, yelling at their mother that Shire was too pretty. But she stayed in, and it became a family film: he eventually included his parents, and even his three-week-old daughter, Sofia.

The shoot itself was a nightmare. “My history with The Godfather was very much the history of someone in trouble,” says Coppola. He knew early on “they were not happy with what I had done…”, and expected to be fired at any moment. In the men’s room he heard crew members talking: about the film – “What a piece of junk!”; and about him – “This guy doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Coppola was constantly undermined. Indeed, Elia Kazan was lined up as a possible replacement. Coppola “kept dreaming that Kazan would arrive on the set and would say to me, 'Uh, Francis, I’ve been asked to…’”. But Brando nobly said he would walk off the picture if Coppola was fired. Pacino, too, expected the boot: “I always felt that I still had to win these people over.” He was convinced “I was out – and then the Sollozzo scene came”. They loved his intensity as he takes bloody revenge in that great sequence in the restaurant.

Brando came good. Coppola notes that “without exception, every one of his crazy ideas I used turned out to be a terrific moment”.

Coppola wanted to fill the film with “hundreds and hundreds of interesting specifics”, one example being the cat Brando cradles in the first scene. It wandered onto the set, Coppola befriended it and settled it on Brando’s lap.

Further disagreements abounded. Evans thought it unnecessary to shoot the Don’s death scene, now one of the best-remembered moments of the film. Cinematographer Gordon Willis thought Coppola unprofessional – Coppola said Willis “hates and misuses actors”. Still, the end result is tremendous, radiating a powerful darkness. Even the now iconic music, by Nino Rota, was disliked by Evans. A favourable preview audience saved its bacon.

Finally, there’s the length. Coppola chopped it down, on Paramount’s strict instructions, to a paltry 135 minutes (for exhibitors’ convenience). Then, Evans says, he himself turned on Coppola: “You shot a saga, and you turned in a trailer. Now give me a movie.” The film was restored to its nearly three hours, and the rest is history – and movie legend.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/f...day-of-it.html





Sci-Fi Movie, Sony Ad Prompt Nigerian Image Angst
Camillus Eboh

A blockbuster sci-fi movie which caricatures Nigerians as gangsters and cannibals and a Sony PlayStation advert which implies they are fraudsters have infuriated a government battling to improve the country's image.

South African film "District 9," which has topped the UK box office for two straight weeks and ranked in the top 10 in North America, is an allegory on segregation and xenophobia, with alien life forms cooped up in a township set in Johannesburg.

None of the groups shown comes out particularly well, but the Nigerians are portrayed as gangsters, cannibals, pimps and prostitutes, while their leader's name is pronounced Obasanjo -- the same as that of Nigeria's former president.

Nigeria has banned cinemas from showing it.

"It is a Hollywood film, shot in South Africa and acted mainly by South Africans. We protested because it showed Nigeria in a very bad light," Information Minister Dora Akunyili, who is spearheading a "rebranding Nigeria" campaign, told Reuters.

"There is no country that does not have prostitutes and criminals but definitely most countries don't have cannibals, and we don't have cannibals in this country. We don't eat human flesh, it is definitely unacceptable," she said.

Akunyili said the government had told the Nigerian Film and Video Censor Board to ensure "District 9" was no longer shown in movie theatres and to confiscate copies. It had also written to the producers telling them to edit out references to Nigeria.

"Good People, Great Nation"

"We do not encourage censorship or government forcibly prescribing actions that infringe upon a consumer's right to choose," said Roy Murray Bruce, president of Silverbird Group, which owns one of the country's main cinema chains.

"However in this instance, Silverbird is fully behind the censorship board's ban on the movie because of its demeaning, crass and offensive misrepresentation of Nigeria and Nigerians."

The controversy comes as Africa's most populous nation seeks to shrug off its image as an epicenter of corruption, epitomized by "419" email fraudsters named after the article in Nigeria's penal code that deals with advance fee fraud.

In March, the government launched a rebranding campaign with the slogan: "Nigeria: Good People, Great Nation."

Even Nigeria's banking sector is being forced to clean up its act. The central bank last month removed the heads of five banks as part of a $2.6 billion bailout, before anti-corruption police brought charges against them including recklessly granting loans without due authorization.

"District 9" has not been the only headache for Akunyili's rebranding campaign.

