Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 22nd, ’06 - P2P-Zone

JackSpratts · 20-04-06, 09:34 AM

"Because you, Mr. Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I'm a friend of Microsoft." – President Hu Jintao

"Leave it to open source hackers to debug and fix aging viral code so that it works correctly. And shame on the anti-viral industry, Kaspersky Lab in particular, for its attempts to deceive the public by passing off old code as something new." – Joe Barr

"I venture to guess that on smaller screen sizes, average consumers might not be wowed as much by the High Definition-DVD." – Peter M. Bracke

"Quite frankly, my direct comparison between the HD-DVD and standard DVDs of 'Phantom' was no contest -- the HD-DVD blew it out of the water. On a good home theater setup, it is would be hard for anyone to say HD-DVD doesn't offer a considerable improvement over standard DVD, at least with 'Phantom' as your demo material. 'Phantom's images are so smooth and free of any apparent imperfections that I almost couldn't believe it wasn't some new sort of CGI enhancement. (Maybe it is?) But however they did it, this film looks absolutely smashing, and is certainly worth watching just to see how good a HD-DVD disc can look." – Peter M. Bracke

"Much of the positive reaction [to Apple's Boot Camp], though, seems to stem from the mistaken supposition that having Windows on a Mac will make OS X look better by comparison, so people will flock to OS X. This is a dubious and dangerous conclusion for Mac heads to draw." – John C. Dvorak

"There's no disagreement about where we should end up - No DRM." – Lawrence Lessig

April 22nd, ’06

RIAA vs Hollywood In P2P Case
p2pnet

The RIAA has launched an anti-p2p file sharing lawsuit which, without exaggeration, threatens to take down the Net in the United States.

The case is Elektra v Barker, pending in Manhattan federal court before recently appointed Judge Kenneth Karas who is, by coincidence, a former federal prosecutor.

And because of its ramifications, it's possibly the most important file sharing case not only in America, but also in the world,

On first blush, there's nothing particularly different or unusual about it and in fact, it's the standard text the RIAA has churned out for more than 18,000 similar cases.

And it's not just because Tenise Barker, a young former social worker who lives in the Bronx, made a motion for dismissal - ie, she tried to stop the lawsuit on the grounds it would apply fully to ALL the RIAA's cases.

As Ray Beckerman says on his Recording Industry vs The People blog, it's because there are probably a dozen other cases pending in which the same motions have been made.

And that's set loud alarm bells clanging in Hollywood and elsewhere.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), in its blind obsession with profit, has allowed greed to get in the way of intelligence, provoking a massive, unwinnable confrontation with Hollywood and its MPAA, the American Association of Publishers and the George W. Bush administration in the shape of America's self-described Top Cop, attorney general Alberto Gonzales, all of whom are lining up against not only Barker and all the other RIAA victims out there, but against the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the trade associations which represent most of the giants of the internet and computer industries, says Beckerman.

How did it come about?

Barker made a simple motion to dismiss the complaint, saying it didn't give her adequate notice of the infringement she's accused of.

In response, "the RIAA made its most shocking and outlandish arguments to date, claiming that merely having a 'shared files folder' on one's computer, and thereby 'making files available for distribution', is in and of itself a 'distribution' and a copyright infringement," says Beckerman, ie, "even if the recordings were legally obtained, and even if no illegal copies were ever made of them, the defendant is still guilty of copyright infringement".

The EFF, the Computer & Communications Industry Association and the US Internet Industry Association realized that if this "absurd argument" was accepted, the entire Net, "nothing more than a giant network of hyperlinks making files 'available'," might be forced offline in the US.

A win for the RIAA would have painful and significant repercussions for vested interests elsewhere in the world.

It was also abundantly clear that by herself, Tenerife Barker doesn't have the financial resources to protect the Net or to wage what would amount to a full scale, single-handed war against the rapacious corporate music industry, Recording Industry vs The People adds, so they were quick to file amicus curiae briefs pointing out to Judge Karas the absurdity of the RIAA's arguments.

Shortly after, the MPAA filed an amicus brief supporting the RIAA's argument, the American Association of Publishers requested permission to file a similar brief, and the United States Department of Justice wrote to the Court indicating the possibility of filing a "Statement of Interest".

And all to collect about $6,000 from a young woman who's now a nursing student and who lives in the Bronx?

Beckerman doesn't think so.
http://p2pnet.net/story/8552

CRIA Falling Apart
Drew Wilson

The CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) is going through hard times. It seems as though after several bold steps failed, the industry is paying the price for it. It may explain why their last press release was published on March 15.

The Sam Bulte incident last year may have kicked off the beginning of the Record industry troubles. As a result, an MP lost her seat and possibly her career. The incident was sparked shortly after the debate over two controversial reform bills ended.

The CRIA then conducted a study with Pollara. The CRIA then claimed that file-sharing is the reason for lost sales. The claims were then tarnished when the full report was publicly released. Michael Geist criticised the CRIA's claims. To his surprise, Pollara responded, defending the CRIA's interpretation. Michael Geist then responded to the criticism. Pollara's move may have backfired as it fuelled speculation about connections between the polling firm and the CRIA.

CRIA's Graham Henderson said that he would end the private copying levy. It's a move that would have many effects. The largest effect is the private copying collectives who receive the funds. One effect is the legal consequence of CD burning should the levy be removed. At the same time, Graham Henderson said "we don't want a private copying levy that, in effect, sanctions online theft." Many critics point out that this is confirmation that the private copying levy also applies to file-sharing.

The damage done by the two incidents ran far deeper then a PR setback. Shortly after, 6 of Canada’s leading record labels quit the CRIA. According to the article, "(CRIA is) looking out for their best interest, and their best interest is multinationals that are not Canadian," said Ric Arboit, president of Vancouver-based Nettwerk Records. Nettwerk is known for top Canadian artists (such as Sum 41, Swollen Members and Avril Lavign), Save the Music Fan and funding the defence of an RIAA lawsuit. Nettwerk Records, Aquarius Records, the Children's Group, Linus Entertainment, Anthem Records and True North Records (all class "B" labels) all quit with a letter that states, "It has become increasingly clear over the past few months that CRIA's position on several important music industry issues are not aligned with our best interests as independent recording companies".

The actions drew concern from the Copyright Board. According to Howard Knopf, a lawyer who defended against the CRIA, "The Board then did something quite interesting. Apparently out of concern for the Indies, it ordered CRIA to send notices to the Canadian Indies in the following language: “CRIA recently opted to change the scope of its representation of its members’ interests in the forthcoming proceedings before the Copyright Board dealing with CSI’ s proposed tariff for the reproduction of musical works by online music services. Subsequently, the Board ordered CRIA to advise you of the following:

1) In these proceedings CRIA has chosen to act only on behalf of (name of each member that CRIA represents).
2) As a result, CRIA will not be allowed to advance any argument or lead any evidence that relates to your situation in particular, or to the situation of any other member of CRIA that CRIA does not represent in these proceedings generally.”" The CRIA strongly opposed this.

Not only is the CRIA suffering a tremendous PR blow, but are also suffering commercial blows as well. One may wonder just how Canadian the CRIA is after so much Canadian music labels left. Michael Geist comments how the C is being removed from the CRIA. He even cites these incidents while talking about Canada's 'cultural deficit'.

With so much ailing the CRIA, it likely is the reason why the CRIA has been so quiet lately on the PR front. It's likely that the CRIA can't do much except go quiet and heal from this multiple disaster. Perhaps the last thing the CRIA wants to hear is 'MC Lars - Download This Song' at this point in time.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1154

In Moscow, Protest Over State's Grip On Media
AF-P, AP

More than 1,000 demonstrators rallied in Moscow on Sunday to protest government efforts to tighten controls over national media.

The protest in central Moscow was linked to the fifth anniversary of the takeover of the NTV television station by the state-controlled company Gazprom in what was widely viewed as a Kremlin-orchestrated move to stifle criticism of the government.

Several prominent television anchors, who lost their jobs amid the authorities' efforts to tighten control over programming, took part in the rally.

"Over the last five years, it became clear that the government only started with NTV and ended up dominating the entire information sector," said Viktor Shenderovich, a prominent NTV program host who was purged from the station by its new owners.

Protesters held posters saying, "Censorship Today, Dictatorship Tomorrow," "Channel One, stop lying!" and "Take TV remote control away from Putin."

Since President Vladimir Putin's first election in 2000, all nationwide networks have come under tight state control, resulting in blanket positive coverage of government activities and the disappearance of critical reporting.

While print media enjoy considerably more freedom compared with broadcasters, top national newspapers are also under pressure of owners who fear that critical reports could jeopardize their business interests.

"I have had enough of the lies on television," said Vera Valkovskaia, a housewife. "The government thinks it is king and we are its slaves."

Shenderovich said that Russia had changed a lot since the natural gas giant Gazprom, in which the Russian government is the main shareholder, bought NTV in 2001. He said the state's stranglehold on television was preventing the emergence of a strong opposition and an independent justice system.

"I hope that the Russian flag will once again symbolize a democratic country and not a KGB colonel," he said, referring to Putin's previous job.

Olga Romanova, a former presenter at Ren-TV who was fired in November after complaining about censorship, said TV news channels had become government mouthpieces.

"We worked hard so that Russians would understand what was happening," she said. "Today there is no more objective information on television."

The purchase of NTV by Gazprom was followed by the departure of many of its leading journalists and a dramatic muting of its famously critical coverage, particularly of the war in Chechnya.

Gazprom in June bought Izvestiya, one of the country's most respected newspapers, pushing the state's control of the media into the print press.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/16/news/moscow.php

French Bill Could Chill Open Source
Peter Sayer

On May 4, the French Senate will debate a copyright bill that is widely expected to have a chilling effect on the development and distribution of open-source software for digital rights management (DRM) or P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file sharing.

That's because the bill's provisions include a penalty of up to three years in prison and a fine of €300,000 for publishing, distributing or promoting software in France that is "manifestly intended" for the unauthorised distribution of copyright works.

The developers of the open-source multimedia player VLC, which can read DRM-protected DVDs, consider themselves targeted. But the legal uncertainty over the term "manifestly intended" makes the bill's coverage so broad that it could even cover the open-source web server Apache, which hosts over 60 per cent of websites, opponents of the bill say. Open-source projects are thought to be more vulnerable than commercial operations because they typically have few resources at their disposal to defend legal actions.

Open-source concerns

France has been a strong supporter of open-source software, with many publicly funded bodies either using it or developing it. Legislation that punishes development and distribution of open-source applications could weaken projects based there, and tarnish the image of the open-source movement with users.

The text of the bill, entitled "Authors' rights and related rights in an information society", aims to transpose the requirements of the European Copyright Directive into French law. France is one of the last countries to transpose this European directive into national law, a situation that prompted the French government to rush the bill through its first reading in the National Assembly using emergency procedures. The bill will have its second and final reading in the Senate beginning May 4, and then must be approved by the president and finally published in the government's Official Journal before it can become law.

Deputies gave their assent to the bill on the afternoon of March 21, and within hours it had claimed its first victim: the French "mirror" of the development site for the open-source file-sharing application Emule.

Emule falls

The Emule project is hosted by Sourceforge.net, a collaborative workspace for open-source developers run by OSTG. Sourceforge provides discussion boards, tracks source code changes and hosts downloads for around 100,000 open-source projects.

A number of web hosting companies around the world, among them OVH SAS of Roubaix, France, offer local copies, or mirrors, of the complete Sourceforge site to spread the load. But soon after deputies voted, OVH CEO Octave Klaba wrote to his customers to tell them: "We are going to remove Emule from our mirror of Sourceforge."

As well as announcing Emule's impending removal from the OVH mirror of Sourceforge, Klaba warned customers that they too face a fine or prison for distributing P-to-P software, and said the company will close down any of its servers found running or hosting such software.

Developers open application reservation

OVH's move has prompted French supporters of open-source software to open a "reserve" for endangered applications.

The legal threat posed by the bill is still imaginary until it becomes law, but the fear it is creating is just as damaging, according to Loïc Dachary, a spokesman for the Free Software Foundation France (FSF France).

"People are going to say that, to avoid risking prison, they're going to banish open-source software [from their servers]," Dachary said.

The prospect that no one will want to host open-source software in France if the bill becomes law has prompted FSF France to step in as host of last resort with a reserve for open-source software.

"Anyone who is afraid [of the bill] can announce that they want to host the software in the reserve," Dachary said.

The reserve is operated by another campaign group, EUCD.info, hosted on servers in France, but FSF France is taking the legal responsibility, promising to defend the right to host open-source projects in the courts if necessary.

The reserve is already home to a handful of applications. For instance, there's Azureus, a P-to-P client for the BitTorrent file-sharing system written in Java, and a number of other P-to-P applications including Emule, Solipsis, Maay and TinyP2P.

Is technology criminal?

But the campaigners have also placed the Linux kernel and the web server Apache in the reserve, a move which they hope demonstrates how ridiculous the bill's provisions could be.

"The Linux kernel contains a component necessary for any exchange over the internet: the TCP/IP stack. All the pirates utilise TCP/IP, and can't commit their illegal acts without this component. Are French publishers distributing the Linux kernel targeted by Article 12bis of the bill? Maybe, maybe not. We just don't know," the reserve's creators write, explaining its inclusion.

Putting a piece of software in the reserve is "a symbolic gesture" that challenges senators examining the bill to ask themselves whether they should really be driving development of open-source software out of the country, Dachary said.

Flee la France

"The law obliges us to flee French territory," he said.

Olivier Chalouhi, founder of the project developing the Azureus client for the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, believes the law will harm France more than it will hurt open-source projects like his.

"The law won't change anything for P-to-P software, as it is developed at an international level. The only thing is that really smart people working in France may go abroad, and that's not in the French interest," he said.

Other European countries are re-examining their implementation of the European Copyright Directive, with varying consequences for open-source projects. Denmark may require DRM vendors to provide the information necessary to make interoperable systems - a plus for the open-source movement as it would allow, for example, the creation of media players that can play protected copyright works on the Linux OS. Meanwhile, Germany may toughen the sanctions for individuals caught sharing copyright works without authorisation, increasing the risks for operators and users of P-to-P applications, whether open source or proprietary.

If these measures are being re-examined, could open-source software face the same threat elsewhere as in France?

"Today, that's not a worry for us," said Dachary. "The idea that other countries might change their law to introduce restrictions on open-source software seems unlikely."
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index...ge=1&pagePos=4

Has File Sharing Cost The Music Industry £1.1bn Over 3 Years?
Charles Arthur

Not according to a back-of-the-envelope calculation by Jupiter Research's Mark Mulligan, who reckons the true figure is closer to £290m. "Where's the extra £0.81bn?" he asks rhetorically on his weblog (http://tinyurl.com/j3jtm).

Mulligan points out that UK music industry sales in 2002 were just over £2bn; in 2005, £1.85bn, a cumulative decrease that's a long way short of £1bn.

The British Phonographic Industry points out the figure, announced along with a new set of lawsuits against some of its customers reckoned to have been illicitly file sharing, was included in a press release (http://tinyurl.com/z6klb). That quoted the independent research company TNS Worldpanel, which put the cost to British music in 2005 of people file sharing rather than paying for music at £414m.

Add to that the £278m drop in sales between 2002 and 2003, and another £376m from 2003-2004, and voilá: there's the BPI's £1.1bn figure for the loss to British music. Or, as it quietly adds, "approximately £650m at trade value" - that is, to the music industry rather than the industry and retailers together.

Mulligan is unimpressed: "The BPI should (a) know better than to infer that consumer survey data is national market revenue data; (b) accept there are many bigger reasons impacting on declining music sales - prices too high, physical piracy, competing expenditure on DVDs and games consoles, and so on."

He points out only 10% of UK internet users are file sharers, or just 5% of the UK population. If they were responsible for all that lost spending, they must have been very big spenders to have left a £1.1bn hole in the music business. "But they're not," Mulligan said this week. "They tend to be young and on low incomes. Physical piracy and the competition from games and DVDs is far more important."

The BPI responds that the methodology shows people who start file sharing end up cutting back on spending: "There are other factors but this looked at the behaviour of music buyers."

Mulligan says the BPI is hyping the numbers because it fears what will happen when young file sharers grow up - and are used to not paying for music; though studies show they do buy mobile ringtones. Might those compensate for the missing millions? Even there Mulligan has bad news: "The modern ringtones such as polyphonic ones are classified as cover versions - so the composer gets a cut but not the record label."
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...752260,00.html

Your Tax Dollars at Work ... for Viacom
Fred von Lohmann

The Washington DC legal newspaper, Legal Times, is reporting (sorry, subscription link) that Kevin Murphy, a legislative aide to Senator Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), has recently taken a job with cable and film giant Viacom. Senator Smith, you may remember, is one of the Hill's leading proponents of the broadcast flag. Smells fishy, you say? Legal Times thinks so, too:
In a potential conflict of interest, a legislative assistant to Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), who is currently sponsoring legislation limiting the use and distribution of digital broadcasts, has been hired by media giant Viacom Inc.

In January, Smith drafted the Digital Content Protection Act, which calls for wider use of "broadcast-flag" technology, a code inserted into digital audio or visual transmissions that limits the ability of consumers to redistribute that content. Broadcast-flag technology is opposed by many consumer groups but has broad support in the entertainment industry. The bill has not been formally introduced.

Keith Murphy, a legislative aide to Smith who has worked closely on the legislation, is scheduled to begin work for Viacom at the end of April. Viacom's subsidiary, Paramount Pictures Corp., is a member of the powerful Motion Picture Association of America, a forceful advocate for the broadcast-flag proposal.

Whether it's actually a conflict of interest or not, it sure has the appearance of impropriety.

Murphy, of course, is not the only government insider who has ended up working for the entertainment industry right after carrying water for the industry while in government. David Israelite, right before taking the top job at the National Music Publisher's Association (NMPA), was head of a DoJ task force that recommended stiffening federal criminal enforcement of copyright laws. And perhaps most infamous is Mitch Glazier, who turned up working at the RIAA soon after he shepherded a change into the Copyright Act's "work for hire" provisions that would have benefited record labels at the expense of song-writers.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004552.php

From October

Why Everyone Hates The Music Industry
Fredric Paul

I recently read a research report from Forrester Research with the provocative title "Music Lessons: Is Your Industry At Risk?" That's a very important question these days, as the recording industry struggles with falling sales and critical challenges from new technology. No one wants to be the next passenger on that train.

But as I leafed through the exhaustive, well-thought-out report, I started thinking that the authors—along with most observers—may have missed the most obvious, most important points.

Subtitled "Why Media Monocultures Are In Big Trouble," the report posits that media businesses that derive all their revenue from a single source tend to exhibit rigid monopoly-oriented thinking behavior that makes them vulnerable to technological and cultural changes. True enough, but if you ask me, that's not what wrecked the record companies.

No, the record companies' real problem is that everyone hates them.

He Hate Me
Musicians hate them for habitually sucking the creativity out of the music and the profits from the CD sales. Usually they do it legally, if not morally, but all too often naïve musicians with few options end up swindled out of their rightful earnings.

And music lovers—don't call us consumers; music can't be consumed—see the record companies as greedy, clueless profiteers quick to jack up prices while placing limits on what music gets released and how you can listen to it.

Record companies add little real value to the process of creating and distributing music, and technological advancements make their role increasingly irrelevant. Movie studios and publishing houses still stand for something, some artistic orientation, but the big record companies don't. These days, who knows or cares which label their favorite artists happen to have signed with?

The only people willing to defend the record labels seem to be a handful of superstar performers who have gotten rich on the blockbuster mentality pervasive in the music industry. Or in the film industry—movie studios seem determined to follow the same antagonistic path. Oh, and a smattering of radio DJs who rake in the payola to play what they're told to play.

Forrester report author Josh Bernoff (with Chris Charron, Jennifer Joseph, and Tenly McHang) acknowledges that the music industry "was out of touch with users," but that drastically understates the severity of the problem. It's not that vendors (musicians) and customers (listeners) aren't in touch with the record companies, it's that they know them and loathe them. And that was the rule even before the companies started suing thousands of their best customers.

The Five Stages Of Musical Death
Forrester's report argues that the music industry is finally coming to terms with its situation. Adapting Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' famous five stages of death and dying to track the music industry's suffering (no, I'm not kidding), it argues that the industry has moved beyond "shock and denial" (stage 1) over Napster to "anger" (stage 2) by suing file-sharers, through "bargaining" (stage 3) by offering digital music subscriptions and into "depression" (stage 4) when it realized that approach wasn't going to work. The fifth and final stage, "acceptance," comes as iTunes exceeds half a billion legal downloads and the industry tries new download services.

I'm not convinced. iTunes was a good start, but that service still has more digital rights restrictions than I'd like. And the companies are once again bickering with Apple over pricing and DRM issues. Plus, they're still suing listeners, and they still don't see their own culpability in their demise.

Making Money From Those Who Won't Pay
One positive sign: Universal Music, the world's largest record company, recently announced that it's "transforming itself into a broader entertainment company that derives more revenue from untapped sources like advertising and apparel," according to Reuters. The goal is to "tap into the enormous demand for free music, and generate revenue from those who can't or won't pay." Instead of being obsessed with controlling how people listen to music, a few record execs may finally be starting to recognize that they need a new business model, that selling recorded performances can no longer be the cash cow it was during the 20th century. (And really, is that such a bad thing? Most of the money from CD sales never reaches the artists anyway, and it makes more sense for records to be loss leaders for live performances and other merchandise. Mariah Carey might have to sell one of her houses, but she'll be OK.)

But most insiders still seem to want to finesse the rights issue. I recently chatted with Stefan Roever, CEO of Navio Systems in Cupertino, Calif. Navio supplies technology to record companies so they can "sell rights, and not just files." The idea is that these rights would offer more flexibility, because listeners could use the right to access the content on multiple platforms, for example, or to download the file again if your media was lost or destroyed. But I think that's putting the cart before the horse. People don't want "rights" to the music they buy. They want to own it. Only when everyone accepts that fact will we be ready to worry about what Navio is selling.

Don't Hate Me Because I'm Rich
It may be too late for the music industry. But what does Forrester's report tell us about other technology and media sectors? Well, I guess if your industry exists in a monopoly monoculture, heavily depends on a single channel and revenue stream, and steadfastly refuses to change along with advancing technology and cultural shifts, it's clearly time to start worrying. According to Forrester, that means TV networks, radio networks, and especially newspapers.

But I say all that stuff is just window dressing. If your vendors and customers hate you, you're dead.

Fredric Paul is Director of Online Editorial Development for CMP Media LLC, TechWeb's parent company.
http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/172300219

Unintended Consequences: Seven Years under the DMCA
April, 2006

[Download a PDF of this Paper - 262K]

This document is version 4. Previous versions are still available:
version 3, version 2, version 1.
Contents
Executive Summary
DMCA Legislative Background
Chilling Free Expression and Scientific Research
Fair Use Under Siege
A threat to innovation and competition
DMCA Shoulders Aside Computer Intrusion Statutes
Conclusion

This document collects a number of reported cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been invoked not against pirates, but against consumers, scientists, and legitimate competitors. It will be updated from time to time as additional cases come to light. The latest version can always be obtained at www.eff.org.

1. Executive Summary

Since they were enacted in 1998, the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. Congress meant to stop copyright infringers from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works and to ban the "black box" devices intended for that purpose. 1

In practice, the anti-circumvention provisions have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than to stop copyright infringement. As a result, the DMCA has developed into a serious threat to several important public policy priorities:

The DMCA Chills Free Expression and Scientific Research.
Experience with section 1201 demonstrates that it is being used to stifle free speech and scientific research. The lawsuit against 2600 magazine, threats against Princeton Professor Edward Felten's team of researchers, and prosecution of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have chilled the legitimate activities of journalists, publishers, scientists, students, programmers, and members of the public.

The DMCA Jeopardizes Fair Use.
By banning all acts of circumvention, and all technologies and tools that can be used for circumvention, the DMCA grants to copyright owners the power to unilaterally eliminate the public's fair use rights. Already, the movie industry's use of encryption on DVDs has curtailed consumers' ability to make legitimate, personal-use copies of movies they have purchased.

The DMCA Impedes Competition and Innovation.
Rather than focusing on pirates, many copyright owners have wielded the DMCA to hinder their legitimate competitors. For example, the DMCA has been used to block aftermarket competition in laser printer toner cartridges, garage door openers, and computer maintenance services. Similarly, Apple invoked the DMCA to chill RealNetworks' efforts to sell music downloads to iPod owners.

The DMCA Interferes with Computer Intrusion Laws.
Further, the DMCA has been misused as a general-purpose prohibition on computer network access which, unlike most computer intrusion statutes, lacks any financial harm threshold. As a result, a disgruntled employer has used the DMCA against a former contractor for simply connecting to the company's computer system through a VPN.
2. DMCA Legislative Background

Congress enacted the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions in response to two pressures. First, Congress was responding to the perceived need to implement obligations imposed on the U.S. by the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty. Section 1201, however, went further than the WIPO treaty required. 2 The details of section 1201, then, were a response not just to U.S. treaty obligations, but also to the concerns of copyright owners that their works would be widely pirated in the networked digital world. 1

Section 1201 contains two distinct prohibitions: a ban on acts of circumvention, and a ban on the distribution of tools and technologies used for circumvention.

The "act" prohibition, set out in section 1201(a)(1), prohibits the act of circumventing a technological measure used by copyright owners to control access to their works ("access controls"). So, for example, this provision makes it unlawful to defeat the encryption system used on DVD movies. This ban on acts of circumvention applies even where the purpose for decrypting the movie would otherwise be legitimate. As a result, it is unlawful to make a digital copy ("rip") of a DVD you own for playback on your video iPod.

The "tools" prohibitions, set out in sections 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b), outlaw the manufacture, sale, distribution, or trafficking of tools and technologies that make circumvention possible. These provisions ban both technologies that defeat access controls, and also technologies that defeat use restrictions imposed by copyright owners, such as copy controls. These provisions prohibit the distribution of "DVD back-up" software, for example.

Section 1201 includes a number of exceptions for certain limited classes of activities, including security testing, reverse engineering of software, encryption research, and law enforcement. These exceptions have been extensively criticized as being too narrow to be of real use to the constituencies who they were intended to assist.4

A violation of any of the "act" or "tools" prohibitions is subject to significant civil and, in some circumstances, criminal penalties.
3. Chilling Free Expression and Scientific Research

Section 1201 has been used by a number of copyright owners to stifle free speech and legitimate scientific research.

The lawsuit against 2600 magazine, threats against Professor Edward Felten's team of researchers, and prosecution of the Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov are among the most widely known examples of the DMCA being used to chill speech and research. Bowing to DMCA liability fears, online service providers and bulletin board operators have begun to censor discussions of copy-protection systems, programmers have removed computer security programs from their websites, and students, scientists and security experts have stopped publishing details of their research.

These developments will ultimately result in weakened security for all computer users (including, ironically, for copyright owners counting on technical measures to protect their works), as security researchers shy away from research that might run afoul of section 1201.

DMCA Delays Disclosure of Sony-BMG "Rootkit" Vulnerability
J. Alex Halderman, a graduate student at Princeton University, discovered the existence of several security vulnerabilities in the CD copy-protection software on dozens of Sony-BMG titles. He delayed publishing his discovery for several weeks while consulting with lawyers in order to avoid DMCA pitfalls. This left millions of music fans at risk longer than necessary.5 The security flaws inherent in Sony-BMG's "rootkit" copy-protection software were subsequently publicized by another researcher who was apparently unaware of the legal risks created by the DMCA.

Security researchers had sought a DMCA exemption in 2003 in order to facilitate research on dangerous DRM systems like the Sony-BMG rootkit, but their request was denied by the U.S. Copyright Office. 6

Cyber-Security Czar Notes Chill on Research
Speaking at MIT in October 2002, White House Cyber Security Chief Richard Clarke called for DMCA reform, noting his concern that the DMCA had been used to chill legitimate computer security research. The Boston Globe quoted Clarke as saying, "I think a lot of people didn't realize that it would have this potential chilling effect on vulnerability research."7

Professor Felten's Research Team Threatened
In September 2000, a multi-industry group known as the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) issued a public challenge encouraging skilled technologists to try to defeat certain watermarking technologies intended to protect digital music. Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten and a team of researchers at Princeton, Rice, and Xerox took up the challenge and succeeded in removing the watermarks.

When the team tried to present their results at an academic conference, however, SDMI representatives threatened the researchers with liability under the DMCA. The threat letter was also delivered to the researchers' employers and the conference organizers. After extensive discussions with counsel, the researchers grudgingly withdrew their paper from the conference. The threat was ultimately withdrawn and a portion of the research was published at a subsequent conference, but only after the researchers filed a lawsuit.

After enduring this experience, at least one of the researchers involved has decided to forgo further research efforts in this field. 8

SunnComm Threatens Grad Student
In October 2003, a Princeton graduate student named J. Alex Halderman was threatened with a DMCA lawsuit after publishing a report documenting weaknesses in a CD copy-protection technology developed by SunnComm. Halderman revealed that merely holding down the shift key on a Windows PC would render SunnComm's copy protection technology ineffective. Furious company executives then threatened legal action.

The company quickly retreated from its threats in the face of public outcry and negative press attention. Although Halderman was spared, the controversy again reminded security researchers of their vulnerability to DMCA threats for simply publishing the results of their research.9

Hewlett Packard Threatens SNOsoft
Hewlett-Packard resorted to DMCA threats when researchers published a security flaw in HP's Tru64 UNIX operating system. The researchers, a loosely-organized collective known as Secure Network Operations ("SNOsoft"), received the DMCA threat after releasing software in July 2002 that demonstrated vulnerabilities that HP had been aware of for some time, but had not bothered to fix.

After the DMCA threat received widespread press attention, HP ultimately withdrew the threat. Security researchers received the message, however-publish vulnerability research at your own risk.10

Blackboard Threatens Security Researchers
In April 2003, educational software company Blackboard Inc. used a DMCA threat to stop the presentation of research on security vulnerabilities in its products at the InterzOne II conference in Atlanta. Students Billy Hoffman and Virgil Griffith were scheduled to present their research on security flaws in the Blackboard ID card system used by university campus security systems but were blocked shortly before the talk by a cease-and-desist letter invoking the DMCA.

Blackboard obtained a temporary restraining order against the students and the conference organizers at a secret "ex parte" hearing the day before the conference began, giving the students and conference organizer no opportunity to appear in court or challenge the order before the scheduled presentation. Despite the rhetoric in its initial cease and desist letter, Blackboard's lawsuit did not mention the DMCA. The invocation in the original cease-and-desist letter, however, underscores the way the statute has been used to chill security research. 11

Xbox Hack Book Dropped by Publisher
In 2003, U.S. publisher John Wiley & Sons dropped plans to publish a book by security researcher Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, citing DMCA liability concerns. Wiley had commissioned Huang to write a book that described the security flaws in the Microsoft Xbox game console, flaws Huang had discovered as part of his doctoral research at M.I.T.

Following Microsoft's legal action against a vendor of Xbox "mod chips" in early 2003, and the music industry's 2001 DMCA threats against Professor Felten's research team, Wiley dropped the book for fear that the book might be treated as a "circumvention device" under the DMCA. Huang's initial attempt to self-publish was thwarted after his online shopping cart provider also withdrew, citing DMCA concerns.

After several months of negotiations, Huang eventually self-published the book in mid-2003. After extensive legal consultations, Huang was able to get the book published by No Starch Press. 12

Censorware Research Obstructed
Seth Finkelstein conducts research on "censorware" software (i.e., programs that block websites that contain objectionable material), documenting flaws in such software. Finkelstein's research, for example, revealed that censorware vendor N2H2 blocked a variety of legitimate websites, evidence that assisted the ACLU in challenging a law requiring the use web filtering software by federally-funded public libraries.13

N2H2 claimed that the DMCA should block researchers like Finkelstein from examining it. Finkelstein was ultimately forced to seek a DMCA exemption from the Librarian of Congress, who granted the exemption in both the 2000 and 2003 triennial rulemakings. The exemption, however, has not been a complete remedy, since it is limited to the act of circumvention, and does not permit researchers to create or distribute tools to facilitate research. 14

Benjamin Edelman has also conducted extensive research into flaws in various censorware products. Edelman's research also led to evidence used by the ACLU in its constitutional challenge to the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which mandates the use of censorware by public libraries.

In the course of his work for the ACLU, Edelman discovered that the DMCA might interfere with his efforts to learn what websites are blocked by censorware products. Because he sought to create and distribute software tools to enable others to analyze the list if it changed, Edelman could not rely on the limited DMCA regulatory exception. Unwilling to risk civil and criminal penalties under Section 1201, Edelman was forced to sue to seek clarification of his legal rights. Unfortunately, the court found that Edelman would have to undertake the research and hazard legal reprisals in order to have standing to challenge the DMCA. The case was therefore dismissed without addressing the DMCA's chill on research. 15

Dmitry Sklyarov Arrested
In July 2001, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was jailed for several weeks and detained for five months in the United States after speaking at the DEFCON conference in Las Vegas.

Prosecutors, prompted by software goliath Adobe Systems Inc., alleged that Sklyarov had worked on a software program known as the Advanced e-Book Processor, which was distributed over the Internet by his Russian employer, ElcomSoft. The software allowed owners of Adobe electronic books ("e-books") to convert them from Adobe's e-Book format into PDF files, thereby removing restrictions embedded into the files by e-book publishers.

