Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 4th, '10

[JackSpratts]

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"Our hack gave 100% knowledge of the key, with zero disturbance to the system." – Vadim Makarov


"Culture is more important than copyright." – Mark Waid



































September 4th, 2010




Huge Push In Brazil To Legalize File Sharing
from the hurdles-remain dept

We've discussed some interesting things happening down in Brazil when it comes to copyright. First, we've looked a few times at how the super popular technobrega music industry has thrived by embracing giving away music and using that to build up fame and business models based on selling scarcities -- such as live shows. But, perhaps more interesting has been the ongoing proposals for new copyright laws in Brazil. For example, there was the decision to buck the trend in many places and not have a notice and takedown provision like the DMCA, but only have content get taken down with a court order -- a position that shows significantly more respect for free speech rights. Separately, one recently proposed draft amazingly included penalties for hindering fair use or the public domain.

It's almost as if folks in Brazil have actually noticed how poorly set up most of the rest of the world's copyright laws are.

Last month, Brazil allowed public comment submissions on copyright, and apparently at the last minute, a large group of artists groups and consumer rights groups put together a proposal to "end" the "war on copying" (found via IP Watch). Basically, the plan has a few parts, but the big one is the idea of legalizing non-commercial file sharing in exchange for a broadband levy of 3 Reais -- or about $1.74 US. That's certainly a hell of a lot cheaper than most proposals out there.

That said... while I appreciate getting rid of "the war on copying," I do think there are some serious problems with a proposal like this. Copyright levies tend to have serious unintended consequences. They create large bureaucracies, where money collection and distribution is not always done fairly. In fact, they often tend to favor bigger name artists over smaller artists, and just having the bureaucracy creates overhead that goes to the bureaucracy, rather than the artists. On top of that, it takes away incentive for consumers to support artists directly through other creative business models, because they feel that they "already paid," via the levy. So, as it stands, I don't think this is a great solution, but it's at least a hell of a lot better than copyright law most other places -- and it's great to see a focus on actually getting past the old "copy wars."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...11710885.shtml





Neighborly Borrowing, Over the Online Fence
Jenna Wortham

THE first time I unboxed my gleaming Roomba, I beamed like a proud new parent as I placed it gently on my hardwood floor.

That evening, I watched it putter around my apartment, sweeping and inhaling dust bunnies. When it gamely bumbled around bulky pieces of furniture, I dashed about, too, lifting the obstacles out of its way. After the Roomba finished its chaotic dance, I put it back into its case and patted the sweet little machine good night. The next morning, I returned it to its rightful owner.

The Roomba was mine for only 24 hours. I had rented it through a service called SnapGoods, which allows people to lend out their surplus gadgetry and various gear for a daily fee.

SnapGoods is one of the latest start-ups that bases its business model around allowing people to share, exchange and rent goods in a local setting. Among others are NeighborGoods and ShareSomeSugar. Other commercial services are springing up, too, including group-buying sites like Groupon, the peer-to-peer travel site Airbnb and Kickstarter, which allows people to invest small sums in creative ventures.

The common thread of all these sites is that access trumps ownership; consumers are offered ways to share goods instead of having to buy them.

Ron J. Williams, co-founder of SnapGoods, based in New York, describes the phenomenon as the “access economy.”

“There may always be certain products that you do need to buy,” says Mr. Williams. “But there is also a growing cultural awareness that you don’t always get enjoyment out of hyperconsumption. The notion of ownership as the barrier between you and what you need is outdated.”

The most obvious reason for all of this is financial. Recession-battered shoppers can test pricey new devices before deciding whether to take the plunge or wait until the next upgrade. (Roombas, for example, can retail for as much as $600 for the newer models. I borrowed mine for a much more palatable $10.)

For all the promise of these new marketplaces, analysts say they aren’t likely to overtake more traditional models anytime soon.

“The holy grails of consumerism are convenience and choice,” says Rachel Botsman, co-author of the forthcoming book, “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.” “This is not the end of the old consumer way. But they could sit side by side. Peer-to-peer could become the default way to share.”

There’s much evidence that this is already happening. Do-it-yourself home improvers can borrow tools for a weekend project, and hobbyist campers can rent equipment per trip, rather than splurge on all-new gear. Travelers looking for inexpensive accommodations can spend the night in someone’s spare bedroom for a fraction of the cost of a hotel room. For people who lend their stuff, it’s a way to make extra money on possessions that are gathering dust.

“My Roomba is on track to pay for itself,” says Luke Tucker, 31, a software engineer who rented me his robotic vacuum cleaner through SnapGoods.

But some experts think that there may be something bigger than thriftiness at play. These services may be gaining popularity because they reinforce a sense of community.

“It turns out to actually be a good way to meet my neighbors,” says Mr. Tucker, who also lists a jigsaw, a digital camera and a wireless keyboard for rent on SnapGoods.

Charlis Floyd, a 22-year-old student, and Nema Williams, a 30-year-old comedian, who rent out their spare bedroom in Brooklyn on Airbnb, say that while the extra income helps — as any little bit does these days — they’re much more interested in the revolving cast of characters they meet.

“We had a couple from England teach us how to make red curry,” says Ms. Floyd.

“Another guy, an artist, promised to paint a mural in our kitchen,” adds Mr. Williams.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it always goes off without a hitch.“Sometimes people can be weird,” says Ms. Floyd. “One girl drank all our milk and another person broke our toilet handle.”

Even so, Ms. Floyd and Mr. Williams still like being in the rental business.

“It’s a win-win situation,” says Ms. Floyd. “You make some extra money and make new friends.”

For entrepreneurs, there’s a payoff in such commerce. Groupon, for example, says it’s on track to generate $500 million in revenue this year; Airbnb has said it is profitable, though it does not provide exact numbers.

Paul J. Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California, says that participating in a community like SnapGoods, Kickstarter, Groupon or Airbnb can ease social isolation and flesh out our network of friends.

“There is an underlying notion that if I rent my things in my house, I get to meet my neighbor, and if I’m walking the goods over, I get to meet them in person,” he says. “We’re drawing on a desire in a fast-paced world to still have real connections to a community.”

Mr. Zak says he conducted a preliminary experiment indicating that posting messages on Twitter caused the release of oxytocin, a neurotransmitter that evokes feelings of contentment and is thought to help induce a sense of positive social bonding. He is now testing those ideas in research on a group of 40 people.

The social interaction “reduces stress hormones, even through the Web,” he says. “You’re feeling a real physiological relationship to that person, even if they are online.”

MR. ZAK says Web commerce is moving beyond transactions by individuals and companies and embracing models that encourage social contact and interaction — a hallmark of the already robust social media phenomenon and a throwback to the good old days when people actually spent time socializing at local markets.

“The Web is bringing businesses back down to the individual as the average company becomes smaller, more niche and specialized,” he says. “Paradoxically, the Web is moving us back to a human-centric business model.”

Trust is a big factor in all of this. Otherwise, how can you be sure that someone won’t just rip you off?

Marketplaces like eBay have long relied on ratings and user reviews to weed out unreliable participants. But in addition to safeguards like preauthorizing the price of rentals through PayPal, the latest wave of peer-to-peer systems make use of social networks like Facebook and Twitter to engender trust.

If someone wants to rent your iPad or crash on your couch, the person’s online profile leaves a trail of digital bread crumbs that makes it harder to pull off a scam, giving potential lenders and hosts reason to breathe easier.

“This new economy,” says Ms. Botsman, “is going to be driven entirely by reputation, which is part of a new cultural shift — seeing how our behavior in one community affects what we can access in another.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/business/29ping.html





Wrongfully Accused Of File-Sharing? File For Harassment
enigmax

There are tens of thousands of people out there receiving letters from lawyers which demand payments to make potential copyright infringement lawsuits go away. Those wrongfully accused have been fighting back in a number of ways, and not without success. Now a team of lawyers is offering to coordinate a group action, with the aim of gathering compensation for victims through harassment claims.

Last month it was revealed that ACS:Law, the now infamous one-man law firm that has sent out tens of thousands demands for cash settlements to make supposed copyright infringement lawsuits go away, has been referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal on allegations of misconduct.

This referral, achieved through the tireless work of those wrongfully accused and consumer groups such as Which? and BeingThreatened.com, was much-welcomed news. But the wheels of justice can turn very slowly. It could take months, maybe more than a year, for the authorities to do their work. This is a serious problem for those still affected by the actions of ACS:Law principal Andrew Crossley.

Make no mistake, this is not going away soon. Crossley is regularly going to court and gaining the identities of thousands more individuals he says are infringing his clients’ copyrights, yet he has no solid proof in almost any instance that this is the case. As a result of flawed evidence, huge numbers of people say they have been accused in error.

Noticing this apparent failing, a team of lawyers in the north of England have announced that they are pursuing a group action and are urging people to come forward to participate. Noting that Crossley has been referred to the SDT for “bullying and excessive conduct”, Ralli Solicitors say that letter recipients may be entitled to compensation for harassment.

“It can be incredibly upsetting for people to receive such letters and they may well have a claim for harassment against ACS Law so I am urging them to come forward,” says Michael Forrester of Ralli’s Intellectual Property and Harassment Law team.

Ralli appears to have considerable experience in this field, having represented several police officers in their claims of harassment made against the Chief Constable of Northumbria Police in 2009.

TorrentFreak contacted Ralli to find out more about the company’s offer. Why does the law firm feel that letter recipients may have been harassed?

“It appears people have been harassed as they have been alarmed and distressed by these letters,” Ralli’s Robert Illidge explained. “A course of conduct which amount to harassment, including alarming and/or distressing a person, is prohibited by the law.”
So what conditions must be met for a letter recipient to be considered eligible for inclusion in the group action? According to Illidge, not many.

“A receipt of correspondence from ACS law, or another firm, falsely accusing a person of infringement,” he told us.

While in some cases the reasons why people are being wrongfully identified may never be known, it is clear that in untold cases innocent bill payers who have carried out no file-sharing at all are getting multiple letters from ACS:Law. Their claims of innocence are going ignored.

The law says that in order to have infringed copyright, bill payers must have either shared files themselves or explicitly authorized someone else to do the act. Since ACS:Law cannot possibly know who is sat at a computer keyboard at any particular time, they wrongfully suggest that the bill payer is the infringer or it is their responsibility to say who did the alleged file-sharing. They are wrong on both counts and people who fall into this category might well consider a claim.

As is common with most cash demands sent to alleged copyright infringers, the settlement amount required by the likes of ACS:Law is carefully weighted. Not too much so that the majority simply can’t pay, and just low enough to make investing in a lawyer to shout their corner an unattractive proposition. So how much will it cost to file for harassment with Ralli?

“Our aim is for the actions to cost claimants nothing,” Illidge told us. “It depends on who is involved, how many claims and how the cases are presented. There are a number of ways of funding group action litigation such as the ‘no win, no fee’ basis.”

So, if successful in their action, what could participants hope to achieve?

“If successful, participants can expect to receive damages for the financial loss and anxiety the letters and other correspondence have caused,” says Illidge. “The law also allows individuals to obtain injunctions in certain specific circumstances, which, if obtained would prevent the harassment from continuing.”

TorrentFreak can’t vouch for Ralli, but with our experience of these actions our friendly advice to bill payers is simple. If you receive a letter addressed to you and you didn’t do what these people say you did, don’t pay. With an eye on the excellent Speculative Invoicing Handbook from BeingThreatened.com, write a single firm but brief letter denying the accusations. If you are harassed again, write to the SRA – they know Mr Crossley very well.

By all means see what Ralli have to offer too. ‘No Win, No Fee’ is just right, but if it’s going to cost much more than a few pounds, don’t bother. ACS:Law have a track record of leaving people alone who have the nerve to stand up to them – you can do that yourselves.

Anyone seeking additional information can contact Michael Forrester or Clare Perchal on 0161 832 6131 or by emailing harassment@ralli.co.uk.
http://torrentfreak.com/wrongfully-a...ssment-100831/





Nuts And Bolts - File Sharing Money Earner
Steve Lawson

This isn't the first time that Hellmail has reported on the apparently unchecked runaway train of threats through the post that are the "Pay us money now or (allegedly) face court action" bonanza - just the thing needed to boost earnings for solicitors in a recession. This time its Gallant MacMillan in pursuit of downloaders of “Ministry of Sound – The Annual” - with demands for £250 - £300.

Post (or mail if you live outside the UK) isn't just about developments in the industry, its also about companies who use the medium for either controversial or in some instances, dishonest purposes, the latter including items sent out by lottery scam merchants and other profiteers, but there are also letters that are designed to intimidate recipients into reacting in a way that follows the psychological principles of compliance, and an official looking letter heading accompanied by a copy of a court document would fit into that bracket.

I might sympathise if I felt the actions of ACS:Law or previously, Davenport Lyons actually were about stamping out piracy but this is more about making money on the back of a few small-time pirates, and worse, too many innocents getting caught up in all this with apparently little or no chance of defending themselves. No matter how you look at this, splatter invoicing (which this is) is designed to create a cash cow for law firms that have decided to venture into the 'dark side’ of legal representation. I look forward to the day when I too become a recipient and can launch a counter claim for harassment but alas I am not one of the chosen. I am astonished that the SRA still hasn't deliberated on this whole affair.

ACS:Law apparently notched things up a gear by sending a questionnaire that is clearly designed to encourage the recipients into incriminating themselves through one misplaced word. The rules as always have to be, forget the questionnaire, reply and deny, otherwise this is little more than an attempt to sign away the accused persons rights. The whole thing stinks and is about as popular with Internet users as "accident at work" claims are with employers, all of which are designed to boost business for the legal profession - apparently at any cost.

As I predicted, more solicitors look set to join the queue and the government seems unable or unwilling to deal with a problem that has been raised many times, before and after the Digital Economy Bill. Some action may follow the SRA's decision to hold Andrew Crossley (ACS:Law) to account in front of the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. I have no doubt that Mr. Crossley will defend his business model to the end, but there is nothing in UK law that makes the internet account holder responsible for the actions of other people and any determined hacker can gain access to private connections. His scheme relies heavily on frightening people into paying up, something that the Kray twins were adept at too.

UK law firm, Ralli, is attempting to fight ACS: Law with a group action for harassment:

“We are advising people who have received these letters but have never even heard of the media they are supposed to have obtained. For example, a middle aged gentleman who has been accused of obtaining dance music when he has no idea what the genre is, let alone the artist!

"It can be incredibly upsetting for people to receive such letters and they may well have a claim for harassment against ACS Law so I am urging them to come forward.”

Not a bad idea. In fact, the costs of examining a hard drive to ascertain whether a computer was indeed used for file-sharing copyrighted works is prohibitively expensive (I know as I worked in this area of the industry) and certainly a good deal more than the claims being sent out by ACS: Law and others.

It is highly unlikely that Crossley will want to escalate the scheme beyond the 'scare packs' currently being sent through the mail. After all, if only a handful pay up, it’s a nice little earner. In the meantime, others are being dragged into an allegedly flawless method to pinpoint guilty Internet users. Harassment? Sure if you're being accused of something you didn't do and are to be judged on the balance of probability rather than on sound evidence that you were using that computer at the time of the alleged infringement.

What I'm really annoyed about is not being singled out as one of the chosen - boy I'd enjoy that. It reminds me of a letter I once received from an individual from the Ivory Coast who assured me I was in for a share of a million dollar fortune - I lead him on to the point where he stood at an airport waiting for me to fly in. Then there was the fly-by-night cowboy in Blackpool trying to glean cheques for some data protection scheme. Many paid up so I hear, but my reply envelope was the heaviest envelope they got that week - with postage to pay on it. Now where is that nuts and bolts tin...
http://www.hellmail.co.uk/postalnews...=2381&zoneid=3





New Copyright Lawsuits Go After Porn on Bittorrent
Evan Brown

Three adult media entertainment producers filed suit yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois alleging copyright infringement against hundreds of anonymous defendants accused of trading videos using Bittorrent. This kind of action resembles the much-criticized mass litigation undertaken by the U.S. Copyright Group against hordes of unknown accused Bittorrent users trading movies like Hurt Locker.

In this case, the subject matter promises to be more provocative. Plaintiff Millennium TGA is known for producing content in the “transsexual adult entertainment niche.” Plaintiff Lightspeed Media Corporation is alleging infringement of content including collections relating to its Jordan Capri and Tawnee Stone websites. Plaintiff Hard Drive Productions produces the Amateur Allure website.

Here are the complaints (PDFs):

• Millennium TGA, Inc. v. Does 1-100
• Lightspeed Media Corporation v. Does 1-100
• Hard Drive Productions v. Does 1-100

http://blog.internetcases.com/2010/0...on-bittorrent/





Creative Industries Gather to Bemoan Filesharing

All those overpaid execs and celebs want even more cash

THE ANTI-PIRACY BRIGADE was out in force in London today, reiterating their support for more regulations to protect the creative industries against all those nasty filesharers.

According to industry chiefs gathered at the Britain's Digital Future event, the government can only secure the future of the UK's entertainment industries by ensuring protection from downloaders.

David Lynn, executive vice president of MTV Networks in UK, said he welcomed the Digital Economy Act as part of a system that tackled piracy head on with both education and legal provisions.

"MTV Networks supports the anti-piracy provisions in the Digital Economy Act and hopes work from internet service providers (ISPs) alongside better education of the legal ways media can be downloaded will lead to a reduction of online file sharing," he said.

Ex-80s crooner Feargal Sharkey, now chief executive of UK Music, was more direct, claiming it was imperative ISPs worked together on the issue of piracy.

"The optimum solution is to create a workable marketplace where the time and effort musicians put into producing work is properly remunerated and protected, and so it's time ISPs sat down together and, for once, had a grown up adult conversation about how to do this," he said.

We think it might be a case of sour grapes though, as Sharkey is probably a bit miffed that A Good Heart hasn't proven a hit with filesharers.

Simon Francis, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, also touched on the issue of intellectual property protection, noting that "legislation is miles behind technological progress".

"Piracy causes over $1 billion of lost revenue in the US alone, with a lot of this emanating from China. It's vital the UK does all it can to help protect its interests," he said.

As is generally the case when putting a value on filesharing, no detail was given on how this $1 billion figure was arrived at. It probably follows the usual incorrect assumption that every piece of downloaded music or film represents a lost sale for those poor media content cartels.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...an-filesharing





Obama’s Commerce Secretary Talks Tough on Music Piracy
David Kravets

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke issued a blistering diatribe against music piracy Monday, declaring it “a growing threat” that “should be dealt with accordingly.”

“This isn’t just an issue of right and wrong,” Locke said in a speech at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the nation’s musical focal points. “This is a fundamental issue of America’s economic competitiveness.”

Borrowing a page from the Hollywood and recording studios, Locke urged internet service providers and content owners “to work collaboratively to combat intellectual property infringement online.”

“Especially to combat repeat infringement,” he added.

Locke’s statements came a week after Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, declared that copyright law “isn’t working” because internet service providers are allowed to turn a blind eye to customers’ unlawful activities with impunity. Hollywood and recording studios have been pushing for the removal of online pirates from the internet in what is largely known as “three strikes” or “graduated response” policy.