Sonyhad to edit an advert for its PlayStation 3 gaming console in which a customer asks the price, and was originally told: "You can't believe everything you read on the internet, otherwise I'd be a Nigerian millionaire by now."

"Why didn't Sony, for instance, use Japan? Japanese being criminals. Don't they have criminals in Japan," Akunyili said.

"In District 9, why didn't Hollywood use the criminals in New York? How many shootings do we have in a day in New York? Why didn't they use the name of their president or their former president? There is no way anybody can defend what they did."

She said Sony had apologized.
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...58N3PB20090924





Is That Monster’s Face Really a Fake?
Michael Cieply

In the close-knit world of those who collect vintage movie posters, one of the few things rarer than a genuine lobby card for Universal Pictures’ 1931 “Frankenstein” has been a forgery of the same.

Perhaps until now.

Over the last several months, collectors of movie memorabilia have been rocked by claims that a Georgia-based collector, Kerry T. Haggard, has corrupted what had been seen as a relatively safe market for classic horror film posters by selling or trading forgeries of the promotional art for pictures like “Frankenstein,” “Dracula” and “The Mummy.”

In July a Los Angeles collector, Ronald Magid, filed suit against Mr. Haggard in Federal District Court in California. Mr. Magid claimed he had been persuaded to swap Mr. Haggard 20 genuine posters and other memorabilia valued at about $150,000 for nine items Mr. Magid said were fakes.

In August another collector, James Gresham, filed a similar suit in Federal District Court in Michigan. That suit claims that Mr. Haggard had joined a restoration artist to create forgeries, 28 of which Mr. Gresham bought or traded for in deals he valued at $852,400.

In an answer filed on Monday to the California complaint, Mr. Haggard denied committing any fraud, contending in turn that Mr. Magid had not only damaged his reputation with smears on various Internet sites, but also sold him items that Mr. Haggard, upon reselling them, were told were fake. As of Friday, federal court records available online did not show a response by Mr. Haggard in the Michigan case.

In response to an e-mailed query, Mr. Haggard said he was the victim of a “colossal frame-up.”

He added: “The monsters of fiction that I have loved & adored so all my life have destroyed my life in a conspiracy not seen since Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Whatever the outcome of the legal cases, a clubby world that often had less to do with business than with shared enthusiasms appears to have lost its innocence.

“It’s very unusual for movie posters,” Grey Smith, who specializes in the category for Heritage Auction Galleries of Dallas, said of the fraud accusations. “It’s quite new to us.”

If fraud has been rare, Mr. Smith said, or at least rarely detected, that is partly because the network of those willing to spend $42,000 for a “Bride of Frankenstein” lobby card, or as much as $286,000 for a full-size one-sheet poster for “The Black Cat,” is small — and the pool of available posters is even smaller. According to Mr. Smith, as few as a half-dozen of certain lobby cards promoting “Frankenstein,” for instance, are known to exist.

Mr. Smith said he was among the first to question the authenticity of a poster sold by Mr. Haggard, when he was shown an example that is not subject to either of the suits.

Mr. Magid, a freelance writer who has contributed film articles to The Los Angeles Times, said in his suit that he was first introduced to Mr. Haggard by a fellow collector. During visits to his Los Angeles home in 2008, Mr. Magid said, Mr. Haggard accepted his genuine posters in return for what turned out to be photographs of original posters that had been fixed to original lobby card material and airbrushed to make them appear real.

In the second complaint, Mr. Gresham, who operates a snowplowing business, said he was befriended by Mr. Haggard and even joined him on a visit to an Oceanside, Calif., restoration artist, Jaime Mendez, whom Mr. Gresham accused of involvement in the forgeries.

Charles Penzien, a lawyer representing Mr. Mendez, said his client did not join in any fraudulent acts or mislead anyone about his restoration work. “Mr. Mendez was shocked to hear that his name has been involved in the fake movie poster controversy,” Mr. Penzien said in a statement sent by e-mail.

Reached by telephone, Mr. Gresham said he had first become aware of Mr. Haggard when he found they were sometimes bidding against each other in online auctions, and that they were eventually introduced by a collector who knew them both.

“We were friends,” Mr. Gresham said of the relationship that developed with Mr. Haggard. “He’d come over to the house, we vacationed with our wives, I trusted him.”

Mr. Gresham said that as word of the suits circulated, he heard from as many as 20 other collectors who feared they might have bought or swapped for forgeries.