Sklyarov was never accused of infringing any copyright, nor of assisting anyone else to infringe copyrights. His alleged crime was working on a software tool with many legitimate uses, simply because other people might use the tool to copy an e-book without the publisher's permission.

Federal prosecutors ultimately permitted Sklyarov to return home, but brought criminal charges against ElcomSoft. In December 2002, a jury acquitted Elcomsoft of all charges, completing an 18-month ordeal for the wrongly-accused Russian software company. 16

Scientists and Programmers Withhold Research
Following the Felten and Sklyarov incidents, a number of prominent computer security experts curtailed their legitimate research activities for fear of potential DMCA liability.

For example, when Dutch cryptographer and security systems analyst Niels Ferguson discovered a major security flaw in Intel's HDCP video encryption system, he declined to publish his results on his website on the grounds that he travels frequently to the U.S. and is fearful of "prosecution and/or liability under the U.S. DMCA law." 17

Following the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, Fred Cohen, a professor of digital forensics and respected security consultant, removed his "Forensix" evidence-gathering software from his website, citing fear of potential DMCA liability. Another respected network security protection expert, Dug Song, also removed information from his website for the same reason. Mr. Song is the author of several security papers, including a paper describing a common vulnerability in many firewalls. 18

In mid-2001 an anonymous programmer discovered a vulnerability in Microsoft's proprietary e-book DRM system, but refused to publish the results, citing DMCA liability concerns. 19

Foreign Scientists Avoid U.S.
Foreign scientists have expressed concerns about traveling to the U.S. following the arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov. Some foreign scientists have advocated boycotting conferences held in the United States, and some conference organizers have decided to hold events in non-U.S. locations. Russia went so far as to issue a travel advisory to Russian programmers traveling to the United States. 20

Highly respected British Linux programmer Alan Cox resigned from the USENIX committee of the Advanced Computing Systems Association, the committee that organizes many of the U.S. computing conferences, because of concerns about traveling to the United States. He also urged USENIX to move its annual conference offshore. 21

The International Information Hiding Workshop Conference, the conference at which Professor Felten's team intended to present its original SDMI watermarking paper, chose to break with tradition and held its next conference outside of the U.S. following the DMCA threat to Professor Felten and his team. 22

IEEE Wrestles with DMCA
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which publishes 30 per cent of all computer science journals worldwide, has also grappled with the uncertainties created by the DMCA. Apparently concerned about possible DMCA liability, the IEEE in November 2001 instituted a policy requiring all authors to indemnify IEEE for any liabilities incurred should a submission result in legal action.

After an outcry from IEEE members, the organization ultimately revised its submission policies, removing mention of the DMCA. According to Bill Hagen, manager of IEEE Intellectual Property Rights, "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has become a very sensitive subject among our authors. It's intended to protect digital content, but its application in some specific cases appears to have alienated large segments of the research community." 23

2600 Magazine Censored
The Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes case illustrates the chilling effect that section 1201 has had on the freedom of the press.

In that case, eight major motion picture companies brought DMCA claims against 2600 Magazine seeking to block it from publishing DeCSS, a software program that defeats the CSS encryption used on DVD movies. 2600 had made the program available on its web site in the course of its ongoing coverage of the controversy surrounding the DMCA. The magazine was not involved in the development of software, nor was it accused of having used the software for any copyright infringement.

Notwithstanding the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press, the district court permanently barred 2600 from publishing, or even linking to, the DeCSS software code. In November 2001, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court decision. 24

In essence, the movie studios effectively obtained a "stop the presses" order banning the publication of truthful information by a news publication concerning a matter of public concern-an unprecedented curtailment of well-established First Amendment principles. 25

CNET Reporter Feels Chill
CNET News reporter Declan McCullagh confronted the chilling effect of the DMCA firsthand. In the course of his reporting, he found four documents on the public website of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The website disclosed that the documents contained information about airport security procedures, the relationship between federal and local police, and a "liability information sheet." A note on the site stated that this "information is restricted to airport management and local law enforcement." The documents were distributed in encrypted form and a password was required to open and read them.

McCullagh obtained the passwords from an anonymous source, but did not open the documents, citing concerns that using a password without authorization might violate the DMCA. This is particularly ironic, as any foreign journalist beyond the reach of the DMCA would be free to use the password.

"Journalists traditionally haven't worried about copyright law all that much," said McCullagh, "But nowadays intellectual property rights have gone too far, and arguably interfere with the newsgathering process." 26

Microsoft Threatens Slashdot
In spring 2000, Microsoft invoked the DMCA against the Internet publication forum Slashdot, demanding that forum moderators delete materials relating to Microsoft's proprietary implementation of an open security standard known as Kerberos.

In the Slashdot forum, several individuals alleged that Microsoft had changed the open, non-proprietary Kerberos specification in order to prevent non-Microsoft servers from interacting with Windows 2000. Many speculated that this move was intended to force users to purchase Microsoft server software. Although Microsoft responded to this criticism by publishing its Kerberos specification, it conditioned access to the specification on agreement to a "click-wrap" license agreement that expressly forbade disclosure of the specification without Microsoft's prior consent.

Slashdot posters responded by republishing the Microsoft specification. Microsoft then invoked the DMCA, demanding that Slashdot remove the republished specifications.

In the words of Georgetown law professor Julie Cohen, "If Microsoft's interpretation of the DMCA's ban on circumvention technologies is right, then it doesn't seem to matter much whether posting unauthorized copies of the Microsoft Kerberos specification would be a fair use. A publisher can prohibit fair-use commentary simply by implementing access and disclosure restrictions that bind the entire public. Anyone who discloses the information, or even tells others how to get it, is a felon." 27

GameSpy Menaces Security Researcher with DMCA
Luigi Auriemma, an independent Italian security researcher, attracted the attention of GameSpy's lawyers after publishing details on his website regarding security vulnerabilities in GameSpy's online services, including a voice chat program, Roger Wilco, and online game finder, GameSpy 3D. Before publishing the information, Auriemma had informed GameSpy and public security mailing lists of the weaknesses. GameSpy, however, had failed to address the vulnerabilities.

In November 2003, GameSpy's lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to Auriemma, threatening civil and criminal penalties under the DMCA. According to GameSpy, Auriemma was publishing key generators and other piracy tools, rather than simply vulnerability research. Whatever the merits of GameSpy's claims, the invocation of the DMCA was likely improper in light of the fact that Auriemma resides in Italy and thus is beyond the reach of the DMCA. 28

AVSforum.com Censors TiVo Discussion
The specter of DMCA litigation has chilled speech on smaller web bulletin boards, as well. In June 2001, for example, the administrator of AVSforum.com, a popular forum where TiVo digital video recorder owners discuss TiVo features, censored all discussion about a software program that allegedly permitted TiVo users to move video from their TiVos to their personal computers. In the words of the forum administrator, "My fear with this is more or less I have no clue what is a protected system on the TiVo box under copyright (or what-have-you) and what is not. Thus my fear for the site." 29

Mac Forum Censors iTunes Music Store Discussion
Macintosh enthusiast website Macosxhints censored publication of information about methods for evading the copy protection on songs purchased from the Apple iTunes Music Store in May 2003, citing DMCA liability concerns. Songs purchased from the Apple iTunes Music Store are downloaded in Apple's proprietary AAC file format, wrapped in digital copy protection. As the webmaster for the site noted, even though information on bypassing the copy protection was readily available on the Internet at the time, republishing user hints on work-arounds risked attracting a DMCA lawsuit and harsh penalties. 30
4. Fair Use Under Siege

"Fair use" is a crucial element in American copyright law-the principle that the public is entitled, without having to ask permission, to use copyrighted works in ways that do not unduly interfere with the copyright owner's market for a work. Fair uses include personal, noncommercial uses, such as using a VCR to record a television program for later viewing. Fair use also includes activities undertaken for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research.

Unfortunately, the DMCA throws out the baby of fair use with the bathwater of digital piracy. By employing technical protection measures to control access to and use of copyrighted works, and using the DMCA against anyone who tampers with those measures, copyright owners can unilaterally eliminate fair use, re-writing the copyright bargain developed by Congress and the courts over more than a century.

Although the Copyright Office is empowered to grant limited DMCA exemptions in a triennial rule-making, it has repeatedly refused to grant such exemptions for consumer fair uses. 31

Copy-protected CDs
The introduction of "copy-protected" CDs illustrates the collision between fair use and the DMCA. Sony-BMG, for example, had released more than 15 million copy-protected CDs in the U.S. market as of early 2006. Although the momentum toward universal CD copy-protection faltered after the Sony-BMG "rootkit" scandal in late-2005, no major label has renounced the use of copy-protection on CDs.

These copy-protection technologies are certain to interfere with the fair use expectations of music fans. For example, copy-protected discs will disappoint the millions who have purchased iPods or other MP3 players, despite the fact that making an MP3 copy of a CD for personal use qualifies as a fair use. Making "mix CDs" or copies of CDs for the office or car are other examples of fair uses that are potentially impaired by copy-protection technologies.

Companies that distribute tools to "repair" these dysfunctional CDs, restoring to consumers their fair use privileges, run the risk of lawsuits under the DMCA's ban on circumvention tools and technologies. 32

Fair Use Tools Banned: DVD Back-up Software
We are entering an era where books, music and movies will increasingly be "copy-protected" and otherwise restricted by technological means. Whether scholars, researchers, commentators and the public will continue to be able to make legitimate fair uses of these works will depend upon the availability of tools to bypass these digital locks.

The DMCA, however, prohibits the creation or distribution of these tools, even if they are crucial to fair use. So, as copyright owners use technology to press into the 21st century, the public will see fair uses whittled away by digital locks allegedly intended to "prevent piracy." Perhaps more importantly, future fair uses will not be developed for restricted media, because courts will never have the opportunity to rule on them. Fair users will be found liable for "picking the lock" and thereby violating the DMCA, whatever the merits of their fair use defense.

Copyright owners argue that these tools, in the hands of copyright infringers, can result in "Internet piracy." But banning the tools that enable fair use will punish the innocent along with infringers. Photocopiers, VCRs, and CD-R burners can also be misused, but no one would suggest that the public give them up simply because they might be used by others to break the law.

Fair use of DVDs has already suffered thanks to DMCA lawsuits brought against DVD copying tools. There are many legitimate reasons to copy DVDs. Once the video is on the PC, for example, lots of fair uses become possible-film scholars can digitally analyze the film, travelers can load the movie into their laptops, and DVD owners can skip the otherwise "unskippable" commercials that preface certain films. Without the tools necessary to copy DVDs, however, these fair uses become impossible.

In the Universal v. Reimerdes case, discussed above, the court held that the DMCA bans DeCSS software. In another case, federal courts ordered 321 Studios' DVD X Copy product taken off the shelves for violating the DMCA. Major movie studios also used the DMCA to sue Tritton Technologies, the manufacturer of DVD CopyWare, and three website distributors of similar software. 33

Movie fans, film scholars, movie critics, and public interest groups have all repeatedly asked the Copyright Office to grant DMCA exemptions to allow the decryption of DVDs in order to enable noninfringing uses. For example, exemptions were sought to allow movie critics to post movie clips, DVD owners to skip "unskippable" previews and commercials, and legitimate purchasers to bypass "region coding" restrictions on their DVD players. Every DVD-related request was denied in both the 2000 and 2003 triennial rulemakings. 34 Even if an exemption were granted, however, the Copyright Office is powerless to grant an exemption to the DMCA's "tools" ban, which means that fair users would be left without the tools necessary to exercise any exemption that might be granted.

Advanced e-Book Processor and e-Books
The future of fair use for books was at issue in the criminal prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov and Elcomsoft. As discussed above, Elcomsoft produced and distributed a tool called the Advanced e-Book Processor, which translates e-books from Adobe's e-book format to PDF. This translation process removed various restrictions (against copying, printing, text-to-speech processing, etc.) that publishers can impose on e-books. 35

The Advanced e-Book Processor allowed those who have legitimately purchased e-books to make fair uses of their e-books, uses otherwise made impossible by the restrictions of the Adobe e-book format. For instance, the program allowed people to engage in the following fair uses:

read the e-book on a laptop or computer other than the one on which it was first downloaded;
continue to access the e-book in the future, if the particular technological device for which it was purchased becomes obsolete;
print an e-book on paper;
read an e-book on an alternative operating system such as Linux (Adobe's format works only on Macs and Windows PCs);
have a computer read an e-book out loud using text-to-speech software, which is particularly important for visually-impaired individuals.

Time-shifting and Streaming Media
As more people receive audio and video content from "streaming" Internet media sources, they will want tools to preserve their settled fair use expectations, including the ability to "time-shift" programming for later listening or viewing. As a result of the DMCA, however, the digital equivalents of VCRs and cassette decks for streaming media may never arrive.

Start-up software company Streambox developed exactly such a product, known simply as the Streambox VCR, designed to time-shift streaming media. When RealNetworks discovered that the Streambox VCR could time-shift streaming RealAudio webcasts, it invoked the DMCA and obtained an injunction against the Streambox VCR product. 36

The DMCA has also been invoked to threaten the developer of an open source, noncommercial software application known as Streamripper that records MP3 audio streams for later listening. 37

embed and Fonts
In January 2002, typeface vendor Agfa Monotype Corporation threatened a college student with DMCA liability for creating "embed," a free, open source, noncommercial software program designed to manipulate TrueType fonts.

According to the student: "I wrote embed in 1997, after discovering that all of my fonts disallowed embedding in documents. Since my fonts are free, this was silly-but I didn't want to take the time to... change the flag, and then reset all of the extended font properties with a separate program. What a bore! Instead, I wrote this program to convert all of my fonts at once. The program is very simple; it just requires setting a few bits to zero. Indeed, I noticed that other fonts that were licensed for unlimited distribution also disallowed embedding.... So, I put this program on the web in hopes that it would help other font developers as well."

Agfa Monotype nevertheless threatened the student author with DMCA liability for distributing the program. According to Agfa, the fact that embed can be used to allow distribution of protected fonts makes it contraband under Section 1201, notwithstanding the fact that the tool has many legitimate uses in the hands of hobbyist font developers. 38
5. A threat to innovation and competition
The DMCA has frequently been used to deter legitimate innovation and competition, rather than to stop piracy.

For example, the DMCA has been used to block aftermarket competition in laser printer toner cartridges, garage door openers, and computer maintenance services. Apple Computer invoked the DMCA to chill Real Networks' efforts to sell music downloads to iPod owners. Videogame hobbyists have been sued for trying to improve or extend the capabilities of their favorite game titles. Sony has threatened hobbyists for creating software that enables Sony's Aibo robot dog to dance, and has sued to block software that allows gamers to play their PlayStation games on PCs.

In each of these cases, it was legitimate competitors and innovators who suffered, not pirates. 39

DMCA Used to Lock Cell Phones to Carriers
American cellular phone subscribers have long suffered with phones that are artificially "locked" to a particular carrier's network. This creates a variety of burdens for consumers, including high roaming rates when traveling (by preventing the use of prepaid SIM chips from local carriers) and barriers to switching carriers. In addition, these restrictions make locked phones harder to recycle and reuse. "Locking" phones seems particularly unjustifiable in light of the "minimum term" and "early termination fee" clauses that guarantee carriers will recoup the costs of the phones they are so fond of "giving away" to lure subscribers.

Responding to consumer demand, phone "unlocking" services have become widespread. Unfortunately, carriers have responded by threatening legal action (and in at least one case, actually suing) under the DMCA. 40

Apple Threatens Real over Harmony
In July 2004, RealNetworks announced its "Harmony" technology, which was designed to allow music sold by Real's digital download store to play on Apple iPods. Until Harmony, the only DRM-restricted music format playable on the iPod was Apple's own "Fairplay" format. Although the iPod plays a variety of DRM-free formats, Real wanted to ensure interoperability without having to give up DRM restrictions, and thus developed Harmony to "re-wrap" its songs using the Fairplay format.

Within days, Apple responded by accusing Real of adopting the "tactics and ethics of a hacker" and threatening legal action under the DMCA. Over the following months, the two competitors engaged in a game of technological cat-and-mouse, with Apple disabling Harmony in updates of its iTunes software and Real promising to revise its technology to re-enable compatibility. In the end, however, Apple's threats of legal action led Real to give up its efforts. 41

Tecmo Sues to Block Game Enhancements
Enthusiastic fans of the videogames Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive 3, and Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball managed to modify their games to create new "skins" to change the appearance of characters who appear in the game (including making some characters appear nude). The modifications were add-on enhancements for the games themselves-only those who already had the games could make use of the skins. These hobbyist tinkerers traded their modding tips and swapped skins on a website called ninjahacker.net.

Tecmo Inc., which distributes the games, was not amused and brought DMCA claims against the website operators and tinkerers who frequented it. The suit was ultimately dismissed after the website was taken down and settlements negotiated with the site's operators. 42

Nikon's Encrypted RAW Format Blocks Adobe
In April 2005, the creator of Adobe's Photoshop revealed that camera-maker Nikon had begun encrypting certain portions of the RAW image files generated by its professional-grade digital cameras. As a result, these files would not be compatible with Photoshop or other similar software unless the developers first took licenses from Nikon. In other words, by encrypting the image files on its cameras, Nikon was obtaining market leverage in the image editing software market.

Adobe cited the prospect of a DMCA claim as one reason why it was unwilling to reverse engineer the format to facilitate interoperability. Nikon and Adobe ultimately negotiated an agreement, but that option may not be practical for many smaller software developers. 43

HP's Region-Coded, Expiring Printer Cartridges
Hewlett-Packard, one of the world's leading printer manufacturers, has embedded software in its printers and accompanying toner cartridges to enforce "region coding" restrictions that prevent cartridges purchased in one region from operating with printers purchased in another. This "feature" presumably is intended to support regional market segmentation and price discrimination.

The software embedded in HP printer cartridges also apparently causes them to "expire" after a set amount of time, forcing consumers to purchase new ink, even if the cartridge has not run dry. This "feature" of HP ink cartridges has lead to at least one consumer class action against the company.

HP has not yet invoked the DMCA to protect these anti-consumer tactics, but both HP's lawyers and its competitors are doubtless well aware of ways in which the DMCA can be used to buttress these tactics. 44

StorageTek Attempts to Block Independent Service Vendors
StorageTek sells data storage hardware to large enterprise clients. It also sells maintenance services for its products. Custom Hardware is an independent business that repairs StorageTek hardware. In an effort to eliminate this competitor in the maintenance services market, StorageTek sued under the DMCA, arguing that Custom Hardware had circumvented certain passwords designed to block independent service providers from using maintenance software included in the StorageTek hardware systems. In other words, StorageTek was using the DMCA to ensure that its customers had only one place to turn for repair services.

A district court granted a preliminary injunction against Custom Hardware. More than a year later, a court of appeals vacated the injunction, holding that where there is no nexus with copyright infringement, there can be no DMCA claim. Although this was a victory for competition, it illustrates the ways in which the DMCA continues to be used to impede competition, rather than prevent piracy. 45

Lexmark Sues Over Toner Cartridges
Lexmark, the second-largest laser printer maker in the U.S., has long tried to eliminate the secondary market in refilled laser toner cartridges. In January 2003, Lexmark employed the DMCA as a new weapon in its arsenal.

Lexmark had added authentication routines between its printers and cartridges explicitly to hinder aftermarket toner vendors. Static Control Components (SCC) reverse-engineered these measures and sold "Smartek" chips that enabled refilled cartridges to work in Lexmark printers. Lexmark then used the DMCA to obtain an injunction banning SCC from selling its chips to cartridge remanufacturers.

SCC ultimately succeeded in getting the injunction overturned on appeal, but only after 19 months of expensive litigation while its product was held off the market. The litigation sent a chilling message to those in the secondary market for Lexmark cartridges.46

Chamberlain Sues Universal Garage Door Opener Manufacturer Garage door opener manufacturer Chamberlain Group invoked the DMCA against competitor Skylink Technologies after several major U.S. retailers dropped Chamberlain's remote openers in favor of the less expensive Skylink universal "clickers." Chamberlain claimed that Skylink had violated the DMCA because its clicker bypassed an "authentication regime" between the Chamberlain remote opener and the mounted garage door receiver unit. On Chamberlain's logic, consumers would be locked into a sole source not only for replacement garage door clickers, but virtually any remote control device.

Skylink ultimately defeated Chamberlain both at the district court and court of appeals, but only after many months of expensive litigation. In the words of the court of appeals, Chamberlain use of the DMCA was nothing less than an "attempt to leverage its sales into aftermarket monopolies." 47

Sony Sues Connectix and Bleem
Sony has used DMCA to sue competitors who created emulation software that permits gamers to play PlayStation console games on PCs. In 1999, Sony sued Connectix, the maker of the Virtual Game Station, a PlayStation emulator for Macintosh computers. Sony also sued Bleem, the leading vendor of PlayStation emulator software for Windows PCs.

In both cases, Sony claimed that competitors had violated the DMCA by engaging in unlawful circumvention, even though the development of interoperable software has been recognized by the courts as a fair use under copyright law. Because courts have suggested that the DMCA trumps fair use, however, the DMCA has become a new legal weapon with which to threaten those who rely on reverse engineering to create competing products.

Neither Connectix nor Bleem were able to bear the high costs of litigation against Sony and pulled their products off the market. No similar emulation products have been introduced, effectively forcing gamers to use Sony console hardware if they want to play the PlayStation games they have purchased. 48

Sony Threatens Aibo Hobbyist
Sony has also invoked the DMCA against a hobbyist who developed custom "dance moves" for his Aibo robotic "pet" dog. Developing these new routines for the Sony Aibo required reverse engineering the encryption surrounding the software that manipulates the robot. The hobbyist revealed neither the decrypted Sony software nor the code he used to defeat the encryption, but he freely distributed his new custom programs. Sony claimed that the act of circumventing the encryption surrounding the software in the Aibo violated the DMCA and demanded that the hobbyist remove his programs from his website.

Responding to public outcry, Sony ultimately permitted the hobbyist to repost some of his programs (on the understanding that Sony retained the right to commercially exploit the hobbyist's work). The incident illustrated Sony's willingness to invoke the DMCA in situations with no relationship to "piracy." 49

Sony Attacks PlayStation "Mod Chips"
Sony has sued a number of manufacturers and distributors of "mod chips" for alleged circumvention under the DMCA. In doing so, Sony has been able to enforce a system of "region coding" that raises significant anticompetitive issues.

"Mod chips" are after-market accessories that modify Sony PlayStation game consoles to permit games legitimately purchased in one part of the world to be played on a games console from another geographical region. Sony complains that mod chips can also be used to play pirated copies of games. As noted above, it is hard to see why an independent vendor of a product with legitimate uses should have to solve Sony's piracy problems before entering the market.

Sony sued Gamemasters, distributor of the Game Enhancer peripheral device, which allowed owners of a U.S. PlayStation console to play games purchased in Japan and other countries. Although there was no infringement of Sony's copyright, the court granted an injunction under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, effectively leaving gamers at the mercy of Sony's region coding system.

Interestingly, courts in Australia, recognizing the anticompetitive and anticonsumer potential of Sony's region coding system, came to a different conclusion under that country's analog to the DMCA. In Stevens v Kabushiki Kaisha Sony Computer Entertainment, the High Court of Australia held in 2005 that the regional access coding on Sony PlayStation computer games as implemented by the PlayStation console did not qualify for legal protection, as it did not prevent or inhibit copyright infringement. Sony, like all vendors, is free to attempt to segregate geographic markets. If it does so, however, it should have to bear its own costs for the effort, rather than relying on the DMCA, which Congress plainly did not enact to trump the usual legal regimes governing parallel importation. 50

Blizzard Sues bnetd.org
Vivendi-Universal's Blizzard Entertainment video game division brought a DMCA lawsuit against a group of volunteer game enthusiasts who created software that allowed owners of Blizzard games to play their games over the Internet. The software, called "bnetd," allowed gamers to set up their own alternative to Blizzard's own Battle.net service.

Blizzard has a policy of locking in its customers who want to play their games over the Internet-it's the Battle.net servers or nothing. Although access to Blizzard's Battle.net servers is free, the hobbyists decided to create bnetd to overcome difficulties that they had experienced in attempting to use Battle.net. The bnetd software was freely distributed, open source, and noncommercial.

Blizzard filed suit in St. Louis to bar distribution of bnetd, alleging that the software was a "circumvention device" prohibited by the DMCA. According to Blizzard, the bnetd software could be used to permit networked play of pirated Blizzard games. The developers never used the software for that purpose, nor was that the purpose for which the software was designed.

It is hard to see why a competitor should have to solve Blizzard's piracy problem before it can offer innovative products for legitimate owners of Blizzard games. Nevertheless, Blizzard prevailed on its DMCA claim, and the bnetd developers ceased distributing the software. 51

Apple Harasses Inventive Retailer
When Other World Computing (OWC), a small retailer specializing in Apple Macintosh computers, developed a software patch that allowed all Mac owners to use Apple's iDVD software, they thought they were doing Macintosh fans a favor. For their trouble, they got a DMCA threat from Apple.

Apple's iDVD authoring software was designed to work on newer Macs that shipped with internal DVD recorders manufactured by Apple. OWC discovered that a minor software modification would allow iDVD to work with external DVD recorders, giving owners of older Macs an upgrade path. Apple claimed that this constituted a violation of the DMCA and requested that OWC stop this practice immediately. OWC obliged.

Rather than prevent copyright infringement, the DMCA empowered Apple to force consumers to buy new Mac computers instead of simply upgrading their older machines with an external DVD recorder. 52
6. DMCA Shoulders Aside Computer Intrusion Statutes

The DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions have also threatened to displace "computer intrusion" and "anti-hacking" laws, something that Congress plainly never intended.

State and federal statutes already protect computer network owners from unauthorized intrusions. These include the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Wiretap Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), and a variety of state computer intrusion statutes. These statutes, however, generally require that a plaintiff prove that the intrusion caused some harm. The DMCA, in contrast, contains no financial damage threshold, tempting some to use it in place of the statutes that were designed to address computer intrusion.

Fortunately, the courts appear to be taking steps to reign in this particular misuse of the DMCA, ruling that the use of authentic usernames and passwords to access computers cannot constitute circumvention, even if done without the authorization of the computer owner. 53 Until more judicial precedents are on the books, however, the improper use of the DMCA as an all-purpose computer intrusion prohibition will continue to muddy the waters for lawyers and professionals.

Disgruntled Company Sues Former Contractor For Unauthorized Network Access
In April 2003, an automated stock trading company sued a former contract programmer under the DMCA, claiming that his access to the company's computer system over a password-protected virtual private network (VPN) connection was an act of circumvention.

Pearl Investments had employed the programmer to create a software module for its software system. In order to complete the work remotely, the programmer used a VPN to connect to the company's computers. Although the contractor created a very successful software module for the company, the relationship turned frosty after the company ran into financial difficulties and terminated the contractor's contract.

The company sued the contractor when it discovered the contractor's VPN connection to the its system, claiming electronic trespass, as well as violations of computer intrusion statutes, the CFAA, and the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. Pearl claimed that it had taken away the authorization it had previously given to the contractor to access its system through the password-protected VPN and that the VPN connection was therefore unauthorized. The Court rejected the company's electronic trespass and CFAA claims due to lack of evidence of any actual damage done. Even though the second server was not being used by the programmer at the time, and its hard drive had been accidentally wiped, the court agreed with Pearl that the existence of the VPN was a prohibited circumvention of a technological protection measure that controlled access to a system which contained copyrighted software. 54
7. Conclusion

Years of experience with the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the DMCA demonstrate that the statute reaches too far, chilling a wide variety of legitimate activities in ways Congress did not intend. As an increasing number of copyright works are wrapped in technological protection measures, it is likely that the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions will be applied in further unforeseen contexts, hindering the legitimate activities of innovators, researchers, the press, and the public at large.

EFF would like to thank the following who helped to create and update this publication:
The Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, Deirdre Mulligan, Nicky Ozer, and Nicolai Nielsen.

http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/?f=uninte...sequences.html

Winternals Gunning For Best Buy/Geek Squads Pirates

The Survey:

Thank you for your interest in this matter. We really appreciate any information you are willing to provide. You don't have to enter your contact information if you don't want to, but we encourage you to let us contact you about your former employment with Best Buy or the Geek Squad. Thanks again for your help!

Are you a former employee of Best Buy or the Geek Squad?

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No
If you are currently employed by Best Buy or the Geek Squad you cannot take this survey. Are you currently employed by Best Buy or the Geek Squad?

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1. In what city and state was the Best Buy store or Geek Squad precinct that you worked in located?

2. Approximately when did you work at Best Buy or Geek Squad?

(month)

(year /yy )
to
(month)

(year / yy)

3. While you worked at Best Buy or with Geek Squad, did you witness the use of unlicensed software?

Yes
No
4. While you worked at Best Buy or with Geek Squad, did you witness the unlicensed use of ERD Commander or any other Winternals' software?

Yes
No
5. Did someone at Best Buy or with Geek Squad provide you with an unlicensed copy of ERD Commander or other Winternals' software?

Yes
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6. Did someone at Best Buy or with Geek Squad provide you with training on the use of ERD Commander or other Winternals' software?

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7. Are you willing to speak with someone at Winternals about your former employment with Best Buy or the Geek Squad?

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8. Please provide us with any specific information that you think might be helpful.

http://www.winternals.com/survey/

BitTorrent Battles Over Bandwidth
Spencer Kelly

Nowadays, many of us have a lot of media stored on our computers such as software, music, videos.

In the last few years users have started to share that content with each other across the net, whether legal or not.

This is something that has plagued the music industry for several years. And now, mainly thanks to a system called BitTorrent, the movie industry could face the same struggle.

But BitTorrent could also be the solution.

Hollywood is definitely interested in distributing its movies over the net. King Kong is the first major film in the UK to be released as a download at the same time as on DVD.

Users on the web will visit a download site and pull the data onto their computers. Many users can be served at once but, if demand is huge, users will effectively have to queue up and wait their turn.

But there is another way to get hold of content and it has caused a nightmare for the music industry of late, with users sharing content amongst themselves, their peers.

Using a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program and a decent internet connection, a user can make all his files available to anyone else who is using the same program.

If you wanted to get hold of a particular song, your file-sharing program would hunt for that file on other people's hard drives. When it finds it, it downloads a copy to your own computer.

The more users who download the file, the more places there are for other users to get it. This reduces the likelihood of bottlenecks, and is a very efficient way of distributing files across the net.

Of course, it is illegal to share copyrighted material like that. But this has not stopped people doing it.

Larger files

More recent developments include being able to download different parts of the same file from different users.

But video files are much larger than music files and have slower upload times.

This is where BitTorrent comes in. It is an incredibly efficient way of distributing large files, like video, across the net, even when there is a high demand, and even when only one person has the complete file.

The key is that a user's computer does not need to wait until it has downloaded the entire file.

As soon as it has downloaded a chunk, it starts uploading it to any other users who do not yet have that chunk.

Similarly, your computer finds other users who have chunks that you are missing, and downloads many at once.

The group of machines sharing a file is called a swarm, for obvious reasons. And the torrent of data flowing between them is called a torrent. The more people in the swarm, the faster the file spreads.

Using BitTorrent is not particularly difficult. There are many different BitTorrent programs freely available for download.

These manage the uploading and downloading for you, maximising your internet connection, which can end up shifting gigabytes in a session.

Once finished downloading, it is considered good manners to stay online, allowing the program to continue sharing the file with other users.

Broadband 'hogs'

BitTorrent's efficient use of broadband connections has hugely increased the amount of traffic going across the net, because it runs all users' net connections flat out to deliver huge files.

Recent estimates say that around a third of all internet traffic is based around BitTorrent.

Some internet service providers think this is unacceptable. Recently BT began clamping down on so-called "broadband hogs", by starting to enforce a 40GB monthly limit.

Some ISPs go even further, breaking down customers' net usage into different types of activity, and discriminating against bandwidth-hungry file-sharers.

So-called traffic-shaping is part of an ongoing battle between ISPs and BitTorrent programmers.

As network providers look for smarter ways to identify torrent traffic, and reduce its impact on their network, more and more help sites are springing up showing users how to encrypt their data to avoid it being tracked and controlled.

Bulldog is one ISP which does not feel the need to traffic shape its data flow. The company's Gavin Young says this is because there are different types of ISPs.

He told Click: "Some ISPs are what we call infrastructure-based, and that means they build their own networks.

"But other ISPs, maybe just for example a brand, are paying money for the fibre, connectivity in that network, and maybe they can't even afford to buy a whole fibre and they're just leasing per megabit units of bandwidth. You're going to be more inclined to try to shape your traffic to keep your cost base down."

Jonathan Arber, a technology expert from Ovum, who specialises in file-sharing, believes ISPs are right to be worried about the amount of traffic that something like BitTorrent creates.

He said: "Certainly, you could see P2P as one of the killer applications for broadband. What that means is that, if users find that their broadband service is actually limiting the application that they most want to use, they'll simply go somewhere else."

New approach

According to Bulldog's Gavin Young, a recent online survey which asked people how ISPs should react to P2P traffic found most respondents wanted to slow it down. In other words to traffic-shape.

He added: "Basically this is a kind of a robotic application to a lot of people.

"They don't necessarily interact that much, they might kick off a download, and go to work or whatever, and so it's not like you're surfing the web, or expecting a response or an instant message.