The Commerce Department, Locke said, is preparing to craft an “administration-wide policy on copyright protection and innovation.”

“At the Commerce Department, we are trying to figure out how we shut out the pirates, while preserving the internet as an avenue for commerce for music and for other creative industries,” Locke added.

He said the internet was a “double-edged sword” for the industry.

“On the one hand, online copyright infringement is a growing threat, with cyberlockers as well as peer-to-peer, file sharing, streaming and user generated content sites providing a constant challenge to the music industry,” he said. “But the internet, if used correctly, can be a great growth engine.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...-threestrikes/





Mark Waid Defends Comic Book Piracy
Mark Langshaw

Mark Waid has spoken out in defence of comic book piracy through filesharing websites, Bleeding Cool reports.

During his keynote speech at the Harvey Awards, the writer said that that copyright should be about putting work into the public domain, rather than protecting corporate interests.

The Irredeemable scribe went on to say that filesharing will lead to a culture of sharing, and that the industry should embrace the concept of the public domain.

"Culture is more important than copyright," he said, adding that "there are more ideas in one week at your comic shop than three years in Hollywood".

Waid's remarks were met with opposition from cartoonist Sergio Aragonés, which allegedly resulted in a verbal disagreement between the two.

The Harvey Awards took place in Baltimore on Saturday. A full list of winners is available via its official website.
http://www.digitalspy.com/comics/new...ok-piracy.html





Entertainment Industry now Targets Network Operators
John Allen and Marlous Schrijvers

In its European filesharing wars, the entertainment industry now targets network operators. A Dutch Court has rejected claims for a generic blockade of The Pirate Bay website.

For several years, the entertainment industry has been combating filesharing via peer to peer networks such as the very popular web site and service "The Pirate Bay". In doing so, it uses special litigation vehicles, such as the BREIN foundation in the Netherlands. Until recently, BREIN's litigation efforts were aimed directly at those responsible for operating or hosting file sharing networks. Now the entertainment industry has turned to network operators and internet access providers to implement blockades of the file sharing web sites.

By his decision rendered on 19 July 2010, the Presiding judge of the court of The Hague rejected the claims of BREIN, which were brought in preliminary injunction proceedings (the well known Dutch "kort geding" proceedings). At the core of the decision is the finding that pursuant to the Enforcement Directive (European Directive 2004/48/EC) an injunction can indeed be obtained against "innocent" third parties such as network and internet access providers, if their services are used in the course of an infringement of intellectual property rights. However, the Court held that this applies in specific and individualised cases of infringement and not as a generic measure to block access to filesharing (e.g. bittorrent) websites for all of Ziggo's 1.5 million internet subscribers.

Background

BREIN started the preliminary injunction proceedings against Ziggo in connection with the website The Pirate Bay.

BREIN demanded that Ziggo block the access for all of its subscribers to all websites of The Pirate Bay via which people can, inter alia, exchange music, films and games by way of torrents (peer-2-peer file sharing). BREIN had already succeeded in obtaining a court order against The Pirate Bay to have them remove any unlawful torrents, but the service remained very active and enforcement efforts had no result.

Arguing that it had no other options, BREIN demanded that the largest Dutch broadband internet provider Ziggo implement blockades in its network (on the basis of a list of IP addresses and domain names), to prevent 1,5 million Ziggo subscribers from having access to the web site The Pirate Bay.

Ziggo's defence

In it's defence, Ziggo stressed its position as a "mere conduit" access provider, having no contractual relationship with the Pirate Bay web site.

It argued that the case concerned the alleged infringement of intellectual property rights by Ziggo's subscribers. Ziggo argued that in this case, the possibility of an injunction against it as a party providing "intermediate servcies" is not available. Ziggo took the position that the relevant legal provisions, implemented pursuant to the Enforcement Directive, would only apply in specific and individualised cases of infringement. Conversely, the possibility to order intermediate services providers to cease their services would not be available as a generic measure, where it is clear that the large majority of Ziggo subscribers are not involved in file sharing (and it also cannot be said that the only purpose of a visit to The Pirate Bay is to engage in illegal activity).

Ziggo also argued that the requested measures would not be effective as these could easily be circumvented and that also for this reason, the requested blockade was disproportionate.

Court's decision

BREIN based its claims on Article 26d of the Dutch Copyright Act ("DCA") and Article 15e of the Neighbouring Rights Act ("NRA") and in the alternative, on the grounds that Ziggo committed an act of tort by not blocking access to the file sharing website. The relevant provisions in the DCA and NRA are based on Article 11 of the Enforcement Directive and provide that a rights owner can bring a separate action against an intermediary, if his services are used in the course of an infringement of intellectual property rights.

The interim relief judge found that such a separate action against an internet service provider could indeed be possible in a case like this, notwithstanding the liability regime for ISP's as laid down in the Dutch Civil Code (article 6:169c DCC, i.e. the implementation of the E-commerce Directive). However, the judge also held that it is necessary for the granting of an injunction as requested by BREIN, that it is established that the third party in question has indeed infringed the rights concerned by making use of Ziggo's services. According to the judge, the Articles 26d and 15e, interpreted in light of the Enforcement Directive, should only be used to end specific and identifiable infringements. It is only in those cases that it may be determined with the required degree of certainty that there is indeed an infringement and that the requested injunction is proportionate. Since for the vast majority of Ziggo's subscribers this could not be established, BREIN's claims, which regarded all of Ziggo's describers, were denied.

Another reason the judge gave for denying BREIN's claims was that granting these would be contrary to the requirement of subsidiarity. According to the judge, the fact that BREIN could have instigated actions against individual subscribers means that there were other, less far-reaching possibilities to act against the alleged infringement.

Comments

It is the first case in the Netherlands in which a court was asked to decide on a rights owners' request to categorically block access to a web site for all the subscribers of a 'mere conduit' access provider.

Several courts in EU countries have already issued decisions in cases between national representatives of rights owners and ISP's via whose networks subscribers can access The Pirate Bay's websites. There is a wide variety in the outcome of these cases, which is, for instance, due to differences in legislation or in the type of proceedings (e.g. criminal law rather than civil law).

The case on the merits is now pending and it will take approximately one year to find out whether the Court follows the approach of the judge in the preliminary injunction proceedings.
http://www.lexology.com/library/deta...5-12945fd15e1f





Here Come 'Hurt Locker' File-Sharing Subpoenas
Greg Sandoval

For people worried that they may be accused of illegally sharing "The Hurt Locker," a movie about defusing bombs, the hope was that efforts to chase them down would fizzle out.

No such luck. The film's producers are finally moving to acquire the names of people they accuse of sharing this year's "Best Picture" winner on peer-to-peer sites. Qwest Communications on Monday notified a customer in Denver that the Internet service provider has received a subpoena from lawyers representing Voltage Pictures, the production company that made "The Hurt Locker."

"It is our company policy to notify our customer when we have received a subpoena requesting their records in civil matter," Qwest informed the customer, who contacted CNET on Thursday and asked to remain anonymous. "As required by law, to the extent we have these records we will furnish the records on or before September 30, 2010."

Voltage Pictures is just one of at least a dozen indie studios that are participating in an antipiracy campaign spearheaded by the Washington, D.C., law firm of Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver. Unlike the major film studios, smaller production companies don't have the resources to finance antipiracy operations. DGW offers to do it for them by filing copyright complaints on their behalf and in exchange takes a cut of whatever fees the suits generate.

DGW representatives were not immediately available for comment.

Landing Voltage Pictures as a customer was a coup for DGW. "The Hurt Locker" has lifted the firm's profile with indie studios, media, and file-sharing community. Some members of the latter category were shaken by the threat of litigation. The days when entertainment companies filed copyright complaints against individuals were supposed to have ended when the music industry stopped filing suits in December 2008.

Court battles loomed once more when DGW began filing copyright suits early this year. In May, "The Hurt Locker" producers filed suit against 5,000 "John Does". DGW attorneys said their investigators had obtained Internet Protocol addresses belonging to the accused, but needed to subpoena ISPs to acquire the names of each Doe defendant. Since then, dozens of nervous people have e-mailed me asking when DGW might begin notifying people they are being sued. That day has apparently arrived.

"The Hurt Locker" is far and away the most notable film working with DGW. "The Hurt Locker," a war film about soldiers whose job it is to disarm bombs in Iraq, was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won six. Not surprisingly, the movie was a popular download on peer-to-peer sites and now a lot of people could get sued.

In legal documents, Voltage Pictures has blamed the movie's relatively poor domestic performance on illegal file sharing.

As of March 21, the movie had grossed $16 million domestically, but took in $40 million overall. According to reports, the film's production budget was $15 million. The film leaked to the Web five months before the movie's U.S. debut.

Delayed by opposition

So why did DGW wait so long between filing the Doe suits and sending subpoenas to ISPs? Well, the law firm certainly had its hands full with all the opposition it faced. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union took DGW to court about whether it was proper to name thousands of individuals in a single lawsuit. Time Warner Cable objected to being compelled to look up thousands of customer records and claimed it was an undue burden. Just last week, an ISP from South Dakota filed a motion to quash one of DGW's subpoenas and argued that a U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., doesn't have jurisdiction over it.

In the EFF case, a federal judge sided with DGW, but EFF and the ACLU did convince the judge to prod DGW to change the language it uses when notifying accused file sharers of the allegations. EFF and the ACLU argued that former notices were confusing.

In a correspondence between DGW and the Qwest customer who contacted CNET, the law firm told him that file sharers have a right to fight or "quash" the subpoena and specified the kind of information Voltage Pictures requested from Qwest. DGW appears to have done away with passages about how copyright owners can sue copyright violators for up to $150,000.

"Well, it's not what I would have written," said Cindy Cohn, EFF's legal director. "I think the letters are much better than they were, but I don't think [DGW] has done a great job of explaining what is happening."

Another change from the previous forms is the price accused file sharers can pay to settle their case. For example, last May, DGW gave Houston-resident John Harrison a chance to settle out of court for $2,500. For allegedly downloading "The Hurt Locker," DGW told the Qwest customer from Denver that settling the case early would cost $2,900, according to documents reviewed by CNET.

Copy of subpoena sent to Qwest Communications ordering it to turn over a customer's records to producers of the 'The Hurt Locker.' Click to enlarge.

When asked what people who find themselves accused by Voltage should do, Cohn advised them to go to EFF's site where they can find information about attorneys, many of whom charge a fee, but have experience in this field.

Cohn said that just being accused by Voltage doesn't mean an innocent person has to fork over money. There is also the option of fighting in court. She said that some of the attorneys who have represented people accused by DGW have reported cases where the defendants didn't know anything about BitTorrent, least of all how to install it. Cohn said she has seen far more of these kinds of complaints than when the music industry was pursuing a similar legal strategy against file sharing.

"I'm quite concerned that the techniques they are using are not very good," Cohn said. "Just because you show up with a bunch of IP numbers doesn't mean they're any good."

Cohn said she hopes people who believe they have been wrongly accused will take the issue to court. She added that because copyright laws are so "draconian" and the costs of litigating so high, she understands why people wouldn't want to pursue that course.

"When it comes to copyright," Cohn said "the law is set up so that truth, whether someone actually violated the law or not, takes a back seat to financial considerations."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20015493-261.html





Another ISP Bucks 'Hurt Locker' Subpoenas
Greg Sandoval

An Internet service provider based in South Dakota is refusing to turn over information belonging to 143 customers accused of illegally sharing the Oscar-winning film, "The Hurt Locker."

In federal court on Monday, Midcontinent Communications filed a motion to quash a subpoena received from Voltage Pictures, the film's producers, who allege some of the ISP's customers used peer-to-peer services to pilfer unauthorized copies of its movie. Voltage seeks to require Midcontinent to identify those customers as well as turn over their home addresses, phone numbers, and other data.

Midcontinent's lawyers told the court that the subpoena was improperly issued and doesn't offer to compensate the ISP for gathering the information. In addition, Midcontinent, which has 250,000 customers in North and South Dakota and parts of Minnesota, is skeptical that a U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., where the subpoena was issued, has jurisdiction over it. Midcontinent told the court that its own policy prevents it from providing "customer information to third parties without a valid court order."

Voltage Pictures is one of more than a dozen independent studios that have hired law firm Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver to spearhead a legal campaign against thousands of people accused of violating their copyrights. Since Dunlap possesses only Internet protocol numbers when gathering information on accused movie pirates, it must first file lawsuits against "John Does." Then, the firm must try to compel ISPs to put names to the IP addresses.
'Hurt Locker' sharers: Expect docs like this (photos)

Sharing large film files continues to get simpler, thanks in large part to improving file-compression technologies and faster Internet connections. While the major film studios have the Motion Picture Association of America to enforce their copyrights, indie filmmakers typically don't have the resources to go after illegal file sharers. In setting up antipiracy operations tailor-made for the indies, Dunlap is trying to build a niche.

But Dunlap, which has reportedly agreed to pay all the costs connected to the lawsuits in exchange for a big percentage of whatever money is collected through litigation, has already run into plenty of profit-eating obstacles. Time Warner Cable raised similar concerns as Midcontinent after receiving numerous subpoenas from Dunlap. A federal judge has raised concerns about the jurisdiction issues and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union argued in court over the legality of naming large numbers of individuals in a single suit.

Tom Simmons, a spokesman for Midcontinent, said Friday that his company is objecting to this partly because Voltage hasn't offered to compensate the company for expenses related to looking up IP addresses and because the request puts an undue burden on the company. But Midcontinent is most concerned with protecting customer privacy, Simmons said.

The subpoena requires "Midcontinent to reveal highly personal information of purported customers," the ISP wrote the court. In the motion to quash, Midcontinent closed by saying before it is required to turn over such sensitive data, "the court should require Voltage Pictures to properly serve Midcontinent with a valid subpoena from a court with subpoena power" over the ISP.

The big question is, will Dunlap face more of these kinds of fights?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20014970-261.html





French ISPs and French Government Locking Horns Over HADOPI Costs
Drew Wilson

There’s a major battle brewing between the French government and the French ISPs. A line is being drawn and it’s about the money. While this was foreseeable thanks to our earlier reports, it will be very interesting to see how far the battle will escalate. One report suggests that ISPs may even opt to not honor their end of the anti-piracy effort.

HADOPI, the three strikes law in France, may have been passed nearly a year ago, the war is far from over and it could very well be one of the several smaller battles that could be the downfall of the law.

Earlier this month, we learned that a battle was brewing between French ISPs and the government. The issue that has caused a thick line in the sand between the two? Compensation of ISPs. In our earlier report, the French government wanted to just let ISPs receive an invoice of the cost to enforce the three strikes law – and yes, it is very expensive to do thousands of IP look-ups per month thanks to things like labor. After doing some research, we discovered that the cost of the three strikes law would be around 50 million Euros per year which translates to about 64 million US dollars. All this evidence to come up with the figure was based on government statements and legal documents.

This is why the negotiations are huge and the stakes are so high. How much of the costs should ISPs absorb? Do ISPs expect compensation on a per IP look-up basis or do they absorb that cost for a period of time and send an invoice to the government, hoping to receive reimbursement after? A lot of hot questions indeed.

Now, according to PC Impact, things may be getting testy as this dispute goes much more public (Google translation).

From the report:

At the press conference introducing the company’s financial results, Maxime Lombardini retracted Hadopi. The CEO of Iliad, recalled that four of the major operators have written to the Ministry of Culture to remember the principle of reimbursement would have to pay the ISP for the implementation of Hadopi including the identification of IP. “Nobody disputes that, then there is a little game of ping-pong between Internet Piracy and the Ministry of Culture, I think this will be resolved. For our part, in any case, it is a prerequisite for the implementation

In other words, compensate us first and then we’ll play ball with this new law. No money, no enforcement.

Maxime Lombardini but could not quantify the amount of Hadopi for the group, while Christine Albanel estimated cost of the law to Orange to an amount “infinitesimal”. So, to make the figures, you must know the volume, pace, yet we are not able to give a figure. A study had raised 70 million euros, it is very far from that. ”

This seems like a rather vague statement. Did he mean that the number is much higher or lower? He is definitely right though, the total cost of enforcing HADOPI depends entirely on two things: The number of IP look-ups required and how much each look-up costs. When we calculated the total cost of 50 Million euro’s, our formula was identical:

A X B = C

Where A is the number of look-ups, B is the total cost per look-up and C is the total cost of enforcement for an increment of time. If you are missing either A or B, you cannot calculate C.

It’s unclear where he got the 70 million euro figure since this was not what we calculated, but if the government is firm on its promise of the total number of disconnections it made back in 2009, then the number won’t be too far off give or take a few million.

The report seems to suggest that if the government just decides that ISPs should foot a good chunk of the total bill for enforcement, then ISPs have an ace up their sleeves:

The law does not provide HADOPI financial chapter, but it requires the ISP that meets the demands for identification. As a result, ISPs are preparing for a showdown: do not implement the requests for identification and see what happens. If the folder part in litigation, they hide behind the constitutional jurisprudence which provides support for state costs related to foreign missions of telecom players.

So it sounds like that if ISPs are unhappy with the compensation provided by the French government, they are willing to go to court on constitutional grounds – and it would be obvious that it would be quite a showdown in court if one were to pit the nations ISPs against the government.

Earlier, we noted that ACTA might be completed sometime this month. If three strikes were to be covertly put back in to ACTA after all that has happened, it would be quite an embarrassing first step out of the gates if the three strikes law failed in France just months after the finalized draft was released.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/90536/f...-hadopi-costs/





PlayStation 3 Modchip Lawsuit First of Many, Says Lawyer

The defendants have vowed to fight the Japanese company no matter the cost
Renai LeMay

Sony's PlayStation 3 mod chip lawsuit could be just the first of many gaming giant-initiated cases in Australia, according to a lawyer who defended a client against Nintendo in a similar case earlier this year.

Late last week Australia's Federal Court slapped a temporary ban -- which expires today -- on a handful of local retailers selling or importing hardware -- commonly known as "mod chips" -- that allows unauthorised software to run on the popular PlayStation 3 console. The court also ordered the chips to be handed over to Sony while the case was running.

The situation echoes a similar case earlier this year, when law firm Berrigan Doube defended a local distributor against a lawsuit by Nintendo, in which the Japanese gaming giant was attempting to stop the retailer from distributing the R4 cartridge, which allows unauthorised applications and games to run on Nintendo's handheld DS console.

The Nintendo case ended in a settlement to Nintendo to the tune of $620,000 without the judge coming to a finding -- and, according to Berrigan Doube director John Cheng, similar cases may go down the same route.

"If history is anything to go by, I envisage many more cases to be settled in favour of the gaming giants before a court is given a proper chance to consider and decide on these highly contentious matters," he said in an emailed statement this afternoon.

In the Sony case, the defendants have vowed to fight the Japanese company no matter the cost.

“This is not OzModChips versus Sony,” wrote retailer OzModChips on its site after Sony won the injunction. “This is not OzModChips, Quantronics, Modsupplier versus Sony. We would go as far as saying that it is not even everyone in Australia versus Sony.”