Mr. Smith, whose company is a principal clearing house for vintage movie posters, said, “Now we’ve all got to be somewhat more on our guard.”

The items in his next auction catalog, Mr. Smith said, were getting a level of scrutiny that had usually been reserved for coins or baseball cards, which have more often been the focus of collectibles fraud.

“It saddens me,” he said. “I feel like this hobby has been degraded in a way.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/movies/26posters.html





Swedish Gallery Owner Accused in Fake Art Scandal
Charlotte Webb

The former owner of a Stockholm art gallery has been accused of grand fraud and art forgery in the amount of 30 million kronor ($4.4 million).

The Stockholm resident is suspected of selling and attempting to sell forged works of art, writes the Metro newspaper.

After searching the man's house, police discovered around 15 forged copies of works by world renowned artists such as George Braque, Egon Schiele, Edward Munch and Alberto Giacometti.

The man is also known to have convinced a woman to loan him 200,000 kronor using a forged Braque painting as collateral.

He is also suspected of having attempted to sell a falsely signed painting by Hungarian painter Viktor Vasarely on the Blocket.se buy and sell website for 2 to 3 million kronor.

The former gallery owner is suspected of forging certificates of authenticity from the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts (Nationalmuseum) for many of these faked masterpieces.

Inspector Heléne Anderson of the Stockholm city police led the investigation into the alleged fraud.

"These are regular people who've been caught up in this. Unfortunately, this matter isn't really a high priority within the criminal justice system," she told Metro.
http://www.thelocal.se/22238/20090923/





Fight Against Anorexia: Legislative Proposal Photos Retouched
(AFP as translated from the French by Google)

The UMP member Valerie Boyer filed in the National Assembly a bill aimed to put a warning on the publicity photos where physical appearance was altered by software for image processing, it was reported Tuesday in his entourage.

This proposal, presented by some fifty members, elected according to the answers of the Bouches-du-Rhone to the concerns of governments to combat incitement to anorexia.

"These images can lead people to believe in the reality that very often do not exist," says she in the explanatory memorandum to its proposal.

The single article of the text reads: "The publicity photographs of people whose physical appearance was altered by software image processing must be accompanied by the words: + retouched photograph to change the physical appearance of a person + ".

It provides a fine of 37,500 euros for non-compliance with this provision.

The goal "is a public health goal," said Mrs. Boyer, that the text can be inserted into the code of public health.

The MP believes that the measure should not be limited to photographs and commercial area of the press. "An advertising poster or photograph on the packaging of a product would be covered, as are photographs of political campaign posters or photographs of art," says she in the explanatory memorandum.

Ms. Boyer had been originally in 2008, a proposed law against incitement to search for extreme thinness or anorexia, especially on the Internet, adopted by the Assembly but not yet examined the Senate.
http://www.translate.google.com/tran...8hWr4OdE_ bHA
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp...cR8hWr4OdE_bHA (French)





Universities Spar Over Disappearing Electronic Messages
John Markoff

In less than two months after a group of University of Washington computer researchers proposed a novel system for making electronic messages “disappear” after a certain period of time, a rival group of researchers based at the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton, and the University of Michigan, has claimed to have undermined the scheme.

In July, the University of Washington team described an experimental system called “Vanish” predicated on the idea of scattering the parts of an encryption key on a publicly accessible peer-to-peer file sharing network in such a way that the key — a large number — would become unusable as pieces of it were lost from the network.

The Vanish researchers had argued that increasingly in a networked world sensitive discussions involving something like a divorce or a lawsuit threaten users’ privacy when they are archived on multiple systems. Encrypting such messages is only a partial solution, the researchers argued, because encryption systems can be broken or keys can be subpoenaed. Therefore, it is virtually impossible to reliably delete information that has been transmitted via the Internet.

The Vanish attackers have created a demonstration system they call “Unvanish” and they said they had undone the Vanish model for gradually eroding encryption keys by subverting the peer-to-peer file sharing system. Their insight was to use a single computer to masquerade as a large number of members of a file sharing network. That rogue machine would simply need to capture and store anything that looked like a Vanish key fragment. The researchers said that this was simple, as the Vanish fragments are identifiable because of their size. Later it would be possible to reconstruct a Vanish message by simply consulting the Unvanish archive.

“In our experiments with Unvanish, we have shown that it is possible to make Vanish messages ‘reappear’ long after they should have ‘disappeared’ nearly 100 percent of the time,” the researchers wrote on a Web site that describes their experiment.