"If something takes three hours instead of two hours, fine. I suspect as people are doing more with video, as opposed to music and songs, that kind of kick-it-off-and-walk-away approach is going to be more common."

But instead of traffic-shaping and limiting what could be the killer application for broadband, could not an ISPs just buy more bandwidth? After all, it is their business to provide this data flow.

Mr Young explained: "Unfortunately, if you buy more bandwidth, somebody has to cover the cost of that.

"What we're seeing is ISPs introducing tiered services, so for example, given the opportunity for light users to maybe have a metered package, who pay per unit at a time or per amount of data you download. So you can control your own costs as a user, and unlimited packages will inevitably cost a bit more.

There are many programs that use the BitTorrent protocol, but it is still not a completely user-friendly experience.

Ovum's Jonathan Arber said: "The various applications, while they are getting more user-friendly, still require a degree of technical knowledge in order to really get BitTorrent working the way it should.

"If you want to kind of get the kind of download speeds that people talk about, you're going to have to know a little bit about configuring the application, a little bit about configuring your own network as well."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ne/4905660.stm

Musical Breast Implants
Ananova

Computer chips that store music could soon be built into a woman's breast implants.

One boob could hold an MP3 player and the other the person's whole music collection.

BT futurology, who have developed the idea, say it could be available within 15 years.

BT Laboratories' analyst Ian Pearson said flexible plastic electronics would sit inside the breast. A signal would be relayed to headphones, while the device would be controlled by Bluetooth using a panel on the wrist.

According to The Sun he said: "It is now very hard for me to thing of breast implants as just decorative. If a woman has something implanted permanently, it might as well do something useful."

The sensors around the body linked through the electrical impulses in the chips may also be able to warn wearers about heart murmurs, blood pressure increases, diabetes and breast cancer.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm...=news.quirkies

In Silicon Valley, a Man Without a Patent
John Markoff

GEOFF GOODFELLOW is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came up with an idea that resulted in a $612.5 million payday. But he will never see a penny of it. He remains little known even in Silicon Valley and, perhaps most surprising, he doesn't really mind.
And herein lies one of the stranger tales about innovation and money in the world of technology.

A high-school dropout, Mr. Goodfellow had his light-bulb moment in 1982, when he came up with the idea of sending electronic mail messages wirelessly to a portable device — like a BlackBerry. Only back then, there was no BlackBerry; his vision centered on pagers. He eventually did get financial backing to start a wireless e-mail service in the early 1990's, but it failed.

So, in 1998, he moved to Prague and bought a bar. While he was there, the BlackBerry did come along. Tending bar, he believed that everyone had forgotten that he had initially come up with the idea of wireless e-mail.

Almost everyone had, that is, except for James H. Wallace Jr., a Washington lawyer for one of the companies involved in a patent dispute over Mr. Goodfellow's invention.

Mr. Wallace represented NTP, a company aggressively defending its patents for wireless e-mail. He flew to Prague two days after first speaking to Mr. Goodfellow in early 2002 to introduce himself.

Mr. Goodfellow says that NTP was concerned that his earlier work might undermine its patent claims, and the company wound up going to some lengths to ensure that it did not. "I kind of had a big grin on my face that someone had dug deep enough to find the person where it all began," Mr. Goodfellow recalled. "He basically wanted to hear my story."

On a subsequent visit a year later, as Mr. Goodfellow remembers it, Mr. Wallace introduced him to a travel companion by saying: "Geoff's the inventor of wireless e-mail. My client patented some of its implementation workings."

Mr. Wallace, in an e-mail response to a reporter's questions, disputed the quotation. But two things are certain. Mr. Goodfellow, an early participant in Silicon Valley's grass-roots computer culture, disdained the notion of protecting his ideas with patents. And Thomas J. Campana Jr., a Chicago inventor with no such qualms, patented the idea of wireless electronic mail almost a decade after Mr. Goodfellow's original work.

Mr. Campana, who died in 2004, was a founder of NTP, and his patent push yielded a bonanza for the company, which will receive $612.5 million in a settlement reached last month in its patent infringement suit against Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry.

For legal and technology experts, the tale of Mr. Goodfellow's pioneering work is evidence of the shortcomings of the nation's patent system, which was created to reward individual creativity but has increasingly become a club for giant corporations and aggressive law firms.

Several legal experts suggested that Mr. Goodfellow's work might have constituted important "prior art" — earlier public information that is relevant to a patent application — that should have been disclosed to patent examiners and the courts by both sides in the dispute.

"I think there is a potential ethics issue," said Mark A. Lemley, a Stanford professor who specializes in patent law. "The basic key is the attorneys have the obligation to disclose everything they know about his prior artwork and make him available as a fact witness."

DESPITE what might have been, Mr. Goodfellow says he has no regrets. His scorn for patents is widely shared by many innovators in Silicon Valley, especially open-source software developers, whose technology competes with products from companies like Microsoft. But it remains a deeply divisive viewpoint.

"You don't patent the obvious," he said during a recent interview. "The way you compete is to build something that is faster, better, cheaper. You don't lock your ideas up in a patent and rest on your laurels."

The initial encounter with Mr. Wallace in Prague was only the beginning of Mr. Goodfellow's indirect role in the BlackBerry case. NTP, he says, seemed intent on neutralizing him as a complication to its patent case.

NTP hired Mr. Goodfellow as a consultant; invoices show he was paid $4,000 a day — about $19,600 in all — for several days' work in 2002, including two trips to meet with lawyers in Washington. As part of a formal contract, he signed a nondisclosure agreement, prohibiting him from revealing any information or consulting with any other parties during the period of the lawsuit.

At one meeting in Washington, when Mr. Goodfellow described his technology at a white board in a conference room, Mr. Wallace insisted that the other lawyers not take handwritten notes for fear of leaving a paper trail, Mr. Goodfellow says. Another meeting, he says, focused on which claims in NTP's patents were least likely to be compromised by Mr. Goodfellow's prior work.

In an e-mail response to a reporter's question about NTP's contacts with Mr. Goodfellow, Mr. Wallace maintained that Mr. Goodfellow was retained because he had been mentioned in news articles from the early 1990's "regarding a product called RadioMail" — his effort to commercialize the wireless e-mail idea — but that Mr. Goodfellow "could not locate any documentation beyond these articles regarding the product."

As it happens, he had documented his wireless e-mail concept even earlier.

In the early 1970's Mr. Goodfellow, then a teenager, was hanging out at SRI International here, generally getting under foot until he was hired in 1974 as an assistant computer operator in the laboratory of the pioneering computer researcher Douglas C. Englebart.

By the early 1980's, the Arpanet, the computer network that preceded the modern Internet, was being used by thousands of academics, scientists and military officers — and by Mr. Goodfellow, who realized that it was possible to relay a mail message from the network to a newfangled alphanumeric pager that had just been introduced by a nearby company, Millicom, of Sunnyvale, Calif., which called its service Metagram.

In 1982, he published his idea on a widely read Arpanet mailing list called Telecom Digest in a note titled "Electronic Mail for People on the Move."

The service, he wrote, "allows Arpanet users to send messages to people on the MetaNet without having to run and find a terminal with a modem on it or go through the human dispatcher, i.e., so you can now do fun things like be driving down the road and have a message appear that says: [YOU HAVE NEW MAIL]."

Mr. Goodfellow went on to become a founder of the world's second commercial Internet company, Anterior Technology (later renamed RadioMail), in his apartment here in 1986. Beginning in 1990, at roughly the same time AT&T hired Mr. Campana to develop pager technology into a wireless mail gateway, Mr. Goodfellow set out to commercialize his idea, ultimately receiving $3 million from financial backers such as Motorola.

RadioMail was introduced in 1991, and the next year Mr. Goodfellow embarked on a partnership with Research in Motion, a Canadian company, and Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications giant. But like a number of Mr. Goodfellow's projects, RadioMail was ahead of its time, and he left the company in 1996. During the height of the Internet bubble, Mr. Goodfellow, a self-taught software engineer, would speak caustically about the hype pervading the era, referring to the surplus of "zero-billion-dollar industries."

He walked away from Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom without the great wealth that it had afforded so many. But if he is miffed, it is because so much of the history has been forgotten.

"I don't want to sound bitter," he said. "I'm overjoyed that what I saw more than 20 years ago is now de rigueur."

Today, Mr. Goodfellow's invention and its fate are a curious but significant footnote to the bitter patent battle between NTP, whose only assets are the Campana patents, and Research in Motion, which has come to dominate the market for wireless electronic mail handsets.

Although the NTP patents have been tentatively invalidated by the United States Patent Office, a jury upheld NTP's infringement suit in 2002, and R.I.M. chose to settle the legal fight for fear of a federal court injunction against its popular service.

And Mr. Wallace, the NTP lawyer, rejects the idea that Mr. Goodfellow's work casts any further shadow over his client's patent claims.

Mr. Wallace said by e-mail that he was not aware of Mr. Goodfellow's 1982 article — though Mr. Goodfellow says he described his 1982 work in detail to NTP lawyers — and that NTP's patent claims turn on integration with a "destination computer," not a pager.

In any case, Mr. Wallace added, "the devil is in the details.

"Suppose I write something saying that teleportation is possible by merely converting matter to energy, beaming the energy to a distant location and reconverting energy back to matter," he said. "Does this mean that my statements compromise the patents of the first person to actually make such a system work? No patent attorney would argue such a thing."

Others take a different view. "The moral of the story is that for a long time now the patent system has been misused," said Mitchell D. Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Corporation, the software publisher, and an adviser to Mr. Goodfellow in the early 1990's. "If it had been properly used, NTP would never have been issued its patents, and they never would have had a basis to pursue a lawsuit against R.I.M."

DURING the court case, R.I.M. and NTP wrangled over three earlier developments: work by some University of Hawaii researchers; a Motorola patent; and work by TekNow, a company in Phoenix. Mr. Goodfellow's company and 1982 system were not mentioned. (R.I.M. executives did not respond to telephone and e-mail requests for comment.)

Although his role went unnoticed both by the federal courts and patent examiners, Mr. Goodfellow's invention is woven into the very fabric of the Internet. The computer network assigns different addresses, known as ports, now numbering more than 65,000, to different services like electronic mail or the World Wide Web. To this day, Port 99 remains set aside for Mr. Goodfellow's original brainstorm: pushing an electronic mail message to a wireless pager.

Mr. Goodfellow sold his bar in Prague in 2004 and returned to Silicon Valley to help his brother run an Internet photography business. He is now back in the thick of innovation, serving as the chairman of a start-up Eritrean company working on voice-over-Internet-protocol technology.

In his spare time he volunteers as a disc jockey at KZSU, the Stanford student radio station. He said his show, beat.net, is his way of continuing to look for the technology edge.

"I'm really interested in the intersection of technology and entertainment," said Mr. Goodfellow, who just turned 50. "These days I'm still trying to spend my time doing new things."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/te...erland&emc=rss

Write Free Software, Pay $203,000 to Patent Holder
Jackson Lenford

Ben Jacobsen, a model railroad hobbyist, wrote a bunch of software to let you connect your computer to your model railroad and control trains with it. He chose to not only give the software away for free, but to make the source code available as well, so that the model railroading/hacker community could improve it and customize it to their liking.

And then KAM Industries, maker of commercial software that serves a similar role, tried asserting their 'patent rights' over doing just that.

When the author of the open source railroad controller asked for additional information about what claims were being infringed, KAM sent him an invoice for $203,000, claiming that the 7000 or so users of his software resulted in damages of at least $29/each.

KAM then sent a request to the author's academic sponsor (unrelated to his independent model railroad work), requesting copies of all his email and other correspondence. This was obviously a dirty tactic meant to rattle Jacobsen more than anything else.

Several more threatening letters arrived. Finally, in January of this year, Jacobsen pointed out that he didn't believe their patent would withstand a challenge in court, noting that there was plenty of prior art, including his allegedly infringing software, which was available before KAM filed their patent application. He also pointed out that they must have known this all along. In February, KAM's lawyers responded by claiming that they know of no invalidating prior art, and that they still viewed Jacobsen's work as infringing on their patent rights.

This is all still ongoing. It isn't clear that KAM will cease harassing Jacobsen, even with the knowledge that their patents are likely illegitimate.

But it is abundantly clear that patents like this hurt the efforts of those trying to make the world a better place by producing tools for others to use (for free in this case). It is equally as clear that even small companies can use their patents as bludgeons against individuals.

The continuing saga (as well as all correspondence to date) can be followed at Jacobsen's website.
http://righttocreate.blogspot.com/20...203000-to.html

Lessons from the Browser Wars

The first-mover advantage is well chronicled, but it didn't help Netscape when Microsoft launched Internet Explorer. What drives technology adoption, and do browser upstarts such as Firefox stand a chance? A Q&A with professor Pai-Ling Yin.
Sara Grant

In a famous example of how first movers can lose their advantage, second-mover Microsoft won the Web browser wars from Netscape and continues to dominate the market today. But that competition was the subject of another "war," this one among researchers who study how technology is diffused into the market.

The debate was this: Did Microsoft win because its Internet Explorer was the technologically superior product to Netscape Navigator, or was Microsoft just more successful at the distribution end by convincing most PC companies, some argue by anticompetitive tactics, to include IE on every PC shipped in the late 1990s? Researchers line up on both sides of the argument.

A recent working paper by Harvard Business School professor Pai-Ling Yin and Stanford professor Timothy F. Bresnahan offers an answer. Looking at both the pace of adoption of new versions of the browsers and the brand choice made by users, "distribution played a larger role than did technical progress in determining the market outcomes," the scholars conclude in the paper "Economic and Technical Drivers of Technology Choice: Browsers."

The implications are significant. Browsers simplified access to the online world, transforming the Internet from a communications vehicle for academics into a mass consumer phenomenon. At the same time, the growing usefulness of the Internet drove sales of personal computers off the chart—the installed base of PCs doubled to 213 million computers between 1995 and 1999. Understanding the complex interaction between the two technologies and how a second mover was able to unseat the incumbent market champion will help innovators of all stripes learn how new technology gets diffused into mass markets.

In this interview, Yin discusses the results and implications for new browser upstarts such as Firefox and Camino. Do they stand a chance against Internet Explorer? Yin says Microsoft's entrenchment in corporate IT, the maturation of the PC market, and the technical difficulty many consumers have in switching to a new browser make it hard soil for new challengers to take root.

Sara Grant: Why did you choose to study Web browsers to look at the idea of diffusion of innovation in a market?

Pai-Ling Yin: Web browsers were the turning point in mass commercializing the Internet. They were the easy-to-use user interface that permitted the average person to access information on servers around the world.

As a tool for exploring how standards are set when new technologies hit the market, the browser wars exhibit many features we like to study: competition between two viable alternatives, rapidly improving technologies, the ability of firms to use strategic levers such as market power and channels of distribution, growth in demand leading to diffusion of the new technology through the population, and uncertainty. Thus, this is one example from which we can generalize lessons regarding the outcome of diffusion of innovation into a market.

Q: In your paper, you explain that your analysis of the "classical concern" in the diffusion of new technologies is based on technological progress versus economic resources. Can you explain this?

A: The classical debate in economics has been whether the market always produces the "best" outcome. Best can be defined in different ways. In one stream of the debate, "best" has been defined as "technologically superior" (again, a term that can be defined differently). So, does the market always lead the "technologically superior" outcome, or can economic actors take actions to influence the market outcome so that a "technologically inferior" outcome arises?

We conclude that while both technological progress (measured by releases of newer and better versions of browsers: version 1, version 1.1, version 2, etc.) and strategic actions (distribution browsers with PC purchases) increase the rate of diffusion of browsers into the population, the strategic actions (distribution or restrictions on distribution in the case of Netscape) are twice as important as technical progress.

Q: Your findings show that at the height of the competition between Netscape and Microsoft during the 1990s, Microsoft's Internet Explorer became the de facto browser standard. What does this say in regards to first-mover versus second-mover advantage, and about future browser battles?

A: What is interesting are the lessons we can learn about how a fast second mover can upset the normally strong barriers to entry that a first-mover advantage in a network setting can create. In short, the big lesson learned is that a window of opportunity exists for a second mover to challenge a first mover in this setting early on when the new technology has not yet diffused through the entire population—the second mover can try to influence new users rather than get the small installed base to switch over.

The second mover has to have some sort of asymmetric advantage, such as control over the distribution of a complement (in this case, the PC), in order to slow the build-up of network effects around the first mover and ensure that the second mover's product begins to build up a critical mass. A number of smaller strategic elements converge to generate this window of opportunity, but I encourage people to read the paper as well as a chapter on this phenomenon which is forthcoming in Shane M. Greenstein & Victor Stango (Eds.), Standards and Public Policy, Cambridge University Press.

As for the future of Web browsers, the standard has been set, and it will be very hard to displace IE. Although Firefox is touted as the new challenger, its share of end-users is only estimated at 10 percent, and end-users are less of a barrier to further market share than are Webmasters.

Q: What are the chances for browsers like Firefox and Camino for the Mac to become mainstream products?

A: Firefox and Camino claim only a small market share, and those users are on the tech-savvy end of the user spectrum. In particular for Mac-centric browsers, we still live in a PC-dominated world. Until IT managers in large enterprises are willing to support these browsers, they will not hit the mainstream in any major fashion.

Why won't an IT manager support these versions? The biggest headache with these browsers is that the majority of Web sites are optimized on IE. Try going to some of the major commercial airline sites, or to the Web sites of older and smaller companies. If you use Firefox, sometimes you will find missing menus, missing pictures, links that don't work, etc. Even Netscape doesn't work with all of our Harvard Business School applications.

But its Webmasters who are the real barrier to a late-to-the-game second mover in the browser market. Because different browsers require slightly different code to be viewable, it is costly for Webmasters to write for different types of browsers. They will tend to pick the browser that is most used by the majority of end-users. Thus, the source of network effects in this market is indirect. While end-users don't know which browser other users are using, the developers of the content that make the browser so useful do care that everyone is using a similar browser.

Q: So Firefox and other new browsers, no matter that they have new features and refinements that IE lacks, remain at a competitive disadvantage?

A: Game over. Firefox and the others have to get the installed base of IE users to switch to their browser, a much harder proposition than IE faced in the '90s when all it had to do was get new users to pick IE rather than Netscape as their first browser.
Either the innovations would have to be huge improvements over what IE can currently do, or a huge problem would have to arise with current IE use to create an opening for such a late second mover to make headway and lead people to go through the hassle of switching their browser.

Even with the security issues that plague IE, Microsoft has a huge amount of cash. If any browser really became a threat, Microsoft could easily imitate their innovation, or fix the IE problem with a patch. Indeed, IE successfully caught up to Netscape's quality by throwing a lot of money and manpower into IE browser development.

Q: What are you working on next?

A: Most closely related to the browser wars is research with professor Estelle Cantillon on how a second mover tipped the derivatives exchange market in the German Bund.

These works contribute to a more general theme in my research on how firms can change industry structure. The market tipping work addresses one part of that question: How can second movers break incumbent control? Casework and early-stage research attack a second aspect of that general theme: Can technology drive changes in demand? In a world of growing information resources, what are the drivers of search? How do people search, really? What would the answers to these questions imply for industry structure and business models in the next twenty years?
http://workingknowledge.hbs.edu/item...8&t=technology

Europe, Too, Takes Harder Line in Handling Terrorism Suspects
Katrin Bennhold

As his wristwatch edges toward 3:26 p.m., the 32-year-old Algerian moves his wooden chair closer to the back door. At 3:30 sharp, his leg needs to be inside his North London house. The man, whose name, by court order, cannot be divulged, wears an electronic tag around his left ankle and is allowed to leave his home just four hours a day.

He was arrested in London four years ago on suspicion of links to the Armed Islamic Group, an Algerian terrorist organization, and spent more than three years in high-security prisons before being put under partial house arrest in October. Now the British government wants to send him back to Algeria.

But no formal charges have been brought, and, he and his lawyer said, he has not been interrogated once, or informed of evidence against him. "Since the day they arrested me, I have never been asked any questions or told what the case is," the man said. "How can you defend yourself in a situation like that?"

Four and a half years after the Sept. 11 attacks, and after deadly bombings in Madrid and London since then, the troubled debate within Western democracies over how to weigh security against basic freedoms has only grown and spread, as the legal tools for dealing with terrorism suspects multiply.

The clashing of priorities has been clear in the United States, in the domestic debates preceding the renewal of the Patriot Act, and in the international uproar over prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

But many European governments, including some that had criticized the United States for its antiterrorism measures, have been extending their own surveillance and prosecution powers. Officials, lawyers and human rights experts say that Europe, too, is experiencing a slow erosion of civil liberties as governments increasingly put the prevention of possible terrorist actions ahead of concerns to protect the rights of people suspected, but not convicted, of a crime.

Most of Britain's new counterterrorism legislation, which outlaws the vaguely worded "glorification" of terrorism, came into force on Thursday. Italy and the Netherlands have relaxed the conditions under which intelligence services may eavesdrop. French legislation recently gave investigators broader access to telephone and Internet data. German legislation being drawn up seeks to allow intelligence services easier access to bank and car registration records.

"We are fiddling with rights that only a few years ago seemed untouchable," said Álvaro Gil-Robles, human rights commissioner at the Council of Europe, an intergovernmental group that monitors human rights.

The most contentious areas concern treatment of terror suspects, he said. Several European countries are extending the length of time suspects who have not been charged may be held or restricted in their freedom.

Some nations have been seeking ways to deport suspects even if torture is practiced in the suspects' home countries. That brushes uncomfortably against major United Nations and European treaties that forbid deportations if the suspect faces a risk of torture.

"Something pretty fundamental is going on," said Gareth Peirce, a lawyer at Birnberg and Peirce in London who represents the Algerian man under surveillance in North London and nine other Middle Eastern and North African men arrested without formal charges within months of Sept. 11.

"A number of countries have been trying to avoid their treaty obligations in relation to arbitrary detention and torture," she said.

As in the United States, defenders of tighter security say that international terrorism demands new approaches and that criminal law is ill-equipped to handle the threat.

"We always think about the rights of the terrorists," said August Hanning, Germany's deputy interior minister and a former intelligence chief. "But if there is an attack that you could have prevented, you also have to be able to look into the eyes of the relatives."

One broad trend has been the extension of police custody and restriction of legal representation.

In December, France increased its period of detention without charge for terror suspects to six days from four; it retained rules that have allowed uncharged suspects to be denied access to a lawyer during the first three days.

Italy last year extended custody to 24 hours from 12 and authorized the police to interrogate detainees in the absence of their lawyers. In 2003, Spain extended the period in which suspected terrorists can be held effectively incommunicado to a maximum 13 days, according to the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

Britain has gone furthest. The latest law doubles the period during which a terror suspect can be held in custody without charge to 28 days. It was just 48 hours in 2001, and Prime Minister Tony Blair fought for an extension to three months.

The new law followed one filed soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that allowed foreign terror suspects to be held indefinitely without charge. The House of Lords declared that measure unlawful in late 2004.

The government, scrambling to find a new way to deal with 10 men held under the provision at Belmarsh Prison in London, introduced a form of partial house arrest known as a ontrol order, which severely restricted their freedom of movement. Since last summer, Britain has also been seeking ways to deport eight of the men back to home countries that are known to practice torture.

One of them is the unidentified Algerian, who is allowed to leave his house only between 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. and may not venture more than a mile away.

He is not allowed to use cellphones or the Internet, and any visitor to his house has to be cleared by the Home Office.

Last week a British High Court judge, Jeremy Sullivan, sharply condemned a control order on another terrorism suspect, identified as M.B., as "conspicuously unfair," saying that suspects' rights are being determined by "executive decision untrammeled by any prospect of effective judicial supervision."

The government said after the ruling that it would appeal, and the Home Office issued a statement, defending its counterterrorism legislation as striking "the right balance between safeguarding society and safeguarding the rights of the individual."

In the Netherlands, a bill likely to pass in coming weeks would introduce something like the British control orders for terrorism suspects the authorities have been "unable to convict."

For a maximum of two years, such suspects can be restricted in their freedom of movement, be obliged to report to the police regularly and prohibited from contacting certain individuals.

In some countries, restrictive tools predate the Sept. 11 attacks, but their use has increased. In France, where a combination of Basque, Corsican and Islamic terrorism prompted the government to lay the groundwork for its antiterrorist legal arsenal as early as 1986, suspects can be held for four years on vague charges.

As of November 2005, some 80 suspects were being held under this provision, more than in any other European country, according to Alain Marsaud, who was France's chief counterterrorism coordinator in the 1980's and is now a lawmaker.

"We're not going to wait until the bomb goes off," said Mr. Marsaud, who wrote a recent parliamentary report on counterterrorism efforts. "That's why we give more power to the judicial system: to arrest people before they act."

The number of Muslim men arrested for "association with wrongdoers involved in a terrorist enterprise" has soared since Sept. 11. According to the French Interior Ministry, it increased from 58 people in 2002, to 77 in 2003, 101 in 2004 and 170 last year.
Lawyers say the British, Dutch and French practices are milder forms of the detention of "enemy combatants" in the United States.

"There is a clear parallel with what is going on in the United States," said Jacques Debray, a Lyon-based lawyer specializing in immigration and penal law, who has represented several terrorism suspects. "They detain people on administrative grounds, while we create a legal framework first. But the logic is the same: preventive detention."

The United Nations Convention Against Torture and the European Convention on Human Rights, ratified by all European Union member countries and the United States, ban torture and other cruel or degrading treatment.

They forbid the deportation of people to countries where they risk torture, and the admission in court of evidence possibly obtained under torture.

But several European countries have sought diplomatic assurances from countries with poorly regarded human rights records that if they deport suspects there, the suspects would not be ill-treated.

Sweden allowed two Egyptian terror suspects to be repatriated on a C.I.A. plane in December 2001 after Cairo gave such assurances. The United Nations Committee Against Torture subsequently said that Sweden had violated its obligations under the United Nations Convention.

Germany, the Netherlands and Austria have also sought to return suspects to Turkey and Egypt by obtaining such pledges.

In Britain, the government has received diplomatic assurances from Libya, Jordan and Lebanon, and was working on similar accords with Egypt and Algeria. Human rights activists say that such assurances are not reliable.

"Why should a country that fails to respect major international conventions against torture respect a mere bilateral agreement?" asked Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch in New York. "It's a legal fig leaf."

The British government is also trying to make deportations possible without such assurances, seeking to intervene in a case before the European Court of Human Rights that involves the Netherlands. In that case, an Algerian terror suspect, Mohammed Ramzy, who was acquitted on charges of links to a terrorist group, has appealed to the court to prevent his deportation by the Netherlands to Algeria on the grounds that he might face torture.

Britain is asking the court to set a precedent by ruling that the risk of torture faced by the suspect has to be weighed against the security risk faced by the host country.

A spokeswoman for the British Home Office called the European Convention on Human Rights a "cornerstone" of the European Union, but added, "There is a valid question about how rights and freedoms are balanced and interpreted in a phase of the current heightened security threat that Europe faces."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/13/news/limits.php

A Sinister Web Entraps Victims of Cyberstalkers
Tom Zeller Jr.

Claire E. Miller, a 44-year-old publishing executive in Manhattan, recently stripped her nameplate from the tenant directory at the entrance to her Kips Bay apartment building, where she has lived for more than 11 years. She has also asked the landlord to disconnect the buzzer and is in the process of changing her phone number.

Drastic measures, all, for an otherwise cheerful and outgoing person. But Ms. Miller has been unnerved by a sudden and, since last September, steady onslaught of unsolicited and lusty phone calls, e-mail messages and even late-night visits from strange men — typically seeking delivery on dark promises made to them online by someone, somewhere, using her name.

"I wouldn't even try to guess at the motivation behind this," Ms. Miller said.

She is being harassed — cyberstalked, by modern definition. The term has by now found its way into dozens of state legislatures, police reports and talk-show lineups, joining other unsavory byproducts of the Internet age.

State legislatures took notice around 1999 and began passing laws that make cyberstalking a crime. Three months ago, President Bush signed federal anti-cyberstalking legislation. But cases like Ms. Miller's make it clear that the problem is not easily legislated away and show how devastating it can be to individuals caught in its web.

One profile posted at the "adult personals" site iwantu.com included Ms. Miller's full name, address and phone number, along with a solicitation for eager suitors to call or drop by her home. "My name is Claire E. Miller," the ad began. It concluded: "I can make you very happy and satisfied. In my den of love pad."

It is the online equivalent of scrawling "for a good time, call Jane Doe" on a bathroom wall, but the reach of the Internet has made such pranks — if they are only that — far more sinister. And the problem is only likely to grow, fueled by the availability of personal data online and the huge growth in social networking and dating sites, which are attracting investment from big companies.

"Cyberstalking is the hidden horror of the Internet," said Parry Aftab, an attorney and executive director of WiredSafety.org, a network of 9,000 volunteers who patrol the Web and assist victims of cyberstalking, child pornography and other online ills. "Nobody talks about it. They think they have to live with it."

Ms. Miller suspects that her perpetrator is a stranger who may have found her personal information while snooping around in the AOL e-mail account of an old high school friend. But late at night, in the topsy-turvy churn of an anxious brain, all kinds of people — old lovers, acquaintances — become possible culprits.

"That's when the self-doubt and fear comes in," Ms. Miller said.

There are no statistics on how often this particular breed of online impersonation takes place, but Jayne A. Hitchcock, the director of Working to Halt Online Abuse, an organization that assists victims of Internet harassment, says it is common enough.

"I think I've seen everything," Ms. Hitchcock said. Participants in online fantasy football leagues, angered by some nuance of the competition, silently turn on and anonymously harass one another, and in eBay auctions, either the seller or the buyer turns stalker, she said. They channel that "Internet road rage," Ms. Hitchcock said, into a variety of anonymous vendettas.

After receiving informal requests for information about cyberstalking from the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies, Ms. Hitchcock's group began tracking demographic details in 2000. In February, the group — which she says handles an average of 50 new cases each week — released a five-year analysis of data on the victims and, to the extent possible, the stalkers. The data is sketchy; victims volunteered to fill out a questionnaire, and harasser data is, in most cases, provided by the harassed. But there are some insights. For example, increasing numbers of men appear to be applying for help, and overt threats of offline harm occurred in about a quarter of the cases last year.

In about half the cases, victim and perpetrator appear to be strangers. For the rest, it can be deeply, disturbingly personal.

Earlier this month, a Suffolk County police officer, Michael Valentine, was indicted on 197 counts of stalking, unauthorized use of a computer and other charges after hacking into the Yahoo e-mail account of a woman he had briefly dated and posing as her in online communications.

The Suffolk County District Attorney's office also charges that Mr. Valentine, of Lake Grove, accessed the woman's personal profile on the dating site Match.com, sending electronic "winks" and other communications to 70 different men on the site. At least two showed up at the woman's home for dates.

That case, and Ms. Miller's, echo that of Gary S. Dellapenta, of Los Angeles, a former security guard who spent the summer of 1998 trolling chat rooms and personals sites posing as his ex-girlfriend. He posted rape fantasies under her name and, providing her home address, begged strangers to deliver on them.

Six men arrived at the former girlfriend's door before Mr. Dellapenta was eventually tracked down. He was sentenced in 1999 to six years in prison under California's then-new cyberstalking law.

J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and the author of several books on criminal personalities, said that the universe of cyberstalkers runs the gamut, from "jokesters and pranksters to people who have clear criminal intent." He called this particular brand of harassment — in which the perpetrator deploys third parties, wittingly or not, to haunt the victim — "stalking by proxy."

"With any new technology that comes along, you have the shadow of criminality that follows," Mr. Meloy said, although he added that the Internet, with all its distance and anonymity, provided a unique vehicle for the unleashing of hidden furies.

"It's a much more veiled, shielded, disinhibited way of communicating," Mr. Meloy said, "and much more raw in the expression of aggression."

Mari J. Frank, an attorney and privacy consultant who specializes in cases of identity theft, called Ms. Miller's situation "identity theft for revenge."

"I speak about it all the time," Ms. Frank said, adding that the rise of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, where young people often naïvely divulge too much information to a world of potential stalkers, has made the situation worse. "Even teens are becoming the victims of cyber ID theft and cyberstalking," she said.

About 45 states now have laws similar to California's. And the new federal law — tucked into the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act — updated telephone harassment law to include computer communications.

Some advocates of civil liberty have complained about what they see as overly broad language of the federal update, which prohibits not only anonymous communications intended to threaten, abuse and harass, but also those intended to "annoy" — a term that might characterize a wide range of anonymous Internet banter that falls far short of cyberstalking.

Others, though, have argued that such banter would be protected by the First Amendment, and only cyberstalkers have anything to fear.

That is, of course, if they can be found.

Ms. Miller filed an initial complaint with the New York City police department in October, but said she was not contacted after that. Using a number provided by a friend, she called a detective with the department's units on computer crimes last week, and is now working with investigators there. (A deputy chief, Michael Collins, a police spokesman, said a clerical error in the processing of Ms. Miller's initial complaint apparently delayed her case.)

Ms. Miller has also found two dating sites where her name has been used — imatchup.com and iwantu.com — and had the profiles either removed or hidden.

According to Ms. Hitchcock, the director of Working to Halt Online Abuse, federal cyberstalking legislation can provide needed leverage in pursuing what are often complicated cases. Perpetrator and victim might reside in different states, for instance, and the evidence might be in the hands of Internet companies all over the country, or the world. The law also gives the F.B.I. and other federal law enforcement agencies greater purview over cyberstalking.