“This will affect everyone that plans to buy such a device worldwide. It already sets a dangerous precedent. Everyone that was using OtherOS, everyone that has had a faulty PS3 laser … and those interested in PS3 custom firmware and homebrew applications. We cannot do it alone, we need the support of everyone in the homebrew community, the media, engineers that understand the inner workings and anyone else that can provide support.”

Cheng said the defendants would need to have unusually strong backing to take on a company like Sony.

"It will take an extraordinary person to really take the fight to the gaming console companies due to the significant resources required and the personal risks attached to defending the allegations raised against them," he said.

Legal analysis

When the Sony case arose yesterday, online commentators immediately raised the spectre of a similar case back in 2005, Stevens v Kabushiki Kaisha Sony Computer Entertainment.

The landmark case saw Sony allege that a Mr Stevens had breached a number of laws by selling mod chips and unauthorised games for its PlayStation consoles. However, the High Court found that Sony's hardware did not constitute what is called a "technological protection measure", meaning it wasn't illegal to break through it.

The case was hailed as a victory for freedom of consumer expression, but Cheng today said the Australian legal situation had been confused since the judgment.

Should the current Sony matter proceed to final judgment, these legal proceedings will offer the Australian community clarification with respect to the uncertainties in Australian copyright law.

Cheng said he believed Sony was likely to argue in court -- as it did in the prior Stevens case, and as Nintendo did this year in its own case, that the PS Jailbreak device infringed the copyright and trademark of the technology embedded in Sony's PlayStation console, and maybe even that the PS Jailbreak was a circumvention device which unlawfully circumvents its protections.

The defending retailers, the lawyer said, would likely argue that not only was the PS Jailbreak software -- which is applied through a USB stick -- not a circumvention device, but that it was actually designed and used to increase the functionality of the PlayStation 3 -- and accordingly, Sony's technology should not be protected.

"In addition," said Cheng, "the respondents may also argue that the PS Jailbreak does not contain Sony's copyright material.

"If it is established that the PS Jailbreak does contain copyright material belonging to Sony, the respondents may argue that the PS Jailbreak is a legitimate device which enables time shifting’ broadcasts and format shifting copyright material and rely upon the exemption to infringement of copyright, being the region coding exemption."

Cheng finally noted that the defendants may also have to argue that the PS Jailbreak did not infringe upon Sony's trademarks.

If the defendants do attempt to fight Sony on the matter, they will likely be in for a tough road. But, according to Cheng, until someone does fight one of the big gaming giants, the issue may never be resolved in a legal sense.

"Until a decision is received from the Court on the subject matters raised in the Nintendo case and now, the Sony case, we are likely to see more cases being brought in the future by gaming console giants against individuals and companies that import and sell mod chips in Australia," he said.
http://www.goodgearguide.com.au/arti...y_says_lawyer/





Game Companies Should Play Fair With P2P
Ernesto

Increasingly, game companies are using peer-to-peer powered solutions to deliver games and updates to their customers. While the use of P2P technology could be beneficial for publishers, consumers, and the image of file-sharing in general, the use of P2P by game companies still lacks transparency, privacy and control. A newly published best practices outline aims to change this.

In the past we’ve praised game companies who adopted P2P-based solution for the distribution of their content. Through the use of P2P, the game companies can save resources and consumers often see improved download times. However, there is also a dark side to this apparent synergy.

Although the use of P2P technology has many benefits, it is not always implemented with the interests of consumers in mind. In fact, quite often gamers are simply abused as cheap bandwidth sources by million dollar corporations, often without their knowledge.

Akamai, one of the largest content delivery companies around, has a P2P-based product called the Netsession Interface which is rather abusive towards customers. The software is installed as a Windows service and it is always running in the background. Even worse, most users wont even know that it’s running because it doesn’t show up in task manager. Nothing of the above is mentioned in their EULA.

The NetSession Interface is used by game publishers including Kuma Games, Aeria Games and NetDevil. Customers who play the games have no user controls or visible indicators, while the software uses ‘their’ upload bandwidth to deliver content to other users for an indefinite period after the download is completed.

Besides Akamai there are various other P2P-based solutions that lack transparency, control or privacy, such as Pando’s Media Booster. Blizzard’s BitTorrent Downloader which is used for the distribution of StarCraft 2 and World of Warcraft is one of the more transparent solutions, but that one is not perfect yet either.

From the Akamai example above it is clear that something has to be done to ensure that consumers are not exploited as bandwidth slaves. P2P technology is great, and many consumer would love to donate some, but there has to be a clear set of rules to guarantee that consumers have a choice.

To address this issue, game publisher company Solid State Networks has just released a best practices document (pdf) which emphasizes giving users transparency and control over their resources. According to the company it all boils down to the following directives:

1. Transparency – Make visible and readily accessible information about the presence and operational activity of the P2P technology.

2. Control – Provide the ability to manage, operate and remove the P2P technology in an intuitive and conspicuous manner to the user.

3. Privacy – Ensure the absolute privacy and security of personal information and user originated files.

We think this is a great initiative and sincerely hope that the gaming industry will adopt this, or a similar set of rules, in the interests of the consumer. A quick search on Google shows that most of it is much needed, as there are are many complaints (1,2,3,4,5) from gamers about the lack of transparency and control that most of the current P2P delivery systems offer.

Surprisingly enough, Solid State Networks already offers their very own P2P-based delivery solution for game publishers that adheres to all three directives. However, the other P2P-based solutions that already exist out there can be easily adopted to become ‘fair’ as well.

Below you’ll find an additional PSA, summarizing how and why game publishers should handle P2P-powered game distribution.
http://torrentfreak.com/game-compani...th-p2p-100901/





More GPL Enforcement Work Again.. and a Very Surreal but Important Case
Harald Welte

In recent days and weeks, I'm doing a bit more work on the gpl-violations.org project than during the last months and years. I wouldn't say that I'm happy about that, but well, somebody has to do it :/

Right now I'm facing what I'd consider the most outrageous case that I've been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software. None of the proprietary userspace programs are touched! None of the proprietary programs are ever distributed either.

If that manufacturer would succeed with such a lawsuit, it would create some very nasty precedent and jeopardize the freedom of users of Linux-based embedded devices. It would be a direct blow against projects that provide "homebrew" software for embedded devices, such as OpenWRT and many others.

I've seen many weird claims and legal strategies when it comes to companies trying to deprive developers of their freedom to modify and run modified versions of Free Software. But this is definitely so weird that I still feel like I'm in a bad dream. This can't be real. It feels to surreal.

It's a pity that I cannot speak up more about the specific company in question right now. I'm desperately looking forward to the point in time where I can speak up and speak out about what has been happening behind the scenes.
http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2010/09/01/





Metal Band Takes On U2 Over File-Sharing

Gama Bomb frontman Philly Byrne knows first hand about file-sharing's impact on record sales. His band did a little experiment with their latest album, offering it as a free download (and it still is, go grab it at the link which follows this article). The funny thing is that this didn't hurt their CDs sales; in fact it helped the band build their fanbase.

So when Philly saw a recent article by U2's manager in GQ Magazine discussing the problems with file-sharing, Philly felt compelled to offer up his counter argument. Here it is: U2's manager Paul McGuinness' recent article is well-reasoned, well-informed and commendable in its aims - though it's crazily short-sighted. It falls at the last hurdle when envisioning future solutions to the problems file sharing causes for the music industry, and is filled with logical blind-spots on the current state of the business. He's got the numbers right, but the headspace is all wrong.

To his credit, Mr McGuinness is here wading into an argument that, as he notes, often involves untold abuse for those willing to stick their oar in. Furthermore, it's one that doesn't affect his untouchably profitable bread-and-butter, U2. So who am I to gainsay him? Last year my band Gama Bomb released their third album free of cost as a download with the permission of our record company, Earache Records. This, to my knowledge, makes us the first signed band ever to do so. We took this step because we personally consume music in this way and were aware our previous albums were largely being consumed as shared files. To release another CD in the traditional way seemed futile. Also, as a band playing a niche form of music on a small budget, we were aware of the potential PR power of such a move. The label agreed, we did it, and that's why I feel qualified to dust off my soap box on this one."

To keep this sweet, Mr McGuinness' argument can be summarised in five points:

1. The 'problem' of 'free' content is the biggest issue facing the music industry

2. ISPs are profiting from widening bandwidth associated with filesharing

3. this has caused the music industry's profit shrink, therefore

4. tackling the ISPs is the key to saving the music industry

5. To this end, governments should legislate to make ISPs punish consumers who infringe copyright, encouraging them to use legal, paid, approved means of consuming music.

Two things stunned me as I read the article. First was Paul's own emphasis on the negative nature of prosecuting consumers for file sharing, though the 'graduated response' or 'three strikes' legislation he champions offers no less a persecution to the very people artists rely on.

Second was this quotation. "In recent years the music business has tried to "fight free with free," seeking revenues from advertising, merchandising, sponsorship...these efforts have achieved little success."

This is rather brash given that 360 degree contracts (where labels share in merch, licensing, royalties and live performance fees) have been common currency in the industry for more than 10 years, with all the majors buying over merchandise production companies in order to best profit from their bands' deals. It seems his own industry are quite keen on it.

It's also startling because U2 signed a 12-year deal with Live Nation in 2008, giving control of the band's merchandise and web presence to the concert promoter in sure recognition of those being vital cogs in the machine. And as for the rest? The band famously synergised corporate sponsorship and high-end merchandising in the form of the U2 iPod in 2004. Textbook new-industry pathfinding.

But Paul skips over these new revenue streams like they're a footnote, when they are in fact the lifelines of the music industry right now.

His band signing to a concert promoter and Lady Gaga hawking Wonder Bread in her videos is a sure indication of their worth.
Mr McGuinness sees the new anti-file sharing legislation as ensuring the future of the music industry, though he admits the labels will have to adapt to the new digital age yet.

I think he's dreaming. I think he'll be looking to a new, final hope in six months time, and another six months after that.

The only way to fix things is to sweep the decks clean, overturn the idea of file sharing as 'theft' and rethink how to profit from it. Industries world wide have done this time and again in the face of social and technological advancements.

There came a day when the log roller guy had to start making wheels, right?

If Paul's argument has five points, maybe it'd be neat for me to present five of my own in counter.

1. It is impossible to police the internet effectively.

2. Technology savvy evaders of new legislation will simplify technology to allow access to those below them. This is a constant stream. File sharing can't be stopped.

3. The old model of record labels being the only career-former for bands is obsolete. Brian Message's proposed Polyphonic label is a good example of alternatives.

4. Endorsing the idea of free content is the route to profit, creating a 'goodwill' industry.

5. Usenet groups currently charge users around £18 per month to download unlimited material. This is the best model for the future, with corporate tie-ins and advertising monetizing the interactive space in which people will swap material.

I'm not here to call Paul McGuinness a hypocrite or an old-guard bulldog or anything of the sort. On the contrary, I want to praise his passion for rock music and ask him to get on side with championing free content and encouraging the music industry to re-tool to take advantage of it. That's a big leap, and may feel like an irrational one since that way lies the death of all that built the towers of the rock and roll biz in the past – but it has to be done.

The coming war between the labels and the ISPs is where this new approach will be forged, though I believe punishing the consumer for being ahead of the curve is simply wrong.

As Mr McGuinness suggests, the great minds behind Facebook, Google and Apple - and yes, behind the rock colossus that is U2 - will need to cooperate to establish the future of the music industry. But that future will not lie in restricting content, throttling bandwidth, or playing an exhausting eternal game whack-a-mole with non-conforming websites.

By the way, when my band released their third album for free last year, we managed to sell an equal number of physical CDs as we did the prior album when it finally hit shelves. Not a spectacular result, but an interesting one.

More importantly, we've seen a groundswell in our fanbase and now get paid more for playing gigs and sell more merchandise than before. On the balance I think we won out, because we gave people what they wanted; a quality album and a bit of credit.

File sharing works for indie bands. And as for the big boys? Let's look at the case in point. Bono's back notwithstanding, U2 are bigger than ever, making over 130 million dollars in the last year, much of it from touring.

The freely distributed album is the path to record tour profits, as the industry knows well, as well as they know consumers' money is still there - it's just being exchanged for different services. What Paul needs to tell the labels is, if you're not willing to change the column titles on your spreadsheet, you don't deserve to be in business.

There are not enough fingers to stick in this dyke Mr McGuinness. Isn't it better to just let the levee break and become the richest swimsuit salesman in town?
http://www.antimusic.com/news/10/aug...-Sharing.shtml





Google Reportedly Seeking Music Exec
FMQB

The next piece of the puzzle in Google's upcoming music service is reportedly falling into place, as the Internet giant is currently seeking out an executive to head up the project. Sources have told All Things Digital that Google has reached out to multiple digital media executives about a position heading up the reported Google Music, but haven't hired anyone yet.

All Things Digital also reports that its sources believe the mysterious Google Music could have its launch delayed from later this year to the first quarter of 2011.

CNet's Greg Sandoval speculates that a Google Music service would be the biggest threat to Apple's iTunes domination yet, due to Google's ability to "launch a successful hardware-software, one-two punch." Sandoval notes that the Google Android phone has become a major competitor to the iPhone.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1933376





Platinum Is So Passé. In iTunes Era, the Singles Count.
Joseph Plambeck

By traditional measures, the British hip-hop artist Taio Cruz is far from being a star. But in the new world of pop music, he is certified gold.

Mr. Cruz’s latest album, “Rokstarr,” has sold just 93,000 copies in 12 weeks, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and this week sits at No. 54 on the Billboard 200 chart.

But while he has sold relatively few albums, he has sold 4.9 million copies of two singles from the album, “Break Your Heart” and “Dynamite,” and videos for those singles have been viewed more than 49 million times online. For his label, Mercury Records, that means he is a commercial success.

For decades, the music industry has been looking to the album charts to establish what made a hit. In the past 10 years, though, album sales have plummeted, sales of singles have surged and new sources of revenue have emerged — like fees for music streamed online and ringtone purchases — that are changing the definition of a hot artist.

Still, much of the industry relies on the Billboard 200, the longtime album sales chart, as the primary measure and talking point about an artist’s moneymaking prowess.

“The music industry has trained people to focus on the album chart for 20 years,” said Jay Frank, the head of music for CMT, the country music cable network. “Now they need to get them to focus on something else.”

BigChampagne, a media measurement firm in California, believes there is an opening for a new chart that better captures an artist’s popularity and commercial success. Last month, the company introduced a service, which it is calling the Ultimate Chart, that ranks artists based on the number of albums sold, singles sold, songs streamed online and other factors. The service also ranks sales of albums and singles, though they diverge little from Billboard’s charts.

On the most recent Ultimate Chart, Mr. Cruz is the No. 2 artist. Lil Wayne ranks as the fourth most popular artist, while his most recent album, “Rebirth,” is on the Billboard album chart at No. 89. (The two charts are not always at such great odds. Eminem is the No. 1 artist on the Ultimate Chart while his album sits at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.)

The new charts reflect the shift in music industry revenue. Even established performers like Rihanna, whose latest album, “Rated R,” broke into the top five on the Billboard 200 in 2009, receives half of her revenue through those other avenues, according to Jim Urie, the head of distribution for the Universal Music Group, which owns her label, Def Jam, as well as Mercury.

“We used to have basically a single line on the revenue sheet,” Mr. Urie said. “Now we have many.”

For most labels and artists, though, revenue from those new streams has not made up for the sharp drop in CD sales. While labels would not discuss overall revenue for specific artists, total revenue from recorded music peaked in 1999, at $13.4 billion, according to Forrester Research, and was about half of that in 2009.

But the multiple ways to make money provide hope to a struggling industry and are also changing the kind of music that gets made and promoted. Album sales are often driven by older listeners who typically favor country and soft-rock artists like Taylor Swift and Susan Boyle.

Pop and hip-hop artists like Taio Cruz and Rihanna are sometimes underrepresented on the album chart, as younger fans in particular have moved to buying singles and streaming music online.

In the near future, that could mean more Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, less Nickelback and Keith Urban.

“It’s becoming clear this year, to the industry and the artists, that when you’re having real hit singles, it has great value,” said David Massey, president of Mercury Records, Mr. Cruz’s label. “They can be more important than the album chart position.”

The Billboard charts have been modified over the years as the music industry changed. Back in 1913, Billboard published a chart showing the popularity of sheet music. In 1945, Billboard magazine introduced a chart displaying the top five albums. Five eventually grew to 200, the number the magazine has stuck with since 1972.

The album charts were largely a guessing game and could be manipulated by music insiders. That changed in 1991, when SoundScan began electronically tracking sales by retailers. The labels signed on to the service, and Billboard used the data for its Billboard 200 chart.

It didn’t take long for the industry to realize that albums usually peaked in sales during their first week of release, rather than build up momentum over time, as they had long thought. That discovery changed the marketing strategy at record labels, said Peter Lubin, a former record executive, putting the focus on the weeks leading up to the release.

“The music industry got very good at creating stories about artist launches,” said David Pakman, a venture capitalist and former chief executive of the digital music store eMusic. “You created a story to get radio programmers to get behind it.”

If a record had a bad first week, Mr. Lubin said, the thinking at a label quickly became, “This record is a loser; if you invest any more money in it, you’ll be a loser, too.”

And no one wants to be a loser. But until a new measurement tool is widely adopted, labels are largely left to their own devices to figure out a profitable strategy and a way to compare their success with the competition.

Cliff Chenfeld, an owner of Razor and Tie, an independent label in New York, said his company tailored a revenue strategy for each project rather than immediately falling back on a calculation of how many albums could be sold.

The singer-songwriter Dave Barnes, an artist signed to Razor and Tie, has never broken the top 50 in the Billboard 200. But Mr. Barnes found success on Christian radio and landed a deal with SongFreedom.com, a site that provides music to wedding photographers and videographers.

The commercial success of that deal, according to Mr. Chenfeld, is not reflected on the Billboard 200, even though its revenue is “considerable, and opportunities like that are viral.”

“The reliance on album sales is very 20th century,” he said.

Bill Werde, the editorial director of Billboard, said its Hot 100 chart lists the most popular songs based on a formula that factors in single sales, radio airplay and online streaming. “We’re constantly evolving what we’re doing and how we do it,” he said. Nielsen, the company that provides the album sales data to Billboard, has started to compile an artist’s revenue streams on a single sheet that it calls a scorecard.

But the top spot on the album charts, like a No. 1 book or a big opening weekend at the box office, remains a salient — and marketable — shorthand for industry success.

“We still fight for the No. 1 spot,” said Lee Stimmel, executive vice president for marketing at Epic Records, a Sony Music label. “It’s still a very important tag to have on a record.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/bu...ia/30hits.html





Playlist.com Files for Bankruptcy, Owes Millions to Major Record Labels
Austin Carr

Will iTunes switch to streaming? When is cloud-based Spotify launching stateside? Is Google Music more than just a rumor? How long will Pandora and Grooveshark last? We all want free streaming music, but can ad-supported services survive?

All these answers depend on the four major record labels--EMI, Sony, Universal, Warner Music Group--which control nearly 80% of the U.S. market, and have struggled to find partners with financially viable business models for online streaming. In yet another reminder of this, free music streaming service Playlist.com filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week after it became drowned in royalty payments.