According to Emmett Witchel, a U.T.-Austin computer scientist, such technical jousting matches are at the very heart of both the computer security and cryptography fields.

“The goals of the Vanish researchers are reasonable goals,” he said, “but their system is fundamentally flawed.” The scheme would not be saved by trying to mask the size of the individual fragments, he added. “It would make the attack a little bit more expensive, but it doesn’t change the basic nature of the problem.”

On Monday, the Vanish researchers responded that they had now modified their initial prototype to use multiple file sharing networks, complicating the task of an attacker.

“The newly discovered weaknesses with our initial research prototype are not an invalidation of Vanish,” said Tadayoshi Kohno, a University of Washington computer scientist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/science/22decode.html





Best Buy and Verizon Jump Into E-Reader Fray
Brad Stone

The budding market for electronic reading devices is about to get two powerful new entrants: Best Buy and Verizon.

On Wednesday, iRex Technologies, a spinoff of Royal Philips Electronics that already makes one of Europe’s best-known e-readers, plans to announce that it is entering the United States market with a $399 touch-screen e-reader.

Owners of the new iRex DR800SG will be able to buy digital books and newspapers wirelessly over the 3G network of Verizon, which is joining AT&T and Sprint in supporting such devices. And by next month, the iRex will be sold at a few hundred Best Buy stores, along with the Sony Reader and similar products.

By all accounts, e-readers are set to have a breakout year. Slightly more than one million of them were sold globally in 2008, according to the market research firm iSuppli. The firm predicts that 5.2 million will be sold this year, more than half of them in North America, driven by the popularity and promotion of the Kindle, which is available only through Amazon’s Web site.

Best Buy’s involvement could give an additional lift to sales. Starting this week, Best Buy is training thousands of its employees in how to talk about and demonstrate devices like the Sony Reader and iRex, and adding a new area to its 1,048 stores to showcase the devices. Best Buy previously sold e-book devices only on its Web site and in limited tests in stores.

“The e-reader has high awareness, but most people have still not seen or touched or played with them,” said Chris Homeister, senior vice president for entertainment at Best Buy. “We feel that this is a technology that is beginning to emerge and that we can bring a unique experience to the marketplace.”

The biggest challenge for iRex, in particular, will be the unfamiliarity of its brand among American consumers. But in many respects, its black-and-gray device is similar to rivals like the Kindle DX, which has a 10-inch screen and costs $489, and the forthcoming Reader Daily Edition, with its 7-inch screen and $399 price tag, from Sony.

The iRex has an 8.1-inch touch screen and links to buy digital books in Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore and periodicals from NewspaperDirect, a service that offers more than 1,100 papers and presents them onscreen largely as they appear in print form.

This year, iRex talked with Barnes & Noble about putting the bookseller’s brand, and not its own, on the new device. But they could not reach an agreement, said Kevin Hamilton, the chief executive of iRex’s North American division and president at Amerivon Retail Sales, a venture capital firm that led an $8 million investment in the company this year.

William Lynch, president of Barnes & Noble’s online business, declined to say whether the bookseller was working on its own reading device, but said it “planned to market digital books in really big and interesting ways” to the 77 million customers who walk into its stores every year. The Barnes & Noble e-bookstore will also be available through a large-screen device from the start-up Plastic Logic, which is expected next year.

IRex has taken a somewhat circuitous path to the consumer market. As a division within Philips, the Dutch electronics company, it was responsible for supplying the screen technology for the Sony Librie, one of the first devices to use so-called e-paper, which mimics the appearance of regular paper on a digital screen. As a separate company since 2004, it has developed large-screen devices for business professionals, doctors and pilots, mostly in Europe.

Its new consumer product offers some techie features that rivals do not. It contains a 3G Gobi radio from Qualcomm, the wireless component manufacturer, which will allow iRex owners to buy books wirelessly when they travel abroad. By contrast, the wireless modem in the Kindle works only on Sprint’s network in the United States. As with the Kindle, the price of the iRex includes unlimited wireless access.

The iRex can also handle the ePub file format, a widely accepted industry standard, which means that owners can buy books from other online bookstores that use ePub and transfer texts onto the iRex.

IRex says it is on track to have a color version of the device by 2011, something that other vendors, which rely on technology from eInk, a subsidiary of Prime View International of Taiwan, say is years away.