But getting that far, Ms. Hitchcock said, is a long road.

Using a Web site usually involves leaving tracks in the form of an I.P. address, which can be traced back to an Internet service provider and perhaps the computer of a stalker. Under most circumstances, a subpoena or a search warrant is required to obtain that information from an online service, so filing a police report is crucial. After that, contacting an organization like WiredSafety.org or Working to Halt Online Abuse, at haltabuse.org, can help. They work with both victims and law enforcement to help move cases forward.

Ms. Miller has taken all these steps — and worked diligently on her own.

Late last month Ms. Miller asked the support staff of iwantu.com, which has offices in Seattle and Canada, Costa Rica and Britain, for data that would reveal the Internet service provider of the person who set up the account there.

On April 3, the company put its position succinctly in an e-mail message to Ms. Miller: "Please note that unfortunately, we cannot supply I.P. addresses. Sorry."

That is precisely what they should have done, said Mark Brooks, an online personals industry analyst and the editor of Online Personals Watch, an industry newsletter. "They can't possibly give that out to another user," said Mr. Brooks, who is a former executive of dating and social networking sites like Cupid.com and Friendster. "It might be a stalker calling to get that information."

Executives for iwantu.com did not return phone calls or e-mail messages seeking comment, and the contact number provided on the imatchup.com Web site for the media relations representative and "Romance Director," Dan Levine, connected to the customer service department instead. A representative reached last weekend said he was not sure why that number was listed, and suggested sending an e-mail message or a letter.

These are delicate issues for an industry that is in the throes of a debate about client safety and security. Several states are considering legislation that would require online personals services to disclose whether they conduct background checks on their members.

According to Mr. Brooks, most members of the industry are sensitive to issues of online safety, but argue that background checks — which must rely on third-party commercial data brokers with spotty information — are expensive and by no means foolproof.

And yet one service, True.com, has quickly become one of the most popular personals sites by conducting background checks on anyone seeking to make a connection. Its staff promises to prosecute those who misrepresent themselves on the site — a concept that Ms. Miller might endorse. She said she planned to pursue her tormenter until he is found.

"I do feel that the Internet is a wonderful tool," she said. "I just want to make sure it's kept safe for everyone."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/17/te...rtner=homepage

China's Bid For 'Respect'

Biz watching Hu visit for anti-piracy commitment
Brooks Boliek

Chinese President Hu Jintao is on his first visit to the U.S. as that nation's leader, and when he leaves the White House Thursday, entertainment industry executives hope he takes a commitment to fight copyright piracy back to his homeland.

Among the litany of complaints Washington has with Beijing is the seemingly endless addiction the rising Asian economic, political and military powerhouse has for bootleg movies, music and other intellectual property. Estimated U.S. losses to Chinese copyright piracy range from $2.5 billion-$3.8 billion a year, according to the U.S. Trade Representative.

According to the USTR's April review, the country's lackadaisical enforcement actions allowed infringement levels of 90% or more "for virtually every form of intellectual property" in China during 2004.

On Tuesday, Hu toured Microsoft Corp.'s suburban Redmond, Wash., campus and dined at company chairman Bill Gates' home. Hu said he admired what Gates had achieved. He also sought to reassure Gates that China is serious about protecting intellectual property rights, a key concern for the company as it battles widespread piracy of its Windows operating system there.

"Because you, Mr. Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I'm a friend of Microsoft," Hu said through a translator, according to the Associated Press. "Also, I am dealing with the operating system produced by Microsoft every day," he added, to laughter.

Gates responded: "Thank you, it's a fantastic relationship," and then quipped, "And if you ever need advice on how to use Windows, I'll be glad to help."

Hu, Gates, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and an entourage of Chinese dignitaries saw some business technology demonstrations and toured Microsoft's Home of the Future, which features experimental technology.

That Hu's American visit began with a tour of Microsoft and dinner with Gates could be viewed as a sign of a newfound seriousness the Chinese government has pertaining to intellectual property theft. His visit comes after years of battling widespread software piracy in the potentially lucrative China market. Chinese government officials say they are serious about cracking down on sales of illegal copies of Windows, and some computer makers are pledging to ship more computers with legitimate Windows software installed.

One of those companies, Lenovo Group Ltd., met Monday with Microsoft officials to reaffirm Lenovo's five-month-old commitment to ship computers with genuine operating systems. Microsoft held a similar meeting last week with Chinese computer manufacturer Founder Technology Group Corp., also among the companies that have pledged to promote legal Windows use.

There also have been recent shows of force by the Chinese regarding piracy of entertainment products; authorities there have closed a half-dozen illegal optical disc plants and said they have eight more under investigation. Last month, the government also announced the creation of a new court that will prosecute pirates, amid increasing international pressure to protect the intellectual property of industries making everything from movies to medicine (HR 3/13).

The government also claims that Chinese courts last year sentenced 741 violators of intellectual property rights, adding that there were 16,583 civil cases against pirates in 2005, a 21% jump from the year before. In late 2004, China lowered the threshold for prosecution of piracy cases; individuals who sell more than 5,000 pirated discs can be imprisoned for three to seven years.

In advance of Hu's visit, Zhang Pimin, deputy director general of China's powerful State Administration of Radio, Film and TV, touted his country's attempts to curb piracy.

"Personally, I hate piracy," Zhang said in an interview through an interpreter. "It hurts the domestic industry as well as the international industry. Piracy leads people to illegal activity and illegal people."

He enumerated the anti-piracy measures the Chinese have taken, saying it will take time for them to take effect. China only recently embraced a market economy with its attendant property rights, Zhang explained.

"We are in a kind of education," he said. "Manufacturing is illegal, and now buying is illegal, too."

Like the high-profile war against illegal downloads in the U.S., it is difficult to get people to understand the problems caused by rampant copyright theft, he said. The average Chinese has only eight years of schooling and per-capita gross domestic product is about one-twenty-fifth that in the U.S., according to the Chinese government.

While industry officials said they realize that changing the Chinese mind-set is difficult, they point out that piracy is not a new problem for Beijing; it's one that they promised to fix before joining the World Trade Organization.

"I'm willing to give a little slack on that point," MPAA chairman and CEO Dan Glickman said. "As long as they have a clear direction."

The Chinese have talked a good anti-piracy game at least since 1996, when the U.S. under then-President Clinton threatened to slap tariffs on Chinese imports unless they took steps to rein in piracy and other unfair practices. Since then the country has been admitted to the WTO and is required to meet fair trade obligations, which include copyright protections, or face lawsuits that could result in sanctions. The studios, record companies and other intellectual property holders have asked the Bush administration to take WTO action, but so far it has not taken that drastic step.

"One of the things that strikes me is that the talking points they use are almost a mirror to those I use when I lobby up on the Hill," RIAA chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol said. "From the standpoint of rhetoric and understanding the issue, they have it down. The question is: Will they back the rhetoric with action?"

On a recent visit to China, Glickman found reason to question the Chinese commitment because pirated DVDs were an easy score.

"Street piracy was ubiquitous," he said. "They give a lot of lip service, backed by limited action. Some of the local government officials are serious about it, but it is haphazard at most."

Hu's visit is as much about polishing his country's image at a time when the copyright piracy helps exacerbate a U.S. trade deficit that is soaring above $200 billion. China is playing economic footsie with countries Washington considers tyrannical, and its undervalued currency hampers U.S. competition.

"Part of President Hu's challenge is also to speak to the U.S. public," Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, a leading administration voice on China, said in a speech this week. "China does not want to be seen as a threat; it's seeking respect."

U.S. and Chinese officials must "demonstrate to the United States public that the economic relationship with China offers a fair, two-way street -- that there are mutual opportunities and benefits."

Entertainment industry executives look at China's billion-plus population and instantly see how it could benefit their business -- only the government would take steps to protect their products.

To that end, execs hope that Hu's visit will work as another pressure point for the entertainment industry.

"It's on the president's agenda list, we know that," Glickman said. "And when their film people talk to me, they know it's a priority."

Bainwol said the Chinese don't have to change their entire world to make a positive impact. A few concrete steps within the next few weeks or months would leave an indelible mark. Giving copyright holders the exemplars -- fingerprints left on CDs and DVDs by the machines that make them -- left in the plants they closed would be considered a show of good faith.

"Hu's visit is a moment in time," Bainwol said. "This is a journey, but there are critical moments coming up in the next few months that will make a difference."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr..._id=1002383350

Gov't Ensures Computers Will Use Genuine Software
China Daily

All the computers produced and sold in China must install authentic operating system software, spokesman for the National Copyright Administration Wang Ziqiang said yesterday.

Governments are especially required to purchase computers with genuine operating system software.

"As the operating system is necessary to a new computer, the requirement at this time is specifically focussed on this type of software," Wang said.

No detailed list was given regarding the type of operating system required for installation.

According to a notice issued by three relevant central government departments, computer manufacturers and retailers that install pirate software will be punished.

The government document also noted that operating system software producers should provide a favourable price to computer companies.

Wang predicted that the price of computers will not go up after the new policy is adopted.

Computer manufacturers and operating system software producers are required to report their sales to the Ministry of Information Industry every year in February.

Those who refuse to do so, or those who provide fake figures, will be exposed to the public.

As for government, various levels of departments were required by another notice to establish a special fund on purchasing further software besides the operating system.

"This is a measure to ensure that all software used on government computers is authentic," Wang said.

Those computers with trademarks normally install authentic software, while most computers that are assembled by individuals do not, according to the spokesman.
http://english.people.com.cn/200604/...11_257472.html

First P2P Infringement Case Heads To Court

Beijing Secondary People's Court has begun to hear a lawsuit filed by Shanghai Busheng Music and Culture Company against Beijing Feixingwang Music Software Development Company, who is accused of software copyright infringement.

This is the first court case in Beijing concerning P2P music downloading technology.

Shanghai Busheng accuses Beijing Feixingwang of illegally providing 59 songs whose copyright belongs to Shanghai Busheng for users to download, share and search.

Busheng says that Feixingwang has made as much as RMB2.944 billion from these illegal downloads.

Beijing Feixingwang argues that the P2P software it provides was developed by a Taiwan company, not itself, so it requests the court to reject the accusers' appeal.

No judgment has been released and another hearing is expected soon.
http://www.chinatechnews.com/index.p...e=news&id=3828

Pretentious prattle

The Man Behind Scrambled Hackz
Eliot Van Buskirk

I saw a video the other day that really stood out from the rest of the links making the rounds.

It depicts a man demonstrating software that appears to parse what he's saying fast enough to reassemble the same words by pulling and reordering bits from a recorded Michael Jackson interview. The result: Jackson appears to speak the same sentence right back to him.

The man goes on to explain how the software behind this process works, and his video closes with a live performance of the software in which a performer appears to employ the beat-box method to control the playback of audio and video on a large video screen behind him, in front of what I can only imagine must be a dazzled crowd.

If you haven't seen it yet, you can watch the video here.

It might look like a fancy parlor trick, but if the Scrambled Hackz (or "sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!") software does what it appears to do in the video, its ramifications extend far beyond. Sven König does a fine job of explaining how the software works in the above video, but here's the general idea:

1) Scrambled Hackz analyzes the audio portion of a video file to determine the tempo of the incoming audio, and then slices it up into discrete chunks of a quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note and so on (a process also used by audio editing programs such as Ableton Live and Sony's Acid software).

2) Using a large number of vectors, those slices are classified into a database according to their sonic characteristics.

3) When you send new audio information to the program (using, say, your voice and a microphone), it follows approximately the same process, becoming classified in the database. The software then outputs the pre-analyzed sample that is most similar to that newly cached sample.

4) The result, as you can see in the video, is that König is able to reconfigure a Michael Jackson interview or any number of '80s music videos on the fly, so that they produce a sound similar to whatever he inputs. On screen, the software plays the frames of video that accompany the selected audio.

I must admit to having been enthralled by this video, because Scrambled Hackz appears to have countless possibilities. One could use the system as a virtual guitar pedal onstage, or as an audio interface to a massive library of longer samples. Producers looking for something that "sounds something like this" would be able to find exactly that in seconds. Or, live performers could use it as it's already been used (see video), as an audiovisual instrument in its own right.

König says Scrambled Hackz was designed specifically to infringe copyright. But it has substantial non-infringing uses, so it passes the main litmus test for whether a piece of software is legal. Users could record audio or video of themselves and use the program to pull together samples of various past performances into a real-time performance. For instance, I could take every bass line I've ever recorded and create new ones out of them merely by humming a few bars. An established artist could perform a single song in a live setting that encompassed his or her entire recorded audio and video catalog. People might load their entire media collections into Scrambled Hackz and play around with them in their homes, in art galleries or on a stage, using only their vocal cords or any instrument.

The list goes on and on. Scrambled Hackz' potential uses, both infringing and non-infringing, are mind-boggling. I can't wait to see what people build on top of it, either.

Wired News was not able to test the program, although it should soon be compiled into something that anyone can use. On the strength of the demonstration video alone, Scrambled Hackz is seriously exciting. An interview with its creator, König, was in order.

Wired News: How did the idea to create Scrambled Hackz initially come to you?

Sven König: My background is more conceptual media art than it is music, and my current main interest is intellectual property, the history of this concept and how it will shape future societies in which most valuable goods are immaterial: ideas/knowledge and information.

I believed (and still do) that IP is fundamentally wrong, and if that's the case it must be possible to show that, not just by writing a text but by an artistic project. So the original idea of (Scrambled Hackz) was just to somehow "hack copyright." I'm a music lover so it was quite clear that I wanted to work with music.

In the beginning I just wanted to show that any of my own music could be completely reconstructed out of very small samples of copyrighted music, to ask the question of who now owns that music? Do I own it or do 30 other musicians/labels own my song?

WN: How long did you develop it after that?

SK: From the first idea above (that was in early 2004) it took just one month to write a small command-line program that would do what I wanted. But its functionality was very limited and it took 60 minutes to synthesize a song of five minutes' length. That was actually already enough to illustrate the original concept but I've realized that if I could get it working in real time it could become a "discursive software." Since then I'm working on the real-time version.

WN: What sort of response have you received from people who have seen the video?

SK: Since I got Boing Boinged I've received thousands of mails from people telling me what a great idea this is. Most of them also want the software badly.

WN: Have you received any commercial or open-source-collaboration interest?

SK: A few commercial inquiries and a lot of people offering help for the open-source development.

WN: When might Scrambled Hackz be released to the public, and under which license and operating systems?

SK: I'm currently very busy with lots of other things, but because there's such a great interest I hope to find the time to launch (Scrambled Hackz) on SourceForge in mid-May. The initial release will be just the core so the nerds can already start to play with it. All code will be licensed under the GNU GPL and it will be platform-independent.

WN: I was astounded by the speed with which the program is able to reassemble the Michael Jackson interview once the sound sample database has been created. Can users of the eventual release expect that sort of performance on a normal machine? Will any special hardware be required?

SK: Michael works in real time on my 2-year-old laptop, a 1.7-(GHz) Centrino with 1.5 (GB of) RAM. No special hardware is needed; any recent computer will do it.

WN: Could the sample lengths be made longer to enable Scrambled Hackz to act as the search mechanism for full measures of music? I'm picturing using it to find the right four-measure sample in a large database, for instance.

SK: Scrambled Hackz is not made for that, but with some tweaking and improvements it should be possible.

WN: Will users be able to analyze their own video and audio libraries using Scrambled Hackz?

SK: Yes, of course.

WN: Are you taking the installation on the road, or are there permanent places where people can try it for themselves?

SK: I'm currently mainly focusing on the improvement of my performance. The installation is shown only at some media art festivals. But I'm getting many inquiries from artists who want to use the software for installations, so maybe it won't take very long and we will see many (Scrambled Hackz) installations everywhere. My installation is very basic anyway. I'm really looking forward to what other people come up with.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,...?tw=wn_index_2

Apple Needs to Make OS X Open-Source
John C. Dvorak

A cloud is rising over Mac OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project. That would make the battle between OS X and Linux the most interesting one on the computer scene. With all attention turned in that direction, there would be nothing Microsoft could do to stem a reversal of its fortunes.

Let's start at the beginning. There's been a lot of fuss over Apple's rollout of the unsupported Boot Camp product, which lets Mac users run Microsoft Windows easily on an Intel-based Macintosh. I got into various levels of trouble when I suggested that Apple was going to gravitate towards Windows since it would be easy to do and there was some evidence that the company might want to do it.

Some people saw this prediction as somewhat contradictory, because I've also been advocating that Mac OS X be ported to all PCs and become an alternative OS for the rest of us on our standard systems. Getting OS X onto PCs might be even more doable today, since researchers are reporting that as many as half of the business-owned PCs in operation now may not be capable of running Microsoft Vista. It seems like an ideal time to roll OS X over to the PC.

So what's actually happening? Well, here's what I think is going on, and also what I think should be going on. Let's start with what's going on.

The Boot Camp product is pure test marketing. It's so obviously test marketing that it's hard to believe that people are foolish enough to get worked up about it. You watch a test-marketing scheme to see the results. You use the results to make predictions. We do not have enough results yet to determine what's going to happen next. The test-marketing scheme is likely to be carefully orchestrated and segmented as follows:

Step 1: Testing for level of interest. Will this initiative of running Windows on a Mac increase or reduce computer hardware sales in any noticeable way among the hacker nerds who bother to go through the process? Will this translate to a broader acceptance?

Step 2: Determining functionality without risk. Does Windows works well on Mac hardware, or not? The idea here is to put it into the wild and see what happens in a support-free environment where Apple has no responsibility to help make it work.

Step 3: Blowback analysis. Apple needs to analyze the reaction to Windows on a Mac. This includes seeing whether there is massive rejection of the idea—protests, picketing, egg-throwing, and flaming. In other words, can the community at large live with the idea of Windows running on a Mac? That cannot be known or assumed without this test.

So this testing scheme essentially breaks down to practicality, functionality, and political marketability. So far, everything seems to be going well except for the blowback, which seems to be mixed but mostly positive. Much of the positive reaction, though, seems to stem from the mistaken supposition that having Windows on a Mac will make OS X look better by comparison, so people will flock to OS X. This is a dubious and dangerous conclusion for Mac heads to draw.

So what do I think will happen now? And specifically, what is Apple going to do with OS X?

If the Windows test keeps going the way it's going, the results may indicate that Mac users are more likely to shift to Windows than we used to think. But what will happen to Mac OS X? I suspect that the testing of Windows on a Mac might be duplicated in reverse, with a similar test of the Mac OS X running on a conventional PC. Here again, we'd need to look at the test-marketing results. In this scenario, the idea would again be to determine—by testing—whether or not getting OS X onto PCs would help or hurt Apple as a company. The same three factors would be assessed: practicality (is anyone interested?), functionality (does it work at all?), and political marketability. In the case of political marketability, one additional variable enters the picture: Microsoft perceiving this as a threat to its business.

Since no company, including massive IBM, has been able to compete with or unseat Microsoft from the desktop, Microsoft's stance alone may prevent any universal acceptance of OS X on the desktop from ever happening. In fact, I assume that as this is being written, Microsoft has coders in its skunk works tearing into OS X looking for deep flaws that it can exploit and publicize. Don't think otherwise. It only makes sense that they'd do this.

Thus a cloud is rising over OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project. That would make OS X versus Linux become the most interesting battle within the computer scene. With all the attention turned in that direction, there would be nothing Microsoft could do to stem a reversal of its fortunes.

But I repeat myself.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1950226,00.asp

U.S. Advised To Promote Open Standards, Source, Innovation

A business- and university-led public policy group has issued a downloadable 72-page report examining open standards, open source software, and "open innovation." The report concludes that openness should be promoted as a matter of public policy, in order to foster innovation and economic growth in the U.S. and world economies.

The report was released by the Committee for Economic Development (CED), a non-profit, non-partisan public policy research organization comprised of about 200 senior corporate executives and university leaders. The report resulted from a project within CED's Digital Connections Council (DCC), which is chaired by Paul M. Horn, SVP of research at IBM. The project was directed by Elliot Maxwell, described as "a key advisor on digital economy issues in the Clinton Administration."

The CED report concludes that intellectual property (IP) law and business practices designed for the trade of physical goods threaten economic development and innovation in digital information product markets such as software. It recommends several specific steps aimed at helping public policy makers promote openness, innovation, and economic growth:

• Open Standards

• Governments should "encourage the development and use of open standards, through processes as open to participation and contribution as possible"

• The results of government-supported research should be readily available for inclusion in open standards

• Governments should create incentives for early disclosure of intellectual property rights affecting open standards, because historically, companies have waited, in order to maximize damage claims

• Open Source Software

• Governments should not mandate any particular license, such as requiring open source software only; however...

• No citizen should be required to use the hardware or software of any particular vendor

• International procurements should also supprt inter-operability requirements

• Open Innovation (such as 'peer production' systems like WikiPedia and eBay user ratings)

• To foster open innovation, federally funded, non-classified research should be widely disseminated, following the example of the NIH (National Institute of Health)

• "Any legislation or regulation regarding intellectual property rights [should be] weighed with a presumption against the granting of new rights ... because of the benefits to society of further innovation through greater access to technology."

• The NSF (National Science Foundation) should fund research into "alternative compensation methods, similar to those created to facilitate the growth of radio, to reward creators of digital information products"

The full 72-page CED report is available for download, here (PDF download). A brief summary, on which this story was largely based, is also available, [urlhttp://www.ced.org/projects/ecom.shtml#open]here[/url].
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2542131185.html

ODF Alliance Continues to Grow and Build Out

As you may recall, a new organization called the ODF Alliance was formed on March 3 of this year to support the uptake of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) by governments. It's formation was in large part intended to make the adoption of ODF less difficult for future states (and less dangerous for state CIOs) than it had been for Massachusetts last year. Yesterday, the ODF Alliance issued a press release announcing that it has more than tripled its membership to 138, and has also appointed a Managing Director.

As I reported one month ago today when I decided to look in on the Alliance a few weeks after its launch, this highly targeted initiative got off to a very rapid start. It appears that the pace of recruitment has slowed (membership leaped from 38 to 113 in the first two and a half weeks, while an additional 25 members have joined in the past month), but I expect that the rate of recruitment may pick up again with the addtion of the new Managing Director, Marino Marcich.

The membership now comprises quite an intriguing list of members, including Corel Software, EDS, EMC, IBM, Novell, Opera Software, Optaros, Inc., Oracle, Software AG, and Sun Microsystems (among many others), on the vendor side, and BellCom OpenSource A/S, Free Standards Group, GNOME, Mandriva, OpenOffice.org, OSDL, and Red Hat (again, among many others) on the open source side. There are many other for profit and not for profit members of all types as well. Or, as sponsor organization Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) President Ken Wasch phrases it in the press release, membership, "ranges from the City of Bloomington, Indiana and the National Archives of Australia to the Indian Institute of Technology and the Bristol City Council (UK)." (For a more detailed analysis of the membership at formation, see my earlier blog entry on March 3.)

The hiring of a Managing Director indicates a degree of commitment and longevity for the initiative, as it is difficult to attract good talent for transient efforts. Marcich's credentials for the job are listed in the press release as follows:

Marcich brings more than a decade in working internationally on technology, standards and open market issues. Prior to joining the Alliance, Marcich was vice president of Dutko Global Advisors, an international strategy and management firm. A former senior official at the U.S. Department of State, Marcich has worked in Brussels advising companies on global strategies relating to regulation, standardization and trade issues.

The European connections are particularly apt, as active and public interest in open standards/open source is much higher in European governmental agencies than in the U.S. counterparts, where support for and adoption of open source software is ongoing but less visable. The membership of the Alliance also reflects a very strong showing of European based companies and organizations of all types.

The press release does not include a great deal of additional information about the activities being conducted by the Alliance (nor has the ODF Alliance Website been updated with anything interesting in the last month), but it does close with this intriguing note:

The ODF Alliance is now actively supporting adoption of the Open Document Format as a worldwide standard of the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The six month approval ballot began November 1, 2005, and ends May 1, 2006. The ODF Alliance and its members have contacted various national voting entities recommending approval and are optimistic of a positive outcome.

In other words, it sounds like the Alliance is engaged in global lobbying for approval of ODF by ISO. From what I understand from other sources, a favorable vote, perhaps involving the participation of an unusually high percentage of eligible members, is not in doubt.

As previously, I'll check in on the Alliance from time to time and report on further developments as they occur.

For further blog entries on ODF, click here.
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standa...60419061204507

GoDaddy.com Donates $10K to Open Source Development Project

GoDaddy.com, the No. 1 registrar of domain names worldwide, recently donated $10,000 to the OpenSSH free secure server management tools project.

According to the company, OpenSSH has become a staple of all free Unix and Linux operating systems in the world. With a long history of security and quality, OpenSSH is the core component used by millions to log in and manage servers. SSH, or Secure Shell, is a service used to log into computers over a network and then execute commands on the remote machine and move files from one machine to another. The service encrypts connections, thus protecting the security of the host machines and the connection itself.

OpenSSH is provided and managed by the OpenBSD project. Like most open source projects, OpenBSD is composed solely of volunteers throughout the world who contribute their time and expertise to creating critical software free of charge.

Support from companies like Go Daddy help ensure the continued success of the vibrant open source engineering community and the introduction of new technologies for the benefit of all. Donations help the project fund acquisition of test hardware and maintenance of needed equipment. The assistance also allows OpenSSH to organize conferences for volunteers to meet and share ideas.

Bob Parsons, GoDaddy.com Founder and CEO commented, ''OpenSSH and the work of the OpenBSD project volunteers are integral to online security. Go Daddy is pleased to be able to help them continue their great contributions to the Internet community. At Go Daddy, we use OpenSSH extensively to manage our large and rapidly expanding technical infrastructure. Our engineering staff relies on it on a constant basis. Go Daddy is very grateful and we want to show our appreciation to this extremely vital organization.''

Theo de Raadt, Founder and Leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects added, ''We are very thankful Go Daddy has the vision to financially support the mission of OpenSSH. This will allow us to keep improving the quality and security of the product which system administrators around the world rely on to do their jobs.''

GoDaddy.com, Inc. is the ''on-ramp'' to the Internet for individuals and businesses worldwide, providing a one-stop shop for acquiring, creating and safeguarding a unique online identity. GoDaddy.com offers a comprehensive line of Internet products and services, including domain name registration, web hosting solutions, personalized email packages, SSL certificates, web development tools, eCommerce utilities and more. GoDaddy.com is the world's No. 1 domain name registrar, both in terms of new registrations and domains under management.

The Go Daddy Group includes three ICANN-accredited domain name registrars: flagship registrar GoDaddy.com, Inc., membership-based registrar Blue Razor Domains, Inc., and reseller registrar Wild West Domains, Inc.

The Go Daddy Group also offers private domain name registration services through Domains By Proxy, Inc., as well as SSL Certificates through its SSL Certificate Authority, Starfield Technologies, Inc. The Go Daddy Group registers or renews a domain name every 3 seconds and more than 13 million domain names in its portfolio. The Go Daddy Group is also the world's largest web host in terms of hostnames.
http://www.thehostingnews.com/article2217.html

Code for Unbreakable Quantum Encryption

Raw code for 'unbreakable' quantum encryption has been generated at record speed over optical fiber at NIST. The work is a step toward using conventional high-speed networks such as broadband Internet and local-area networks to transmit ultra-secure video for applications such as surveillance.

The NIST quantum key distribution (QKD) system uses single photons, the smallest particles of light, in different orientations to produce a continuous binary code, or "key," for encrypting information. The rules of quantum mechanics ensure that anyone intercepting the key is detected, thus providing highly secure key exchange.

The laboratory system produced this "raw" key at a rate of more than 4 million bits per second over 1km of optical fiber, twice the speed of NIST's previous record, reported just last month. The system also worked successfully, although more slowly, over 4 km of fiber.

After raw key is generated and processed, the secret key is used to encrypt and decrypt video signals transmitted over the Internet between two computers in the same laboratory. The high speed of the system enables use of the most secure cipher known for ensuring the privacy of a communications channel, in which one secret key bit, known only to the communicating parties, is used only once to encrypt one video bit. Compressed video has been encrypted, transmitted and decrypted at a rate of 30 frames per second, sufficient for smooth streaming images, in Web-quality resolution, 320 by 240 pixels per frame.

Applications for high-speed QKD might include distribution of sensitive remote video, such as satellite imagery, or commercially valuable material such as intellectual property, or confidential healthcare and financial data. In addition, high-volume secure communications are needed for military operations to service large numbers of users simultaneously and provide multimedia capabilities as well as database access.
http://www.it-observer.com/news/6127...um_encryption/

Mafia Boss's Encrypted Messages Deciphered
Rossella Lorenzi

The recently arrested "boss of bosses" of the Sicilian Mafia, Bernardo Provenzano, wrote notes using an encryption scheme similar to the one used by Julius Caesar more than 2,000 years ago, according to a biography of Italy's most wanted man.

The biography, written by journalists Salvo Palazzolo and Ernesto Oliva, is published in Italian on www.bernardoprovenzano.net, which is the most exhaustive Web site on Provenzano.

Accused of numerous murders, including the 1992 killings of two judges for which he was sentenced to life in jail, the 73-year-old boss was arrested last week in a farmhouse about just a few miles from his Sicilian hometown Corleone, a place forever associated with the Godfather saga.

Also known as "Binnu u tratturi" (Binnu the tractor) because of his reputation for mowing down people in his youth, Provenzano had been on the run for more than 40 years, many of them spent writing cryptograms on little pieces of paper, known in Sicilian dialect as pizzini.

The Italian police found about 350 pizzini in Provenzano's hideaway.

A few dozen of these notes contained requests to his family, such as having lasagne on Easter. All the others, featuring orders to his lieutenants, displayed numeric sequences that concealed the names of people.

Caesar Cipher
At least one coded note, published in the Web site's biography, has a strong resemblance to what's known as Caesar cipher, an encryption scheme used by Julius Caesar to protect important military messages.

The letter, written in January 2001 by Angelo Provenzano to his father, was found with other documents when one of Provenzano's men, Nicola La Barbera, was arrested

"...I met 512151522 191212154 and we agreed that we will see each other after the holidays...," said the letter, which included several other cryptograms.

"The Binnu code is nothing new: each number corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. "A" is 4, "B" is 5, "C" is 6 and so on until the letter Z , which corresponds to number 24," wrote Palazzolo and Oliva.

While the classic Caesar cipher moves everything three letters later (A becomes D, B becomes E, etc.), the "Provenzano code" assigns a number to each letter by simply increasing by 3 the value given to the 21 letters of the Italian alphabet listed in order.

So, A becomes 4 (1+3), B becomes 5 (2+3), C becomes 6 (3+3), etc

"In the Provenzano code the key is the +3 shift," mathematics expert Alessandro Martignago told Discovery News.

As the code is cracked, the "512151522 191212154" person becomes "Binnu Riina." Most likely, it refers to Bernardo Riina, arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of aiding Provenzano while he was on the run.

According to Martignago, the Provenzano code might have been made more secure by changing the + 3 key with other shift characters ( +5, +7, +8, etc.) from time to time.

"Looks like kindergarten cryptography to me. It will keep your kid sister out, but it won't keep the police out. But what do you expect from someone who is computer illiterate?" security guru Bruce Schneier, author of several books on cryptography, told Discovery News.

Indeed, no high-tech ran the Mafia network under Provenzano's rule. Top Mafia businesses were conducted on an obsolete Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter. Pizzini were delivered by a chain of messengers.

The fact that the boss code was rather straightforward may be explained by Provenzano's lack of education. It stopped when he dropped out of school at about eight.

Anna Petrozzi is an editor at Antimafia 2000, a magazine that Provenzano read, as copies found in his hideaway attest.

"The police are not new to these coded messages. When they arrested in 2002 Antonio Giuffré, one of his right-hand men then turned informer, and about 30 pizzini came to light," she told Discovery News.

Those pizzini helped investigators enormously. Once the cryptograms were decoded, several members of Provenzano's close circle were identified, a step which ultimately led to his arrest.

"Now we will have to work on the newly discovered pizzini, which contain several coded names. We have known the system used to code them since 2002," assistant state prosecutor Giuseppe Pignatone told state television RAI 2 on Thursday.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs...tml?source=rss

'Scary Movie' Sends Weinsteins to the Top
AP

Bob and Harvey Weinstein returned to the box-office lead as ''Scary Movie 4'' debuted with $41 million, the first No. 1 opening for the new company founded by the former Miramax bosses.

It was the best Easter weekend debut ever, beating the $30.1 million opening of ''Panic Room'' in 2002, according to studio estimates Sunday.

With the success of ''Scary Movie 4,'' Bob Weinstein said he hopes to have a fifth film in the horror-spoof franchise in theaters over Easter weekend next year.

''I say the Weinsteins should be getting `Scary Movie' 5 through 10 ready right away,'' said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.

Weinstein said director David Zucker and writer Jim Abrahams, collaborators on ''Airplane!'' and the ''Naked Gun'' movies, would reteam for the next sequel.

''Scary Movie 4'' was released under the Weinstein Co.'s Dimension label, which the brothers brought with them after their departure from Disney-owned Miramax last year. Disney continues to share half the proceeds from the ''Scary Movie'' flicks and any future installments in pre-existing Dimension franchises, such as the ''Scream'' or ''Spy Kids'' series.

The Weinsteins will have sole control over any new franchises Dimension undertakes.