Playlist, a site which hosts on-demand music for users to share and generate playlists, is mired in debt. The company owes more than $24 million to major labels and $1.68 million to indies in royalty costs. Additionally, its bandwidth bill alone for providing free online streaming comes to $803,470--not exactly a sustainable financial picture.

After settling a lawsuit with Universal and WMG in May and battling the RIAA and nine other labels for mass copyright infringement, it appeared Playlist had finally worked out its licensing deals with the majors. But by that time, the company had perhaps suffered too much loss, especially after subsequent bans from MySpace and Facebook.

Playlist is certainly not the first streaming service to struggle to keep up with royalty payments. Last year, a similar music service called SeeqPod shuttered its doors after building a library of 13 million tracks. Streaming songs for free was costing MySpace up to $10 million per month, until it decided to disable auto-play to reduce costs. And even successful services like Spotify have struggled to land a U.S. deal with major labels for royalty payments. In April, it surfaced that after receiving 1 million plays of her hit song "Poker Face," Lady Gaga had only earned just $167 from the service.

Perhaps this is why Apple, after teasing many for so long with a possible streaming service, is now rumored to be heading toward a social "sharing" service instead.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1685863/p...-record-labels





From Apple, a Step Into Social Media for Music
Miguel Helft

Apple jumped into the social networking business on Wednesday, introducing Ping, a service built into iTunes that is intended to help users discover new music and, presumably, buy more songs from Apple.

Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, showcased Ping at an event here along with a string of other new products. They included updates to Apple’s iPod line of music players and new software that allows wireless printing from iPads and iPhones.

Mr. Jobs also introduced a much-anticipated upgrade of its Apple TV set-top box that is smaller and, at $99, significantly cheaper than its predecessor, which did not sell well. It allows users to rent television shows from Fox and ABC for 99 cents, and like many other devices, it can also stream movies from Netflix.

Mr. Jobs said the changes to the iPod lineup, which include new versions of the Shuffle, Nano and Touch models, were the most significant since Apple introduced its first music player in 2001.

“This year we’ve gone wild,” Mr. Jobs said. Sales of iPods have declined this year, but revenue from them has continued to grow as more buyers choose the higher-priced Touch model.

An unexpected announcement from Mr. Jobs was the introduction of Ping. With it, users will be able to follow friends and see what music they have bought or enjoyed, what concerts they plan to attend and what music they have reviewed. They will also be able to follow bands and get updates on their new releases, concert tours and other events.

Many other online music services like Pandora and Zune Social from Microsoft already have features that allow friends to share information about music.

While other social networks have struggled in the shadow of Facebook, some analysts said that Apple had a chance to turn Ping into a success. The service will be instantly available to 160 million iTunes users, as long as they download the latest version of the software, which Apple released on Wednesday.

“Apple wants to create even tighter links with iTunes users and keep them a click away from buying a song,” said Mike McGuire, a vice president with Gartner. “Ping will give people more reasons to spend frequently and rapidly.”

While Ping may put Apple in competition with Facebook, its impact on the struggling MySpace may be more pronounced, analysts said. MySpace has emphasized music over the last few years.

“This isn’t about reconnecting with your girlfriend from eighth grade,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with the Altimeter Group. “This is about talking to people about music.”

A spokeswoman for MySpace declined to comment.

Mr. Jobs said Ping would have simple privacy controls. Anyone will be able to follow bands and receive their updates, and users will be able to say whether they want to be followed by anyone or only by people they approve.

The new iPod Touch is thinner than the previous model and comes equipped with front- and rear-facing cameras, as well as Apple’s FaceTime video chatting software. It also has the same high-resolution retina display that Apple first showcased on the iPhone 4 earlier this year.

The Touch comes in three versions; the cheapest has 8 gigabytes of storage and costs $229.

Apple shrank the iPod Nano by replacing its wheel interface with a touch screen. It costs $149 for an 8-gigabyte version and $179 for 16 gigabytes.

In introducing the new version of Apple TV, Mr. Jobs acknowledged that the set-top box had not been as successful as he had hoped. The new version replaces the download-to-own model with a rental service that has shows from Fox and ABC for 99 cents. Mr. Jobs said the other networks had yet to agree to Apple’s pricing.

“We think the rest of the studios will see the light and get on board with us,” he said.

But that is far from guaranteed. All television studios are wary of distributing their shows in new ways on the Internet for fear of harming their existing businesses, which rely on cable and satellite subscriptions.

Fox and ABC agreed to Apple’s pricing model only after lengthy negotiations and heated internal discussions, especially at Fox’s parent, the News Corporation.

ABC’s participation is not surprising, given that Mr. Jobs is the largest shareholder and a board member of its parent, the Walt Disney Company.

For its part, Fox suggested that its agreement with Apple was something of an experiment. In a statement, Jim Gianopulos, the chairman and chief executive of Fox Filmed Entertainment, said the studio was excited to work with Apple over the next several months to “explore this innovative offering.”

Other networks, like CBS and NBC, are pointedly not participating in the rentals program. “Episodic television is not a pay-per-view business,” said Keith J. Cocozza, a spokesman for Time Warner, which owns HBO, TNT and other channels. Companies like Time Warner are instead supporting the existing subscription TV model, which is being gradually extended to the Web.

Analysts said that the new Apple TV was likely to be more of a hit than its $299 predecessor, in part because of its low price, but also because of software that allows users to stream content from their iPhones and iPads to their TVs through the set-top box. But they said Apple’s challenges in securing more content underscored the continuing difficulties that technology companies faced in cracking the TV market.

“Apple has not yet made a significant play for control of the TV,” James L. McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester, wrote on his blog.

Brian Stelter contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/te...y/02apple.html





The Full-On Assault On Cable Is Underway
MG Siegler

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon — when you hear these names, you usually think about how these tech giants all compete with one another. But what if they all teamed up for one cause? They’d be unstoppable, right? We’re about to find out.

All of these companies are currently sitting in the same boat about to storm the beaches. Which beaches? Those belonging to the the cable television providers in the U.S. It has only just begun, but the assault is underway.

Let me start by saying that of course the cable companies aren’t about to go away. Even if the mega assault by the tech juggernauts is successful, it will be many years before everyone’s addiction to cable gives way to something else. But it will. And that something else will be content served over the Internet.

And in that regard, the cable companies have positioned themselves fairly well because many of them are among the largest ISPs in the country now. But it’s their core business, cable television, that is facing this assault.

Just take a look at the big picture. Everyday there is a new story about how one of the aforementioned tech giants is on the verge of something new meant to control our time spent watching content — and much of it from the living room. Today’s story is about Google’s big pay-per-view movie plan for YouTube, a new service they’re hoping to debut later this year with full Hollywood studio support. If they land it, it could be huge. But that’s just today’s example.

On Wednesday, at an event in San Francisco, Apple is widely expected to debut their next iteration of the Apple TV — which will likely now be called the “iTV”. Alongside it, they’re expected to unveil a new layer of iTunes that will allow people to rent television shows for $0.99 a pop. Again, that too could be huge.

But it doesn’t really matter if one of these individual things doesn’t hit it big (and certainly the current Apple TV hasn’t). It’s the fact that all of these giant companies are clearly focused on this one thing: invading the living room and changing the way we consume video entertainment.

And they absolutely should be focused on that space. It’s a multi-billion dollar goldmine of potential that is sitting around begging to be disrupted. Consumers want this — even if many don’t realize it yet.

You see, there are plenty of us more tech-savvy consumers who have long thought about severing our ties with cable television — and some of us already have to varying degrees. Most average consumers simply don’t realize there are better alternatives out there yet, because the truth is that there is no singular better alternative right now. But these services from the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, etc. keep moving forward. And as more enter the game, they keep pushing each other to improve at a more rapid pace.

Cable is vulnerable because for far too long they’ve screwed us all with ridiculous prices for a crapload of content that we simply don’t want. Despite the ever-present promise of a-la-carte pricing, it has never come to fruition. And so our cable bills remain close to (or over) $100 a month. We’re paying for so much stuff we simply don’t want. But we have no choice.

Further, the vast majority of consumers would agree that the cable companies have just about the worst customer service imaginable. They’re continually promising to get better, but they never do. They’re always over-billing, service is always going out, and their phone lines are always jam-packed with complaints that fall upon deaf ears. Compare this to a company like Netflix which actually reaches out to you when they think they might have screwed up — even in the smallest way.

And on top of the garbage customer support, there’s the actual user experience of cable. It’s awful. Each company seems to be competing with the others for who can pick the worst cable box with the shittiest software. For a little while it looked like TiVo may solve that problem with their own DVR box that provided a layer on top of the cable box. But the cable companies put a quick end to that when they started including DVRs in their own boxes — complete with true-to-form god-awful UIs — for far cheaper.
It’s almost unbelievable to me that in this day and age that the user interface many of us have in our cable boxes looks as if it was designed with a crayon by a 6-year-old. This is how we interact with the device that is for many, the most-used in their home: the TV. A lot of kitchen appliances now have better UIs.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon — all of these guys offer experiences that are a million times better than cable. The only thing that’s holding them back is the content. Netflix is the one arguably making the most headway here, but that’s mainly for movies and older television shows. But Netflix is smart in that they’re not trying to do their own thing. They’re great as a supplement to something like the Xbox 360 and soon, undoubtedly, the iTV. If Xbox Live really can get live sports programming too, it will be another step.

The same is true if YouTube gets major Hollywood rentals. Undoubtedly, this will be a part of the Google TV package that will launch later this year. It’s an interesting model because Google TV is a platform that’s meant to lay on top of existing cable. But in that regard, it may end up being a great bridge to move people away from their cable addiction, and towards content over the Internet.

And if Apple’s iTV comes with the television show rentals, it will also be an important step. For most people, buying each television show you want to watch doesn’t make a lot of sense. But renting them for a cheaper price does. As a person who only is interested in a handful of shows, I expect such a solution to be a fraction of a fraction of the cost of my cable bill. I can’t wait.

Amazon has a pipeline into the living room through a few set top boxes already, but they’re also likely working on their own solution — in the same way they have their Kindle solution for digital books. People probably never thought the Kindle and other similar devices would lead to a changing of the book industry as quickly as it has — but it’s happening, just ask the Borders down the street from me which is going out of businesses.

And with cable, it’s going to happen too.

The music industry has already been disrupted. The book industry has been disrupted. The mobile industry has been disrupted. Now it’s time for the cable industry to be disrupted. There are too many major players with too many billions of dollars worth of resources for something not to hit and change the industry. It’s amazing that all of these guys are focusing on the same thing at the same time.

I, for one, cannot wait for the day when cable has to surrender and fall back into its role as a dumb pipe for the Internet. Innovation always tops greed and complacency. Always. The assault is underway.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/29/time-to-disrupt-cable/





Small Internet Providers Get Higher Speeds: CRTC
Peter Nowak

The CRTC is sticking to its guns and ordering big phone network owners such as Bell and Telus to offer smaller wholesale companies higher internet speeds, despite previous disagreement from the government.

Network owners will be required to offer whatever internet speeds they themselves sell to retail customers to smaller companies that rent portions of their networks, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission affirmed Monday. The requirement is necessary to maintain competition and reasonable prices for broadband services, the regulator said.

"Access to broadband internet services is a key foundation for the digital economy," CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein stated. "The large telephone and cable companies are bringing their fibre networks closer to Canadian homes and businesses, which allows for faster internet connections. Requiring these companies to provide access to their networks will lead to more opportunities for competition in retail internet services and better serve consumers."

The decision reaffirms a December 2008 CRTC ruling, which was remanded for reconsideration a year later by Industry Minister Tony Clement. The government acceded to lobbying from the big phone companies and ordered the CRTC to review its decision on the grounds that it had failed to consider a number of issues:

* How the matching speeds would diminish the phone companies' incentives to invest in new infrastructure.
* Whether there is sufficient competition to protect consumers without the requirement of matching speeds.
* Whether the regulatory requirements on phone and cable companies are equal.
* How the matching-speeds requirement would affect phone companies' abilities to offer services such as television over an internet connection.

Smaller internet providers such as Teksavvy and Execulink had argued that without requirements to offer matching speeds, the big companies would put them out of business. Bell and Telus are selling internet connections of up to 25 and 15 megabits per second respectively over newer fibre-based networks, but smaller providers can typically offer speeds of no more than five megabits per second over older copper-based infrastructure.

After holding a public hearing earlier this year, the CRTC now says it will allow phone companies to charge smaller providers an extra 10-per-cent mark-up to use their newer infrastructure in order to recoup the costs of their investments.

The regulator also said it would require cable companies to modify their existing internet access services to make it easier for smaller, "alternative" providers to connect to them. Cable companies are already required to offer matching speeds.

Small providers were denied their request to require phone and cable companies to reconfigure their networks to offer additional services, such as television. The CRTC said forcing such a reconfiguration "would constitute a disincentive to network investments without necessarily enhancing innovation or competition."

Commissioner Timothy Denton attached a dissenting opinion, which agreed with most of the ruling but chided the reconfiguration denial. The denial prevents smaller internet providers from getting around the download limits or throttling imposed on certain uses, such as peer-to-peer software, by network owners, he said.

"The current ambivalence about the role and legitimacy of smaller carriers continues. They are allowed to exist but denied the means to innovate," he said. "In a business with as much uncertainty as this, turning down the possibility for technical and business innovation seems a riskier move than letting it go ahead.
Ruling evokes mixed reaction

Some smaller internet providers were pleased with the majority of the decision, but agreed with Denton.

"The CRTC’s approach will entrench the duopolistic nature of the communications wireline services industry in many important markets and stifle the ability of competitors to provide new and innovative services," said Teksavvy's chief technology officer Marc Gaudrault in a statement.

"In this environment, it will be very difficult for competitors to attract the capital necessary to innovate, grow and contribute to the greatest extent possible to the competitive landscape and increase consumer choice."

Bell said the decision discourages investment in its networks and shows there is a lack of clarity in public policy.

The allowed 10-per-cent mark-up "is mere tinkering and does not create an environment which allows us to maximize the returns on our very significant fibre network investments," said Mirko Bibic, senior vice-president of regulatory and government affairs.
"We need to know, which is it? Do we want as much network investment in Canada as possible, or not? Last year, cabinet sent this issue back to the CRTC for reconsideration. Clearly, this isn’t the decision cabinet was looking for."

Ken Engelhart, vice-president of regulatory affairs for Rogers, said that although the decision went about as expected, some issues remain. Phone companies, for example, can charge 10 per cent more for access to their higher-speed infrastructure, but cable companies cannot.

"They seem pretty concerned about symmetry between phone and cable, which is fair enough, I think, but they seem to have introduced a couple of asymmetries in this decision," he said. "So much for the level playing field."

Network owners will have 90 days to propose to the CRTC the fees they intend to charge smaller internet providers for faster speeds.

The regulator said it will consider the phase-out of mandated internet access when alternatives such as wireless and satellite become more accepted as substitutes.

Monday's decision is likely to put pressure back on the federal government, which will have to decide whether to overrule the regulator or let the CRTC's requirement stand. The cabinet has 90 days to make a decision.

A spokesperson for Clement said it would be inappropriate to comment because the CRTC decision can be reviewed by the Governor in Council.
http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2010/0...rnet-crtc.html





Chile: Network Neutrality is Law

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From: (unknown charset) Lauren Weinstein <lauren_at_replaced.for.your.security>
Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:43:58 -0700

----- Forwarded message from Arturo 'Buanzo' Busleiman <buanzo_at_replaced.for.your.security>

Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:30:52 -0300
From: Arturo 'Buanzo' Busleiman <buanzo_at_replaced.for.your.security>
Subject: Chile: Network Neutrality is law

http://www.lavanguardia.es/internet-...ntent=FaceBook

(in spanish).

"Chile es el primer país del mundo que garantiza por ley el principio de neutralidad de internet,
según informa este viernes el blog de la Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones (CMT) de
España."

Chile is the first country of the world to guarantee by law the principle of network neutrality,
according to the Teleccomunications Market Comission's Blog from Spain.

"El diario oficial de la República de Chile publico ayer la Ley que garantiza que cualquier usuario
de Internet podrá utilizar, enviar, recibir u ofrecer cualquier contenido, aplicaciones o servicio
legal a través de Internet, sin bloqueos arbitrarios o discriminación."

The official newspaper of the Chilean Republic published yesterday a
Law that guarantees that any Internet user will be able to use, send,
receive or offer any content, applications or legal services over the
Internet, without arbitrary or discriminatory blocking.


http://archiver.mailfighter.net/nnsq...t/29/0002.html





F.C.C. Seeks More Input on Wireless Internet Rules
Edward Wyatt

On the Internet, data moves at the speed of light. The Federal Communications Commission, not so fast.

After months spent gathering comments about preserving an open and competitive Internet, the F.C.C. requested more feedback on Wednesday about whether regulations should apply to wireless Internet service.

The agency is also asking for comments about one of the most hotly debated Internet regulatory issues: special services that offer to prioritize certain digital traffic for a fee.

Those two issues were at the center of a recent proposal by Verizon and Google that generated widespread debate in the telecommunications and Internet communities.

Last month, Google and Verizon proposed a framework that would offer some consumer protections for an open Internet but would allow broadband service providers the freedom to speed the delivery of some digital content for a fee.

The proposal also would exclude wireless broadband from nearly all regulation.

The F.C.C.’s decision to seek further comment during the next 55 days effectively precluded any commission actions until after the Congressional elections in November.

Lawmakers of both parties have accused the F.C.C. of trying to “regulate the Internet” with recent proposals that would give it authority over the companies that provide consumers with Internet connections.

Several public advocacy groups expressed anger at the F.C.C.’s move, accusing it of trying to duck a politically difficult decision.

Those groups have been pushing for the commission to re-establish its authority over Internet service providers and to guarantee the open-access practice known as net neutrality.

“I think it has the appearance of the F.C.C. kicking the can down the road,” said Derek Turner, research director for Free Press. “The job of the F.C.C. is to protect the public interest. That includes making the really hard decisions that may anger some powerful industry incumbents.”

F.C.C. officials said the request for additional comments was tied in part to the Google-Verizon proposal. But the agency was also trying to guard against generating unintended negative consequences, and to ensure that any rules it did adopt would not be thrown out on a technical claim that the commission had not followed federal rule-making procedures.

“As we’ve seen, the issues are complex, and the details matter,” Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, said in a statement. “Even a proposal for enforceable rules can be flawed in its specifics and risk undermining the fundamental goal of preserving an open Internet.”

The F.C.C.’s proposed rules on preserving an open Internet were also blocked by an appeals court decision in April that struck down the commission’s legal basis for enforcing net neutrality — the concept that no legal content or application should receive priority on the Internet or be blocked by an Internet service provider.

The commission has floated a separate proposal that would reclassify broadband Internet service under a portion of the Communications Act that regulates telephone and other telecommunications services.

Currently, Internet access is defined as an information service, a category that is lightly regulated under the act. The F.C.C.’s reclassification proposal is intended in part to allow the commission to enforce net neutrality.