One challenge for the entire digital reading market is the price of these new devices. A recent report from Forrester Research suggests most consumers will buy a digital reading device only when they cost less than $100. One way this could ultimately happen is if wireless providers like Verizon subsidize the devices and sell them in their stores, as they do with the inexpensive laptops called netbooks.

Verizon says it has no plans to do this, but analysts think that could conceivably change if e-readers like the iRex sell well. “If this becomes a revenue stream for a company like Verizon, which actually gets paid for the bandwidth required to distribute content, then it is in Verizon’s benefit to promote these devices and in many cases underwrite them,” said Allen Weiner, an analyst at Gartner.

But Mr. Weiner also says that first, iRex, Amazon and the entire e-reading category have an even more significant problem: savvy consumers may hold off on buying devices to see whether Apple enters the market with a more general-purpose tablet computer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/te.../23ebooks.html





German Youth Would Vote Pirate Party Into Parliament
Ernesto

Next week the German Pirate Party will compete in the elections for the German Parliament, but this week the country’s youth already cast their votes. In the youth polls nearly 9% of all votes went to the Pirate Party, a result that the party hopes to match in the upcoming election.

The youth organization U18 aims to promote political awareness among the German youth and traditionally they hold their own election prior to that of the adults. This year the Pirate Party was one of the surprising winners.

This Friday more than 120,000 youngsters cast their votes at one of the U18 voting booths. Of these, a massive 8.72% voted for the Pirate Party that currently holds one seat in the German Parliament.

The result of this election is encouraging for the Pirates, who already had a great run at the European election earlier this year where they surpassed some of the established local parties in some districts.

“The outcome of this election shows us that young people recognize the importance of ‘having a vote’,” Pirate Party Charmain Jens Seipenbusch said. “The fact that many of them have chosen us, shows that young people find it important to defend their civil rights and that the Pirates tackle the crucial issues of the 21st century.”

The ‘real’ German federal election is scheduled for 27 September, and the Pirate Party hopes to gain a few dozen seats in the German Parliament so they can do something about increased Internet censorship and abuses of copyright by multi-billion dollar companies.

Getting into the German Parliament will not be an easy task as it requires a minimum of 5% of the total votes. Let’s hope the German parents listen to their kids for once.
http://torrentfreak.com/german-youth...iament-090920/





Lily Allen Deletes Pro-Copyright Blog and Ends Career
Ernesto

Yesterday it was revealed that, despite her calls for tougher anti-piracy legislation, Lily Allen herself created illicit mixtapes full of copyrighted music and made them available to the public. Today, after having rationalized why it is okay for her to pirate music, she killed her pro-copyright blog because “the abuse was getting too much.”

In a few dozen articles on her new blog, Lily Allen complained how illegal file-sharing is bankrupting the music industry. Unfortunately for her she forgot to remove some of her old mixtapes from LilyAllenMusic.com, which revealed that she’s not the saint she claimed to be.

However, just a few hours after we posted the article, Lily explained that she’s not a pirate but simply didn’t know any better.

“I made those mixtapes 5 years ago, I didn’t have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then…,” she responded.

What she probably meant to say is that she had no clue about copyright before her income depended on it. Yet, she believes that every other person on this planet should know better, or get their Internet access cut off. Way to go girl.

In fact, the old Lily from 5 years ago is not too different from the hundreds and thousands of casual file-sharers today. Copyright is a complex issue and the boundaries between right/wrong and illegal/legal are not always that clear. Instead of waging a war against file-sharers on the blog she could have tried to pass her knowledge about copyright on to the public.

She chose to make it a soundboard for frustrated artists instead, which only resulted in negative reactions from the public up to a point where Lily couldn’t take it anymore. Indeed, TorrentFreak read one posting on the site which had in excess of 100 comments – only 4 of which supported the singer’s position.

“I’ve shut down the blog, the abuse was getting too much,” she explained on Twitter a few minutes after she announced the end of her legendary music career.

Just before she pulled the blog she wrote “I will not make another record,” adding “The days of me making money from recording music has been and gone as far as I’m concerned, so I don’t stand to profit from [anti-piracy] legislation.”

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the debate Lily inflamed over the last week. While there seemed to be an endless stream of rich musicians willing to complain on behalf of bands we’ve never heard of with “we aren’t suffering, they are” statements, there were also huge numbers of music fans who were more than a little reluctant to be lectured by well-off superstars on the issue.