''We've got four or five new franchises in development, so it's not just like I'm going to go ad infinitum on the old stuff,'' Bob Weinstein said. ''We've got other ideas that I'm really excited about starting.''

The animated hit ''Ice Age: The Meltdown,'' which had been No. 1 the previous two weekends, slipped to second place with $20 million, raising its total to $147.2 million.

The weekend's other new wide release, Disney's animated tale ''The Wild,'' debuted at No. 4 with $9.6 million.

Fox Searchlight's acclaimed satire ''Thank You for Smoking,'' a hit in limited release, expanded nationwide and took in $4.45 million to come in at No. 8.

Hollywood's overall revenues rose for the fourth-straight weekend, with the top-12 movies grossing $110 million. That was up 23 percent from 2005's Easter weekend, which came three weeks earlier last year. It was up about 45 percent compared to the mid-April weekend last year.

The industry has pulled ahead slightly from its slow pace last year, when movie attendance fell 8 percent. The ''Ice Age'' and ''Scary Movie'' sequels have provided a solid lead-in to what analysts consider a strong early-summer lineup that launches next month with ''Mission: Impossible III,'' ''The Da Vinci Code,'' the animated tale ''Over the Hedge'' and ''Poseidon,'' a remake of ''The Poseidon Adventure.''

''Scary Movie 4'' continued the success of 2003's ''Scary Movie 3,'' which had rejuvenated the fading franchise by softening the tone from the R ratings of the first two installments to PG-13. The first ''Scary Movie'' opened at No. 1 in 2000 with a $42 million take.

The latest version features longtime ''Scary Movie'' player Anna Faris and co-stars Leslie Nielsen, a Zucker and Abrahams favorite who starred in ''Airplane!'' and ''The Naked Gun'' comedies.

Bob Weinstein said 40 to 50 percent of the audience was in the 12- to 17-year-old range. The movie also drew well among older audiences lured in by the Zucker-Abrahams brand of humor, Weinstein said.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. ''Scary Movie 4,'' $41 million.

2. ''Ice Age: The Meltdown,'' $20 million.

3. ''The Benchwarmers,'' $10 million.

4. ''The Wild,'' $9.6 million.

5. ''Take the Lead,'' $6.7 million.

6. ''Inside Man,'' $6.3 million.

7. ''Lucky Number Slevin,'' $4.6 million.

8. ''Thank You for Smoking,'' $4.45 million.

9. ''Failure to Launch,'' $2.6 million.

10. ''V for Vendetta,'' $2.2 million.

------

Universal Pictures and Focus Features are owned by NBC Universal, a joint venture of General Electric Co. and Vivendi Universal; DreamWorks is a unit of DreamWorks SKG Inc.; Sony Pictures, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount and Paramount Classics are divisions of Viacom Inc.; Disney's parent is The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is a division of The Walt Disney Co.; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight Pictures are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros., New Line and Warner Independent are units of Time Warner Inc.; Lionsgate is owned by Lionsgate Entertainment Corp.; IFC Films is owned by Rainbow Media Holdings, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Box-Office.html

AT&T Aims For Internet Television
Laurie Sullivan

In an effort to secure a position in Internet-based television, AT&T Inc. reported an agreement Tuesday with Akimbo Systems to offer Internet-based video-on-demand to its Homezone TV service subscribers. The service begins this summer.

The AT&T Homezone service, being trialed within several states, integrates AT&T Yahoo! high-speed Internet and AT&T DISH Network programming. The service provides video on demand, digital video, and Internet content, such as photos and music through a set-top box.

Akimbo's digital content library offers more than 10,000 television programs and movies-on-demand. The company said it adds daily more than 150 titles in 85 categories, from music and sports to movies and educational programs.

The service, which combines Internet and Dish Network programming, intends to complement AT&T's Project Lightspeed, a multi-billion dollar fiber upgrade that will let AT&T sell Internet protocol television (IPTV) service to homes, as the offering continues to roll out, an AT&T spokeswoman said.

An online guide with video search functions provides full program descriptions and previews. Remote access with an Internet-connected computer lets subscribers browse and download programs, so new shows are available for viewing when they get home.
http://www.techweb.com/wire/networking/185303601

Panasonic Unveils 103-Inch TV Screen
AP

Home TV screens just keep getting bigger. And there's no end in sight. Panasonic pitched a tent outside the New York Stock Exchange yesterday to show off the biggest high-definition plasma screen yet.

At 103 inches, it's an inch bigger than versions being produced by Samsung and LG.

Panasonic vice president Andrew Nelkin says the new screen weighs 400 pounds. If you buy one, and have a wall big enough to fit it, you'll want professional installation.

He also says he wouldn't be surprised to see someone come up with an even bigger screen before long.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT

JackSpratts · 20-04-06, 09:39 AM

Our Very First High-Def DVD Review

The Last Samurai (HD-DVD)
Peter M. Bracke

Well, here I sit. After years of hype, hope, anticipation, numerous delays and endless public bickering between the two warring high-def DVD camps, with the first next-gen DVD player and a quartet of discs in front of me, fired and ready for review. It's a big moment in the life of any unabashed hi-tech geek -- the launch of a new format is equivalent to Christmas, New Year's, Easter and Fourth of July all rolled into one. And since this is high-definition we're talking about, multiply that euphoria by ten -- because the ability to own affordable, pre-recorded HD content has been the holy grail of home theater enthusiasts for the past two decades. So the fact that HD-DVD is finally here and a genuine, tangible reality, well... it is hard to believe this day has finally come.

Which makes the pressure of what to watch first almost unbearable. If I'm being honest, I can't say that if I had my druthers, the first HD-DVD discs consumers would have to chose from would be 'Million Dollar Baby,' 'Serenity' and 'Phantom of the Opera' -- though they are all good movies to be sure. But I definitely would never have picked a Tom Cruise movie to kick off a new HD format, let alone one as big-budget, bloated and self-important as 'The Last Samurai' (geesh, even 'Top Gun' would have been better -- at least that has flying jets and Kenny Loggins on the soundtrack). But here I am, picking 'Samurai' as my first-ever high-def DVD review title, if only because it allows me to pay the biggest compliment I can think of to the new HD-DVD format -- despite the fact I would normally hate this movie, I loved every last single second of it. Because it looked and sounded so damn good on the format that it actually made me excited again to watch a Tom Cruise movie. Now, that is some kind of technological miracle.

But before we get on to the good stuff, a quick recap of 'Last Samurai' for those of you who actually want to know what the movie is about. It is the late 19th century in Japan, and American war captain Nathan Algren (Cruise) must lead a group of Japanese soldiers to defeat a rebellion of the countries that remain Samurai. But before you can say "Dances with Wolves," Algren is captured and imprisoned by the Samurai, and soon finds himself becoming spiritually transformed by the forces he once swore to destroy. But soon the Japanese forces will begin again their search for Algren and the Samurai -- ready to destroy the warrior culture and anyone who stands in the way of its eradication.

Truth be told, 'Last Samurai' is an entertaining movie. It's filled with tons of loud sword fights, panoramic vistas, Very Important Dialogue and lots of slo-mo shots of Tom flashing his sullen, toothy grin. And it certainly is a handsomely-mounted epic, with top-notch production and costume design, strong performances by its largely Japanese cast (particularly Ken Watanabe, who earned an Oscar nom for his role as Algren's mentor Katsumoto) and polished direction by Ed Zwick. But aside from feeling a bit too close to 'Shogun' meets 'Dances with Wolves' for my comfort, I just never once believed Cruise as Algren. But perhaps I'm biased -- years of Cruise's Scientology rants and couch-jumping antics have for me long overshadowed his skills as an actor. But in terms of slick Hollywood bombast with a dash of cultural clash thrown in, 'Last Samurai' is not a bad night of popcorn entertainment. And it makes a perfect disc to show off your new next-gen HD gear. So, forget the plot -- how does this sucker look and sound?

The Video: Sizing Up the Picture

Unfortunately, assessing the quality of an HD-DVD disc isn't as easy as standard DVD. While connecting the nearly decade-old DVD format we know and love to today's TVs is fairly straightforward (even with its multitude of connection options), and you always know the basic resolution output you're going to get, HD-DVD is a far more complicated proposition. With the HD format's multiple of resolution formats (720p, 1080i, 1080p, etc.), the quality of the picture you are going to receive is much more dependent on the equipment that you have, and how you connect it all up. In the HD world, one size does definitely not fit all. So that means there is a little good news/bad news when it comes to how much picture bang for your buck these first first HD-DVD discs can deliver.

First the good news. Warner has not skimped on its first HD-DVD releases. 'Last Samurai,' like Warner's other two initial HD-DVD offerings ('Million Dollar Baby' and 'Phantom of the Opera') showcases the movie by encoding it at 1080p -- meaning you're going to get every last pixel of the HD format's absolute maximum 1,920 x 1,080 resolution. Hooked up properly to a HDTV that can accept an 1080p input, and you're getting a professional-grade image that can only be bettered by today's multi-million dollar digital cinema formats (which would be pretty useless for the screen sizes in the majority of home theaters anyway).

Now, the bad news. There are very few HD display devices on the market today that can accept a 1080p input (we're using one of them, the HP Pavilion 65" DLP RPTV, as the centerpiece of our reference system), but then Toshiba's two first-gen HD-DVD players (the HD-A1 and its slightly snazzier cousin, the HD-XA1) can only output 1080i anyway. That means the performance you can get today out of these first HD-DVD discs is a slight notch down from full 1080p, but rest assured, it can still deliver one hell of a picture, and is certainly a major leap forward in image quality over even the best standard DVD image.

So that caveat aside, I watched 'Last Samurai' via the Toshiba HD-XA1's HDMI 1080i output, and I also did comparisons via the player's component output (which is still the best input the majority of HDTV sets on the market can accept). Then I fired up a showing of 'Last Samurai' I recorded off of HBO-HD recently on my Dish Network HD DVR, to make a comparison between HD-DVD and satellite HD broadcasts. Finally, I did a quick HD-DVD versus standard DVD comparison, just for giggles. (I would have liked to have also done a comparison between HD-DVD and the fledgling D-VHS HD videotape format, but alas 'Last Samurai' has not been released on D-VHS.)

Now, at last, the results. Watching 'The Last Samurai' at 1080i via HDMI on the HP was certainly an impressive experience. Quite simply, it delivered the best video I've ever seen on a pre corded consumer format. There are some shots that were breathtaking -- the kind of three-dimensional images you rarely seen outside of the cinema. Close-ups predictably had the biggest wow factor, though even some of the widest panoramic shots boasted noticeable fine detail that exceeded anything seen on standard DVD. Colors also "popped" incredibly well, with a few shots containing lots of deep oranges and lush greens that were incredibly striking. The transfer's blacks were also rock solid, and contrast excellent. Plus, I noticed none of the ringing or halos still frequently seen on standard DVD transfers, which gave 'Last Samurai' a very natural, film-like appearance.

After watching the full film via HDMI, I shuttled back and forth between the HDMI outs and the component outs on the Toshiba HD-XA1. First, great news for those who do not currently own an HDTV set with HDMI inputs -- Warner has elected not to enforce ICT, the controversial "down-res" copy protection scheme built into the HD-DVD spec, that allows a content provider to downgrade the quality of an HD DVD disc to standard DVD quality via the component outs. So that means you can watch all the studios initial HD-DVD offerings in full 1080i without HDMI -- at least for now, until Warner decides to implement ICT (which it has publicly stated it intends to do). Also note that component connectors are not capable of delivering full 1080p, however, so if you eventually want to upgrade your home theater to the full 1080p experience, you will still have to buy a new set down the road.

As for the picture quality via HDMI versus Component outs, I'd give the edge slightly to HDMI. I've always found it to be a ever-so-slightly more crisp picture, with more solid color reproduction and a tad richer blacks. However, 'Last Samurai' still looked great via Component outs, and it certainly rivaled any film-based satellite HD broadcasts I've seen.

Comparing the HD-DVD and the HBO-HD broadcast showing of 'Samurai' also bore some interesting results. I'd give the edge to HD-DVD, because of one considerable improvement versus satellite and terrestrial HD broadcasts -- macroblocking. I've subscribed to DirecTV, Voom and now Dish Network, and even the best of their HD broadcasts suffer from some sort of pixelization, mostly on fast motion. I noticed absolutely no macroblocking on the HD-DVD 'Samurai,' even on the most fast-cut, complex scenes. That's a real boon for those who want the best quality money can buy, especially when it comes to today's whiplash-paced big-budget action blockbusters. Aside from that issue, the HD-DVD and HBO-HD versions of 'Samurai' were pretty comparable, though I thought the HD-DVD also boasted more detail visible in the darkest areas of the picture, and slightly improved sharpness and contrast overall. Overall, purely in terms of picture clarity and resolution (minus the macroblocking issue) I'd rate the HD-DVD as about a 5 to 10 percent improvement over the satellite HD broadcast.

Finally, comparing the HD-DVD versus standard DVD, the victor was clear. HD-DVD is simply sharper, clearer, more vibrant and more real. I was also a bit surprised that the HD-DVD of 'Samurai' sported stronger colors and better blacks than the standard DVD version, even though they appear minted from the same master. The considerably increased detail of the HD-DVD format also gives the image a better sense of contrast, as distinct picture elements like the glint on a blade or fine clothing textures now "pop" off the screen more, as opposing areas of light and dark are now more pronounced. (I will take a closer look at HD-DVD quality versus upconverted SD DVD in my review of Universal's 'Serenity.')

However, the difference between the HD-DVD and standard DVD does narrow a bit if you output the standard DVD via the Toshiba's HDMI out, which can upconvert standard DVD's 480p native resolution to 720p or all the way up to 1080i (no 1080p option on these first-gen players). Watching the standard DVD of 'Samurai' upconverted to 1080i, I'd say it was about 15 percent better than the 480p out, with a sharper picture and surprisingly richer blacks (which I wasn't expecting). Though it still can't compare to the HD-DVD of 'Samurai,' I venture to guess that on smaller screen sizes, average consumers might not be wowed as much by the HD-DVD. Certainly, if these new next-gen high-def DVD formats are going to win over the mainstream, they need to be seen on larger screen sizes. At when compared to upconverted standard DVD, they just don't deliver the same quantum leap in quality that standard DVD did with VHS.

The Audio: Rating the Sound

Here's where the HD-DVD format hasn't quite reached its full potential. Though Warner's 'Phantom of the Opera' release contains the first soundtrack encoded in Dolby's proprietary TrueHD loseless compression format -- which promises to deliver up to 7.1 channels of surround sound equivalent in quality to the original studio master -- 'Samurai' boasts a more standard 5.1 surround track, albeit one recorded in Dolby Digital-Plus.

In brief, Dolby Digital-Plus is a new, slightly improved stopgap between TrueHD and the 5.1 Dolby tracks typical to SD DVD. Built on Dolby Digital, the DD+ multichannel audio standard for all next-gen HD DVD formats and HD broadcasts delivers higher bitrates and sampling rates, and can "matrix in" an additional two surround channels of surround information into an existing 5.1 channels of encoded information. In other words, play a Dolby Digital PLus soundtrack via your existing Dolby Digital 5.1 receiver, and get a standard 5.1 soundtrack. Run it through a Dolby Digital Plus receiver, and you can extract the full 7.1 experience.

Unfortunately, no DD+ nor TrueHD receivers are yet on the market. So the only way to get the increased benefits of the DD+ format's better bitrate and improved sound quality on the first-gen Toshiba decks is a bit complicated. The players will not try and output DD+ via the HDMI, coaxial or optical audio outputs. It will simply extract the core Dolby Digital 5.1 audio which should be compatible with any receiver. You can, however, run the player's dedicated 5.1 outs -- that's one cable for each channel -- to your receiver, which will allow you to extract out the extras 2 surround channels (provided your receiver supports 7.1 speakers).

What this all means for you non-tech types is that for the most part, until TrueHD and Dolby Digital-Plus receivers hit the market, you're pretty much going to get the same Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks your getting on SD DVD. Which is not a bad thing, at least in the case of 'Last Samurai.' It's a great, sometimes stupendous mix. There is strong dynamic range throughout the entire film, enlivened by very powerful, deep bass, particularly during combat sequences. Dialogue and the fine score had a pleasing tonal quality, still sounding warm and human despite the often bombastic sound effects. And the surround channels are used to often powerful effect from the very beginning, from discrete sounds and atmospheric effects to the gothic rain, thunder and gunshots that grow in prominence in the second half of the movie.

Still, the audio is still the one area where HD-DVD can not really shine just yet. But if the picture quality is any indication, once receiver technology catches up and more studios begin encoding discs with TrueHD, HD-DVD should really deliver the best audio yet heard in home theater.

The Supplements: Digging Into the Good Stuff

As was expected, Warner has ported over all of the supplements from the standard DVD release of 'The Last Samurai.' Which means none of the extras here will surprise anyone who already has the previous DVD. Still, it's better than the alternative -- the studio could have easily just gone no-frills for its first HD-DVD offerings, and charged a premium or the high-quality video and audio sans extras.

Before I dive into the goodies, a note on how they are presented. As these are the same extras as the SD DVD release, they were not created with HD in mind. All the video-based supplements are encoded at 480p, and outputted as pillarboxed 4:3 video. The quality is quite good, though the film clips, which are letterboxed within the 4:3 pillarboxed frame, certainly look crappy compared to the film in HD-DVD. Also notable is that, due to HD-DVD's considerable storage capacity, both the complete feature and all the SD DVD extras -- which required two-discs on the old release -- are now easy to access on this HD-30 dual-layer HD-DVD disc. The number of all these mega-disc special editions is, if not going to be completely eliminated, will certainly be greatly reduced.

Now, the extras. Once again we have an audio commentary with director Ed Zwick. Certainly, he is an articulate, knowledgeable guy. Though, to be honest, I have not been a fan of most of his commentaries. He comes off occasionally dry and humorless, and there is no exception here. But if you have 132 minutes to spare and want to know every last production detail -- from staging the fight scenes to working with a star of Cruise's magnitude, who as Zwick makes clear has his own input into every aspect of the film -- this commentary won't disappoint.

The video-based supplements kick off with the 21-minute History Channel Documentary, "History vs. Hollywood: The Last Samurai," which delves into the historical fact behind 'Samurai's fiction. Unfortunately, I didn't think it was as strong as most of the History Channel's other movie-inspired special, coming off as largely promotional with little in the way of historical grit. Maybe Cruise edited this one, too.

Next up are three longer featurettes that focus on the filmmaking due of Zwick and Cruise. "Edward Zwick: A Director's Video Journal" runs 26 minutes as is an assemblage of on-set diary footage narrated by Zwick and Cruise; the 12-minute "Tom Cruise: A Warrior's Journey" tracks Cruise as he undergoes sometimes grueling preparation to effectively portray a Samurai warrior; and the 17-minute "Making an Epic: A Conversation with Edward Zwick" is just that -- a one-on-one interview with the director, which is largely redundant with the audio commentary.

Ironically, it is the series of three short 5- to 7-minute featurettes that round out the set that I enjoyed the most, if only because they are free of the Zwick-Cruise grandstanding and back-patting. "A World of Detail: Production Design with Lilly Kilvert" shows us how the sets were built; "Silk and Armor: Costume Design with Ngila Dickson" examines the costuming; and "Imperial Army Basic Training: From Soldier to Samurai: The Weapons" dissects how the film's battalion of extras were drilled in combat and tactical maneuvers.

Finally, a couple of deleted scenes run about 5 minutes with optional Zwick commentary, but they are nothing thrilling. There is also a couple of minutes of promo footage of film's twin premieres in Tokyo and Kyoto, plus the theatrical trailer, which unfortunately is not presented in full 1080p HD (only 480p SD video).

HD Bonus Content: Any Exclusive Goodies in There?

Sadly, no. Aside from a couple of just-announced upcoming Universal HD-DVD titles, all of the studios' initial HD-DVD offerings are lacking in any extras aside from what you'll find on their SD DVD siblings. I'm sure that will change in the future, as if both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats are going to succeed with the mainstream, they have to deliver more than just video and audio, but something new on the extras front, too.

However, even HD bonus content-free discs like 'Samurai' do have a few nifty tricks up their sleeve. Mainly the menu system, though sadly far slower than I thought, does allow you to perform previously static SD DVD functions like chapter search and special feature access "live" along with the movie. Meaning if you hit menu while the movie is playing, you don't have to wait a few seconds while you jump over to the menu, then back. Instead, an overlay appears over the film itself, and you can dynamically make selections. Kinda cool, and virtually seamless. I sense this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of interactivity on HD-DVD, so I hope more studios tinker with these kind of functions on future releases.

But funny enough, the best "HD bonus feature" on 'Last Samurai' is Warner's new HD-DVD teaser promo, which shows clips from such upcoming HD-DVD titles as 'Batman Begins,' 'The Matrix' and 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,' all in glorious 1080p. They look great, and only gets me salivating for the next round of Warner releases. Bring 'em on!

Final Thoughts

So that wraps up my initial first impression of HD-DVD -- it looks great, but is it great enough? Admittedly, I've been living with HD for three years now. Being in L.A., I've been able to enjoy HD terrestrial and satellite broadcasts for quite a while, and also own a D-VHS deck. So HD-DVD is not so much something new as an extension of what I've already been enjoying. Certainly, it delivers on the bottom line -- it matches and, at times, exceeded the HD I've seen. But will it be enough to blow people away after all the hype? Purely on video quality, I hate to say probably not. Unless you are only used to standard DVD on a 32-inch or less TV, and see HD-DVD on a big screen, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. But if you have a dedicated home theater that can take full advantage of HD-DVD's capabilities, you certainly will be getting the best pre-recorded consumer video money can buy.
http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/lastsamurai.html

The Phantom of the Opera (HD-DVD)
Peter M. Bracke

The 'Phantom' Menace

They say timing is everything in Hollywood, and that was certainly true for the 2004 film adaptation of the Broadway smash 'The Phantom of the Opera.' First produced for the stage in 1986, it took nearly twenty years for the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical extravaganza to hit the big screen, long after the play had first captured the cultural zeitgeist. Produced on a lavish budget of over $70 million, the film barely scraped $50 million in domestic box office receipts, disappearing to video stores as quickly as it faded out of the public's consciousness.

Perhaps things would have been different had 'Phantom' hit theaters a decade ago, when its sensibilities were a bit more in vogue. On stage, it was one of Broadway's hottest tickets in the '80s and early '90s, but its appeal has since been diminished by weak touring company productions, and its sales usurped by far hipper, post-modern stage smashes as 'Hairspray,' 'Avenue Q' and the unstoppable kitsch of 'Mamma Mia.' 'Phantom' was already a dated anachronism by the dawn of the new millennium, which made a big-screen version about as commercially appealing as a hip-hop 'Cats.'

For those unfamiliar with the story of 'The Phantom of the Opera,' it has been told and retold so many times it almost seems like a fairy tale, not based on the famous book by Gaston LeRoux. The Phantom (here played by Gerald Butler) is a disfigured musical genius, who lives hidden deep within the bowels of the Paris Opera House. Soon a young musical sensation, Christine (Emmy Rossum) becomes the Opera House's new star, and the Phantom is bewitched. Becoming his unwitting protege, he soon terrorizes the opera company to woo the love of his life. Needless to say, romantic tragedy ensues.

Sticking more or less faithfully to both the original source material as well as the Webber-Rice play, the movie version of 'Phantom' is a handsome, earnest, lively film. Director Joel ('Lost Boys,' 'St. Elmo's Fire') Schumacher would not seem to be the most likely candidate to helm a big-screen version of 'Phantom,' but Schumacher has never been an ironic filmmaker. He plays the material absolutely straight, which probably doomed the film commercially, but gives it a timeless feel lacking in far more clever if instantly dated modern musicals like 'Moulin Rouge' and 'Chicago.'

Indeed, as I watched 'Phantom,' I had to constantly remind myself what decade I was in. By 30 minutes into the film, when Christine takes her famous descent into the bowels of the Opera House with the Phantom by way of gondola, I felt like I had stepped into some weird musical mishmash of a big-hair '80s Heart video and the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. Funny, campy, cringe-inducing yet strangely endearing all at once, this 'Phantom' absolutely refuses to so much bat an eyelash in the direction of hip irony. That makes it cheesy to the extreme, but oddly captivating -- though perhaps not in the way intended.

Admittedly, I am probably not the target audience for the sappy sentiment of 'Phantom.' Nor I am much a fan of Webber's musical style, a sort of pop-opera mash-up that occasionally produces a nice tune (the title theme of 'Phantom' has a great, devilish bass line it is impossible not to tap your foot to), but more often than not revels in Disney-esque blandness. But despite all that, even I found myself roped in by the end of the film's 142 minutes. Perhaps that is more a tribute more to the power of LeRoux's original creation than Schumacher's penchant overblown theatrics, but I genuinely cared what happened to Christine and the Phantom. I can't say I shed any real tears by the time of the film's predictable, tragic climax (really, do I need to tell you what happens?), but it did kinda make me glad that earnest, sincere romantic films are still being made in Hollywood. Even if no one is going to see them anymore.

The Video: Sizing Up the Picture

My surprise enjoyment of 'Phantom of the Opera' continued with the film's impressive picture. I would even venture to say that of all the initial HD-DVD titles I have reviewed thus far, 'Phantom' has produced some of the most striking images. I don't know if I've ever described a video transfer as "delicate" before, but that is exactly the trick 'Phantom' pulls off here, perfectly straddling the line between technical razzle-dazzle and a realistic video image.

A lavish, sumptuously-mounted film, 'Phantom' is certainly overflowing with color, texture and subtle lighting, which quite frankly got lost even on the fine-looking standard DVD released last year. But not here. Quite frankly, my direct comparison between the HD-DVD and standard DVDs of 'Phantom' was no contest -- the HD-DVD blew it out of the water. On a good home theater setup, it is would be hard for anyone to say HD-DVD doesn't offer a considerable improvement over standard DVD, at least with 'Phantom' as your demo material.

Based on the usual approach to transfers of films such as this in the past, I expected 'Phantom's vibrant reds, oranges and midnight blues to be pumped up to oblivion, with all the characters looking not so much as they have been lit with light, but painted with day-glo colors. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by how much detail there on the HD-DVD transfer. From the fine textures of the actor's skin in close-up to the most minute costume design details, I was often blown away by how terrific the image looked. Depth is incredibly three-dimensional in just about every scene, so much so that I'd say there are select shots here that rival the best video I've ever seen on any consumer format.

What also pushes 'Phantom' into the realm of true HD demo material is that, unlike Warner's other initial HD-DVD launch title, 'The Last Samurai,' it is almost completely lacking in film grain. As good as 'Samurai' looks, it was shot using the Super 35 process, which produces a bit of grain in the image, which often comes across as noise on video. But 'Phantom's images are so smooth and free of any apparent imperfections that I almost couldn't believe it wasn't some new sort of CGI enhancement. (Maybe it is?) But however they did it, this film looks absolutely smashing, and is certainly worth watching just to see how good a HD-DVD disc can look.
http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/phant...opera2004.html

1080P — Time for a Reality Check!
Peter Putman

Thinking about buying a new 1080p rear-projection TV, front projector, or LCD TV? You might want to put your credit card back in your wallet after you read this.

It’s obvious that the buzzword in consumer TV technology this year is “1080p”. Several manufacturers are showing and shipping 1080p DLP and LCoS rear-projection TVs. We’ve seen RPTVs and front projectors with 1920x1080 polysilicon LCD panels at CESA, NAB, and InfoComm. And the trickle of large LCD TVs and monitors with 1920x1080 resolution is turning into a flood.

To get your attention, marketers are referring to 1080p as “full spec” HD or “true” HD, a phrase also used by more than one HD veteran in the broadcast industry. We’re hearing about “1080p content” coming out of Hollywood, from broadcasters, from cable systems, and from direct broadcast satellite services.

The budding format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD for the next generation of high definition DVD players promises the same thing — 1080p content at high bit rates, finally realizing the full potential of HDTV.

STOP!

Enough of this nonsense. It’s time to set the record straight, to clear up the air about what 1080p is and isn’t.

First off, there is no 1080p HDTV transmission format. There is a 1080p/24 production format in wide use for prime time TV shows and some feature films. But these programs must be converted to 1080i/30 (that’s interlaced, not progressive scan) before airing on any terrestrial, satellite, or cable TV network.

What’s that, you say? Those 1080p/24 could be broadcast as a digital signal? That’s true, except that none of the consumer HDTV sets out there would support the non-standard horizontal scan rate required. And you sure wouldn’t want to watch 24Hz video for any length of time; the flicker would drive you crazy after a few seconds.

No, you’d need to have your TV refresh images at either a 2x (48Hz) or 3x (72Hz) frame rate, neither of which is supported by most HDTVs. If the HDTV has a computer (PC) input, that might work. But if you are receiving the signals off-air or using a DVI HDCP or HDMI connection, you’ll be outta luck.

What about live HDTV? That is captured, edited, and broadcast as 1080i/30. No exceptions. At present, there are no off-the-shelf broadcast cameras that can handle 1080p/60, a true progressive format with fast picture refresh rates. It’s just too much digital data to handle and requires way too much bandwidth or severe MPEG compression. (Consider that uncompressed 1920x1080i requires about 1.3 gigabits per second to move around. 1080p/60 would double that data rate.)

How about Blu-ray and HD-DVD? If either format is used to store and play back live HD content, it will have to be 1920x1080i (interlaced again) to be compatible with the bulk of consumer TVs. And any progressive-scan content will also have to be interlaced for viewing on the majority of HDTV sets.

Here’s why. To cut manufacturing costs, most HDTV sets run their horizontal scan at a constant 33.8 kHz, which is what’s needed for 1080i (or 540p). 1080p scans pictures twice as fast at 67.6 kHz. But most of today’s HDTVs don’t even support external 720p signal sources, which requires a 44.9 kHz higher scan rate.

In the consumer TV business today, it’s all about cutting prices and moving as many sets as possible through big distribution channels. So, I ask you: Why would HDTV manufacturers want to add to the price of their sets by supporting 1080p/60, a format that no HDTV network uses?

Here’s something else to think about. The leading manufacturer of LCD TVs does not support the playback of 1080p content on its own 1920x1080 products, whether the signal is in the YPbPr component or RGB format. Only the industrial monitor version of this same LCD HDTV can accept a 1920x1080p RGB signal.

Now, don’t blame HDTV manufacturers for this oversight. They are only supporting the 1080 format in actual use, 1920x1080i, a legacy digital format that has its roots in the older Japanese MUSE analog HDTV format of the 1980s. That’s one big reason that 1080i has remained as a production and transmission format.

It gets worse. All kinds of compromises are made in the acquisition, production, and transmission of 1080i content, from cameras with less than full resolution in their sensors and reduced sampling of luminance and chrominance to excessive MPEG compression of the signal as it travels from antenna, dish, or cable to your TV.

But that’s not all. To show a 1080i signal, many consumer HDTVs do the conversion from interlaced to progressive scan using an economical, “quickie” approach that throws away half the vertical resolution in the 1080i image. The resulting 540p image is fine for CRT HDTV sets, which can’t show all that much detail to begin with. And 540p is not too difficult to scale up to 720p.

But a 540p signal played back on a 1080p display doesn’t cut the mustard. You will quickly see the loss in resolution, not to mention motion and interline picture artifacts. Add to that other garbage such as mosquito noise and macroblocking, and you’ve got a pretty sorry-looking signal on your new big screen 1080p TV.

Oops! Almost forgot, that same 1080p TV may not have full horizontal pixel resolution if it uses 1080p DLP technology. The digital micromirror devices used in these TVs have 960x1080 native resolution, using a technique known as “wobbulation” to refresh two sets of 960 horizontal pixels at high speed, providing the 1920x1080 image. It’s a “cost thing” again. (Let’s hope these sets don’t employ the 540p conversion trick as well!

To summarize: There are no fast refresh (30Hz or 60Hz) 1080p production or transmission formats in use, nor are there any looming in the near future — even on the new HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats. The bandwidth is barely there for 1080i channels, and it’s probably just as well, because most TVs wouldn’t support 1080p/60 anyway — they’d just convert those signals to 1080i or 540p before you saw them.

The 1280x720 progressive-scan HDTV format, which can be captured at full resolution using existing broadcast cameras and survives MPEG-2 compression better than 1080i, doesn’t make it to most HDTV screens without first being altered to 1080i or 540p in a set-top box or in the HDTV set itself. So what chance would a 1080p signal have?

Still think you’ve just gotta have that new 1080p RPTV? Wait until you see what standard definition analog TV and digital cable look like on it…
http://www.hdtvexpert.com/pages_b/reality.html

Why You Should Boycott Blu-Ray And HD-DVD

This page details all the things that are wrong with the next generation DVD players, and why you don't want any part of it. If you purchase a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player to watch high definition movies, you are essentially saying that you are perfectly ok with everything on this page, and that's no good. Therefore, I ask you to vote with your wallet and boycott Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

If you've ever watched HDTV, you know what a treat it is. At 5 times the resolution of normal television, it looks fantastic. I would love to be able to purchase or rent HD movies to watch at home. But I just can't bring myself to do it, for the reasons listed below. This is all very unfortunate. They have lost me as a customer. I hope to persuade you as well.