Thomas J. Tauke, an executive vice president at Verizon, said the company was encouraged by the commission’s decision to further study net neutrality as it applied to wireless broadband and specialized services.

“At the same time, it remains clear that whatever action the F.C.C. takes will be clouded by legal uncertainty until the Congress enacts legislation that spells out the authority of the F.C.C. and establishes a broadband policy,” Mr. Tauke said.

Portions of the commission’s notice cited examples that could give hints of the F.C.C.’s leanings on the wireless issue. It said that AT&T’s Mobility wireless broadband service and the Leap Wireless broadband service had recently introduced pricing plans that charged different prices based on the amount of data a customer used.

“The emergence of these new business models may reduce mobile broadband providers’ incentives to employ more restrictive network management practices that run afoul of open Internet principles,” the commission said.

The F.C.C.’s notice also raised issues concerning specialized services, including its desire for a clear definition of what they were and whether they would supplant the open Internet by reducing investment on expanded Internet network capacity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/technology/02fcc.html





AT&T: Net Rules Must Allow 'Paid Prioritization'
Declan McCullagh

AT&T said Tuesday that any Net neutrality plan restricting its ability to engage in "paid prioritization" of network traffic would be harmful and contrary to the fundamental principles of the Internet.

Telecommunications providers need the ability to set different prices for different forms of Internet service, AT&T said, adding that it already has "hundreds" of customers who have paid extra for higher-priority services.

"Our view is that if the Federal Communications Commission is going to be making policy decisions on this front, it should base them on the facts, as opposed to dogma," an AT&T representative told CNET on Tuesday. In a blog post, AT&T vice president Hank Hultquist argued that the Internet Engineering Task Force's specifications specifically permit paid prioritization.

The flap over paid prioritization started a few weeks ago when Free Press, a pro-regulatory advocacy group, sent letters (No. 1 and No. 2) to the FCC dubbing the concept "discriminatory" and claiming it will "only benefit the few content giants that have deep enough pockets to pay for favorable treatment."

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Free Press research director Derek Turner said that allowing paid prioritization would undercut the entire concept of Net neutrality, which had its previous legal foundation swept away earlier this year when a federal appeals court shot down the FCC's attempt to punish Comcast for temporarily throttling BitTorrent transfers.

Since that ruling, liberal interest groups have been lobbying FCC chairman Julius Genachowski for a new set of regulations, while a majority of members of the U.S. Congress has opposed the idea. Google and Verizon responded by announcing their own proposal, which includes a "presumption" that paid prioritization on wired networks is illegal.

"A ban on paid prioritization is the DNA of the open Internet," Turner said. He called AT&T's arguments a "straw man," saying that: "What AT&T is describing is a practice that we have no problem with, which is that an end user can buy a T1 and set priority flags, and AT&T respects those priority flags."

Prioritization 'expected'
But the designers of the protocols that make up the modern Internet had something a bit more ambitious in mind. In the late 1990s, the Internet Engineering Task Force revised those standards to allow network operators to assign up to 64 different traffic "classes," meaning priority levels.

Free Press "wants to force consumers to be charged higher rates to pay for the construction of more broadband infrastructure than would be needed if networks could be better managed," says Berin Szoka, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, which has been critical of new broadband regulations.

A July 1999 IETF specification (RFC 2638) discusses paid prioritization by saying: "It is expected that premium traffic would be allocated a small percentage of the total network capacity, but that it would be priced much higher." Another specification (RFC 2475) published half a year earlier says that setting different priorities for packets will "accommodate heterogeneous application requirements and user expectations" and "permit differentiated pricing of Internet service."

Today that concept of "differentiated services" is referred to as DiffServ. It's part of quality-of-service technologies that companies like AT&T offer, usually to business customers, that rely on DiffServ packet headers to group different types of classes of service together. Real-time voice communication may be ranked the highest, followed by financial transactions, then e-mail, and finally bulk file-transfer protocols that aren't as sensitive to brief slowdowns.

It's true that DiffServ markings are typically used inside corporate networks to support applications like VoIP. But a video-conferencing site that has connectivity through AT&T could presumably use DiffServ to prioritize its packets over, say, online shopping and BitTorrent transfers--and keep that priority all the way to an AT&T home customer.

Which is precisely the argument that AT&T is making. In a strongly-worded letter sent Monday to the FCC, AT&T says that the protocol specification "in no way limits the use of DiffServ to packets marked by 'end users,' as opposed to content providers or network operators."

"The (FCC) should view with healthy skepticism the opinions it receives on technical Internet matters from an advocacy group with no demonstrable expertise or operational experience in those matters," AT&T's letter says. "Paid prioritization over Internet access is not, as Free Press maintains, some lurking future menace that would pervert the intent of the IETF. To the contrary, it was fully contemplated by the IETF."

Free Press' Turner disagrees. "DiffServ was not designed to be a tool to allow the network provider to drive application-level discrimination," he says. He says that his organization will send a letter to the FCC by Wednesday explaining its position.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20015231-38.html





Your Own Hot Spot, and Cheap
David Pogue

Someday, they’ll build wireless Internet into every building, just the way they build in running water, heat and electricity today. Someday, we won’t have to drive around town looking for a coffee shop when we need to check our e-mail.

If you want ubiquitous Internet today, though, you have several choices. They’re all compromised and all expensive.

You could get online using only a smartphone, but you’ll pay at least $80 a month and you’ll have to view the Internet through a shrunken keyhole of a screen. You could equip your laptop with one of those cellular air cards or U.S.B. sticks, which cost $60 a month, but you’d be limited to 5 gigabytes of data transfer a month (and how are you supposed to gauge that?). You could use tethering, in which your laptop uses your cellphone as a glorified Internet antenna — but that adds $20 or $30 to your phone bill, has a fixed data limit and eats through your phone’s battery charge in an hour.

Last year, you could hear minds blowing coast to coast when Novatel introduced a new option: the MiFi. It creates a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot that, because it’s the size of a porky credit card, can go with you everywhere. The MiFi gets its Internet signal from a 3G cellphone network and converts it into a Wi-Fi signal that up to five people can share.

You can just leave the thing in your pocket, your laptop bag or your purse to pump out a fresh Internet signal to everyone within 30 feet, for four hours on a charge of the removable battery. You’re instantly online whenever you fire up your laptop, netbook, Wi-Fi camera, game gadget, iPhone or iPod Touch.

The MiFi released by Virgin Mobile this week ($150) is almost exactly the same thing as the one offered by Verizon and, until recently, Sprint — but there’s a twist that makes it revolutionary all over again.

The Virgin MiFi, like its rivals, is still an amazing gizmo to have on long car rides for the family, on woodsy corporate offsite meetings, at disaster sites, at trade show booths or anywhere you can’t get Wi-Fi. If you live alone, the MiFi could even be your regular home Internet service, too — one that you can take with you when you head out the door. And it’s still insanely useful when you’re stuck on a plane on a runway.

But three things about the Virgin MiFi are very, very different. First, Virgin’s plan is unlimited. You don’t have to sweat through the month, hoping you don’t exceed the standard 5-gigabyte data limit, as you do with the cellular-modem products from Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. (If you exceed 5 gigabytes, you pay steep per-megabyte overage charges, or in T-Mobile’s case, you get your Internet speed slowed down for the rest of the month.)

If you hadn’t noticed, unlimited-data plans are fast disappearing — but here’s Virgin, offering up an unlimited Internet plan as if it never got the memo.

Second, Virgin requires no contract. You can sign up for service only when you need it. In other words, it’s totally O.K. with Virgin if you leave the thing in your drawer all year, and activate it only for, say, the two summer months when you’ll be away. That’s a huge, huge deal in this era when every flavor of Internet service, portable or not, requires a two-year commitment.

Third, the service price for this no-commitment, unlimited, portable hot spot is — are you sitting down? — $40 a month.

That’s no typo. It’s $40 a month. Compare that with the cheapest cellular modems from AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint: $60 a month. T-Mobile also charges $40 a month for its cellular modems. But all four of those big companies require a two-year contract, and come with those scary 5-gigabyte monthly data limits.

(There’s actually another Virgin plan available, too: you can pay $10 for a 100-megabyte chunk of Internet use that expires in 10 days. It’s intended for people who are heading out for the weekend and just want to keep in touch with e-mail without having to fork over a whole month’s worth of money — and without paying $15 or $25 for each night of overpriced hotel Wi-Fi. And speaking of options, Virgin also offers a standard U.S.B. plug-in cellular modem with exactly the same pricing details.)

I’ve pounded my head against the fine print, grilled the product managers and researched the heck out of this, and I simply cannot find the catch.

Is it the speed? No. You’re getting exactly the same 3G speed you’d get on rival cellular modems and MiFi’s. That is, about as fast as a DSL modem. A cell modem doesn’t give you cable-modem speed, but you’ll have no problem watching online videos and, where you have a decent Sprint signal, even doing video chats.

Is it the coverage? Not really; Virgin uses Sprint’s 3G cellular Internet network, which is excellent. You’re getting exactly the same battery life and convenience of Verizon’s MiFi — for two-thirds the monthly price.

(Why would Sprint allow Virgin to use its data network but undercut its own pricing in such a brazen way? Because Sprint is focused on promoting its 4G phones and portable hot spots — even faster Internet, available so far only in a few cities. For example, its Overdrive portable hot spot is $100 after rebate, with a two-year commitment. The service is $60 a month for 5 gigabytes of 3G data and unlimited 4G data.)

That’s not to say that there’s no fine print whatsoever.

First, the Virgin plan doesn’t include roaming off Sprint’s network; the old Sprint MiFi plans did. According to Virgin, that’s not a big deal — the regular Sprint network covers 262 million people, whereas roaming would cover 12 million more — but it means that you might be out of luck in smaller towns.

Second, the Virgin MiFi can’t plug directly into your computer’s U.S.B. port to act as a wired cellular modem, like other carriers’ MiFi units. You can connect to it only wirelessly, if you care. (You can still charge it from your computer’s U.S.B. jack, but very slowly. A wall outlet or car adapter is a much better bet.)

Finally, remember that the Virgin MiFi is still a MiFi, so it’s a bit uncommunicative. It has only a single, illuminated button that serves as the on-off switch and an indicator light that blinks cryptically in different colors. You have to press that button and wait about 20 seconds before you can get online.

But come on: $40 a month? With no commitment or contract?

I did a little survey of broadband Internet prices among my Twitter followers. Turns out $40 a month is not only a great price for cellular (portable) Internet service — it’s among the lowest broadband prices in America, period. In some areas you can pay $35 a month for DSL service. But most people pay $50 to $60 for high-speed Internet, which makes the Virgin deal seem even more incredible.

And unlike those plans, Virgin lets you turn on service only when you want it. You can buy service — as with a prepaid phone —either by calling an 800 number or visiting a Web site. Handily enough, you can get onto the Virgin Web site to re-activate your MiFi, even if you’d previously stopped paying for service.

The MiFi’s portability has always made it an exceptionally flexible and useful little gadget — and Virgin’s prepaid model, unlimited data plan and dirt-cheap pricing just multiply that flexibility. And if Virgin can make money with a plan like this, the mind boggles at just how overpriced the similar offerings from its rivals must really be.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/te...h/02pogue.html





Why Your Senator Can't Skype
Julianne Pepitone

Internet video-chatting service Skype helps connect people across the globe -- but your representatives in Congress are banned from using it.

House Democrats and Republicans have been tussling over whether to overhaul technology rules that prohibit lawmakers from using Skype to chat from their offices with the people they govern.

Their obstacle: A 2006 ban on running peer-to-peer applications behind House and Senate firewalls. Such programs allow computers to share files (remember Napster?), which could pose a security risk.

Skype is a peer-to-peer (P2P) program, but its software is a different animal from the popular-with-pirates media swapping applications that gave the P2P field a reputation as the Internet's Wild West. While Skype users can send files directly to others, the company says it's impossible to share documents accidentally -- as users could with file-sharing programs like LimeWire.

Skype has fans on Capitol Hill: House Minority Leader John Boehner, R.-Ohio, and Michele Bachmann, R.-Minn., have championed the Republican-led fight to change Congress' peer-to-peer ban. They object to using taxpayer money to rent old, expensive video-conferencing equipment when Skype offers a better and cheaper option.

Back in April, Boehner and other Republicans sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Administration Committee Chairman Robert Brady, D-Penn., urging them to "make Congress more open" with Skype.

"We are certain that Skype, an increasingly relevant communication tool for Americans already widely used in the private sector, could be easily implemented in Congress in a manner that would not reduce the security of the House IT infrastructure," they wrote. "Rather than lagging behind, let's move one step closer into the future of congressional communications."

Pelosi passed that letter on to the bipartisan House Committee on Administration, which will ultimately make the decision on whether to allow Skype. She asked the committee to determine whether Skype can be used without compromising House security.

Four months later, that evaluation is still creeping along. Staci Pies, Skype's director of government and regulatory affairs, said the company is working with lawmakers to answer their technical questions about the Skype's software.

She spotlighted the talks in a recent post on Skype's blog, writing that Washington sorely needs better communication: "Too often, the public is left scratching their heads, wondering, 'D.C... can you hear me now?'"

Republicans, frustrated with the talks' glacial pace, are tossing fuel on the fire. "House Republicans are listening to Americans and have asked to use Skype to communicate, but Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats continue to block its use," Bachmann wrote recently in an online discussion.

Meanwhile, Democrats are staying mum about the decision's timeline. "We are engaged in ongoing discussions with Skype to address the specific security concerns," said a spokesman for Pelosi.

While the video-chat scuffle wears on, plenty of lawmakers are adopting the technology on their own. Rep. Bobby Bright, D-Ala., held a Skype conference recently with soldiers deployed in Iraq, while Bachmann made a Skype appearance earlier this month in support of her colleague Roy Blunt's Senate run.

But even some of Skype's fans are staying away from taking a stand on the service. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D.-Vt., who regularly chats online with school classes in Vermont, doesn't have a view on whether the Skype ban should be lifted, according to his spokesman.

But he likes the technology: "It's a further dimension of real-time connection. It ties him to the students," Leahy's representative said.

"The whole thing seems ridiculous," policy blog Techdirt grumbled about the wrangle. "Did Congress also have to get approval before Representatives were allowed to use the telephone? It's difficult to understand why forward-looking elected officials need to get special permission to try out communication tools that can help them better represent their constituents."

The real kicker is that Skype fans on Capitol Hill still have an easy way to take advantage of the technology: Even if the software is blocked on their desktops, lawmakers can use Wi-Fi networks or their mobile phones to get around the ban.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/18/tech..._ban/index.htm





Cisco May Be Making A Run For Skype
Michael Arrington

Cisco has made an offer to acquire Skype before they complete their IPO process, says one of our more reliable sources. We have not been able to confirm this rumor one way or another via other sources, which isn’t surprising. A company in lock down during the IPO process is usually even more tight lipped than normal.

But if true this would be one very big acquisition. Skype insiders are hoping for an out of the gate valuation of $5 billion or so, we’ve heard. Presumably Cisco would have to bidding in that range to make it interesting.

Google was also rumored to be sniffing around Skype, but antitrust concerns may have persuaded them not to make an actual offer.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/29/cis...run-for-skype/





India Says Will Ask Google and Skype to Give Data Access

India will send notices to Google and Skype asking them to set up servers in the country and give access to its internet data, a top home ministry official said on Wednesday.

Echoing concerns raised by several other countries, India has already said it wants the means to fully track and read BlackBerry's secure email and access to internet data that officials fear could be misused by militants.

BlackBerry maker, Research In Motion, will give India access to secure BlackBerry data beginning September 1, a government source said this week, leading New Delhi to put off a decision on whether to shut down the smartphone.

Home Secretary G.K. Pillai told reporters that similar demands will be made of Google and Skype and notices will be sent to them. He did not say when.

BlackBerry's reputation is built on its system security and a compromise under pressure from governments could damage the device's popularity with business professionals and politicians.

Apple Inc and Nokia, RIM's two biggest smartphone rivals, may have the most to gain if India blocks BlackBerry services. Nokia said on Monday it will host an email server in India from November 5.

(Reporting by C.J. Kuncheria; editing by Alistair Scrutton)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6802HN20100901





China Requires ID for Mobile Phone Numbers
Michael Wines

China’s government began on Wednesday to require cellphone users to furnish identification when buying SIM cards, a move officials cast as an attempt to rein in burgeoning cellphone spam, pornography and fraud schemes.

The requirement, which has been in the works for years, is not unlike rules in many developed nations that force users to present credit card data or other proof of identification to buy cellphone numbers. The government’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that about 40 percent of China’s 800 million cellphone users currently are unidentified. Those users will be ordered to furnish an ID by 2013 or lose their service, the Communist Party’s English-language newspaper, Global Times, reported.

A government center that deals with cellphone complaints reported that an average Chinese phone user receives a dozen spam messages a week, and that three in four users received messages that involved fraud, the state-run English-language newspaper, China Daily, reported on Wednesday.

Some analysts, however, questioned whether the new requirement would substantially reduce illicit messages. Instead, they warned that it could give the government new tools to locate and punish individuals who send cellphone messages that censors deem unacceptable. China’s central government has steadily tightened its censorship of the Internet and wireless communications since 2008, blocking increasing numbers of Internet Web sites, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and, most recently, shutting down microblogs that it regards as subversive.

The new regulation will be implemented largely by the three government-controlled companies — China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom — that provide all cellular service.

“Is China prepared for this?” David Bandurski, an author and media analyst at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project, said in a telephone interview. “Does it have the legal framework and the institutions in place to guarantee they can do this and still protect the privacy of consumers?

“People are basically providing their phone numbers and ID numbers” to the mobile carriers, he said. “Those are the two most important pieces of information that most people have.”

In an article posted Wednesday on the China Media Project’s Web site, a legal researcher at the government-sponsored Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Zhou Hanhua, expressed doubts that requiring users to register their names with the companies would control spam.

Initially, he wrote, the rules likely will first create a black market in legally registered SIM cards that can be used for spam, and then spur hackers to find ways to circumvent the registration requirement.

“Technology innovation will soon trump the government’s control,” he wrote.

Others were less concerned. A professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Zeng Jianqiu, said that real-name registration was essential if services now common in other nations, such as payment by cellphone, are to become established in China.

Privacy “is a problem that needs to be considered seriously,” he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “The regulators and mobile operators also need to find ways to protect personal information. But I think some, like China Mobile and Telecom, are already doing this.”

Under the new policy, convenience store and street vendors who have been selling anonymous SIM cards were to suspend sales on Wednesday until they are trained to register their customers. Foreigners will also be required to furnish a passport or other identification when establishing cellphone service.

Zhang Jing contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/wo...a/02china.html





Maryland Attorney General Upholds Right to Video Traffic Stops

Maryland attorney general rules that state police were wrong to charge motorist with felony for recording his traffic stop.

Anthony Graber traffic stopMaking a recording of a police traffic stop is not a crime in the opinion of Maryland's attorney general. In a ruling issued last month from the state's top law enforcement office, Chief Counsel Robert N. McDonald found the legal grounds weak for felony wiretapping charges of the type brought against a motorcyclist who posted a video of himself being arrested on YouTube. Maryland State Police had taken advantage of ambiguity in the law to prosecute Anthony Graber, 25 for the April 13 recording.