But most prominent were those vehemently opposed to UK plans to disconnect alleged infringers from the Internet. The abuse that Lily spoke of on her blog largely wasn’t directed at her, but at these plans and her support for them. Think again Mr Mandelson.
http://torrentfreak.com/lily-allen-d...career-090924/





Swedish Parliament Behind Wikipedia Celebrity Smears
Charlotte Webb

Actor George Clooney is a "communist amateur" and Swedish actress and comedian Nour El-Refai is a "feminist bitch", according to someone, or several people, using computers traced to the Riksdag.

The revelations came as part of an investigation by TV8's “Aschberg” current affairs television programme into changes made to entries on the Swedish version of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.

A total of 55 changes could be traced via IP numbers to computers housed in the Swedish parliament and at the offices of Swedish political parties.

Aschberg's report also found that most of the changes were made during business hours.

Someone from the Moderates has repeatedly removed information pertaining to liquor-soaked parties organized by the party's youth wing, MUF, in an effort to attract new members.

In addition, articles reporting that the Left Party's youth wing, Ung Vänster, had inflated their membership statistics have been removed no less than five times.

Information about Christian Democratic politician Ella Bohlin's past membership in Livets Ord ('Word of Life'), a conservative evangelical religious organization, has also been removed by someone using a computer at Christian Democratic party headquarters.

Over and above these embellishments and touch ups, however, a pure smear campaign targeting a number of celebrities has been traced to parliament computers.

Amongst other choice remarks, one individual has written on the Swedish language version of Wikipedia that Swedish football star Zlatan Ibrahimovic has a “brash and arrogant playing style”, later adding that the footballer also has a criminal background.

Another famous hockey player has been accused of rape and labeled an “amateur”.
http://www.thelocal.se/22218/20090922/





Wilma Cozart Fine, Classical Music Record Producer, Dies at 82
Allan Kozinn

Wilma Cozart Fine, a record producer who, with her husband, C. Robert Fine, ran the classical division of Mercury Records in the 1950s and early ’60s, producing hundreds of recordings that are still prized by collectors for the depth and realism of their sound, died on Monday at her home in Harrison, N.Y. She was 82.

Her death was announced by her son Thomas.

Mrs. Fine was one of the first women to excel at record production, a field that is still dominated by men. She brought sensitivity and taste to her work, which included notable recordings by the conductors Rafael Kubelik, Antal Dorati and John Barbirolli; the composer and conductor Howard Hanson; the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Detroit Symphony; the pianists Byron Janis, Gina Bachauer and Sviatoslav Richter; and the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

With Mr. Fine, an ingenious recording engineer whom she married in 1957, she developed recording techniques that, even in their early monaural recordings, seemed to capture not only the performance but also a sense of the space in which it took place.

The Fines were among the first to make mass-market stereo recordings, and in the early 1960s they experimented with recording on 35-millimeter film instead of on magnetic recording tape. Among their productions were sonic spectaculars like a 1954 recording of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” by Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony, with bells recorded at Yale University and a cannon recorded at West Point, and a 1958 remake, with different bells and cannon.

Mrs. Fine also had a brilliant marketing sense. One of the first things she did when she joined Mercury, in 1950, was persuade the label’s president, Irving Green, to sign the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, then floundering. Mercury’s first recording with that orchestra, overseen by the Fines, was Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” with Kubelik conducting, in April 1951. When the recording was released that fall, along with another recording of works by Bartok and Bloch, Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times that “unless this recording has flattered the ensemble’s competence out of all recognition, one must welcome the Chicagoans back to the top rank of American orchestras.”

But it was another sentence in the review that caught the Fines’ attention: “Thanks to one of the finest technical jobs of recording made on this side of the Atlantic the orchestra’s tone is so lifelike that one feels one is listening to the living presence.” Thereafter, Mercury’s classical discs bore the legend “Living Presence,” and the slogan helped define the company’s goals and achievements.

Mrs. Fine was born in Aberdeen, Miss., on March 29, 1927, and grew up in Fort Worth. She studied music education and business administration at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas) in Denton and found a job working as Dorati’s personal secretary when he was music director of the Dallas Symphony. When Dorati moved to the Minneapolis Symphony, Mrs. Fine followed, but she soon decided to move to New York, where, with a recommendation from Dorati, she was hired by Mercury.