There are a lot of acronyms on this page, so here are some quick definitions for you:

DRM - Digital Restrictions Management - technology to restrict what you can do with media you purchase
AACS - Advanced Access Content System - the DRM infection used for both Blu-ray and HD-DVD
BD+ - an addition to AACS for Blu-ray discs, that provides additional restrictions to what you can do
MMC - Mandatory Managed Copy - a theoretical way for you to make a legal copy of a movie
HDCP - High-bandwith Digital Content Protection - Encryption of data over digital connections
HDMI - High Definition Multimedia Interface - A digital connection found on most new HDTV's, all HDCP compliant
DVI - Digital Visual Interface - Precursor to HDMI, found on many older HDTV's. However, many DVI connections are not HDCP compliant, making them worthless for Blu-ray and HD-DVD.
MPAA - Motion Picture Ass. of America - trade organization representing the major movie companies
RIAA - Recording Industry Ass. of America - trade organization representing the major music companies

Reasons to be outraged by Hollywood
If your HDTV does not have an HDMI port, or an HDCP-compliant DVI port, you won't be able to watch HD movies in high definition. Bad news for the 3 million people in the US who don't have digital HDTV's and will only be able to connect over analog (component) cables - your movies will be downsampled to 1/4 their resolution, making them essentially the same as a standard DVD. The studios are understandably scared of an open, high quality, digital video interface, so they are insisting that your TV supports digital encryption to fully enjoy its new movies. This helps them to sleep better at night, but realistically only the honest people will be inconvenienced. Someone will likely figure out a way around it, given enough time. Some studios have said they won't enable this restriction for their initial movie launches, but remember they can enable it at any time in the future.

On a similar note, you will also have problems playing these movies on your computer with an internal Blu-ray or HD-DVD drive. If you don't upgrade to an HDCP compliant video card and monitor, you're screwed. An HDCP compatible video card is different than a compliant one, and will not work.

AACS means that Blu-ray and HD-DVD will never be compatible with free software, affecting nearly everyone that wants to view these movies on their computer but isn't running Windows or Mac OS X. While this is a minority of computer users, they should not be ignored. Some might say history is doomed to repeat itself.

Mandatory Managed Copy (MMC) theoretically allows things such as making legal backups and streaming content from one part of your house to another, but the studios have the option of charging you money to do that. The first batch of HD players won't even support MMC. As well, all aspects of MMC will require your player to be connected to the internet, which isn't inherently bad, but is certainly open for abuse. Besides, what if you don't have an available internet connection close to your home theater? What if you don't have broadband? Answer: Too bad. More details re: MMC can be had in this insightful interview with an HD-DVD rep.

It's amazing that MMC even exists, considering this. Choice quote: "Even if CDs do become damaged, replacements are readily available at affordable prices". Translation: please purchase another copy of content you have already paid for, thank you.

The MPAA and RIAA think that DRM is more important than human life. Wow.

"Hacking" your player, for example to remove the region coding, or playing a bootlegged disc, may lead your player to self destruct. (Only applies to Blu-ray and BD+ from what I can gather).

More about internet connections: the MPAA originally wanted that to be a requirement just to play these movies. They have since changed their mind.

They also originally considered having each disc being playable by only one player, meaning that if you played a new movie in your player, your friend couldn't watch the same disc in his player. Again they changed their mind, but that it was even considered is pretty shocking.

Other reasons you don't need HD-DVD or Blu-ray
The jump from VHS to DVD was dramatic and obvious - superior video quality, digital surround sound, non-degrading storage format, multiple audio tracks, bonus features, etc. The jump from DVD to the next generation does not provide any benefits other than higher resolution, which to be fair is a great reason to want that upgrade, but that's it! Plus, DVD's still look pretty damn nice to most people. Don't fall for the "better sound" hype either. 5.1 channel Dolby or DTS is pretty much the best it's going to get. Do you really want more speakers behind you than in front of you?

Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD will be a format war, leaving both consumers and retailers very frustrated. Do you want to gamble with investing thousands of dollars in a technology that may not be around in a few years? Some studios will only release their movies on one or the other format (Sony Pictures obviously will only do Blu-ray), which means if you want access to all possible movies, you will either have to buy both players or get a dual-format player. Chances are both formats will not be very successful, because of the insane costs and the fact that most people do not own HDTV's. Besides, the future is probably video on demand, not on disc. Even Bill Gates agrees.

The players and the media are going to be expensive. HD-DVD players will run $500, Blu-ray will be $1,000, and those are minimum prices. Most of the movies will retail for over $30. For computer storage, blank media will also cost around $30 minimum. Surely these costs will drop over time, but that combined with the format war makes it obvious that you should wait a bit before jumping on.

The biggest lie of all is that we even need these new technologies to have HD video on a disc. DVD video has been around for almost 10 years now, and since then vastly superior video compression technologies have been introduced, namely MPEG-4 and all its variants (h.264, DivX, XviD, etc). These compression formats are absolutely amazing in regards to size vs quality. A hi-def movie in any of these formats could easily fit onto a normal DVD, let alone a dual layer one. The only problem is that you can't really 'update' your existing player. In the consumers' best interest, what they would do is release new DVD players that not only supported these newer formats, but also had the ability to be upgraded for future technologies. We wouldn't need these expensive blue lasers to fit more data on a disc. Unfortunately, this solution doesn't line the pockets of shareholders and executives, so it is unlikely to happen.

The public is not ready for a new format already. A lot of people have spent a lot of money building their DVD collections, a format that just became mainstream ~5 years ago. Do you really want to go out and replace all of those movies? These new players will be backwards compatible with your old movies for sure, but if you just blew a grand on a shiny new player, you're going to want to watch your favorite movies in all their HD glory, right? Haven't you ever heard someone say, "Well, looks like now I have to buy another copy of the White Album" ?
http://fuckbluray.com/boycott

Making and Breaking HDCP Handshakes
Ed Felten

I wrote yesterday about the HDCP/HDMI technology that Hollywood wants to use to restrict the availability of very high-def TV content. Today I want to go under the hood, explaining how the key part of HDCP, the handshake, works. I’ll leave out some mathematical niceties to simplify the explanation; full details are in a 2001 paper by Crosby et al.

Suppose you connect an HDMI-compliant next-gen DVD player to an HDMI-compliant TV, and you try to play a disc. Before sending its highest-res digital video to the TV, the player will insist on doing an HDCP handshake. The purpose of the handshake is for the two devices to authenticate each other, that is, to verify that the other device is an authorized HDCP device, and to compute a secret key, known to both devices, that can be used to encrypt the video as it is passed across the HDMI cable.

Every new HDCP device is given two things: a secret vector, and an addition rule. The secret vector is a sequence of 40 secret numbers that the device is not supposed to reveal to anybody. The addition rule, which is not a secret, describes a way of adding up numbers selected from a vector. Both the secret vector and the addition rule are assigned by HDCP’s central authority. (I like to imagine that the central authority occupies an undersea command center worthy of Doctor Evil, but it’s probably just a nondescript office suite in Burbank.)

An example will help to make this clear. In the example, we’ll save space by pretending that the vectors have four secret numbers rather than forty, but the idea will be the same. Let’s say the central authority issues the following values:
secret vector addition rule
Alice (26, 19, 12, 7) [1]+[2]
Bob (13, 13, 22, 5) [2]+[4]
Charlie (22, 16, 5, 19) [1]+[3]
Diane (10, 21, 11, ,14) [2]+[3]

Suppose Alice and Bob want to do a handshake. Here’s how it works. First, Alice and Bob send each other their addition rules. Then, Alice applies Bob’s addition rule to her vector. Bob’s addition rule is “[2]+[4]”, which means that Alice should take the second and fourth elements of her secret vector and add them together. Alice adds 19+7, and gets 26. In the same way, Bob applies Alice’s addition rule to his secret vector — he adds 13+13, and gets 26. (In real life, the numbers are much bigger — about 17 digits.)

There are two things to notice about this process. First, in order to do it, you need to know either Alice’s or Bob’s secret vector. This means that Alice and Bob are the only ones who will know the result. Second, Alice and Bob both got the same answer: 26. This wasn’t a coincidence. There’s a special mathematical recipe that the central authority uses in generating the secret vectors to ensure that the two parties to any legitimate handshake will always get the same answer.

Now both Alice and Bob have a secret value — a secret key — that only they know. They can use the key to authenticate each other, and to encrypt messages to each other.

This sounds pretty cool. But it has a very large problem: if any four devices conspire, they can break the security of the system.

To see how, let’s do an example. Suppose that Alice, Bob, Charlie, and Diane conspire, and that the conspiracy wants to figure out the secret vector of some innocent victim, Ed. Ed’s addition rule is “[1]+[4]”, and his secret vector is, of course, a secret.

The conspirators start out by saying that Ed’s secret vector is (x1, x2, x3, x4), where all of the x’s are unknown. They want to figure out the values of the x’s — then they’ll know Ed’s secret vector. Alice starts out by imagining a handshake with Ed. In this imaginary handshake, Ed will apply Alice’s addition rule ([1]+[2]) to his own secret vector, yielding x1+x2. Alice will apply Ed’s addition rule to her own secret vector, yielding 26+7, or 33. She knows that the two results will be equal, as in any handshake, which gives her the following equation:

x1 + x2 = 33

Bob, Charlie, and Diane each do the same thing, imagining a handshake with Ed, and computing Ed’s result (a sum of some of the x’s), and their own result (a definite number), then setting the two results equal to each other. This yields three more equations:

x2 + x4 = 18
x1 + x3 = 41
x2 + x3 = 24

That makes four equations in four unknowns. Whipping out their algebra textbooks, the conspiracy solves the four equations, to determine that

x1 = 25
x2 = 8
x3 = 16
x4 = 10

Now they know Ed’s secret vector, and can proceed to impersonate him at will. They can do this to any person (or device) they like. And of course Ed doesn’t have to be a real person. They can dream up an imaginary person (or device) and cook up a workable secret vector for it. In short, they can use this basic method to do absolutely anything that the central authority can do.

In the real system, where the secret vectors have forty entries, not four, it takes a conspiracy of about forty devices, with known private vectors, to break HDCP completely. But that is eminently doable, and it’s only a matter of time before someone does it. I’ll talk next time about the implications of that fact.

[Correction (April 15): I changed Diane’s secret vector and addition rule to fix an error in the conspiracy-of-four example. Thanks for Matt Mastracci for pointing out the problem.]
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1005

Sun DRM Finds A Home In Korean IPTV Pilot
Faultline

Sun Microsystems may have already found its first customer, in a Korean IPTV system, for its DReaM (DRM Everywhere Available) open source DRM, a system that is not meant to be completed for at least another 12 months.

This was revealed by the director of conditional access at Korean company Alticast, as he was speaking at a Sun Microsystems event at the end of March. Alticast revealed plans to build the DReaM conditional access system into an IPTV pilot, but also to build a commercial product based on it for implementation throughout the Far East. Sun says it is still between nine and 15 months away from a product, but since this is based on an Open source process, code exists already for most of the system.

This week Sun released the source code for two components of DReaM, its DReaM-CAS (Conditional Access System) and DReaMMMI (Mother May I) the underlying mechanism for always asking a central resource for permission to access content. In papers that Sun put out this week it has described both of these processes. DReaMCAS or D-CAS currently only manages access to content in the MPEG-2 format.

Sun told us in October that it plans to create a royalty-free, interoperable DRM technology, independent of any specific hardware or operating systems which focuses on the concept of a user being given access to content, rather than one specific device being authenticated. This is something that may come more easily to Sun, since it can rely on the Liberty Alliance initiative which is was also behind, for allowing a single copy of a persons identity to act as a trust source for other services, without having to reveal identities to other services.

Sun kicked off into DRM with a European Eurescom project started in 2001 and reported on in 2003, funnily enough called OPERA,where it worked with DMD Secure, Exavio, SDC AG and T-Systems and some European operators. The inappropriate name (Opera is a browser company) came from InterOPERAbility of DRM technologies.

SDC and Sun built a system that was based on the Java SIM card found inside a mobile phone, and had Windows Media DRM authenticated with RealNetworks, and RealNetworks authenticated with SDC’s client and all of it using the Java based SIM for identity.

The iCOD TV system (internet Contents on Demand) is being built now and phase one lasts until February 2007, by a combination of Korea Telecom, which is handling the network design including the QoS services, Etri which is handling MHP/OCAP compatible standardized middleware, Sitec making the set top and Alticast designing a downloadable Conditional Access system based on D-CAS and the EPG. It has been funded by the consortium and some Korean government money with the aim of Korea developing its own IPTV stack of components.

The network design is supposed to offer fast channel zapping by using a new version of the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) although that is really only responsible for a small part of the delay time in a channel change. The system will use H.264 compression over an MPEG 2 transport stream.

Billing and purchasing of content is expected to work directly through the downloadable open source conditional access system. At present DReaM will only protect content through the network and is not yet ready to operate on stored video programming, although Sun is likely to address that prior to releasing products of its own.

The system uses AES encryption, requires a constantly open two way IP connection and it sends encrypted keys to the content along with the content, and these have to be decrypted by an existing public key. Entitlement messages are delivered out of band in a separate communication using the Mother May I protocols. More D-CAS applications will generate the entitlement messages, and a Java smart card will be used for authentication, which will store and manage viewers rights and viewing history.

The EPG that Alticast is designing looks similar to the successful Microsoft-demonstrated Mosaic system, and will show multiple live TV streams on one screen for selecting programming, as well as offering picture in picture capability for watching two views of the same program simultaneously.

Currently in Korea NDS dominates the conditional access market, with Nagravision coming a distant third, while Gemstar dominates EPG systems.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04..._korean_pilot/

Reasons to Love Open-Source DRM
Eliot Van Buskirk

I acknowledge that the title of this column is strange. Aside from the fact that most savvy music listeners (justifiably) hate DRM, the very idea of using open-source software to enforce digital rights management runs counter to everything commonly assumed about the technology: that it needs to be secret, obscure, proprietary.

But open-source DRM is exactly what Sun Microsystems has proposed, with its DReaM initiative. Its goal is to promulgate an open-source architecture for digital rights management that would cut across devices, regardless of the manufacturer, and assign rights to individuals rather than gadgets.

Assuming it catches on, this would create a bizarro world version of the copy-protection landscape. Today, consumers largely scorn DRM schemes in favor of unprotected MP3s ripped from CDs or downloaded off P2P networks. One reason for this is because iTunes-purchased music only plays on iPods, and subscription files from services such as Rhapsody only play on Microsoft Janus-compatible MP3 players. If DReaM works, consumers will be able to access their purchased songs through a number of providers, and using a wide variety of devices.

Sun is talking about a sea change on the scale of the switch from the barter system to paper money. Like money, this standardized DRM system would have to be acknowledged universally, and its rules would have to be easily converted to other systems (the way U.S. dollars are officially used only in America but can be easily converted into other currency). Consumers would no longer have to negotiate separate deals with each provider in order to access the same catalog (more or less). Instead, you -- the person, not your device -- would have the right to listen to songs, and those rights would follow you around, as long as you're using an approved device (more on that later).

The idea of Lawrence Lessig endorsing any DRM scheme is enough to make certain heads explode. But the "fair use" champion approved Sun's plan, because Sun worked with the Creative Commons "pretty much from the outset, to support their license definitions," according to Tom Jacobs, director of engineering at Sun Labs and the project lead of the Open Media Commons.

Lessig's statement read, "In a world where DRM has become ubiquitous, we need to ensure that the ecology for creativity is bolstered, not stifled, by technology. We applaud Sun's efforts to rally the community around the development of open-source, royalty-free DRM standards that support 'fair use' and that don't block the development of Creative Commons ideals."

Assuming Sun supports fair use by including the means for copyright works to be duplicated for educational purposes, parody and criticism, our current concept of fair use should survive this new DRM. That said, the EFF has its doubts. I have my own doubts, too. Sun's DReaM "Usage Scenarios" document says that its fair-use mechanism is purely optional for rights holders. I'd like to see Sun make this a mandatory part of the DReaM licensing rules.

Another potential objection to Sun's plan is that it sounds a lot like existing Microsoft or Apple DRM, in which secure content only plays on certified devices. But there's one major difference in that area: The certification process would be run by a standards body, rather than by individual companies.

I asked Jacobs to explain who would certify the players, and what would block the non-certified players from playing DReaM-protected content. "There will be an independent legal entity whose sole job it would be to take submissions of devices or players and do certification and testing of the device," he said. He expects that group will be in place by the summer.

Any manufacturer in the world would be able to add support for DReaM files at a negligible expense (remember, this is open source) and submit its device to the standards body for certification, similar to the way CSS worked with DVD players. Players and programs that aren't certified cannot legally use the DReaM scheme to play protected content.

Assuming companies such as Samsung and Panasonic (both of which attended Sun's recent Open Media Community Workshop) jump at the chance to include DReaM in their devices, the next piece of the puzzle would be for online music distributors to adopt the system. With internet investment on the rise and record labels growing increasingly frustrated with Apple's stranglehold on the digital music market, I don't doubt that any number of upstart services would be willing to gamble on selling DReaM-protected files, assuming the device support is there.

Jacobs expects the fiercest resistance to come from backers of existing, closed-source DRM. "If you happen to be one of those handful of winners -- there are probably two winners at the moment -- you want to make sure there's a lot of FUD out there about how hard it is for the whole world to switch over to anything other than what they've already got. But in reality, everyone else is on the outside, looking with great envy at the potential for success that's been shown by this first generation of digital distribution solutions. And so all these other suppliers on the outside are looking at how … they (can) get in."

"They're looking for a solution just like what we're describing here," Jacobs says.

Maybe this is the free market finally waking up to do something about a system that everyone (except for Apple and Microsoft) seems to agree is broken. As Jacobs pointed out to me, web developers had difficulty coding pages to display properly on different browsers before standards were put in place. If Sun's DReaM comes true, the same could happen for protected music.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70548-0.html

Lessig, Stallman on 'Open Source' DRM
Andrew Orlowski

When Sun trumpeted its 'open source DRM' last month, no one at first noticed an unusual name amongst the canned quotes. Lending his support to the rights enforcement technology was Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation board member, and Software Freedom Law Center director, Professor Lawrence Lessig. A name usually associated with the unrestricted exchange of digital media.

Debian activist and copyright campaigner Benjamin Mako Hill noticed, and thought this was odd. "The fact that the software is 'open source' is hardly good enough," he wrote, "if the purpose of the software is to take away users' freedom - in precisely the way that DRM does."

Was DRM less bad because it was 'open source'? Professor Lessig tells us that he should have reviewed the Sun Microsystems press release before it went out. It doesn't fully reflect his position, he says, and he's emphatic that this blessing doesn't constitute an endorsement.

"Rockstars and newspapers endorse things," he told us by email. "I don't."

Richard M Stallman, who founded the Free Software movement and devised the original GNU public license, diplomatically didn't dwell on the support Lessig gave Sun's DRM.

"Anyone can mis-speak," he said. "But I hope people can learn from this."

He warns that, if DRM is open source, it might actually be worse than proprietary DRM, and he issued a rallying cry for free software campaigners that DRM is incompatible with freedom.

(How 'open source' Sun's DRM really is questionable, says Mako, since it allows proprietary implementations - that's something Lessig may not have been aware of at the time of the Sun press release.)

What follows, then, is excerpted from interviews with all three over the past week. Unprompted, both Stallman and Lessig spent considerable time with us discussing the wider context. Take away the need for DRM, they both point out, and the discussion becomes moot. Both have differing views on how this can be achieved, but it merits an article in itself, so we'll follow up with a Part Two in the very near future.
Stallman on freedom

As he so often does, Stallman began by drawing a sharp distinction between "open source" and the free software movement. This is more than mere semantics, as becomes apparent when he turns to DRM, because it's a distinction that reflects very different philosophical and moral approaches to writing software.

"The values of the Free Software Movement are the freedom to cooperate, and the freedom to have control over your own life. You should be free to control the software in your computer, and you should be free to share it," he sums up.

"The weakness of the 'Open Source' approach, is that it has been designed as another way to talk about the issues, one that cites only practical values. It agrees with the conventional attitude that what matters about software is what job it does, and how much money it costs. That's exactly the same attitude Microsoft wants you to take."

"Both 'open source' and proprietary developers are saying that convenience matters - but we're saying freedom and community matter more. We're not saying convenience doesn't matter, but there's more than just having a reliable and powerful program."

"I'm willing to undergo the tremendous inconvenience to create a free program that's a replacement for a proprietary program. That's why we have the GNU/Linux system, because a lot of people were prepared to make practical sacrifices so we can have that freedom."

Now here's where this underpins the DRM discussion.

Stallman says that the if you accept the proposition that 'open source' is good because it results in more powerful and reliable software, this makes 'open source DRM' worse than proprietary DRM. As he explains -

"If you think that the important thing is for the software to be powerful and reliable, you might think that applying the OS development model to DRM software is a way to make DRM powerful and reliable," he explains.

"But as far as I'm concerned, that makes it worse - because it's job is restricting you. And if it restricts you reliably, that means you've been thoroughly shafted.

"If you look at the issue from the perspective of the FSM, you come to a completely opposite conclusion, which is: the whole point of DRM is to deny your freedom and prevent you from having control over the software you use to access certain data. That's the direct opposite of our goal. So our goal is not served by having a free program that implements DRM. It doesn't make anything any better for our freedom. So from the point of the Free Software movement in general, a TiVoized program is not good at all, because it doesn't deliver the freedom that Free Software stands for."

Stallman offers a neat encapsulation of this approach:

"We're not very concerned with how a program was developed, we're concerned with what people are allowed to do with it now."
TiVo-ization

Stallman then explains the perils of TiVo-ization. This was the case that prompted the writing of Clause 3 of the revised GPL 3.0, [draft (http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft) - rationale behind change (http://gplv3.fsf.org/rationale#SECTI...00000000000000), which is currently in a lengthy consultation process.

What's TiVo-ization, Richard?

TiVo uses a lot of free software, he explains. It's a stripped down GNU/Linux system, containing portions including the kernel which are under a GPL license and have the source code available.

"Released under GPL, this would be great except for one thing," says Stallman. "If you install a modified version in it, it won't run. The hardware has been set up to detect modified versions and not run them."

Stallman then reiterates the four freedoms that he says underpin Free Software. Real programmers count from zero, so freedom Zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish; One is the freedom to study and change the software; Two is the freedom to redistribute copies as you wish; Three is the freedom to distribute modifed versions as you wish.

"TiVo nominally gives you Freedom One, but practically it does not; it turns it into a sham," he says.

Stallman says the specific example is important - and he implicitly rejects the idea that the market will supply demand for these freedoms in this case.

"If the TiVo was one amongst a spectrum of products that run that software, then it might not matter. You might be OK, and no one would get TiVos anymore. But in fact, often there is no other alternative, and we know there are conspiracies amongst large companies to ensure there is no alternative. So we can't just count on competition to make this problem unimportant," he says.

"We're trying to make sure Freedom One will never be turned into a sham."

Stallman sums up the position that DRM will never be 'free'.

"The crucial thing in Free Software is a moral principal - after all, Free Software didn't begin in 1982. Licenses had existed before 1982. So Free Software is not about a 'model', it's about an ethical stand. Users must have these Four Freedoms."

So what was Professor Lessig's rationale for supporting an 'open source' DRM? He explained more on his weblog the following day, and went into even more detail with us this week.

"If all one says is (a) 'Sun's openDRM is great,' that's praising DRM," says Lessig . "But if one says (b) 'we should live in a world without DRM, and we should be building infrastructure and laws that render DRM unnecessary, but if we have DRM, then Sun's is better than Hollywood's,' then that's not 'praising DRM' but identifying a lesser evil. Again, what I did was give a speech at Sun conference where I said (b).

He expanded -

"There's no disagreement about where we should end up - No DRM."

"The only real disagreement is about the dynamic consequences - how this new kind of DRM affects the ecology for DRM generally. About this, I think honest people have to say no one knows, but we each have our own hunch. My view is openDRM pollutes the control freaks' plan so significantly that it can't achieve what they want - a general infrastructure of control built into the technology. Of course, I could be wrong about that."

Lessig stresses he hasn't endorsed the Sun technology.

"How do you say free on the Apple platform? How do you even have the argument? There is no doubt some version of DRM is with us over the next 5 years at a minimum. I want it to be possible to wage the war for free culture in that space as easily as it can be waged in this world."

"We can win the battle against it without eradicating DRM from every corner of cyberspace. Instead, I view 'the battle' about DRM much like I view 'the battle' over free software. Free software (in the Stallman sense of that term) 'wins the battle' when it is the major platform upon which software development is done. In that sense, free software has already won in certain important fields of battle, and in that sense, I certainly think free software will 'win the battle.' But when it wins, it won't trouble me that there are machines out there that are running Windows. To close the loop on the analogy, once 'the battle' against proprietary software is lost, Windows will have lost its virulence."

To Lessig, it's simply a pragmatic solution. Mako Hill can understand the pragmatism, but he isn't impressed.

"His answer is that where DRM exists – where we have already lost, it’s better to beg for scraps from the table."

"I think what Lessig is seeing is that everybody who buys an iPod buys a machine with DRM, and there's a billion songs out there that have DRM on them, and he’s saying there are all these hundreds of millions of devices that use DRM, so do we want it to be an open source, friendly DRM? It can only take certain fair use rights into account if it’s going to be effective at all."

"I think what he got was a promise the system could be used in a way that protects fair use. But media producers have the right of choosing which implementations they want. Do you think Time Warner will allow their media to play on machines that allow people to copy things?"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04..._stallman_drm/

Circumvent PDF DRM… with Gmail!
Andreas

Apparently, Gmail’s built-in “View as HTML” functionality, which allows you to view the content of PDF files (and other types of documents) as if they were classic webpages, works regardless of the files’ usage restrictions (= DRM). I don’t think this is a bad thing ;-) but just wonder how Google can back up this design decision — or is it a mistake?

You can try this out yourself:

Create or download a DRMed PDF file. I used this file from the Adobe site.
Open the file with Adobe Reader and click on the “Lock” icon in the down-left corner to see which restrictions apply. Our example file can be printed, but editing or text extraction is not allowed.
Send the file as an attachment to your Gmail account.
Open the mail you’ve sent yourself and choose the “View as HTML” option below the (empty) mail body.
An HTML version of the encrypted file is displayed — part of the layout might be gone, but the text can be extracted with a simple copy/paste command. In case the original PDF file had printing restrictions, those are stripped as well.

Note 1: a quick test with a PDF file with print restrictions yielded similar results — Gmail converted the file in question without any problem.

Note 2: Google Search on the other hand does comply with the copy restrictions inside PDF files — this search query for instance gives only non-encrypted PDF files a “View as HTML” option.
http://akira.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/and...ith-gmail.html

FCC Commissioner Wants To Push For DRM Just 'Cause She Likes It
Mike

The FCC's purpose is supposed to be about regulating the scarce resource (yes, this is up for debate, according to some) that is wireless spectrum. However, over the years, they've repeatedly worked to go beyond that basic charter, sometimes leading to them getting slapped down by those who remember what the group's purpose is. However, that won't stop some of the commissioners from pushing the envelope on pet projects apparently. Newest Commissioner Deborah Tate has apparently announced that while she knows its outside the FCC's authority, she's a huge fan of copy protection and hopes to use her new position as a "bully pulpit" on the topic. Apparently, her love of country music has brought her to this studied position -- despite increasing evidence that copy protection tends to shrink the overall market, and create fewer opportunities for musicians.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060419/0210252.shtml

Eff Files Brief In Free Speech Case
Ryan Paul

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a friend of the court brief with the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) arguing that free speech rights on the Internet must take precedence over foreign intellectual property law. The case in question, Sarl Louis Feraud International v. Viewfinder Inc., could potentially have a significant impact on freedom of speech rights, Internet regulation, and international law.

Viewfinder, the defendant, is an American company that produces and maintains a web site called Firstview.com which features information about recent fashion industry trends and events. The plaintiff, Sarl Louis Feraud International, is a fashion design company. Viewfinder took numerous photographs at a fashion show and published those photographs on the Firstview web site. Sarl Louis Feraud argues that its intellectual property was infringed when Viewfinder published photographs of various Sarl Louis Feraud fashions. Under French law, fashion designs are considered to be protected intellectual property, but this is not the case under American law. Since the web site was viewable in France, Sarl Louis Feraud decided to bring a suit against Viewfinder. After being awarded a default judgement in French court, the plaintiff attempted to enforce that judgement in America.

The United States adheres to a principle of comity, which means that it will typically enforce the rulings of foreign courts when applicable, and when doing so does not violate ordre public, the fundamental principles of local law. By nature, the concept of ordre public is extraordinarily vague, so cases where it comes into play tend to get very convoluted very quickly. In this particular case, Sarl Louis Feraud International v. Viewfinder Inc., the defendent argues that enforcing the judgement of the French court would violate ordre public because it infringes upon first amendment rights. Judge Lynch ruled in favor of the defendent, pointing out that freedom of speech is an essential and inseperable facet of American legal tradition:

Viewfinder's last, and sole persuasive, argument is that the French judgment is "repugnant to fundamental notions of what is decent and just" because Viewfinder's conduct is protected by the First Amendment. The freedoms of speech and of the press protected by the First Amendment are not mere vagaries of legal policy, matters of legal detail that might as easily have been resolved differently by our legislatures or courts. Freedom of speech is a matter of constitutional command, binding even on the will of the majority as expressed in legislation. The very Congress of the United States "shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Even among the basic human rights protected by the United States Constitution, the First Amendment occupies a special place. As Justice Cardozo put it, the American legal tradition "reflects a pervasive recognition of th[e] truth" that freedom of speech is "the matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other freedom."

The plaintiff protested the ruling, arguing that publication of the photographs doesn't "possess sufficient communicative elements to bring the First Amendment in to play." There are precedents in first amendment case law (particularly Spence v. Washington) where it is established that protection can be rescinded if the form of speech in question doesn't "convey a particularized message," or if the message conveyed isn't likely to be understood by the audience. The plaintiff has appealed the ruling, and plans to continue the legal battle.

In their brief, the EFF, ACLU, and CDT, insist that enforcement of the French court's ruling would have a severely detrimental impact on American freedom:

To open the door to foreign restrictions on U.S. speakers even the slightest crack would allow foreign courts to impose restrictions on speech that even Congress could not validly enact, fundamentally undermining First Amendment protections for Internet speech. This door must be kept closed, and closed tightly.

The part about the ability of congress to enact the restrictions is very important. The text of the brief echoes Judge Lynch's allusion to the fact that the first amendment clearly forbids congress from making laws that infringe on free speech. This is relevant because it implies that the abridgement of free speech constituted by the French judgement is clearly and overtly "repugnant to the fundamental notions of what is decent and just." In essence, if an action is so repugnant that our own elected representatives aren't permitted to do it with our consent, then it makes absolutely no sense to a allow a foreign court to do it on the basis of comity.

The brief also argues that enforcing the French ruling would create a dangerous slippery slope in which foreign governments could use their own highly restrictive legislation to impose limitations on free speech conducted over the Internet by American citizens:

Recognizing the essential character of the Internet as a global medium, American courts overwhelmingly have rejected attempts to censor it. ... when nations seek to control content on the Internet by applying their domestic laws extraterritorially to speech originating in the United States, the broader threat to freedom of expression is palpable. ... The conclusion that the French Order may be enforced in the United States despite its conflict with our constitutional freedoms would establish an international regime in which any nation would be able to enforce its legal and cultural "local community standards" on speakers in all other nations. In such a regime, ISPs and content providers would have no practical choice but to restrict their speech to the lowest common denominator in order to avoid potentially crushing liability.

The implications of such a regime would be wide-sweeping given the range of speech-restrictive laws in foreign nations that U.S. courts would be required to enforce. In addition to China and France, a host of nations impose restrictions on speech that would be deemed unconstitutional in the United States.

The brief is really great reading for anyone who's following the intersection of the Internet and international law. The brief's authors present many excellent arguments and examine in great detail the detrimental consequences associated with Internet censorship as well as free speech rights. They also illuminate the importance of this particular case, showing how the the future of free speech on the Internet could be threatened not just by traditional censorship from countries that place tighter limits on freedom of speech, but by the steady, international expansion of intellectual property laws.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060417-6609.html

Supreme Court Won't Hear Falwell's Appeal
Gina Holland

Evangelist Jerry Falwell on Monday lost a Supreme Court appeal of a case that sought to shut down a Web site with a similar name but opposite views on gays.

Falwell claims that a gay New York City man improperly draws people to a site by using a common misspelling of the reverend's name as the site's domain name.

A federal judge sided with Falwell, who runs a Virginia-based ministries, on grounds that Christopher Lamparello's domain name was nearly identical to the trademark bearing Falwell's name and could confuse Web surfers.

But last year, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed and said that Lamparello was free to operate his "gripe site" about Falwell's views on gays at http://www.fallwell.com . Lamparello "clearly created his Web site intending only to provide a forum to criticize ideas, not to steal customers," the court said.

The Jerry Falwell Ministries site is: http://www.falwell.com .

Falwell's Web site is more high-tech, with pictures of the minister, and sales material for books and videos.

Lamparello's Web site is mainly in black and white, with no photographs or items for sale. He says that Falwell is wrong in preaching that gay people are sinners who can change. At the top of the site a disclaimer reads: "This Web site is NOT affiliated with Rev. Dr. Jerry Falwell or his ministry."