"No appellate decision in Maryland specifically addresses the application of that law to recording of police activity," McDonald wrote in his opinion.

Graber had been stopped for speeding on Interstate 95. While driving an unmarked car in plain clothes, Maryland State Trooper Joseph David Uhler cut off Graber as he brought his motorcycle to a stop. Uhler then jumped out of his car, gun drawn, commanding, "Get off the motorcycle" before identifying himself. Graber had a camera on his helmet that recorded the entire incident, which he later posted on YouTube (view video). The sight of Uhler wielding his weapon in public over a traffic infraction drew a storm of criticism. Uhler responded by ordering his colleagues to raid Graber's residence and confiscate all of his computer equipment as evidence of wiretapping. By filing charges that could send Graber to prison for sixteen years, the state police wanted to send a clear message to anyone who might consider documenting police misconduct in the future.

Under the interpretation of the state police and prosecutors, a police officer has an expectation of privacy while working on public streets. Ordinary citizens on those same streets, however, have no such expectation and are subjected to constant monitoring by the state's red light cameras, speed cameras and recently expanded automated license plate recognition systems. The attorney general's office examined the question of whether the conversation in a traffic stop constituted an "oral conversation" that is "intercepted" under the wiretap act if a citizen records the arrest. After considering a related attorney general ruling from 2000, McDonald ruled that there is no difference between a police officer and a citizen as far as the statute is concerned.

"The reasoning of that excerpt, which suggested that a police officer would not face prosecution or liability under the act for recording an arrest or traffic stop in a public place, would apply equally well to a private person involved in the same incident," McDonald wrote.

Several other states, with the exception of Massachusetts, have developed case law that clearly allows the recording of police traffic stops. The attorney general's ruling did not directly consider the details of the Graber case, but it concluded that the most likely outcome should it come to trial would be acquittal.

"A court could hold that a police stop of an individual necessarily is not a 'private conversation' and therefore does not involve an oral communication covered by the state wiretap act," McDonald ruled. "This conclusion would be consistent with the suggestion made in the 2000 opinion and with the holdings of the courts in most other states construing state eavesdropping statutes. Given the language of the Maryland statutes, this seems the most likely outcome in the case of a detention or arrest."
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/32/3227.asp





Craigslist Removes its Controversial Adult Section
Phillip Mcneal

The online classified website Craigslist has removed its controversial Adult Services portion of its website. Technology blog TechCrunch was the first to report the section had been blacked out with the word "Censored."

In August several state attorneys general called for the closing down of the Adults Services section on Craigslist due to the continued prostitution advertisements and continuing public outrage.

A multi-state letter was sent to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark, claiming that because craigslist cannot or will not be capable of screening adult services ads, it should stop accepting them altogether and shut down the section.

“Craigslist clearly lacks the wherewithal — or will — to fight flagrant prostitution ads that persist on its site,” the letter said. “Prostitution is a booming business on craigslist, perhaps more than ever before.”

“We understand that prostitution is profitable — but its human toll is intolerable, and craigslist should cease being an enabler. Despite its much-touted ‘manual review’ of Adult Services, craigslist has failed to block blatant prostitution ads.”

The section was shut down on Friday night to all users in the United States, but is still viewable by international users.
http://wireupdate.com/wires/9446/cra...adult-section/





Sweden Reopens WikiLeaks Founder Rape Investigation

Sweden's chief prosecutor said on Wednesday she was reopening a preliminary investigation into rape charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that a lower official had withdrawn two weeks ago.

Neither Assange, who has denied the charges, nor his lawyer could be immediately reached for comment.

WikiLeaks published more than 70,000 secret military files on Afghanistan in what U.S. officials have called one of the biggest security breaches in U.S. military history.

Assange has said he has been warned by Australian intelligence that he could face a campaign to discredit him after leaking the documents.

Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny said the decision to reopen the probe was taken after further review of the case.

"There is reason to believe that a crime has been committed. Considering information available at present, my judgement is that the classification of the crime is rape," Ny said in a statement on the Prosecution Authority's website.

"More investigations are necessary before a final decision can be made," she added.

The chief prosecutor also said a preliminary investigation into charges of molestation against Assange would be expanded to include sexual harassment.

Allegations of rape and molestation were brought against Assange, an Australian citizen, two weeks ago.

The more serious charge was dropped almost immediately, though prosecutors continued to look into the molestation charge.

WikiLeaks says it is an non-profit organisation funded by human rights campaigners, journalists and the general public.

It promotes the leaking of information to fight government and corporate corruption. Earlier this year, it leaked a classified video showing a 2007 helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists.

(Reporting by Niklas Pollard and Simon Johnson; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
http://af.reuters.com/article/worldN...68024A20100901





Researchers Cripple Pushdo Botnet
Dennis Fisher

Researchers have made a huge dent in the Pushdo botnet, virtually crippling the network by working with hosting providers to take down about two thirds of the command-and-control servers involved in the botnet.

Pushdo for years has been one of the major producers of spam and other malicious activity, and researchers have been monitoring the botnet and looking for ways to do some damage to it since at least 2007. Now, researchers at Last Line of Defense, a security intelligence firm, have made some serious progress in crushing the botnet's spam operations.

After doing an analysis of Pushdo's command-and-control infrastructure, the researchers identified about 30 servers that were serving as C&C machines for the botnet. Working with the hosting providers who maintained the servers in question, the LLOD researchers were able to get 20 of the C&C servers taken offline, the company said.

"We identified a total of 30 servers used as part of the Pushdo/Cutwail infrastructure, located at eight different hosting providers all over the world. The information about the activity was extracted from Anubis reports, which contain details about the system and network activities, including a pcap file that contains the network traffic we observed while doing the analysis. We contacted all hosting providers and worked with them on taking down the machines, which lead to the take-down of almost 20 servers. Unfortunately, not all providers were responsive and thus several Command & Control servers are still online at this point," researcher Thorsten Holz wrote.

The result is that the volume of spam that Pushdo is producing has dropped to nearly zero.

At the time of Pushdo's appearance several years ago, researchers found evidence that Pushdo's creators had gone to some lengths to avoid detection and prevent removal of the malware associated with the botnet. The creators had changed the way that Pushdo made HTTP requests, creating overly long GET requests to make them less identifiable.

"The length of the request will likely change between different service pack levels of Windows. IDS/IPS signatures can still be written around such a request, taking advantage of the fact that no other HTTP headers are sent as one characteristic to key in on. However, even with this approach, false positives may still occur," SecureWorks researcher Joe Stewart wrote in an analysis in 2007. "Clearly the author of Pushdo is intent on evading detection for as long as possible, in order to have the maximum amount of time to seed Cutwail spambots into the wild."

One of the interesting aspects of the original version of Pushdo is that its creator was using it not just to send spam, but also to spread other pieces of malware. This has become a more common business model in recent years as bot herders have looked for new ways to make money from the millions of compromised PCs under their control.
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/re...-botnet-082710





Nasty Data-Stealing Bug Haunts Internet Explorer 8
Dennis Fisher

There's an unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 that enables simple data-stealing attacks by Web-based attackers and could lead to an attacker hijacking a user's authenticated session on a third-[arty site. The flaw, which a researcher said may have been known since 2008, lies in the way that IE 8 handles CSS style sheets.

The vulnerability can be exploited through an attack scenario known as cross-domain theft, and researcher Chris Evans originally brought the problem to light in a blog post in December. At the time, all of the major browsers were vulnerable to the attack, but since then, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all have implemented a simple defense mechanism. Mozilla was the last to fix the issue, in July.

But Microsoft has not yet implemented a fix for the vulnerability, and Evans on Friday posted a message to the Full Disclosure mailing list pointing out this fact and linking to a benign demo site.

Here's how Evans explains the problem in his original post in December:

It works by abusing the standards relating to the loading of CSS style sheets. Approximately, the standards are:

• Send cookies on any load of CSS, including cross-domain.

• When parsing the returned CSS, ignore any amount of crap leading up to a valid CSS descriptor.

By controlling a little bit of text in the victim domain, the attacker can inject what appears to be a valid CSS string. It does not matter what proceeds this CSS string: HTML, binary data, JSON, XML. The CSS parser will ruthlessly hunt down any CSS constructs within whatever blob is pulled from the victim's domain.

The upshot of this is that if a victim has visited a given Web site, authenticated himself to the site, and then visits a site controlled by an attacker, the attacker would have the ability to hijack the user's session and extract supposedly confidential data. This attack works on the latest, fully patched release of IE8, Microsoft's flagship browser.

Three researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have published a paper on this attack--to which Evans contributed--and lay out a client-side defense against it. The defense calls for browsers to enforce the content-type checking for style sheets that are loaded from other sites. The authors stipulate that strict enforcement of this policy can break a very small number of sites, so a less-strict version also is detailed in the paper.

The defense has been adopted in one for or another by Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera.

Evans said in his Full Disclosure message that he decided to post it as a way to encourage Microsoft ti fix the problem. "I have been unsuccessful in persuading the vendor to issue a fix.," he wrote.

Last month, Evans said that the bug itself might have been known in the attacker community since 2008.

"That's a dangerously long time for such a bug to be live and known by hackers.," he wrote. "Browsers are complicated pieces of software and will always have bugs. Time-to-fix therefore matters for a browser. If security is a factor in your browser choice, I recommend you look at Opera or Chrome. These browsers fixed this bug the fastest."
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/na...lorer-8-090410





Hackers Blind Quantum Cryptographers

Lasers crack commercial encryption systems, leaving no trace.
Zeeya Merali

Quantum hackers have performed the first 'invisible' attack on two commercial quantum cryptographic systems. By using lasers on the systems — which use quantum states of light to encrypt information for transmission — they have fully cracked their encryption keys, yet left no trace of the hack.

Quantum cryptography is often touted as being perfectly secure. It is based on the principle that you cannot make measurements of a quantum system without disturbing it. So, in theory, it is impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept a quantum encryption key without disrupting it in a noticeable way, triggering alarm bells.

Vadim Makarov at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and his colleagues have now cracked it. "Our hack gave 100% knowledge of the key, with zero disturbance to the system," he says.

In standard quantum cryptographic techniques, the sender — called 'Alice' for convenience — generates a secret key by encoding classical bit values of 0 and 1 using two different quantum states of photons, or particles of light. The receiver, 'Bob', reads off these bit values using a detector that measures the quantum state of incoming photons. In theory, an eavesdropper, 'Eve', will disturb the properties of these photons before they reach Bob, so that if Alice and Bob compare parts of their key, they will notice a mismatch.

In Makarov and colleagues' hack, Eve gets round this constraint by 'blinding' Bob's detector — shining a continuous, 1-milliwatt laser at it. While Bob's detector is thus disabled, Eve can then intercept Alice's signal. The research is published online in Nature Phototonics today1.
Breaking the rules

The cunning part is that while blinded, Bob's detector cannot function as a 'quantum detector' that distinguishes between different quantum states of incoming light. However, it does still work as a 'classical detector' — recording a bit value of 1 if it is hit by an additional bright light pulse, regardless of the quantum properties of that pulse.

That means that every time Eve intercepts a bit value of 1 from Alice, she can send a bright pulse to Bob, so that he also receives the correct signal, and is entirely unaware that his detector has been sabotaged. There is no mismatch between Eve and Bob's readings because Eve sends Bob a classical signal, not a quantum one. As quantum cryptographic rules no longer apply, no alarm bells are triggered, says Makarov.

"We have exploited a purely technological loophole that turns a quantum cryptographic system into a classical system, without anyone noticing," says Makarov.

Makarov and his team have demonstrated that the hack works on two commercially available systems: one sold by ID Quantique (IDQ), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and one by MagiQ Technologies, based in Boston, Massachusetts. "Once I had the systems in the lab, it took only about two months to develop a working hack," says Makarov.

This is the latest in a line of quantum hacks. Earlier this year, a group led by Hoi-Kwong Lo at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, also showed that an IDQ commercial system could be fully hacked. However, in that case, the eavesdropper did introduce some noticeable errors in the quantum key2.

Grégoire Ribordy, chief executive of IDQ, says that the hack of Makarov and his group is "far more practical to implement and goes further than anything that has gone before".

Both IDQ and MagiQ welcome the hack for exposing potential vulnerabilities in their systems. Makorov informed both companies of the details of the hack before publishing, so that patches could made, avoiding any possible security risk.

"We provide open systems for researchers to play with and we are glad they are doing it," says Anton Zavriyev, director of research and development at MagiQ.

Ribordy and Zavriyev stress that the open versions of their systems that are sold to university researchers are not the same as those sold for security purposes, which contain extra layers of protection. For instance, the fully commercial versions of IDQ's system also use classical cryptographic techniques as a safety net, says Ribordy.

Makarov agrees that the hack should not make people lose confidence in quantum cryptography. "Our work will ultimately make these systems stronger," he says. "If you want state-of-the-art security, quantum cryptography is still the best place to go."
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/1008....2010.436.html





New Government ID Cards Easily Hacked

The sensitive personal information found on the new German identification cards with data chips scheduled for nationwide introduction this November can be easily hacked, according to testing done by a TV news show.

Public broadcaster ARD’s show “Plusminus” teamed up with the hacker organisation the Chaos Computer Club to find out how secure the controversial new radio-frequency (RIHD) chips were.

Set to air Tuesday evening, the report shows how they used the basic new home scanning machines that will go along with the cards, and found that scammers would have few problems extracting personal information. This includes two fingerprint scans, which German citizens can opt out of, and a new six-digit PIN number meant to be used as a digital signature for official government business and beyond.

The home scanners will be necessary for use with home computers to process the personal data for official business and possibly even online shopping.

The Interior Ministry has promised to sponsor the distribution of one million scanners with some €24 million set aside by the government’s recent stimulus package. Some banks and computer magazines also plan to provide free promotional starter kits.

In an interview with the show, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said he saw no immediate reason to act on the alleged security issue.

Meanwhile on Tuesday the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) rejected the Plusminus' criticism of the new ID card. The agency’s personal identification expert Jens Bender said the card was secure and called the combination of an integrated chip with a PIN number a “significant security improvement compared to today’s standard process of user name and password.”

But a classic Trojan horse program that logs keystrokes remained a threat, he admitted, because users must use keyboards in addition to the scanners.
http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20100824-29359.html





Tabloid Hack Attack on Royals, and Beyond
Don Van Natta Jr., Jo Becker and Graham Bowley

IN NOVEMBER 2005, three senior aides to Britain’s royal family noticed odd things happening on their mobile phones. Messages they had never listened to were somehow appearing in their mailboxes as if heard and saved. Equally peculiar were stories that began appearing about Prince William in one of the country’s biggest tabloids, News of the World.

The stories were banal enough (Prince William pulled a tendon in his knee, one revealed). But the royal aides were puzzled as to how News of the World had gotten the information, which was known among only a small, discreet circle. They began to suspect that someone was eavesdropping on their private conversations.

By early January 2006, Scotland Yard had confirmed their suspicions. An unambiguous trail led to Clive Goodman, the News of the World reporter who covered the royal family, and to a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, who also worked for the paper. The two men had somehow obtained the PIN codes needed to access the voice mail of the royal aides.

Scotland Yard told the aides to continue operating as usual while it pursued the investigation, which included surveillance of the suspects’ phones. A few months later, the inquiry took a remarkable turn as the reporter and the private investigator chased a story about Prince William’s younger brother, Harry, visiting a strip club. Another tabloid, The Sun, had trumpeted its scoop on the episode with the immortal: “Harry Buried Face in Margo’s Mega-Boobs. Stripper Jiggled . . . Prince Giggled.”

As Scotland Yard tracked Goodman and Mulcaire, the two men hacked into Prince Harry’s mobile-phone messages. On April 9, 2006, Goodman produced a follow-up article in News of the World about the apparent distress of Prince Harry’s girlfriend over the matter. Headlined “Chelsy Tears Strip Off Harry!” the piece quoted, verbatim, a voice mail Prince Harry had received from his brother teasing him about his predicament.

The palace was in an uproar, especially when it suspected that the two men were also listening to the voice mail of Prince William, the second in line to the throne. The eavesdropping could not have gone higher inside the royal family, since Prince Charles and the queen were hardly regular mobile-phone users. But it seemingly went everywhere else in British society. Scotland Yard collected evidence indicating that reporters at News of the World might have hacked the phone messages of hundreds of celebrities, government officials, soccer stars — anyone whose personal secrets could be tabloid fodder. Only now, more than four years later, are most of them beginning to find out.

AS OF THIS SUMMER, five people have filed lawsuits accusing News Group Newspapers, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s publishing empire that includes News of the World, of breaking into their voice mail. Additional cases are being prepared, including one seeking a judicial review of Scotland Yard’s handling of the investigation. The litigation is beginning to expose just how far the hacking went, something that Scotland Yard did not do. In fact, an examination based on police records, court documents and interviews with investigators and reporters shows that Britain’s revered police agency failed to pursue leads suggesting that one of the country’s most powerful newspapers was routinely listening in on its citizens.

The police had seized files from Mulcaire’s home in 2006 that contained several thousand mobile phone numbers of potential hacking victims and 91 mobile phone PIN codes. Scotland Yard even had a recording of Mulcaire walking one journalist — who may have worked at yet another tabloid — step by step through the hacking of a soccer official’s voice mail, according to a copy of the tape. But Scotland Yard focused almost exclusively on the royals case, which culminated with the imprisonment of Mulcaire and Goodman. When police officials presented evidence to prosecutors, they didn’t discuss crucial clues that the two men may not have been alone in hacking the voice mail messages of story targets.

“There was simply no enthusiasm among Scotland Yard to go beyond the cases involving Mulcaire and Goodman,” said John Whittingdale, the chairman of a parliamentary committee that has twice investigated the phone hacking. “To start exposing widespread tawdry practices in that newsroom was a heavy stone that they didn’t want to try to lift.” Several investigators said in interviews that Scotland Yard was reluctant to conduct a wider inquiry in part because of its close relationship with News of the World. Police officials have defended their investigation, noting that their duties did not extend to monitoring the media. In a statement, the police said they followed the lines of inquiry “likely to produce the best evidence” and that the charges that were brought “appropriately represented the criminality uncovered.” The statement added, “This was a complex inquiry and led to one of the first prosecutions of its kind.” Officials also have noted that the department had more pressing priorities at the time, including several terrorism cases.

Scotland Yard’s narrow focus has allowed News of the World and its parent company, News International, to continue to assert that the hacking was limited to one reporter. During testimony before the parliamentary committee in September 2009, Les Hinton, the former executive chairman of News International who now heads Dow Jones, said, “There was never any evidence delivered to me suggesting that the conduct of Clive Goodman spread beyond him.”

But interviews with more than a dozen former reporters and editors at News of the World present a different picture of the newsroom. They described a frantic, sometimes degrading atmosphere in which some reporters openly pursued hacking or other improper tactics to satisfy demanding editors. Andy Coulson, the top editor at the time, had imposed a hypercompetitive ethos, even by tabloid standards. One former reporter called it a “do whatever it takes” mentality. The reporter was one of two people who said Coulson was present during discussions about phone hacking. Coulson ultimately resigned but denied any knowledge of hacking.