Besides signing and recording American orchestras, Mrs. Fine and her crew made recordings in London, Vienna and Moscow. She retired in 1964 to rear her sons, who survive her. In addition to Thomas, of Brewster, N.Y., her sons are Matthew, of Montclair, N.J., and John, of Port Chester, N.Y. She is also survived by a brother, Eugene Cozart of Fort Worth; and four grandchildren. Mr. Fine died in 1982.

Mrs. Fine came out of retirement in 1989 to oversee the reissue of the Mercury Living Presence recordings on CD. She worked on the remastering project for a decade.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/ar...ic/25fine.html





Jackson Lost Will to Live, Confidante Says
Alex Dobuzinskis

Michael Jackson lost the will to live in recent years, a former close confidante said on Friday, as scores of fans camped out to be the first to see the singer's final appearance in the "This is It" movie.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, appearing on NBC's "Today" show, unveiled lengthy conversations he taped with Jackson during their 1999-2001 friendship, and said the "Thriller" singer suffered deep emotional pain.

"He lost the will to live," Boteach said. "I think he was just going through the motions of life toward the end."

Boteach also said that Jackson, who had plastic surgery several times, once confessed that he didn't want to appear in public, because he felt that he looked like a "lizard."

Jackson died in Los Angeles on June 25 of a prescription drug overdose, less three weeks before he was due to begin a series of 50 sold-out comeback shows in London.

Back in March, when Jackson visited London to announce the "This Is It" shows, he appeared in a military-style jacket and punched the air.

But the tapes collected by Boteach show Jackson to be a far less confidant man, who feared growing old and had suffered levels of loneliness and pain that the rabbi said "staggers the imagination."

"I would like some way to disappear, where people don't see me anymore at some point," Jackson said in the tapes.

"I don't want to grow old. I never want to look in the mirror and see that," the singer said.

Boteach has turned his conversations with the pop star into a book, published on Friday, called "The Michael Jackson Tapes."

Jackson Fanfare

Boteach's book comes as Jackson's fans lined up in Los Angeles three days before tickets go on sale on Sunday for the October 28 release worldwide of "This Is It".

The movie is based on footage of Jackson rehearsing for his London shows and demand is expected to be strong for the two week limited release.

Some 200 fans were camped out on Friday, across the street from where Jackson had his final rehearsals, waiting to buy tickets to the movie premiere. The waiting fans will also get commemorative tickets designed by Jackson for the now canceled London shows.

Sunil Kumar, 25, a fashion design student from India, was one of the fans who slept on concrete overnight. Kumar said Jackson had a huge fan base in India.

"He's kind of a god of the dance," Kumar said. "No one ever danced like him in the whole world."

Tony Kirby, 51, wearing a black hat and an open shirt, sat on a lawn chair next to his wife, waiting it out as their 7 year-old daughter bounded around nearby.

"When we got here I wasn't even grey, I've got grey hair now," Tony joked.

The Kirbys said Jackson was a significant figure for African-Americans like themselves, because he showed a black artist could break through racial barriers and become a global star.

The fans camping out in Los Angeles will get their tickets at 12:01 a.m. on Sunday -- the same day global online ticket sales begin for regular showings of movie.

(Editing by Jill Serjeant)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...58N0WK20090926





Pearl Jam Poised for First No. 1 Album in 13 Years
Keith Caulfield

Pearl Jam is on course to nab its first No. 1 album on the U.S. pop chart in 13 years next week.

Industry prognosticators suggest the band's new "Backspacer," released on Sunday, could shift anywhere between 175,000 to 200,000 copies by week's end. That sales figure should easily place it ahead of the competition when the Billboard 200 chart for the period ended September 27 is published on Wednesday.

The new album -- Pearl Jam's first not with a major label -- is sold exclusively in the United States through Target, iTunes, Pearl Jam's Web site and independent retailers.

The group's last studio release, 2006's self-titled set, bowed at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 279,000 copies according to Nielsen SoundScan. The band last graced the No. 1 slot way back in 1996, when "No Code" became its third chart-topper.

Since "No Code," the group has notched three No. 2 albums ("Yield," "Binaural" and "Pearl Jam") and a No. 5 set with "Riot Act" in 2002.