Falwell's attorneys have fought over domain names in the past. Three years ago, an Illinois man surrendered the domain names jerryfalwell.com and jerryfallwell.com after Falwell threatened to sue for trademark infringement.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...700465_pf.html

F.B.I. Is Seeking to Search Papers of Dead Reporter
Scott Shane

The F.B.I. is seeking to go through the files of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson to remove classified material he may have accumulated in four decades of muckraking Washington journalism.

Mr. Anderson's family has refused to allow a search of 188 boxes, the files of a well-known reporter who had long feuded with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had exposed plans by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Fidel Castro, the machinations of the Iran-contra affair and the misdemeanors of generations of congressmen.

Mr. Anderson's son Kevin said that to allow government agents to rifle through the papers would betray his father's principles and intimidate other journalists, and that family members were willing to go to jail to protect the collection.

"It's my father's legacy," said Kevin N. Anderson, a Salt Lake City lawyer and one of the columnist's nine children. "The government has always and continues to this day to abuse the secrecy stamp. My father's view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they're up to."

The F.B.I. says the dispute over the papers, which await cataloging at George Washington University here, is a simple matter of law.

"It's been determined that among the papers there are a number of classified U.S. government documents," said Bill Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman. "Under the law, no private person may possess classified documents that were illegally provided to them. These documents remain the property of the government."

The standoff, which appears to have begun with an F.B.I. effort to find evidence for the criminal case against two pro-Israel lobbyists, has quickly hardened into a new test of the Bush administration's protection of government secrets and journalists' ability to report on them.

F.B.I. agents are investigating several leaks of classified information, including details of domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency and the secret overseas jails for terror suspects run by the C.I.A.

In addition, the two lobbyists, former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, face trial next month for receiving classified information, in a case criticized by civil liberties advocates as criminalizing the routine exchange of inside information.

The National Archives recently suspended a program in which intelligence agencies had pulled thousands of historical documents from public access on the ground that they should still be classified.

But the F.B.I.'s quest for secret material leaked years ago to a now-dead journalist, first reported Tuesday in the Chronicle of Higher Education, seems unprecedented, said several people with long experience in First Amendment law.

"I'm not aware of any previous government attempt to retrieve such material," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "Librarians and historians are having a fit, and I can't imagine a bigger chill to journalists."

The George Washington University librarian, Jack Siggins, said the university strongly objected to the F.B.I.'s removing anything from the Anderson archive.

"We certainly don't want anyone going through this material, let alone the F.B.I., if they're going to pull documents out," Mr. Siggins said. "We think Jack Anderson represents something important in American culture — answers to the question, How does our government work?"

Mr. Anderson was hired as a reporter in 1947 by Drew Pearson, who bequeathed to him a popular column called Washington Merry-Go-Round.

Mr. Anderson developed Parkinson's disease and did little reporting for the column in the 15 years before his death in December at 83, said Mark Feldstein, director of the journalism program at George Washington, who is writing a book about him.

His files were stored for years at Brigham Young University before being transferred to George Washington at Mr. Anderson's request last year, but the F.B.I. apparently made no effort to search them.

Kevin Anderson said said F.B.I. agents first approached his mother, Olivia, early this year.

"They talked about the Aipac case and that they thought Dad had some classified documents and they wanted to take fingerprints from them" to identify possible sources, he recalled. "But they said they wanted to look at all 200 boxes and if they found anything classified they'd be duty-bound to take them."

Both Kevin Anderson and Mr. Feldstein, the journalism professor, said they did not think the columnist ever wrote about Aipac.

Mr. Anderson said he thought the Aipac case was a pretext for a broader search, a conclusion shared by others, including Thomas S. Blanton, who oversees the National Security Archive, a collection of historic documents at George Washington.

"Recovery of leaked C.I.A. and White House documents that Jack Anderson got back in the 70's has been on the F.B.I.'s wanted list for decades," Mr. Blanton said.

Mr. Carter of the F.B.I. declined to comment on any connection to the Aipac case or to say how the bureau learned that classified documents were in the Anderson files.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/wa...rtner=homepage

New RFID Travel Cards Could Pose Privacy Threat
Anne Broache and Declan McCullagh

Future government-issued travel documents may feature embedded computer chips that can be read at a distance of up to 30 feet, a top Homeland Security official said Tuesday, creating what some fear would be a threat to privacy.

Jim Williams, director of the Department of Homeland Security's US-VISIT program, told a smart card conference here that such tracking chips could be inserted into the new generation of wallet-size identity cards used to ease travel by Americans to Canada and Mexico starting in 2008. Those chips use radio frequency identification technology, or RFID.

"If you haven't been to some of our busiest land crossings, I always refer to them as economic choke points...We ought to use technology to improve that," said Williams, whose office operates the biometric program used to verify that the fingerprint of a person using a U.S. visa to cross a U.S. border matches that of the person who was issued the visa.

Williams' remarks at an industry conference are likely to heighten privacy concerns about RFID technology, which has drawn fire from activists and prompted hearings before the U.S. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission. One California politician has even introduced anti-RFID legislation.

Many of the privacy worries center on whether RFID tags--typically miniscule chips with an antenna a few inches long that can transmit a unique ID number--can be read from afar. If the range is a few inches, the privacy concerns are reduced. But at ranges of 30 feet, the tags could theoretically be read by hidden sensors alongside the road, in the mall or in the hands of criminals hoping to identify someone on the street by his or her ID number.

Williams defended a remotely readable RFID'ed identity card to audience members who suggested selecting one that could be scanned from only a few inches away. Border police oppose that idea because "they're concerned about people dropping cards, about people sticking their hands out the window," he said. "They don't think that meets their mission needs"--that is, speeding up the border-crossing process.

Those forthcoming cards, called "PASS" (for People Access Security Service), are part of a federal requirement that, starting Jan. 1, 2008, anyone entering the United States from Mexico or Canada must carry a passport or "alternative" travel document. Homeland Security envisions that document will take the form of a "vicinity-read" wallet-size card that will capture information from a distance and automatically display the cardholder's picture and other biographic information on the border agent's computer screen.

Homeland Security has said, in a government procurement notice posted in September, that "read ranges shall extend to a minimum of 25 feet" in RFID-equipped identification cards used for border crossings. For people crossing on a bus, the proposal says, "the solution must sense up to 55 tokens."

The notice, unearthed by an anti-RFID advocacy group, also specifies: "The government requires that IDs be read under circumstances that include the device being carried in a pocket, purse, wallet, in traveler's clothes or elsewhere on the person of the traveler....The traveler should not have to do anything to prepare the device to be read, or to present the device for reading--i.e., passive and automatic use."

An internal agency spat?
But Homeland Security could run into some internal opposition in the form of the State Department, which appears to be leaning toward the "proximity" method instead of remotely readable RFID'ed identity cards.

"We think proximity read offers greater security protections," Frank Moss, deputy assistant secretary of state for passport services, said Tuesday. That method would also have a better chance of getting past the scrutiny of privacy advocates in the requisite rule-making process, added Moss, who joked that he had been labeled the "anti-Christ" by one person who commented on the State Department's e-passport proposals.

RFID chips are already going to appear in U.S. passports starting in October 2006, the Bush administration ruled last October. And the possibility of RFID-implanted drivers' licenses because of the Real ID Act has caused New Hampshire's House of Representatives to disavow the proposal entirely.

Moss ticked off a list of reasons why Americans shouldn't be concerned about the safety of RFID'ed passports any longer. He admitted the State Department was wrong to claim last year that the e-passport chips could be read within only 10 centimeters. He credited the scathing comments from privacy watchdogs for the agency's decision to adopt two safeguards: a cryptographic technique known as basic access control and "antiskimming material" on the passport's front cover, which "greatly complicates" the capture of data when the book is fully or mostly closed, Moss said.

The government agencies said they need to reach an agreement on the RFID technology they'll use in the next month so that they can begin soliciting proposals from private firms for the chip's design. They hope to begin producing the PASS cards no later than nine months from now, Moss said.

"What we're putting in the card is possibly nothing but a 96-digit serial number that is random and would do nothing but point back to a database...someone would have to hack into our database at the same time," Homeland Security's Williams said, adding that the agency is considering delivering the cards in a "Mylar sleeve that would block the technology when people aren't using it." They're also exploring using a card that would have to be activated by the user, through a fingerprint or some other biometric method, before any information could be read remotely.
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/softwa...9352807,00.htm

Study Fuels a Growing Debate Over Police Lineups
Kate Zernike

The police lineup is a time-honored staple of crime solving, not to mention of countless cop movies and television shows like "Law and Order." Each year, experts estimate, 77,000 people nationwide are put on trial because witnesses picked them out of one.
In recent years many states and cities have moved to overhaul lineups, as DNA evidence has exposed nearly 200 wrongful convictions, three-quarters of them resulting primarily from bad eyewitness identification.

In the new method, the police show witnesses one person at a time, instead of several at once, and the lineup is overseen by someone not connected to the case, to avoid anything that could steer the witness to the suspect the police believe is guilty.

But now, the long-awaited results of an experiment in Illinois have raised serious questions about the changes. The study, the first to do a real-life comparison of the old and new methods, found that the new lineups made witnesses less likely to choose anyone. When they did pick a suspect, they were more likely to choose an innocent person.

Witnesses in traditional lineups, by contrast, were more likely to identify a suspect and less likely to choose a face put in the lineup as filler.

Advocates of the new method said the Illinois study, conducted by the Chicago Police Department, was flawed, because officers supervised the traditional lineups and could have swayed witnesses.

But the results have empowered many critics who had worried that states and cities were caving in to advocacy groups in adopting the new lineups without solid evidence that they improved on the old ones.

"There are people who'd say it's better to let 10 guilty persons free to protect against one innocent person being wrongfully convicted," said Roy S. Malpass, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso and an analyst for the Illinois study, who served on a research group on eyewitness identification for the National Institute of Justice in 1999.

"I'm fine with that when we're dealing with juvenile shoplifters," Dr. Malpass said. "I'm not fine with that for terrorists. We haven't figured out the risk there."

The new lineups lack some of the drama of the old. In some places, witnesses view lineups on laptop computers to make them completely "blind" to influence from someone administering the process.

Psychologists who favor these so-called sequential double-blind lineups say that showing witnesses people one at a time makes lineups more difficult for the witness, and therefore better. Witnesses have to compare the person in front of them against their memory of the crime, rather than simply against the other faces in the lineup.

"It turns a lineup into a much more objective, science-based procedure," said Gary L. Wells, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University and a prominent proponent of blind sequential lineups. "The double-blind is a staple of science; it makes as much sense to do it in a lineup as it does in an experiment or drug trial."

In classroom studies by Dr. Wells and others, the sequential method was found to reduce the number of times witnesses chose an innocent person, without reducing the number of times they chose the right one.

The movement to change lineups took off in the 1990's after a growing number of DNA exonerations. New Jersey was the first state to adopt the sequential method, in 2001. The Wisconsin Legislature recently recommended the same approach, as did commissions in North Carolina, Virginia and, last week, California. Boston and Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, use sequential lineups, and Washington, D.C., is studying them in one district.

Still, lineup methods remain an open debate: law enforcement officials in California and New York have resisted changes, arguing that the evidence in favor of the sequential approach is not firm.

A guide for prosecutors produced in 1999 by the National Institute of Justice study group said "there is not a consensus" and declined to recommend sequential lineups as a "preferred" method.

But before the Illinois study, released last month, no one had compared the two methods in the field.

The experiment was part of an overhaul package recommended in 2002 by the Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment, set up by former Gov. George Ryan of Illinois after DNA evidence exonerated several death row inmates. It tested the two methods for a year in three dissimilar cities; half the lineups were conducted sequentially and half were done simultaneously.

"Surprisingly," the study said, the sequential lineups proved less reliable than the simultaneous ones.

Out of 700 lineups, witnesses in those using the simultaneous method chose the correct suspect 60 percent of the time, compared with 45 percent of the time for the sequential lineups. Witnesses in the sequential lineups were more likely to pick the wrong person — someone brought in as filler — choosing incorrectly 9 percent of the time, versus just 3 percent in the simultaneous lineups.

And witnesses declined to make a pick in 47 percent of the sequential lineups, compared with 38 percent of the simultaneous ones. (Percentages were rounded.)

"If you are going to take officers outside their comfort zone, you have to be able to sell them on the reasons you are doing it," said Sheri Mecklenburg, general counsel to the superintendent of the Chicago Police Department and director of the experiment. "Based on this study, I think we'd have a difficult time having them believe this is a way to get more reliable eyewitness identifications."

Prosecutors elsewhere say the results make them less inclined to move to sequential lineups.

"This is very powerful because it's real," said Patricia Bailey, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan who has considered lineup changes for New York City. "This isn't a classroom study where people are watching a 30-second video of a crime that happened to someone else."

Paul A. Logli, president of the National District Attorneys Association, said that his group would discuss lineups at its convention this fall, but that many prosecutors were doubters.

"I think many prosecutors think doing it sequentially runs contrary to human nature," Mr. Logli said. "Human nature tells me that having the ability to compare is more helpful than destructive. Doing it sequentially is almost like this is a trick question."

Dr. Wells of Iowa State said the Illinois study had not validly compared the two lineup methods because simultaneous lineups had not been done "blind."

But Dr. Malpass of the University of Texas and Ms. Mecklenberg said the point was to study the new method against the status quo.

The new study will be the focus of a conference Friday at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Thomas P. Sullivan, a former United States attorney in Chicago and the co-chairman of the governor's commission that recommended the study, said that already, the results had "changed the debate."

"It has put a cloud over the sequential system," Mr. Sullivan said. "I think it will retard the system throughout the country until this gets sorted out."

But others say changes to lineups should focus on other elements that studies have shown produce more reliable picks: reducing pressure on witnesses by advising them that they do not have to pick someone; making sure that "fillers" strongly resemble the suspect; and recording what the witness says upon choosing a suspect, so juries can hear how certain they were about a pick.

"I don't understand why the rest of these reforms shouldn't be adopted immediately," said Barry C. Scheck, a co-director of the Innocence Project, a legal clinic that uses DNA evidence to try to overturn wrongful convictions. "The controversy over sequential blind has obscured the fact that all the other reforms are not in dispute."

Ms. Mecklenburg, in Chicago, said, "There are no sides in this debate."

"We all want the same thing," she said. "Whether you are a prosecutor or police or defense counsel, we all want reliable eyewitness identifications."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/us...rtner=homepage

Microsoft To Pull Plug On Windows 98, ME In July
Gregg Keizer

Microsoft has begun reminding users of Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, and Windows Millennium that it will cut off all support for the aging operating systems in July.

"Microsoft is ending support for these products because they are outdated and these older operating systems can expose customers to security risks," the company said in a notice posted to its Web site. "We recommend that customers who are still running Windows 98 or Windows Me upgrade to a newer, more secure Microsoft operating system, such as Windows XP, as soon as possible."

After July 11 -- the scheduled release date for that month's security bulletins -- Microsoft will no longer provide security updates for the OSes. Only online self-help support will be available, and that's guaranteed only through July 11, 2007.

On Tuesday, Microsoft provided three critical security patches for Windows 98 and Millennium, part of its lifecycle pledge to fix onerous bugs until all support is dropped.

Previously, Microsoft had extended the final support stage for Windows 98 and Millennium from January 2004 to June 30, 2006. In January of this year, the Redmond, Wash. developer announced that it would move the end date to July 11 to account for one final security bulletin release.

No-charge and extended hotfix support for Millennium ended December 31, 2003, and for Windows 98, on June 30, 2003.

Although Windows 98 may be found on numerous aged consumer machines, it's little-used in corporations. In a 2005 survey, for instance, Canadian asset-tracking firm AssetMetrix said that Windows 98 was running only about 5 percent of enterprise PCs.
http://www.informationweek.com/share...leID=185300782

Hands-On Testing Of The New Linux Virus
Joe Barr and Joe Brockmeier

Thanks to one of our readers, NewsForge has obtained a copy of the widely reported Windows/Linux cross-platform "proof of concept" virus. News reports thus far on the code have contradicted themselves: some reported the virus can replicate itself on both Windows and Linux, others saying it has a viral nature only on Windows. Testing by both NewsForge staff and Hans-Werner Hilse may reveal why the confusion.

Our tests shows the code's viral nature is sometimes -- but not always -- effective on both platforms, depending on the kernel being used. Of course, it's impossible for us to test every version of the kernel out there, but thus far, it looks like those prior to version 2.6.16 are susceptible, and at least some of those after that release are not. Here's how we tested at NewsForge.

Our first test was run on an AMD64 box with a fresh install/update of Ubuntu Dapper Flight 5 386 with the 2.16.15-20-386 kernel, with the WINE and GHex -- a binary viewer/editor -- packages also installed. After unzipping the viral package (clt.zip) into an empty directory, we tested CLT.EXE by executing it under WINE in a subdirectory containing only a small executable and linkable format (ELF) file, called hello, written in assembler, that we created for the test. We ran CLT.EXE, and a small window popped up saying that the "dropper" -- as the code calls itself -- had executed successfully.

When we examined the hello ELF file with GHex, however, it showed no signs of contagion -- not even the lines of text which were supposedly installed in lieu of the virus itself when run on Linux. We soon learned that the reason hello remained uninfected in the first test was that the hello executable file is too small, not because the viral code could not replicate on Linux. Another NewsForge staffer testing CLT.EXE under VMWare found that it did infect larger ELF files.

Next, we copied the programs more, date, and ls from /bin into the test directory. When we ran CLT.EXE again, all three of those ELFs were infected. Each was 4,096 bytes larger than it had been before the test. But did those 4,096 additional bytes actually contain the viral code? Would the ELF files still execute? Those questions became the basis for our next test scenario.

Instead of running CLT.EXE under WINE, we repeated the tests in a different directory, using uninfected copies of the same target programs, and then executing an infected version of ls in that directory. The only difference we could detect was that the pop-up window no longer appeared: more, ls, and date were all infected and hello remained untouched.

Meanwhile, on the other side the Atlantic

Hans-Werner Hilse has been digging deeper into the viral code than we did. Hilse described his initial testing as follows:
2.4.26 running in qemu (I took an ISO of Damn Small Linux) -- qemu simulates a Pentium II -- I was also able to see the infection taking place.

I found a difference for the program flow when I compared the systrace from the 2.6 kernels mentioned above (2.6.16.2 and 2.6.15.4). Indeed the mmapping fails on the newer kernel:

(command is "strace -viqo strace.log ./echo x", "echo" is /bin/echo but an infected version, another copy of echo -- not infected -- is waiting as "E" to be infected).

--->2.6.15.4: [08047416] readdir(3, {d_ino=10933298, d_name=""}) = 1
[0804742d] stat("E", {st_dev=makedev(3, 7), st_ino=10933298, st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_nlink=1, st_uid=1000, st_gid=100, st_blksize=4096, st_blocks=40, st_size=16600, st_atime=2006/04/14-21:31:09, st_mtime=2006/04/14-21:31:09, st_ctime=2006/04/14-21:31:09}) = 0
[0804744d] open("E", O_RDWR) = 4
[08047463] ftruncate(4, 24792) = 0
[0804747e] old_mmap(NULL, 28672, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED, 4, 0) = 0xb7fca000
[0804749c] munmap(0xb7fca000, 24792) = 0
[080474a7] ftruncate(4, 20696) = 0
--->2.6.16.2:
[08047416] readdir(3, {d_ino=722045, d_name=""}) = 1
[0804742d] stat("E", {st_dev=makedev(3, 1), st_ino=722045, st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_nlink=1, st_uid=1000, st_gid=100, st_blksize=4096, st_blocks=48, st_size=20696, st_atime=2006/04/14-21:31:09, st_mtime=2006/04/14-21:31:31, st_ctime=2006/04/14-21:35:16}) = 0
[0804744d] open("E", O_RDWR) = 4
[08047463] ftruncate(4, 28888) = 0
[0804747e] old_mmap(NULL, 32768, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED, 1, 0) = -1 ENODEV (No such device)
[080474a7] ftruncate(4, 20696) = 0

so obviously the mmap in 0804747e fails on the newer kernel version. What makes me wonder now is that the syscall is named "old_mmap". Sounds like a deprecated interface...

Hilse continues to test, looking to discover why the virus works on some kernels and not on others. The last we've heard from him was this:
My earlier suggestion seems to become true. The ebx register is actually reset to "1" after the "ftruncate" call. Compare the both register dumps to see this. Before the ftruncate-syscall, ebx is 7. After that call, when interrupted at breakpoint #3, it is 1.

I don't know for sure if this is normal behaviour. But many sources on the Web seem to suggest that for Linux syscalls the registers except eax should stay unmodified (i.e. get reset when returning from kernel into userspace). This is what many assembler examples seem to suggest. So I really think the kernel might be wrong here.

We sent an email to Linus Torvalds to let him know about our testing. He replied:
That said, it sounds like it's a regular program that just happens to work on both Windows and Linux, and that happens to do things that are perfectly OK per se (i.e. writing to files that are owned by the user). So it's interesting just because of the "works on both Linux and Windows" angle, not because of any viral nature.

A post we sent to the Linux Kernel Mailing List offering the "proof of concept" code to any kernel hackers interested to trying to figure out why it works on some versions of the kernel but not on others has been ignored. Obviously, the people concerned about the inner workings of the kernel are not as concerned about this threat as those selling anti-virus software.

Based on our examination of the code, Linux users need to be aware of two things. First, given the right permissions, a virus can replicate itself on Linux. This, however, has never been in doubt -- it remains to be seen whether malware authors can create a virus that can spread as easily on Linux as viruses on Windows. Second, this "proof of concept" is an excellent example of why running as root is a very bad idea.
http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/04/17/1752213

Torvalds Creates Patch For Cross-Platform Virus
Joe Barr

Linus Torvalds has had an opportunity to examine the testing and analysis by Hans-Werner Hilse which we reported on yesterday, and has blessed it as being correct. The reason that the virus is not propagating itself in the latest kernel versions is due to a bug in how GCC handles specific registers in a particular system call. He has coded a patch for the kernel to allow the virus to work on even the latest Linux kernel.

That may sound terribly complex, so let's break it down. A system call is made when an application, in this case, the virus, wants the kernel to perform a task for it: perhaps to read some data, or write it to a file, or so on.

As part of the housekeeping done by an application before such a call, specific registers -- a register is a temporary storage address which can be accessed as fast as possible by the CPU -- are loaded with additional information required to perform whatever task the call is asking for.

If you wanted to move a string of data like "CAPZLOQ TEKNIQ 1.0" from one place in memory to another, you would need to load the address where the string begins in one specific register, the address where you want it moved to in another register, and the number of bytes to move in yet another.

By convention, applications assume that certain registers will not be changed during the call. The reason the virus did not work in the latest kernel is that one register, the ebx register, which the virus expects to remain unchanged, is being overwritten.

The bug, which seems to me is more of a bug in GCC than the kernel, doesn't seem to appear in most code. It takes the rare combination of hand-crafted assembler code and the use of old, now deprecated, system calls to appear. This lends support to the speculation that this virus is not new code at all, in spite of how Kaspersky Lab is trying to use it to drum up new business.

I wrote Torvalds with Hilse's suspicion that the problem is caused by the ftruncate system call, manifested in the erroneous old_mmap function. According to Torvalds:

This is exactly right. "sys_ftruncate()" seems to corrupt %ebx due to a compiler issue. We've had that issue before: the kernel uses some special calling conventions where the system call stack is both the saved register area _and_ the argument area to the system calls.

That speeds up system call entry, since we avoid any unnecessary argument setup costs, but sadly gcc then thinks the callee function owns the argument stack, and can overwrite it. We've had hacks to avoid it in the past, but the ftruncate case has gone unnoticed (see later on why it doesn't matter for any normal apps).

So, for sys_ftruncate(), gcc compiles it to

sys_ftruncate:
movl 4(%esp), %eax # fd, fd
xorl %ecx, %ecx # length
movl 8(%esp), %edx # length, length
movl $1, 4(%esp) #,
jmp do_sys_ftruncate #

where that "movl $1, 4(%esp)" overwrites the original argument stack (the first argument, which is the save-area for %ebx).

Sad, sad. This particular case only happens with "-mregparm=3", which has been around for a long time, but only became default in 2.6.16. Which is probably why Hans-Werner didn't see the problem with older binaries. He just compiled with a different configuration.

Now, the reason normal programs don't care is that glibc saves and restores the %ebx register in the system call path. So if you use the regular C library, you'd never care. The virus has probably been written by hand in assembly, and because it didn't save/restore %ebx, it was hit by the fact that the system call modified it.

(To make it even harder to hit - it probably also only happens with the old "int 0x80" system call mechanism, not with the modern "syscall" entrypoint. Again, you'd probably only see this on old hardware _or_ if you wrote your system call entry routines by hand).

So the virus did a number of strange things to make this show up, but on the other hand the kernel does try to avoid touching user registers, even if we've never really _guaranteed_ that. So the 2.6.16 effect is a mis-feature, even if a _normal_ app would never care. It just happened to bite the infection logic of your virus thing.

Hilse has tested the patch provided by Torvalds as a workaround, and reports:

Indeed, this worked. With a recompiled kernel, everything is running as expected. And yes, it is using the int 0x80 interface from assembly code. As it's viral code, it is trying to avoid any overhead and reuses registers as much as it can (from what I can tell).

Leave it to open source hackers to debug and fix aging viral code so that it works correctly. And shame on the anti-viral industry, Kaspersky Lab in particular, for its attempts to deceive the public by passing off old code as something new.
http://software.newsforge.com/articl.../04/18/1941251

Howto Install The Base GNU/Linux System Onto a USB Thumbdrive With The Root Partition Encrypted

Invention: The TV-Advert Enforcer
Barry Fox

For over 30 years, Barry Fox has trawled through the world's weird and wonderful patent applications, uncovering the most exciting, bizarre or even terrifying new ideas. His column, Invention, is exclusively online. Scroll down for a roundup of previous Invention articles.

The advert enforcer

If a new idea from Philips catches on, the company may not be very popular with TV viewers. The company's labs in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, has been cooking up a way to stop people changing channels to avoid adverts or fast forwarding through ads they have recorded along with their target programme.

The secret, according to a new patent filing, is to take advantage of Multimedia Home Platform - the technology behind interactive television in many countries around the world. MHP software now comes built into most modern digital TV receivers and recorders. It looks for digital flags buried in a broadcast, and displays messages on screen that let the viewer call up extra features, such as additional footage or information about a programme.

Philips suggests adding flags to commercial breaks to stop a viewer from changing channels until the adverts are over. The flags could also be recognised by digital video recorders, which would then disable the fast forward control while the ads are playing.

Philips' patent acknowledges that this may be "greatly resented by viewers" who could initially think their equipment has gone wrong. So it suggests the new system could throw up a warning on screen when it is enforcing advert viewing. The patent also suggests that the system could offer viewers the chance to pay a fee interactively to go back to skipping adverts.

Micro Electrical Generator

There is little point in building tiny micro-electro-mechanical devices (MEMS) if they need big batteries to work. So Washington State University, US, has been working on a radical solution - a microscopic generator that burns hydrocarbon fuel to generate electricity.

Within the device, droplets of fuel are deposited onto a flat metal plate (about 1 millimetre to a side) and then ignited. As the plate heats up, drops of liquid mercury travel along a connected tube to a strip of piezoelectric material. Heat from the mercury causes the piezoelectric strip to flex, generating a small pulse of electric power.

Some of this power is used to create an electrostatic charge which moves the mercury droplets back towards the hot plate to pick up another dose of heat. This lets the system generate a continuous series of electric pulses.

Each micro-generator can only produce about 1 milliwatt of power but an array of several thousand could produce several watts - enough to let MEMS do plenty of useful work.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/arti...-enforcer.html

Seagate Ships First Perpendicular 3.5" Hard Drive
Wolfgang Gruener

Scotts Valley (CA) - Seagate will announce on Tuesday the industry's first 3.5" hard drive that is based on perpendicular recording technology. Targeting enterprise applications, the new Cheetah 15K.5 doubles the capacity of its predecessor and promises 30% more performance.

With the 2.5" perpendicular drive out the door, Seagate has begun transferring the new recording technology, which promises higher capacities and improved performance, into the next form factor. The new Cheetah 15K.5 is positioned as the firm's new flagship hard drive and provides enterprise users significantly more storage space and bandwidth, the manufacturer said.

Compared to the preceding non-perpendicular 15K.4 generation, which has been offered in 36 GB, 73 GB and 146 GB versions, the new 15K.5 is available with 300 GB (four platters), 147 GB (two platters) and 73 GB (one platter). The sustained data transfer rate is up about 30% from 58-96 MB/s in the 15K.4 to about 73-125 MB/s in the 15K.5. Seagate claims that the new Cheetah is the first hard drive to break the 100 MB/s data transfer barrier.

No changes are announced to the drive's reliability, which is still rated at 1.4 million Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF). Also, the platters of the enterprise drive continue to spin at 15,000 rpm; average seek time remains at 3.5-4.0 ms.

Seagate said that the 15K.5 is currently shipping to OEMs with 3 Gb/s serial attached SCSI (SAS), Ultra320 SCSI, and 4 Gb/s fibre channel interfaces. Channel shipments are scheduled for June of this year. Prices of the Cheetahs have not been announced.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/04/17/se...perpendicular/

Review: external storage with ESATA

Thecus Brings SATA to External Storage
Patrick Schmid

Most users do one of two things when their PC runs out of hard disk space: they either add an additional drive or rely on external storage with a USB 2.0 or Firewire connection. However, both options have their disadvantages, since installing a new drive can be a cumbersome process, while external hard drives do not offer the same level of performance as that of directly attached Serial ATA (SATA) or UltraATA. However, external SATA (eSATA) is a worthy alternative.

eSATA falls under the DAS (Direct Attached Story) category, which comprises storage products that are hooked up externally at a high speed using fast interfaces such as SATA, SAS or UltraSCSI.

Taiwanese storage firm Thecus' eSATA device accommodates two SATA drives, with a maximum bandwidth of 300 MB/s. Still eSATA is not going to replace USB 2.0 or Firewire any time soon: eSATA is comparatively a nascent technology and most motherboards do not yet offer it, while USB or Firewire can be found on almost any computer today. For this reason, Thecus decided to equip the N2050 with both eSATA and USB ports.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Conclusion

The date transfer rate of 30 MB/s that USB 2.0 offers does indeed pale in comparison to 100 MB/s for eSATA, while the WD1500 drives are capable of delivering even better performance in RAID 0. It is also good to see that Thecus did not throw the USB 2.0 interface away, because it is a nice backup interface whenyou want to use the device with other computers via USB 2.0.

However, its setup hinders the N2050's performance. The RAID controller seems to prevent even faster data-transfer rates, which we proved was possible by running a RAID 0 setup with exactly the same drives, but on a controller from Promise. With our reference test system, we achieved up to 170 MB/s transfer rates. But this shortcoming in potential is only important in high-performance scenarios such as video editing.

We also hope Thecus will offer JBOD support (not everybody really needs RAID) as well as a way of securing the RAID mode selector switch so that an accidental reset will not cause you to lose your data.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/...ernal_storage/

We like to watch

Most Web Users Are 'Silent Surfers'
Quentin Reade

The majority of web users don't participate online, preferring just to passively read information presented to them, according to new research.

Although 92 per cent of European websites surveyed prompt visitors to participate, the majority (53 per cent) of European internet users are passive, silent surfers.

Just 23 per cent of web users in the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Spain and Italy respond to prompted participation, such as polls and competitions, and a further 24 per cent are unprompted contributors that maintain blogs, websites or post in forums.

The study by JupiterResearch, also warns that the growth of consumer-generated content comes from a sizeable and vocal minority – mainly young and male - and this has a disproportionately wide influence.

Julian Smith, analysts at JupiterResearch, said he expected the influence of this vocal minority to grow:

“With the adoption of content creation tools democratising the publishing of information, consumers will increasingly be exposed to informal, peer produced content alongside formal, professionally created content.”
http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/83383.html?aff

Pays to be popular

Social Bookmarking: Vote Early, Vote Often
Rafe Needleman

"Do you find this page useful?" That's a question that used to appear on the bottom of Web pages. You could click yes or no, or maybe even send a note to the publisher, and it was good. For the publisher. Ultimately, your feedback might have influenced the site owner to improve the site, but it was a slow process, and the feedback loop was not transparent, so you, the user, couldn't see what impact you were making.

The new thing in feedback, at least for tech sites, is to flag a story on Digg.com. If you don't know it, Digg is a fantastic site that collects pointers to Web links (stories, blog entries, and so on) from its users. Links that are popular bubble up to the top of the list. Users of Digg then see these links, and if they also like them, they click a little Digg It button to add another vote. It appears under a square box--called a chiclet by some (like me)--that lists the number of votes the link got. Del.icio.us is similar in some ways. (For a cool mashup of Digg and Del.icio.us, see DiggLicious.com, which displays new Digg and Del.icio.us links in real time, as they are posted.)

There are dozens of other social bookmark sites. Some focus on different topics (such as video) or have interesting user interface fillips. But they are all about the same thing: enabling members of a community to share the content they like the best.

The Digg effect
Digg now rivals Slashdot as the most important nonsearch driver of links to technology sites, which is leading many tech publishers to consider two things: first, how they can get users to Digg their stories and, second, how they can add Digg-like functionality to their own sites.