News of the World was hardly alone in accessing messages to obtain salacious gossip. “It was an industrywide thing,” said Sharon Marshall, who witnessed hacking while working at News of the World and other tabloids. “Talk to any tabloid journalist in the United Kingdom, and they can tell you each phone company’s four-digit codes. Every hack on every newspaper knew this was done.”

Bill Akass, the managing editor of News of the World, dismissed “unsubstantiated claims” that misconduct at the paper was widespread and said that rigorous safeguards had been adopted to prevent unethical reporting tactics. “We reject absolutely any suggestion or assertion that the activities of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, at the time of their arrest, were part of a ‘culture’ of wrongdoing at the News of the World and were specifically sanctioned or accepted at senior level in the newspaper,” Akass wrote in an e-mail.

He accused The New York Times of writing about the case because of a rivalry with a competing media company.

In February, the parliamentary committee issued a scathing report that accused News of the World executives of “deliberate obfuscation.” The report created a stir yet did not lead to a judicial inquiry. And Scotland Yard had chosen to notify only a fraction of the hundreds of people whose messages may have been illegally accessed — effectively shielding News of the World from a barrage of civil lawsuits. The scandal appeared to be over, especially for Coulson, who had been hired by the Conservative Party to help shape its message in the run-up to the general election. In May, when David Cameron became prime minister, he rewarded Coulson with the top communications post at 10 Downing Street.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/ma...hacking-t.html





Defense Department’s Cyberwar Credibility Gap
Michael Stevens

Undersecretary of Defense William J. Lynn has published an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine redefining the United States’ stance towards cyberwarfare, and he’s already getting shot at – primarily by IT pundits who find it hard to believe that the incident which led to the Pentagon’s recognizing cyberspace as a new “domain of warfare” could have really happened as described.Cyberwar - William J. Lynn

In his essay, “Defending a New Domain,” Lynn recounts a widely-reported 2008 hack that was initiated when, according to Lynn, an infected flash drive was inserted into a military laptop by “a foreign intelligence agency.”

Critics such as IT security firm Sophos’ Chief Security Adviser Chester Wisniewski argue that this James Bond-like scenario doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The primary issue is that the malware involved, known as agent.btz, is neither sophisticated nor particularly dangerous. A variant of the SillyFDC worm, agent.btz can be easily defeated by disabling the Windows “autorun” feature (which automatically starts a program on a drive upon insertion) or by simply banning thumb drives. In 2007, Silly FDC was rated as Risk Level 1: Very Low, by security firm Symantec.

Use of agent.btz Questioned

The question posed by Wisniewski and others is, why would a foreign intelligence agency attack the U.S. government with such a low-powered weapon? While making it clear that he has no insider knowledge of the incident, Wisniewski argues that the scenario put forth by Lynn isn’t credible. In his words, “Either it wasn’t put there by a foreign government or it wasn’t agent.btz.”

Tom Conway, security firm McAfee’s Director of Federal Business Development, doesn’t find it difficult to believe that a foreign government would make use of agent.btz. “Why reveal your trade craft if something that’s widely available on the black market will do the job?” he asks. He is, however, very concerned about what the attack revealed about the state of U.S. military security. “One, the fact that the network was vulnerable shows a lack of governance. Two, it shows that classified information is at risk, not just unclassified. Three, it shows that our adversaries are aware of One and Two.”

When interviewed by the influential security blog Danger Room, Lynn refused to provide any details about the incident or to discuss any retaliatory measures that might have been taken.

An Evolving U.S. Policy

The question of whether the 2008 hack is to become the Tonkin Gulf of cyberspace has to some extent overshadowed the content of the article, which is significant as a new framing of the Obama administration’s cyberspace policy.

The essay characterizes the threat to U.S. interests as “asymmetrical,” a military term of art that is used to describes conflicts such as the one now taking place in Afghanistan, where skirmishes against guerrilla forces replace conventional battles, and where the enemy may make up for what it lacks in numbers and firepower with agility and cunning. The deterrence models of the Cold War – assured retaliation – do not apply. Rather, “Deterrence will necessarily be based more on denying any benefit to attackers.” Targets may be non-military, such as U.S. power grids, transportation networks and financial systems.

To combat cyber threats, Lynn has ordered the creation of a single, four-star command, the U.S. Cyber Command, which is to become fully operational by October. The new command will have responsibility for day-to-day protection of defense networks, and will work with “a variety of partners” inside and outside the U.S. Government, including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the Defense Information Systems Agency.

The Pentagon has already deployed three overlapping lines of defense: a new emphasis on basic computer hygiene (e.g. updating patches promptly), the use of intrusion detection sensors, and the use of government intelligence capabilities to provide “highly specialized active defenses.”

Lynn also calls for “dramatic improvements in the government’s procedures of acquiring information technology.” At present, the time from funding to deployment of a new government IT system averages 81 months, which is obviously too slow to keep up with the pace of technology.
http://www.securityweek.com/defense-...redibility-gap





Computer Animation, Made by Hand
John Anderson

NO one’s four-legged friends were harmed during the making of “My Dog Tulip,” but the roar of Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s untethered Jack Russell suggests that two-legged strangers might not fare so well.

“Oh, Oscar, stop,” Sandra Fierlinger said, opening the door to the couple’s tree-shrouded cottage on the Main Line, outside Philadelphia. “He’ll be fine, as soon as you get to the other side of the room.”

He wasn’t, it turned out. But even the menacing Oscar couldn’t distract from the room itself: a bank of computer monitors stretched across half the width of the house; beneath them a phalanx of custom-made computers and hard drives crowded one another along the floor. Here the couple put into motion J. R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir about his late-life “romance” with a German shepherd, taking computer animation into an orbit both new and retrograde: computerized yet hand drawn.

Which didn’t quite make sense until Mr. Fierlinger sat down at what he calls his light table: as his digital “pen” moved across the horizontal surface, a line drawing appeared on the vertical screen, creating the “motion” of two existing images that, when run at 24 frames per second, will be cinema. About 60,000 drawings went into “Tulip.” But no paper. Or plastic.

Opening on Sept. 1 at Film Forum in the South Village, “My Dog Tulip” features the voices of Christopher Plummer as Ackerley, the writer and longtime BBC radio host; Lynn Redgrave, who died in May, as his nettlesome sister; and Isabella Rossellini as a kindly veterinarian. As it happens, nearly everyone involved is a dog lover: the Fierlingers have Gracie, a mix of shepherd and corgi, and Oscar (whose electronically adjusted voice was used when an aggressive bark was called for). Mr. Plummer said in a telephone interview that he grew up around dogs and “prefers them to a lot of humans,” while Ms. Rossellini said that, of course, she is “a huge dog person.”

“I even raise dogs for the blind,” she said via e-mail, adding: “The drawings for the animation are very charming, don’t you think so? I love their work.”

That work has won the Fierlingers a Peabody Award (“Still Life With Animated Dogs,” 2001), and Mr. Fierlinger earned an Oscar nomination for best animated short in 1980 for “It’s So Nice to Have a Wolf Around the House.” Anyone who’s grown up watching “Teeny Little Super Guy” segments on “Sesame Street” has been watching a Fierlinger creation.

Ms. Fierlinger, 55, who has a fine-arts background, adapted her skills to colorizing her husband’s sketches. “I paint with layers, just as I would with traditional animation,” she said. “I make my own brushes and mix my own colors, just as if it were a paper background. But I do it all on the computer.”

Unlike studio cartoons, which often involve computer-generated imagery, the Fierlingers’ work is hands-on, sort of. What’s eliminated is wasted motion: the shuffling of paper, the sharpening of pencils, the setting up of shots. That it still took them three years to make “My Dog Tulip” almost seems surprising. It certainly gave Mr. Plummer pause.

“He said, ‘I was told it’s going to take you three years to do this,’ ” Mr. Fierlinger, 74, recalled, “and I said, ‘Yes, at least.’ He said, ‘I’m going to be dead by then, I’ll never get to see it.’ I told him: ‘I’m roughly about your age, so if you think you’re going to be dead, then so am I, and it will never get done. You won’t miss anything.’ When we met again last year in Toronto, we agreed the time had gone so fast.”

The heart of “My Dog Tulip” is Mr. Ackerley’s story of his late-middle-age relationship with an Alsatian named Tulip. Bittersweet, heartfelt and rendered in an eccentric, expressive style, the movie seems poised to draw dog-loving moviegoers like beagles to bacon. (New Yorker Films, the distributor, is doing grass-roots promotion to dog walkers, vets, pet food stores and bookstores; New York Review of Books Classics is reissuing the Ackerley book.)

But Mr. Fierlinger’s story could be a movie too — and was, actually, in his animated autobiographical 1995 film “Drawn From Memory.” The child of Czech diplomats, he was born in Japan, relocated to the United States as a youngster and then shipped to Czechoslovakia, where his uncle, Zdenek Fierlinger, became the country’s first postwar prime minister, while his father worked in the top echelons of the Soviet puppet government. A boarding-school classmate of Vaclev Havel’s and a member (at least geneaologically) of the ruling elite, Mr. Fierlinger fled to America shortly after his father’s death in 1967.

The Fierlingers use French software called TVPaint; the director Nina Paley, whose “Sita Sings the Blues” was a breakthrough in personalized computer animation, uses the more popular Flash.

“There are many ways to use Flash,” she said, “the most common being with ‘motion tweens’: creating a virtual puppet, and having Flash automatically move the pieces from place to place. That’s commonly called ‘cutout style.’ But you can also use Flash to draw every single frame from scratch if you want. I used a combination in ‘Sita’: mostly cutout style, but also some straight-ahead-style hand-drawing straight into the program.” She also “did some paintings on paper, which I scanned in.”

Not so at Chez Fierlinger, where the forward-thinking animators are cutting themselves loose not just from graphite and cameras but also from traditional avenues of financing and distribution: a children’s film they wanted to make — and are in fact making — centers on Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail around the world solo. It was turned down for financing by the public-television production arm ITVS.

“We thought we could do whatever we wanted,” said Mr. Fierlinger, who is returning to his teaching job at the University of Pennsylvania this term. “Everything we’ve done for PBS has been a success. But they said, ‘We can’t see why children would want to watch this for an hour.’ ”

So they’re doing it in installments, like a graphic novel, and selling it online. “We realize we could do this all on the Internet, for the iPad or similar devices,” Mr. Fierlinger said. “We don’t need a distributor. We don’t even need actors. And the technology is developing so fast that by the time we’re done, there are things we’ll be using that people aren’t even talking about now.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/movies/29tulip.html





Of Two Minds About Books
Matt Richtel and Claire Cain Miller

Auriane and Sebastien de Halleux are at sharp odds over “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” but not about the plot. The problem is that she prefers the book version, while he reads it on his iPad. And in this literary dispute, the couple says, it’s ne’er the twain shall meet.

“She talks about the smell of the paper and the feeling of holding it in your hands,” said Mr. de Halleux, 32, who says he thinks the substance is the same regardless of medium. He added, sounding mildly piqued, “She uses the word ‘real.’ ”

By the end of this year, 10.3 million people are expected to own e-readers in the United States, buying about 100 million e-books, the market research company Forrester predicts. This is up from 3.7 million e-readers and 30 million e-books sold last year.
The trend is wreaking havoc inside the publishing industry, but inside homes, the plot takes a personal twist as couples find themselves torn over the “right way” to read. At bedtime, a couple might sit side-by-side, one turning pages by lamplight and the other reading Caecilia font in E Ink on a Kindle or backlighted by the illuminated LCD screen of an iPad, each quietly judgmental.

Although there are no statistics on how widespread the battles are, the publishing industry is paying close attention, trying to figure out how to market books to households that read in different ways.

A few publishers and bookstores are testing the bundling of print books with e-books at a discount. Barnes & Noble started offering bundles in June at about 50 stores and plans to expand the program in the fall, said Mary Ellen Keating, a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman.

Thomas Nelson, a publisher of religious books, offers free e-books with a print book for some titles. It is particularly good for readers who want to share books with family or friends who read in different formats, said Tod Shuttleworth, senior vice president and group publisher at Thomas Nelson. The bundles have sold well, and Thomas Nelson is considering adding more for the holiday shopping season.

Meanwhile, Amazon.com is doing its best to convince print lovers that “reading on Kindle is nothing like reading on a computer screen.” Its Web site promises a display on which “text ‘pops’ from the page, creating a reading experience most similar to reading on printed paper” because it produces neither glare in a well-lighted spot nor a glow in the dark.

Sony, which introduced a new line of e-readers Wednesday, said they were smaller and lighter than before, with clearer text and touch screens, all to make them feel more like printed books. “Consistently the No. 1 thing we heard was it needs to feel like a book, so you just forget that you have a device in your hand,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division.

This straddle-the-line marketing underscores a deeper tension: the desire to keep the print business alive so as not to alienate a core market, while establishing a base for a future that publishers see as increasingly digital, said James L. McQuivey, an e-reader industry analyst with Forrester.

“There is much more emotional attachment to the paper book than there is to the CD or the DVD,” said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “It is not logical — it’s visceral.”

A print book bundled with an e-book would have been useful for Liz Aybar, 35, and Betsy Conti, 31, a Denver couple who like reading together so much that when they read “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” in paperback, Ms. Conti ripped out sections of the book as she finished them so Ms. Aybar could read them.

But since Ms. Conti, a director of technology, bought an iPad, she has gone to the other side. They are both reading Ken Robinson’s “The Element,” but bought two separate copies — a print book for $15 and a $13 Kindle version for the iPad.

“I feel more connected to a book than I do through the iPad,” said Ms. Aybar, who works at an education nonprofit group.

Alexandra Ringe, an editor, and her husband, Jim Hanas, a fiction writer, both 41, fell in love over books, with one of their early dates at a used-book festival in Manhattan. They married in a SoHo bookstore and live in an apartment in the Park Slope neighborhood with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

She collects vintage yearbooks and self-help books. But he likes to read on his iPhone.

“For me, real reading is for e-books, and books have become this kind of collectors’ object,” said Mr. Hanas, who has published short stories in literary journals like McSweeney’s and is publishing his next book, “Why They Cried,” only in digital format. “It’s kind of amazing to see people still going through the stages of acceptance that books are going away, saying they like the way books feel and smell. I was there, but I’m past that now.”

For Erin and Daniel Muskat, a couple in Brooklyn, the ink-stained quarrel has disrupted the togetherness of their reading habits.

Ms. Muskat, 29, bought an iPad for her husband, 33, who works at his family’s shoe business, before their honeymoon in June, but quickly discovered that his electronic reading impinged on her old-fashioned reading.

“I brought a book with me and I barely read it,” said Ms. Muskat, a media consultant. “We used to go to the beach and we’d both take out books, but he had an iPad, and it was almost distracting because it didn’t feel like he was reading with me.”

For Mr. de Halleux, a video game executive, the battle over reading tastes has skipped to a new generation. He and his wife both read to their 3-year-old son, Tristan. He reads Winnie the Pooh to the child on a screen. She reads it in old-fashioned paperback form.

Mr. de Halleux said he was confident the boy would eventually favor the digitized version. “He really likes it because you can zoom in on things,” he said.

And he said the discussion in his household had brought in his parents, too. His own father favors paperbacks, arguing they can be more easily shared, while his mother goes for the e-reader, which she says is easier on faltering eyesight as people get older.

“The argument is more heated by the day,” Mr. de Halleux said. “It’s a topic of intense scrutiny at the moment.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/te...02couples.html





Digg Users Lash Out At New Format, Join Forces with Reddit
Megan Friedman

Social news site Digg is in a bit of trouble with its users.

The link-aggregating site recently unveiled a long-awaited redesign, and left fans fuming. The new design favors personalization, allowing you to "follow" certain publishers, in a form similar to Twitter. However, many are now complaining that the new Digg gives too much power to publishers and not enough power to users.

In its previous versions, the only way to submit content to Digg was to manually submit it. But in version 4, media companies (like TIME) could automatically submit all their articles to Digg. For example, this new feature, combined with technical glitches, led to a NewsFeed quote post about Paris Hilton to remain on Digg's front page for hours on end on Saturday. This was cool for us, but if we were Digg users we'd probably want to read something longer than a few sentences. Users seemed to agree, with commenters using the post as an example of Digg "going corporate" and neglecting users. Another new development, the absence of the "bury" button to remove stories you didn't like, meant that disapproving users couldn't do a thing about it.

Digg users weren't taking this lying down. Many changed their profile images into anti-Digg messages, and some declared today "Abandon Digg Day." But the best revenge? Teaming up with the enemy. So many enraged Digg fans jumped ship and headed to competitor Reddit that the latter's moderators posted a Reddit 101 guide for new users. And as icing on the betrayal cake, one intrepid Digg-hater set up an automatic feed on Digg of Reddit posts. With the help of fellow users "up-voting" these posts, the front page of Digg is filled with Reddit links.

Reddit's loving the attention. It's reaping the benefits of this snafu — and it even tweaked its logo to look more like Digg's. Now it's up to Digg to get its users to come back.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/08/30/...s-with-reddit/





Advances Offer Path to Shrink Computer Chip
John Markoff

Scientists at Rice University and Hewlett-Packard are reporting this week that they can overcome a fundamental barrier to the continued rapid miniaturization of computer memory that has been the basis for the consumer electronics revolution.

In recent years the limits of physics and finance faced by chip makers had loomed so large that experts feared a slowdown in the pace of miniaturization that would act like a brake on the ability to pack ever more power into ever smaller devices like laptops, smartphones and digital cameras.

But the new announcements, along with competing technologies being pursued by companies like IBM and Intel, offer hope that the brake will not be applied any time soon.

In one of the two new developments, Rice researchers are reporting in Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society, that they have succeeded in building reliable small digital switches — an essential part of computer memory — that could shrink to a significantly smaller scale than is possible using conventional methods.

More important, the advance is based on silicon oxide, one of the basic building blocks of today’s chip industry, thus easing a move toward commercialization. The scientists said that PrivaTran, a Texas startup company, has made experimental chips using the technique that can store and retrieve information.

These chips store only 1,000 bits of data, but if the new technology fulfills the promise its inventors see, single chips that store as much as today’s highest capacity disk drives could be possible in five years. The new method involves filaments as thin as five nanometers in width — thinner than what the industry hopes to achieve by the end of the decade using standard techniques. The initial discovery was made by Jun Yao, a graduate researcher at Rice. Mr. Yao said he stumbled on the switch by accident.
Separately, H.P. is to announce on Tuesday that it will enter into a commercial partnership with a major semiconductor company to produce a related technology that also has the potential of pushing computer data storage to astronomical densities in the next decade. H.P. and the Rice scientists are making what are called memristors, or memory resistors, switches that retain information without a source of power.

“There are a lot of new technologies pawing for attention,” said Richard Doherty, president of the Envisioneering Group, a consumer electronics market research company in Seaford, N.Y. “When you get down to these scales, you’re talking about the ability to store hundreds of movies on a single chip.”