Other albums looking to enter high on the Billboard 200 chart next week include Three Days Grace's "Life Stars Now," Five Finger Death Punch's "War is the Answer," David Gray's "Draw the Line" and Mika's "The Boy Who Knew Too Much." The current champ is Jay-Z's "The Blueprint 3," which sold 298,000 copies during the week ended September 20.

(Editing by DGoodman at Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...58O0A420090925





Doo-Wop Group Still Says it Will Sing Saturday
Dirk Perrefort

The manager of a band calling itself The Platters said the musicians intend to take the stage Saturday at the Ethan Allen Hotel.

Whether the show would go on has been in question in recent days after state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal on Wednesday demanded proof the group has rights to the name of the legendary doo-wop band.

It appeared an agreement was reached Thursday between Blumenthal and the hotel that would let the show continue as long as it was billed as a tribute to The Platters.

But Friday, the band's manager, Larry Marshak of Live Gold Operations of Floral Park, N.Y., said the group will take the stage as The Platters.

He added he was not involved in any negotiations that resulted in the agreement with the hotel and the state Attorney General's Office.

"We will go on tomorrow night, and we will go on as The Platters," Marshak said. "Nobody is going to stop us. They can't stop us from saying anything we want on stage."

He said earlier this week that while the band doesn't have any of the original members of The Platters, they do have the rights to use the name.

Others, however, including the manager for Herb Reed, the founder and last remaining original member of The Platters, disagreed with those claims.

A hotel official on Thursday said they also expect the show to take place, since they have a contract with the group to perform Saturday night.

Blumenthal said Friday his staff will be closely monitoring the situation as it develops Saturday.

"We will have to see what actually happens," he said. "We are prepared to take appropriate action, depending on what the band actually does. But the public has been put on notice that there have been potentially misleading claims about this band."

Appropriate actions, he said, could include civil penalties and restitution.

Blumenthal commended hotel officials for "doing the right thing" and offering refunds to anyone who thinks they were misled by concert marketing, as well as clarifying who will be performing.
http://www.newstimes.com/latestnews/ci_13420128





Beatles Break Chart Records With 9/9/09 Releases
FMQB

With the CD release of their digitally re-mastered catalog on 9/9/09, The Beatles broke sales chart records around the world, once again showing their lasting influence on the world of music. In the major music markets of North America, Japan and the U.K., consumers purchased more than 2.25 million copies of The Beatles’ re-mastered albums, both individually and in two multiple-CD boxed sets, one in stereo and one in mono, during the first five days of release.

According to EMI, in the U.S. alone, consumers purchased more than one million copies of re-mastered Beatles titles during the first five days of release. On Billboard’s Comprehensive Albums Chart, which includes current and catalog titles, The Beatles set a new record for the most simultaneous titles by a single artist (18), including five of the top 10 and nine of the top 20. On the Pop Catalog Chart, The Beatles achieved another Billboard chart first for the most simultaneous titles in the top 50 (16), a record they previously set themselves with 12 titles in December 1995. The Beatles have nine of the chart’s top 10 titles, and all 14 re-mastered CDs are in the top 20.

In the U.K. last week, The Beatles had four titles in the top 10, seven in the top 40 and 16 in the top 75, including both the stereo and mono boxed sets, as well as 2000’s Beatles 1 compilation. This set a new record for the most simultaneous albums in the U.K. charts, according to the U.K. Official Charts Company. In this week’s U.K. chart, The Beatles have 13 albums in the top 75. A further 84,000 CDs were sold last week, bringing their total sales of the re-masters to over 354,000 in 11 days and their total U.K. sales this decade to 6,755,000.

The Fab Four made waves in other countries too. In Japan, all 14 re-mastered titles and boxed sets debuted in the top 25 of the international chart, including seven of the top 10. Across all titles and boxed sets, more than 840,000 albums were purchased by consumers in Japan in the first three days of sales. In Canada, The Beatles have 15 of the top 20 catalog titles including all of the top 11. The stereo boxed set is a new entry in the current albums chart at number four, the highest debut for a boxed set in Canada since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales. In France, all 14 of the re-mastered titles and boxed sets entered the latest album chart, including three in the top 10. This is a new record for the most original studio albums in the French album chart in one week. And in Italy, The Beatles have 17 titles in the current chart – a record for the most simultaneous entries in the album chart. The band also has set a new record for the most simultaneous albums in the Belgian chart, the Polish chart, and the Swedish Top 60.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1512144

















Until next week,

- js.



















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