The announcements are significant in part because they indicate that the chip industry may find a way to preserve the validity of Moore’s Law. Formulated in 1965 by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, the law is an observation that the industry has the ability to roughly double the number of transistors that can be printed on a wafer of silicon every 18 months.

That has been the basis for vast improvements in technological and economic capacities in the past four and a half decades. But industry consensus had shifted in recent years to a widespread belief that the end of physical progress in shrinking the size modern semiconductors was imminent. Chip makers are now confronted by such severe physical and financial challenges that they are spending $4 billion or more for each new advanced chip-making factory.

I.B.M., Intel and other companies are already pursuing a competing technology called phase-change memory, which uses heat to transform a glassy material from an amorphous state to a crystalline one and back.

Phase-change memory has been the most promising technology for so-called flash chips, which retain information after power is switched off.

The flash memory industry has used a number of approaches to keep up with Moore’s law without having a new technology. But it is as if the industry has been speeding toward a wall, without a way to get over it.

To keep up speed on the way to the wall, the industry has begun building three-dimensional chips by stacking circuits on top of one another to increase densities. It has also found ways to get single transistors to store more information. But these methods would not be enough in the long run.

The new technology being pursued by H.P. and Rice is thought to be a dark horse by industry powerhouses like Intel, I.B.M., Numonyx and Samsung. Researchers at those competing companies said that the phenomenon exploited by the Rice scientists had been seen in the literature as early as the 1960s.

“This is something that I.B.M. studied before and which is still in the research stage,” said Charles Lam, an I.B.M. specialist in semiconductor memories.

H.P. has for several years been making claims that its memristor technology can compete with traditional transistors, but the company will report this week that it is now more confident that its technology can compete commercially in the future.

In contrast, the Rice advance must still be proved. Acknowledging that researchers must overcome skepticism because silicon oxide has been known as an insulator by the industry until now, Jim Tour, a nanomaterials specialist at Rice said he believed the industry would have to look seriously at the research team’s new approach.

“It’s a hard sell, because at first it’s obvious it won’t work,” he said. “But my hope is that this is so simple they will have to put it in their portfolio to explore.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/sc...31compute.html





IBM Describes Fastest Microprocessor Ever
Mark Hachman

IBM revealed more details of its 5.2-GHz chip on Tuesday, the fastest microprocessor ever announced. Don't bet that you'll ever be able to buy it, though.

At the Hot Chips 2010 conference in Palo Alto, IBM executives described the z196, which will power its Z-series of mainframes, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not over a million. IBM will ship the chip in September, said Brian Curran, an IBM distinguished engineer. The mainframe itself was announced in July.

IBM also previously claimed the title of fastest microprocessor with the POWER6 chip, which ran at speeds of up to 4.6 to 4.7 GHz, and its own z10, a 2008 chip which ran at speeds of up to 4.4 GHz.

IBM defines the z196 as one of the few remaining CISC chips, which allows for bulky, large programs that can require much more memory to execute in than RISC chips, including the PowerPC and ARM embeddded processors, among others.

The z196 contains 1.4 billion transistors on a chip measuring 512 square millimeters fabricated on 45-nm PD SOI technology. It contains a 64KB L1 instruction cache, a 128KB L1 data cache, a 1.5MB private L2 cache per core, plus a pair of co-processors used for cryptographic operations.

In a four-node system, 19.5 MB of SRAM are used for L1 private cache, 144MB for L2 private cache, 576MB of eDRAM for L3 cache, and a whopping 768MB of eDRAM for a level-four cache. All this is used to ensure that the processor finds and executes its instructions before searching for them in main memory, a task which can force the system to essentially wait for the data to be found—dramatically slowing a system that is designed to be as fast as possible.

The chip uses 1,079 different instructions, Curran said. Of these, 75 can be used by millicode only, with 219 executable by millicode; an additional 24 instructions are conditionally executed by millicode. (Millicode is an internal term used at IBM for instructions internally executed by the processor, slightly bulkier than the "microcode" used by other chips.) The chip can use 211 medium instructions cracked into two or more instructions at issue, with 269 dual issued. The remaining 340 instructions are RISC-like, Curran said.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2368264,00.asp





Army Revises Training to Deal With Unfit Recruits
James Dao



Dawn breaks at this, the Army’s largest training post, with the reliable sound of fresh recruits marching to their morning exercise. But these days, something looks different.

That familiar standby, the situp, is gone, or almost gone. Exercises that look like pilates or yoga routines are in. And the traditional bane of the new private, the long run, has been downgraded.

This is the Army’s new physical-training program, which has been rolled out this year at its five basic training posts that handle 145,000 recruits a year. Nearly a decade in the making, its official goal is to reduce injuries and better prepare soldiers for the rigors of combat in rough terrain like Afghanistan.

But as much as anything, the program was created to help address one of the most pressing issues facing the military today: overweight and unfit recruits.

“What we were finding was that the soldiers we’re getting in today’s Army are not in as good shape as they used to be,” said Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who oversees basic training for the Army. “This is not just an Army issue. This is a national issue.”

Excess weight is the leading reason the Army rejects potential recruits. And while that has been true for years, the problem has worsened as the waistlines of America’s youth have expanded. Earlier this year, a group of retired generals and admirals released a report titled “Too Fat to Fight.”

“Between 1995 and 2008, the proportion of potential recruits who failed their physicals each year because they were overweight rose nearly 70 percent,” the report concluded.

Though the Army screens out the seriously obese and completely unfit, it is still finding that many of the recruits who reach basic training have less strength and endurance than privates past. It is the legacy of junk food and video games, compounded by the cutting of gym classes in many high schools, Army officials assert.

As a result, it is harder for recruits to reach Army fitness standards, and more are getting injured along the way. General Hertling said that the percentage of male recruits who had failed the most basic fitness test at one training center rose to more than one in five in 2006, up from just 4 percent in 2000. The percentages were higher for women.

Another study found that at one training center in 2002, three recruits suffered stress fractures of the pubic bone, a problem found largely among women. But last year the number rose to 39. The reason, General Hertling said: not enough weight-bearing exercise and a diet heavy on sugary sodas and energy drinks but light in calcium and iron.

The new fitness regime tries to deal with all these problems by incorporating more stretching, more exercises for the abdomen and lower back, and more agility and balance training. It ramps up in difficulty more gradually. And it sets up a multiweek course of linked exercises, rather than simply offering discrete drills.

There are fewer situps, different kinds of push-ups and fewer long runs, which Army officials say are good for building strength and endurance but often lead to injuries. They also do not necessarily prepare soldiers for carrying heavy packs or sprinting short distances.

“We haven’t eliminated running,” General Hertling said. “But it’s trying to get away from that being the only thing we do.” (The new system does include plenty of sprinting.)

Some of the new routines would look familiar to a devotee of pilates, yoga or even the latest home workout regimens on DVD, with a variety of side twists, back bridges and rowing-like exercises. “It’s more whole body,” said First Lt. Tameeka Hayes, a platoon leader for a class of new privates at Fort Jackson. “No one who has done this routine says we’ve made it easier.”

The program was largely the brainchild of two former gym teachers turned Army fitness gurus. They are a military version of Click and Clack, finishing each other’s sentences and wisecracking with the alternating beat of gas-fired pistons.

One, Stephen Van Camp, is also a former professional kick-boxer who unwittingly ran a marathon with a fractured ankle. “That’s not tough. That’s stupid,” he now says.

The other, Frank Palkoska, is a former Army officer and West Point fitness instructor who adorns his office here with black-and-white photographs of 19th-century exercise classes and an assortment of retrograde equipment like medicine balls and wooden dumbbells.

“It’s back to the future,” Mr. Palkoska says before launching into a lament about the X-Box generation. “Technology is great, but it’s killing us.”

As he and Mr. Van Camp started developing what became a 434-page manual, they began by considering what combat soldiers do and came up with a checklist of things like throwing grenades and dodging gunfire.

Then they matched those needs with functional exercises. Some of those are already in use by the Army, but others are new and still others are drawn from century-old routines. There are drills that mimic climbing, that teach soldiers how to roll and that require swift lateral movements. Some are done in body armor.

The old style of physical training, he said, was less relevant to soldiers’ tasks, which entail lots of jumping, crouching and climbing. “What we did in the morning had nothing to do with what we did the rest of the day,” Mr. Palkoska said.

Under General Hertling, the new regimen will also include a makeover of the mess halls at its training bases. At Fort Jackson, there are more green leafy vegetables, less fried food, and milk instead of soda. The food line includes color-coded messages to encourage privates to eat low-fat entrees (marked in green). And there are other changes: no more assaulting tires with bayonets, but more time spent on rifle marksmanship and fighting with padded pugil sticks.

The trick now will be to push the program into the rest of the Army, where evidence suggests many soldiers are becoming overweight, particular during or soon after deployments. The Army Training and Doctrine Command recently distributed the new fitness policy to the entire Army, officially replacing a physical fitness field manual that was first published in 1992.

While the training posts will have to follow the new program, since they are under General Hertling’s command, it is not mandatory for officers in the field. Every unit’s exercise routine is determined by its commander, and the current generation of officers has been indoctrinated under the old system.

The key, Mr. Palkoska says, will be to revamp the Army’s fitness test, which soldiers take twice a year. It measures a soldier’s ability to do situps, push-ups and a two-mile run. Since soldiers often train to the test, those are the exercises most of them do.

Mr. Palkoska and Mr. Van Camp hope the Army will revise that test by including new kinds of exercises and perhaps eliminating the situp.

“We know kids today are less fit,” Mr. Palkoska said. “We have to adjust.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/us/31soldier.html





Washington Post Suspends Columnist for Twitter Hoax
Joseph Plambeck

On Monday morning, Mike Wise, a sports columnist at The Washington Post, published to his Twitter account that the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would be suspended for five games.

Now Mr. Wise himself is suspended.

The information Mr. Wise published about Mr. Roethlisberger was made up — a test, he said, of how fast a piece of misinformation could spread online. (Mr. Roethlisberger was suspended for six games, not five, after he was accused of sexual assault in March, and the N.F.L. is considering whether to reduce the suspension.) Mr. Wise followed his initial post about the quarterback with three others about his sourcing for the news. And by the end of the day, the paper had suspended him for a month.

On his radio program on Washington’s WJFK on Tuesday morning, Mr. Wise said, “I could give you 10 reasons why I did this and explain what went wrong in the execution. But none of it matters today. I made a horrendous mistake.”

Kris Coratti, a spokeswoman for The Post, said that she could not comment on personnel issues. Before joining the paper in 2004, Mr. Wise worked as a reporter at The New York Times for 10 years.

Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at the journalism school of Columbia University, said that because Twitter was often a source of news — athletes posting updates about their contracts, for example — the posts of newsmakers and journalists were taken seriously by followers.

A journalist’s reputation “is on the line with every tweet, for better or worse,” Mr. Sreenivasan said. “People have a reasonable expectation that it’s accurate or the best of what you know at the moment.”

Within a few hours of Mr. Wise’s Twitter post on Monday, The Post’s sports editor, Matthew Vita, sent an e-mail to his staff reminding it of the paper’s guidelines for using social media.

“When you use social media, remember that you are representing The Washington Post, even if you are using your own account,” Mr. Vita wrote. “This is not to be treated lightly.”

Yet within The Post, there was disagreement about whether the punishment fit the crime. Andrew Alexander, the paper’s ombudsman, wrote on his blog that Mr. Wise was “lucky he wasn’t fired.” Howard Kurtz, the paper’s media writer, wrote in a message on Twitter that the suspension “seems overly harsh to me.”

But on his radio program in Washington on Tuesday, Mr. Wise said that he agreed with the suspension.

“I’m paying the price I should for careless, dumb behavior in the multiplatform media world,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/bu...ia/01post.html





Mark Waid on Delivery, Content, and the Gulf Between

So I was asked to deliver the keynote speech at the Harvey Awards this year. And I worked hard on it. Really hard. Notecard set after notecard set, document after document, draft after draft. Because I’d chosen a topic that I’m practically evangelical about, the tough part wasn’t coming up with stuff to say--the tough part was winnowing down the number of ideas. I went through an entire pocket notebook’s worth of paper writing and re-writing right up until my cue to speak. And that’s because I wanted to hit a home run. I really, really wanted to knock it out of the park in front of my peers.

And I didn’t.

I was uncharacteristically nervous, and it showed. I just listened to a partial recording, and while it was probably a solid double and not nearly as botched as I want to remember, to my ears, that speech was an absolute train wreck. I joked a few times about it being “a vodka-fueled rant” to cover my nervousness, but now that I listen to a playback, I get why some of the people in the room were ready to throw a punch: I didn't hit the points hard enough that I'M NOT SAYING WE SHOULDN'T GET PAID and I’M NOT ARGUING AGAINST OWNERSHIP. I did say those things, more than once, but not often enough and not at all in the back half of the speech, and I’m pretty sure that’s how I lost some of the audience, because I went off on tangents about sharing, and tangents are really dangerous territory when your speech doesn’t even begin until nearly 10:00 at night.

Worse, at least one audience member misinterpreted my speech as suggesting we should do away altogether with copyright and ownership and disagreed aggressively, and while that wasn’t at all what was said, if my message was misheard, I regret that profoundly and apologize to the listeners.

But while I may have fumbled the delivery, I’m still proud of the content (and would like it stated for the record that at no time did I “defend piracy”; seeing my speech reported as such really misses the point.) There is no written text, so no official transcript exists thus far, but Jonah Weiland has invited me to CBR to re-deliver the reconstructed speech to all (with its points better organized--I’m less nervous at a keyboard than I am with Jerry Robinson and Denny O’Neil staring expectantly back at me, go figure), so ready the tomatoes....

I’ve been asked a lot to speak about digital, because it’s such a passion with me and I’m such an advocate. But saying “Let’s cheer for digital comics!” seems kind of mundane. I want to talk tonight instead about how we fret about downloads and "piracy" and their impact. How we’re in danger because people are breaking copyright. But, first, let's talk a little about copyright and its history.

What most people don’t realize about copyright is that it was originally conceived to protect not artists but the public domain--to ensure that artists and writers and their heirs couldn’t have perpetual ownership of their work until the end of time because, at some point, the sentiment went, you ought to have to give back to culture the same way you, I, and all artists draw from it. Certainly, you should benefit from your work, and you should have legal protection, but I find it interesting that the original intent was to deliver ides back into the public domain.

Then, three hundred years ago exactly this year, publishers co-opted the copyright concept to create what are the foundation of today's copyright laws--but even then, they existed not to protect creative folks but, rather, publishers and printers. Copyright was about making sure no one could bootleg the printed work and compete with legitimate, licensed printers. It was about protecting distribution. Public domain was still seen as important, however, because no one then or now can argue that Western civilization would be better if Shakespeare's heirs still controlled his works and they couldn't be read in schools without payment, or if you had to pay a fee every time you wanted to even look at a Degas. Culture is more important than copyright.

That copyright system, however imperfect, worked for centuries. It was a decent balance of copyright and culture--you were allowed to profit from your work during your lifetime, your heirs even got many years' grace period afterwards, and then it all went back into the pool of public domain at some point long after you were dead. But for the past several decades, megacorporations have turned copyright into a perpetual revenue machine for them that will never end and never expire. That's great for individual copyright holders who draft off of that momentum, but it’s lousy for culture. Worse, it's led to a mindset among creators that the only acceptable reward for creativity is dollars and cents...

...but that leaves culture and public domain out in the cold, and again, culture is more important than copyright. No one's saying we shouldn't be compensated for our work, but we are obliged to give back at some point. Moreover--and I know that in hard economic times like these, it's very hard to remember this--I would also offer that being able to contribute to culture, having the satisfaction of knowing that we've done work that is embraced by others, watching our ideas spread and seed new ideas--if you're calculating overall job compensation, that is not without value.

“Yes, Professor Waid, you hippie freak, sharing is all well and good, but how does that pay my bills?”

I know. I know. We all still should be financially compensated for hard work so we can keep doing this and make a decent living. No argument. And that brings us back around to filesharing. If you're genuinely morally indignant about this issue, I understand and respect that. But I worry that a lot of the moral indignation I hear over filesharing is just a way of trying to mask our panic over how our ability to make a living with our art is quickly eroding under the current business models. And I understand that fear. I really, truly do.

Look, if you are in comics just to make money, I can respect that. Honestly, no sarcasm. But if you are here to create a sustainable living for yourself while at the same time finding some way to give back to the world, then filesharing is not a problem...it’s an opportunity.

Like it or not, downloading is here. Torrents and filesharing are here. That's not going away. I'm not here to attack it or defend it--I'm not going to change anyone's mind either way, and everyone in America at this point has anecdotal evidence "proving" how it hurts or helps the medium--but I am here to say it isn’t going away--and fear of it, fear of filesharing, fear of illegal downloading, fear of how the internet changes publishing in the 21st century, that’s a legitimate fear, because we’re all worried about putting food on the table and leaving a legacy for our children, but we’re using our energy on something we can’t stop, because filesharing is not going away.

And I’ll tell you why. It’s not because people “like stealing.” It’s because the greatest societal change in the last five years is that we are entering an era of sharing. Twitter and YouTube and Facebook--they’re all about sharing. Sharing links, sharing photographs, sending some video of some cat doing something stupid--that’s the era we’re entering. And whether or not you’re sharing things that technically aren’t yours to share, whether or not you’re angry because you see this as a “generation of entitlement,” that’s not the issue--the issue is, it’s happening, and the internet’s ability to reward sharing has reignited this concept that the public domain has cultural value. And I understand if you are morally outraged about it and you believe to your core that an entire generation is criminal and they’re taking food off your table, I respect that.

But moral outrage is often how we deal with fear. It’s a false sense of empowerment in the face of fear. And I’m here to tell you, that if at core you’re reacting not out of moral outrage but out of fear of the internet and the whole way publishing seems to be headed--that’s good news. Because that’s something we can fix.

We are the smartest, most creative medium in America. We put out ideas on a periodical basis bam, bam, bam. We don’t put out a screenplay every three years. We don’t invent a TV show every ten years. There are more ideas in one Wednesday in one comic shop than in three years of Hollywood. We're notoriously bad businessmen, but we are unmatched for creativity and inventiveness, and there are ways to make filesharing work for us rather than cower in fear that it’s going to destroy us.

I'm going to be rolling out some ideas in the next few weeks on how I personally want to make torrents work for me, not take away from me, and how I plan to shift the paradigm. Lots of you already have similar ideas or will, as well. I’m not saying that to plug anything I’m doing; I just want to go on record that I’m willing to walk the walk. My ideas may work. They may not work. But I’m going to share them. And if they don’t work, I’m going to keep trying. And I’m going to set up forums by which we can share our ideas on this, and I invite us all to throw them around. I really want us to keep that dialogue open. But we can define the terms of 21st century publishing and not have them defined for us.

I don’t want to be afraid. I don’t want to enter my third decade of my career terrified that publishing’s going down the tubes when we have the power to affect it. In fact, we have the advantage of being able to watch how other media have mismanaged their attempts at digital for ten years and learn from their mistakes. We can--and we will--find ways to make the internet work for us and for the enrichment of culture.
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?p...ticle&id=28129


















Until next week,

- js.



















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