The easy way for publishers to hasten their entry into the Digg ecosystem is to add a Digg It button or link to pages on their sites. Surprisingly, considering the importance of Digg, few publishers have done this. Our sister site, ZDNet, has some buttons on its blog entries. It's more common to see Add To Del.icio.us links on stories, perhaps because the coding required for that is slightly simpler than the unsupported code it takes to add a Digg It link.

Digg-like voting systems are taking off on other sites. The community search tool Wink, for example, allows users to vote on results, using Digg-like chiclets. The RSS readers Rojo and Newsvine also have voting. Like Digg, these services collect stories from around the Internet, and the voting system helps them rank relevance so that they can present users with better results.

Coming to a site near you
I will not be surprised when content sites begin adding local chiclet voting to their stories. By local, I mean sites may simply use a Digg-like interface to allow users to flag stories they like. The sites can then present these stories on their front page as "most popular." Even if the stories are not submitted to any social or community link sites, such as Digg, it's a good thing for improving relevance on a site. More clicks on chiclets mean a more popular story, and the popular stories get promoted highly, which makes the site seem better.

At some point, chiclet voting may work for both local sites and roll-up sites such as Digg. For example, we may soon be able to vote on a story and have it flagged on the story's own site, as well as on Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, or any other combination of social bookmark sites.

Ultimately, all these voting and bookmarking tools help publishers, by providing information on which stories are popular and which are not. When publishers, bloggers, or site managers see massive traffic coming to a story from Digg, they know they've hit on the right formula, and chances are they'll be thinking about ways to do more stories like that one. It's a virtuous circle. So when you read a story you like and you see an option to vote on it by submitting your vote to a bookmarking service, go ahead and do it. You'll be doing good work for the publisher, and in return, you'll be improving the sites you like the most.

And yes, if you like this story, you can Digg it and add it to Del.icio.us.
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3000_7-...xt&tag=nl.e501

Ad-Aware PR
roy_batty

[Abstract]
Ad-Aware is a poorly written anti-spyware program from Lavasoft. Running it gives you a false sense of safeness. There can be done numerous attacks against this software. I'll show some of the problems and attacks in this write-up. Here's just a summary of the most visible problems I've run into.

1. Definition file
1.1. "Encrypted" with xor \
1.2. Packed with ZIP with simple password - trivial to intercept def
updates and change the defs
to make the malware invisible
1.3. No checksum in the def file /
1.4. Big redundancy in the def file
1.5. !!! Multiplying the number of entries in the def file with constant
1.46 to make it look it has more definitions !!!

2. Program
2.1. Poorly written checksum algo
2.2. Poorly written scanning algo (slow as hell)
2.3. CSI works only for in-memory images and is useless

You want the proofs? Read the following text ...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. [Intro]
"Lavasoft is the industry leader and most respected provider of anti-spyware solutions. Lavasoft develops and delivers the highest quality antispyware solutions to keep your computer or network free of compromising and intrusive threats to your privacy."
--

This write-up reviews the industry leading antispyware solution from the most respected provider of anti-spyware solutions - Ad-Aware from Lavasoft. I will show that this software is just a piece of crap, nothing more, nothing less. PR sells, right?

2. [Ad-Aware SE]
"Ad-Aware SE is the latest version of our award winning and industry leading line of antispyware solutions and represents the next generation in Spyware detection and removal. It is quite simply the most advanced solution available to protect your privacy. With the all new Code Sequence Identification (CSI) technology that we have developed, you will not only be protected from known content, but will also have advanced protection against many of their unknown variants. "
--

2.1. "Encrypted" with xor
The reference file defs.ref is just a plain ZIP file that is then "encrypted" using following algo.

void decode_mem(char *b, unsigned int b_s)
{
static char decode_string[] = "\x00\x50\x50\x50\x50\x50\x50\x50\x68\x69\x73\x20\x70\x67\x6 7\x67\x67\x67\x67\x20\x6d\x75\x73\x74\xe0\xe0\xe0\xe0\xe0\xe 0\x6e";

int unsigned y = 0;
for(unsigned int x = 0; x < b_s; x++)
{
b[x] ^= decode_string[y];
if(++y == (sizeof(decode_string) - 1))
y = 0;
}
}

Pointer b points to memory with the content of defs.ref and b_s is just size of the buffer.

2.2. Packed with ZIP with simple password After "decrypting" there is a ZIP file with file 29388543757543549 inside. The file name is visible in ad-aware.exe. The ZIP file is password protected and the password is "This program ^u@_LSstreams145681902". First part of the password [This program ^u@_LSstreams] is in plaintext inside ad-aware.exe, second part is created runtime.

2.3. No checksum in the def file
After "decrypting" and decompressing there is a definition file with
following structure.

[header]
[family names]
[www names]
[family descriptions]
[obj_stream]

offset size description
32h WORD? internal build
80h ???? version of ref file, ends with 0ffh
100h ???? family names, separated by 0ffh, ends with 0ffffh
???? ???? www names, separated with 0ffh, ends with 0ffffh
and content of ini file
(comments for family names)
gets stored to description.ini

???? ???? stream of objects ... starts with word OBJ_STREAM(n)[x]
where n is prolly number of the stream streamu (1 for now)
- IMHO preparation for incremental updates -
and x is nunmber of objects in the stream
at the end of stream there is 0ffffh again

[Example of reference file, info gives ad-aware directly]
Definitions File Loaded:
Reference Number : SE1R47 24.05.2005 offet 80h
Internal build : 55 offst 32h
File location : G:nadanadadefs.ref ...
File size : 435074 Bytes file size before decompression
Total size : 1439523 Bytes file size after decompression
Signature data size : 1408291 Bytes sizeof(family descriptions) + sizeof(obj_stream)
Reference data size : 30720 Bytes family names size
Signatures total : 40174 [x] * 1.46 + www names
CSI Fingerprints total : 886 entries in OBJ_STREAM with type 0f0h
CSI data size : 30371 Bytes sizeof entries with type 0f0h
Target categories : 15 known before
Target families : 679 count of family names

There is no checksum of the content of the definition file nor is the file signed. It is trivial to modify the content of the file, for example modifying checksums of malware binaries by malware that wants to hide itself from Ad-aware is thus really _very_ easy.

2.4. Big redundancy in the def file
The definitions consist of registry keys, www sites, file names and the most visible part form the checksums of malware binaries.
[ Snippet from defs.ref]
...
3830397280 10842529196097280 97280
3657194622 106199918742094622 94622
3830994208 1059056701129094208 94208
3697194208 105862934264094208 94208
3697194210 1058568963132094210 94210
...

Every checksum entry consists of a header, reference to family name and three ASCII numbers. Two of the numbers are checksums concatenated with file size and the third one is the file size.

...
38303[97280]
108425291960[97280]
[97280]
...

2.5. Poorly written checksum algo Computation of first level checksum

unsigned int compute_first_level_fingerprint(unsigned char *b)
{
unsigned int checksum = 0;

for(unsigned int x = 0; x < 0x600; x += 0x20)
{
checksum += b[x];
checksum += x;
}

return checksum;
}

Computation of second level checksum

unsigned int compute_second_level_fingerprint(unsigned char *b, int l)
{
unsigned int checksum = 0;
unsigned int x = 0;

for(; x < 0x2000; x += 0x2)
{
checksum += b[x];
checksum += x;

if(x >= (l - 2))
break;
}

for(x = (l >> 1); x < (l >> 1) + 0x7ffc; x += 0x2)
{
checksum += b[x];
checksum += x;

if(x >= (l - 2))
break;
}

return checksum;
}

Pointer b points to buffer holding content of the file, l is the buffer/file size.

...
sprintf(size, "%d", x);
sprintf(first_level, "%d%d", compute_first_level_fingerprint(b), x);
sprintf(second_level, "%d%d%d%d", compute_second_level_fingerprint(b, x), (unsigned char) b[x >> 1], (unsigned char) b[x - 4], x);
...

first_level now holds the first level checksum
second_level now holds the second leve checksum
size now holds the file size

Now we can just do a string compare against checksum entries in data file. If match is found, the fourth word is a index into family names string list. There are also entries that have description incorporated, but the entry structure is very easy to guess - feel free to explore it on your own.

As you can see, the checksum is really very basic one and could be easily spoofed. Colisions are easy to find. Next thing is the ASCII format of the checksums and file size concatenating.

Lavasoft claims "Now Ad-Aware and Ad-Watch Use much smaller reference files" and I just have to say: you really want me to believe that?

2.6. !!! Multiplying the number of entries in the def file with constant
1.46 to make it look it has more definitions !!!

2.7. Poorly written scanning algo (slow as hell)
"Scanning speed increased" is written in PR blablas that come with Ad-Aware SE. I must laugh when I hear this. I must laugh _very_ loudly.

The psudo-C code of Ad-Aware file scan algo follows.

for entry from entries
{
alloc_mem(file_size);

read_file_to_memory(); // no memory mapped files, ReadFile()
count_checksums();

if(does_match_entry(entry, checksums))
break;

free_mem();
}

The real "Scanning speed increased" algo follows.

map_file_to_memory();
count_checksums();

for entry from entries
{
if(does_match_entry(entry, checksums))
break;
}
unmap_file_from_memory();

So if you run the Ad-Awares file scan and you hear disk making noisy sounds, it's not like Ad-Aware is doing a good job finding the malware on your drive. It's just it uses very poorly written algo, that makes a lot of unnecessary disk reads thus wasting resources of your computer.

2.7. CSI works only for in-memory images and is useless

"Uses our all new CSI (Code Sequence Identification) technology to identify new and unknown variants of known targets"
Oh. What a technology! I wondered how they're doing this, I was thinking about some emulation engine, code shrinker, advanced pattern matching ... I also thought (everyone must think that) that CSI is used on file scanning basis. It's not. CSI scanning is used only when scanning memory and thus ... is useless. Another PR blabla.

3. [Outro]
"Lavasoft's Ad-Aware SE, the world's leading brand in antispyware solutions, has been acknowledged and awarded in variety of distunguished magazines and publications all over the world." --

Acknowledged!

btw it's not just a coincidence that the Ad-Aware engine uses another PR crap firm F-Secure in their products for fighting with spyware. Nice simbiotic.
This text was written in the city of Sofia

(C) 1999-06 Roy Batty, who is a stranger in the world he was made to live in roy.batty@phreaker.net

Eddie lives...somewhere in time

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

[decode.cpp]
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <windows.h>

void decode_mem(char *b, unsigned int b_s)
{
static char decode_string[] = "\x00\x50\x50\x50\x50\x50\x50\x50\x68\x69\x73\x20\x70\x67\x6 7\x67\x67\x67\x67\x20\x6d\x75\x73\x74\xe0\xe0\xe0\xe0\xe0\xe 0\x6e";

int unsigned y = 0;
for(unsigned int x = 0; x < b_s; x++)
{
b[x] ^= decode_string[y];
if(++y == (sizeof(decode_string) - 1))
y = 0;
}
}

void main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
if(argc < 2)
{
printf("Syntax: decrypt_def_file.exe <def_file>\n");
return;
}

HANDLE h = CreateFile(argv[1], GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE, 0, NULL, OPEN_EXISTING, 0, 0);
if(h == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE)
return;

DWORD s = SetFilePointer(h, 0, 0, FILE_END);
SetFilePointer(h, 0, 0, FILE_BEGIN);

HANDLE m = CreateFileMapping(h, NULL, PAGE_READWRITE, 0, 0, NULL);
CloseHandle(h);

if(h == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE)
return;

char *b = (char *) MapViewOfFile(m, FILE_MAP_ALL_ACCESS, 0, 0, 0);
CloseHandle(m);
if(!b)
return;

decode_mem(b, s);

UnmapViewOfFile(b);

return;
}
[decode.cpp]

http://rootkit.com/newsread.php?newsid=471

Yahoo Profit Falls 22%; Ad Sales Up
Laurie J. Flynn

Yahoo reported a 22 percent decline in first-quarter profit on Tuesday but met Wall Street's earnings forecast, helped by solid growth in advertising sales.

As a result, Yahoo's shares rose $1.92, or 6.1 percent, in after-hours trading, after closing up 33 cents, at $31.30, in the regular session.

Investors were relieved to see Yahoo avoid a repeat of last quarter, when it issued a cautious forecast that set off a 13 percent decline in its share price.

Yahoo, which runs the largest Internet portal, said profit fell to 11 cents a share from 14 cents a share a year earlier. Revenue in the period, which ended March 31, rose 34 percent, to $1.57 billion from $1.17 billion.

Yahoo said revenue in its branded and search advertising businesses rose 35 percent, to $1.38 billion, as more businesses paid to have their ads displayed next to search results. Sales in Yahoo's fee-based services business, including its deal with Internet service providers like AT&T and Verizon Communications to sell digital subscriber line services, increased 25 percent, to $186 million.

"Our overall advertising business saw solid growth and our user numbers continued to climb," Terry S. Semel, the chief executive, said.

Yahoo continues to face vigorous competition in advertising from Google, which leads the category, and Microsoft, which holds a distant third place. But Yahoo executives dismissed reports that it was rapidly losing to Google in share of overall searches. In a departure from the company's usual practice of not commenting on such issues, Susan L. Decker, the chief financial officer, told analysts that Yahoo had a 15 to 20 percent gain in search queries during the quarter.

Earlier Tuesday, comScore, a market research company, released the results of a survey that showed Yahoo had lost considerable market share to Google in the last year. In March, Google's share of the online searches in the United States rose 19 percent, to 43 percent of all searches from 36 percent in March 2005, while Yahoo's share declined 8 percent, to 28 percent of all searches, during the same period. Microsoft's share of searches declined to 13 percent from 17 percent in the period, comScore said.

Yahoo executives said Tuesday that new technology the company was developing to increase its advertising search revenue would soon be ready for a phased roll-out.

"It's a great opportunity for us," Mr. Semel said. The new technology, he said, would improve Yahoo's ability to attach paid ads to searches, an area in which Google is considered to have superior technology today. "It will allow us to do a better job every time we do a search," Mr. Semel said.

The company first described the new system last year. Executives said they would describe it more fully next month at a meeting with analysts. Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, said the system was crucial to Yahoo's growth, and the company would have benefited by introducing it sooner.

Net revenue, or sales excluding the fees Yahoo shares with its advertising partners, rose 33 percent, to $1.09 billion from $821 million.

"This was a very good quarter," Mr. Rashtchy said. "Expectations were realistic, in fact low, but the results were solid and consistent."

Yahoo said its net income fell to $159.9 million from $204.6 million a year earlier, partly because of higher stock option expenses.

Excluding the stock expenses, Yahoo's earnings were $231 million, or 15 cents a share, up from $195 million, or 13 cents a share, a year earlier.

Looking ahead, Yahoo's outlook for the second quarter was also in line with expectations. The company forecast second-quarter revenue of $1.08 billion to $1.16 billion, and full-year net revenue of $4.6 billion to $4.85 billion.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call expect Yahoo to post second-quarter sales of $1.08 billion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/business/19yahoo.html

AT&T and Verizon: We Own Your Congress
Preston Gralla

Wonder why AT&T and other telcos are winning the net neutrality debate, and just about every other issue that comes before government? It's simple: Money talk. Telcos spent a whopping $60 million in lobbying money just at the federal level, second only to the health care industry, Business Week reports.

That's bad enough, but there's worse as well. The Center for Public Integrity compiled a list of the top 100 money-givers to Congress between 1998 and 2005, and telcos dominate the list.

Here are a few of its findings:

* Verizon Communications Inc. $81,870,000
* SBC Communications Inc. $58,035,037
* AT&T Corp. $53,349,499
* Sprint Corp. $47,276,585
* BellSouth Corp. $33,732,827
* Qwest Communications International Inc. $24,523,480

So next time you wonder why telcos always seem to get their way with the feds, just look at those numbers. They're buying the best Congress money can buy.
http://techsearch.cmp.com/blog/archi...verizon_1.html

The RIAA vs. the EFF: Who Will Redefine Copyright for the Digital Age
Hannibal

In a recent editorial, an attorney representing a defendant in one of the RIAA's 19,000 lawsuits over P2P technology made the case that the RIAA's arguments in Elektra v. Barker, if accepted by a judge, have the potential to undermine the very nature of the Internet. Here at Ars, we've previously touched on the RIAA's radical notion, first introduced in this case, that simply making files available on a shared folder constitutes infringement (regardless of whether the files were actually accessed by another party). The new editorial reiterates the dangerous absurdity of parts of the RIAA's arguments, but in favorably citing a recent EFF amicus brief in the case it also raises the question of who, in fact, is really the party arguing for the pre-digital status quo.

The EFF's most recent brief, summarized here and available here, has been covered here at Ars before. But it's worth taking another good look at, because of the odd and ironic way that it places the EFF on the side of arguing for a pre-Internet model of distribution, while the RIAA, in its own twisted fashion, tries to drag copyright law into the digital age.

To recap briefly, the EFF has caught the RIAA and their allies (the MPAA and the US Attorney General's Office) trying sneak through the courts a complete overhaul of existing copyright legislation. The change in the definition of a copyright owner's exclusive right of distribution that the RIAA seeks to have the court acknowledge is at once troubling and fascinating—troubling because, hey, it's the RIAA that's pushing this, and we all know they're Pure Evil(TM), and fascinating because in its own odd way the attempted alteration would "update" copyright law to take account of the reality of digital distribution in a manner that it currently does not.
Exclusive rights, and the RIAA's arguments against P2P

US copyright law gives rightsholders the following exclusive rights over their work:
The right to reproduce the copyrighted work;
The right to prepare derivative works based upon the work;
The right to distribute copies of the work to the public;
The right to perform the copyrighted work publicly; and
The right to display the copyrighted work publicly.

(Bitlaw has a good, quick rundown of these rights. For even more practical, layperson-friendly discussion of these issues, I like Nolo's The Copyright Handbook: How to Protect and Use Written Works, by Stephen Fishman.)

In its lawsuits against P2P users, the RIAA wants to argue two things. First, it wants to argue that illegal downloaders are infringing on the copyright owners' exclusive right to reproduce their copyrighted work. As the very word "copyright" suggests, the rightsholders' exclusive right to make copies of a work is at the very heart of copyright law, and the EFF in fact concurs with the RIAA on this issue, holding that P2P downloading is technically copyright infringement from a legal standpoint.

More controversially, though, the RIAA would like to argue that those who upload copyrighted works onto P2P networks are infringing on rightsholders' exclusive right to distribute copies of the work to the public. This argument that a digital transmission of a work that results in a copy on the other end equals distribution is where things start to get really, really interesting.
Defining "distribution"

The letter of US copyright law specifically and clearly stipulates that in order to "distribute" a copyrighted work, an actual, physical exchange of a material object (a book, a CD, a tape, etc.) must take place. In this sense, the Copyright Act isn't really cognizant of the concept of digital distribution of copyrighted works—it just isn't on the law's radar at all. Apparently, the DMCA didn't really fix things in this regard, either.

As far as the courts are concerned, the issue of distribution and digital transmission is significantly murkier. The EFF's brief illuminates just how murky the issue is, with some courts taking for granted that digital transmission does constitute infringing distribution and at least one lower court hewing to the letter of the law and ruling that it does not. The EFF therefore urges the US District Court to be the first court to explicitly tackle the issue of digital transmission and distribution, and to define "distribution" so that it requires the exchange of a physical object.

The part that's fascinating and somewhat ironic, at least to me, is that the EFF is now in the position of arguing in favor of an outmoded, pre-Internet concept of "distribution," and one that runs directly counter the plain sense of the way that both the language and the concept of "digital content distribution" is currently employed in just about any online venue where the topic is discussed. Would anyone argue that Apple is not, in fact, in the business of distributing music now? (Actually, that's a bad example, because Apple may be arguing exactly that in their ongoing dispute with Apple Records. Still, you get the point.)

Anybody who moves music, video, and text online is in the "distribution" business, more or less. That's how we think about it, and that's how we talk about it. So does it really make sense to continue to define distribution strictly in terms of the transfer of material objects, and then to adopt the fiction that consumers of digital content are somehow licensed "reproducers" and that the distributors of it are not actually doing any "distributing."

I'm not actually sure what's to be done here. On the one hand, the RIAA can't be allowed to single-handedly remake copyright law so as to favor its own business model and possibly wreck the Internet. But on the other hand, copyright law needs to be fundamentally rethought for the digital age. I just don't trust anyone in Washington—neither those in Congress who'll vote on any overhaul legislation nor those on K Street who'll write it—to do anything but stick it to consumers and innovators. The last time we tried something even remotely like this, we got the DMCA.
Conclusions

Ultimately, the Elektra v. Barker case is about case law and legal precedent. On one side is the RIAA and their allies, who'd like to have a high court "clarify" in a ruling that will bind the lower courts that digital transmission is indeed "distribution" per the Copyright Act. On the other is the EFF, who would also like a binding, clarificatory ruling to the opposite effect.

However this case turns out, it's going to have major repercussions for everyone in the digital content business. And however it turns out, I have no doubt that it's only the opening salvo in a battle that will take at least a decade to sort itself out. This case will be appealed, regardless of who wins, and I'm certain that the issue of digital transmission and distribution will eventually be dealt with in Washington, either by the US Supreme Court or by Congress.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060418-6626.html

Online Music Hitting False Notes
Troy Wolverton

The online music business is booming, but is anybody making real money at it?

If you're doing the actual selling of music -- or music subscriptions -- to consumers, the short-term answer appears to be not much. Competition, marketing expenses, a faulty business model, slow-changing consumer attitudes and the use by some companies of music as a lure to sell other goods and services have all conspired to keep the business largely in the red.

And that's not likely to change anytime soon, no matter -- or arguably because of -- how many millions of songs Apple Computer (AAPL:Nasdaq) sells through its iTunes music store, analysts say.

"It's a long-haul business right now," says Aram Sinnreich, managing partner of Radar Research, a Los Angeles-based consulting firm. "It will be at least three years before anyone can make a serious profit selling digital music," largely because of the hold that Apple has on the market.

And even then, Sinnreich says, making money will require some serious changes in the way consumers are buying online music.

"Nobody will ever make money from selling 99-cent downloads" as Apple does through iTunes, he says. "There's not a margin in it."

Regardless of what's happening on the bottom line, though, companies are certainly seeing huge growth in digital music sales. The Recording Industry Association of America, for instance, estimates that the U.S. retail market for digital downloaded songs and albums grew to $503.6 million in 2005 from $183.4 million in 2004. The RIAA estimated that U.S. consumers spent another $421.6 million on ring tones and other mobile music content last year and some $149.2 million on music subscription services.

(The organization did not have estimates for prior-year ring tone or subscription sales, meaning that according to the RIAA's data, they effectively grew from a base of $0).

This boom has contrasted sharply with the overall music industry, where retail sales fell about 0.6% last year to $12.27 billion.

At Apple in particular, iTunes revenue is becoming increasingly important to the company's overall sales. The company groups iTunes song sales with sales of iPod accessories. In the first quarter, that unit tallied $491 million in revenue, or 8.5% of the company's overall sales, up from $177 million, or 5% of the company's sales, in the same period a year earlier. Apple has sold more than 1 billion songs through iTunes; citing data from Nielsen SoundScan, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said that iTunes accounts for more than 80% of the total U.S. market for digital music sales.

That success to date has had some investors and financial analysts salivating at the company's prospects, giving yet one more reason to be bullish on Apple's shares.

But they may be getting a bit ahead of themselves. While Apple says iTunes is operating in the black, financial analysts generally estimate that the store is marginally profitable at best.

And even that performance seems to be a rare exception. Napster (NAPS:Nasdaq) , which operates a rival online music services, is losing considerable money each quarter. Another rival, RealNetworks (RNWK:Nasdaq) , has been consistently losing money on its actual operations, which exclude gains from investments or legal settlements, the company's real money makers of late. And few analysts think Yahoo!'s (YHOO:Nasdaq) music service, which is charging a bargain basement price of $5 a month for a subscription, is operating in the black either.

The problem digital music vendors face is that they haven't figured out a business model that works, analysts say. The industry is reminiscent of the early days of e-commerce, when everyone and his brother rushed in to set up a Web store but nobody had figured out how to turn a profit.

Selling downloads a la carte isn't a profitable business, because for every 99-cent song (like Apple sells), stores have to pay the music labels 65 cents or more, according to analysts' estimates. Add in marketing and technology costs, and the margins start to become very slim.

Many analysts see subscription services as the long-term future for the business, because they offer greater margins and recurring revenue. Indeed, Chris Gorog, Napster's CEO, estimates that the margins for subscription services are "four times" greater than those for individual downloads.

But today's subscription services aren't compatible with the iPod, which is by far the most popular digital music player. And Apple has shown no signs of losing its lead in the digital music player market or any interest in making iTunes subscription-based music -- or opening the iPod to other music services.

The iPod's success is holding back subscription services "to a tremendous degree at this point," Sinnreich says.

But other analysts say that's not all Apple's fault. Even if selling songs one-by-one online isn't great for music vendors, it's the method consumers are most familiar and comfortable with. Apple has made much of the idea that iTunes allows consumers to own, not rent, music, and that message has resonated with consumers who for years have been buying CDs and, before that, LPs and tapes.

For subscription services to take off, it's going to "require far more consumer education and changes in behavior compared to how they have traditionally purchased music," says Ross Rubin, an analyst with industry research firm NPD Group.

Some analysts believe that there's little future in merely selling songs -- or even subscriptions to digital music. Profitable companies will be those that defray costs in other ways, who use music to lure in customers for other services or products, or who see music as an incremental, not primary, revenue source.

Apple, for example, uses iTunes to support sales of iPods -- not the other way around. Cellular network providers are already making considerable incremental profits off ring tones, analysts say.

If so, the online world could end up looking a lot like the offline world, where music store companies have been closing and consolidating in recent years. In their place, most music CDs are now being sold through general or electronics retailers such as Best Buy (BBY:Nasdaq) or Wal-Mart (WMT:NYSE) , companies that often use discounted CDs to lure in customers to buy other products.

MusicNow, the digital music service from Time Warner's (TWX:NYSE) AOL unit, is profitable, says Neil Smith. But that has a lot to do with being able to defray marketing costs across AOL's huge user base, he says. And selling subscriptions to MusicNow is just one piece of a larger strategy of marketing music and music-related content, he says.

At this point, the companies that make money on digital music "won't be the pure-play music companies," says Smith. "If history is any guide, the only people that make money [in music] are the [music] labels."
http://www.thestreet.com/_googlen/te.../10279448.html

Music Labels Jockey for 'American Idol' Exposure
Jeff Leeds

Question: Who's going to get the ax this week on "American Idol"?

The answer for many in the recording industry is: Who cares? More pressing by far, in certain music circles these days, is who wins and loses among record labels trying to land their artists and songs on the blockbuster television show, now in its fifth season.

Most of the show's viewers may obsess on the drama leading to the coronation of a new Idol. And music executives are watching too: the show tends to bestow commercial success on its champions, who have the benefit of starting their music careers with a built-in bloc of voters behind them. Viewers, not to mention new fans, snapped up CD's from past winners, particularly Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson, by the millions.

But the show has become so popular that even the songs performed on the show — either by established artists making guest appearances or by the contestants themselves — receive a sales boost in some cases. While the exposure does not spark sales of every song or artist every week — far from it — the sales spikes so far have been enough to turn "American Idol" into a coveted booking for established artists looking to return to the mainstream or maintain their public appeal. As a result, the on-screen anxiety over who makes the cut each week is now being mirrored by off-screen hand-wringing over how to tap the exposure offered by the show, which is due to close out its season late next month.

For one clear measure of the "Idol" Effect, consider the Canadian singer-songwriter Daniel Powter. In early February Mr. Powter, who had enjoyed a radio smash in Europe last year with his song "Bad Day," had only begun to develop fans in the United States.

But on Feb. 7 "American Idol" producers started using the song as a send-off for departing contestants. Sales of the digital single of "Bad Day" have since exploded, with the song logging multiple weeks at No. 1 as downloads routinely exceed 110,000 copies a week, totaling more than 690,000 copies through April 9, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. Mr. Powter's CD is expected to have its debut on the national sales chart today in the Top 10, a respectable start for a new artist.

Geoff Mayfield, a senior analyst at Billboard magazine, notes that the show has appeared to spur sales for particular acts since its first season. But this year, "as the show gets more established as a ratings giant, there are more people in the consumer base that are reacting to it," Mr. Mayfield said. "There's no longer a variety show like there used to be. Aside from Leno and Letterman, what do we have on television that reminds us of what a variety show used to be? It serves that purpose."

"American Idol," which has been averaging 30 million viewers a night, has crushed every rival on the television schedule, including the Grammy Awards, which has not gone unnoticed by music executives, who had viewed the recording academy's annual telecast as the biggest opportunity of the year to secure television exposure for artists. So as the stature of "Idol" has increased, so has the eagerness of record labels hoping to place their artists on the show.

Nigel Lythgoe, one of the executive producers of the show, said that in choosing the themes and artists that will appear, "we've always said we are going to introduce back to America the greatest songwriters in the world."

Yet the show also made a habit of picking artists who happen to have new CD's to promote, including Barry Manilow, Kenny Rogers and Shakira.

When it comes to determining which artists will have the chance to bask in the show's exposure, the clout of "Idol" means that the producers can largely choose whom they wish. "They're holding all the cards," said Monte Lipman, president of Universal Records.

The show has a deal under which the winner's CD will be distributed by Sony BMG's RCA Music Group. That label is also home to acts that are appearing this season, including Mr. Manilow and Rod Stewart. But the producers have been willing to spread the exposure a bit; they had an episode in which contestants had to perform Stevie Wonder tunes (he's with Universal). And Mr. Rogers, who records for EMI, has been a guest.

Artists do occasionally decline. Mr. Lythgoe said the producers had extended an invitation to Prince, though it is unclear whether that famously private star would be willing to spend time working up song arrangements with the contestants, as past guests have. "He's a very shy man," said Mr. Lythgoe.

It was the show's obvious commercial power during past seasons that encouraged the producers to make guest appearances a staple of the show this year. "We realized we had this influence as well," Mr. Lythgoe said. "We're giving them something back. They're not just coming on this corny American show."

Major stars, he added, "know longevity in this business comes from riding the waves that come by you. At the moment, we are the wave."

The producers also carry most of the influence over which songs are performed on the show. As Mr. Lythgoe explained it, the producers choose an over-arching theme for each week's show, and then provide contestants with extensive lists of songs to choose from that both fit the theme and have been approved for use by music publishers, who control the song copyrights.

There are still efforts to game the system, as one senior label executive affirmed, agreeing to speak only on condition of anonymity, to avoid angering the show's producers. He said he tried to send packages of his company's music to the contestants in the hope that one might choose to perform one of its tunes. Mr. Lythgoe responded, "We've got a very good security firm."

It is not clear exactly what determines whether a particular contestant's performance will generate a sales spike. The results can be unpredictable. On the March 1 episode, for example, the contestant Chris Daughtry sang "Hemorrhage (in My Hands)," which had been a hit for the rock band Fuel in 2000. Sales of the digital single soared to more than 17,900 copies the following week, up from just over 1,100, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Mr. Daughtry's timing was fortuitious: Fuel recently parted ways with its lead singer, and is now auditioning for a new one. "It just came out of the blue," said Paul Geary, the band's manager. "Our Web site lit up. This guy gets on the air and nails the band's biggest hit. I think he'd be a contender for the gig."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/ar...on/19idol.html

P2P saved the music

New Paradigm Opened Market To New Music
Christopher Hutsul

Crooner Michel Bublé was the toast of the Junos April 2. It didn't matter that the throwback crooner (who's the poor man's Harry Connick Jr., who is a poor man's Dean Martin, who is the poor man's Frank Sinatra), has nothing to do with the real musical revolution that's going on in Canada right now.

If the event were truly about excellence, alternative Canadian acts Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Metric and Stars would have been centre stage. Those bands, and a handful of other performers, have turned on music fans around the world.

The buzz at festivals like SWSX in Texas and CMJ in New York ? important gatherings for the makers of new music and the people who listen to it ? is all about this family of indie rockers from the north.

Our scene is the darling of New York music press: it seems like every week there's another story in the New York Times about Canada's pop mastery. Indeed, Canadian rock stars, whether reflected in CD sales or not, are on fire. For the first time since Martha and the Muffins, it's cool to be a Canadian rocker.

It only makes sense that the recording industry would showcase an artist like Bublé in favour of an indie act like Arcade Fire, because in the end, Bublé fans pay for music, while many Arcade Fire fans don't. It's not that Arcade Fire fans are bad people ? it's just that those who'd seek out new, challenging music are also more likely to have the technological wherewithal to be able to download for free. I suspect that Bublé fans are, in a sense, a throwback too. To them, the place to find music is the record store. If you're in the business of selling CDs, you're going to want to promote musicians that appeal to this kind of audience. The hype at the Junos won't hurt.

But the real story is the renaissance that's happening in Canadian pop music.

It's hard to quantify the success and influence of the aforementioned bands in any traditional sense, because so many of their fans have illicit copies of their material. On paper, it might appear that Bublé has sold many more albums than, say, the new wave Montreal band Wolf Parade. But if you were to count actual tracks distributed, legally and illegally, you'd see a different picture.

The Canadian Recording Industry Association says the industry's in a slump. That may be true, but music as an art form is being enjoyed more fervently than it has since, well, probably ever.

It's hard to pin down what, exactly, brought about this renaissance. But isn't it curious that Canada has enjoyed this renaissance half a decade after the recording industry said file sharing would kill music?

The advent of Napster ? a simple computer program that allowed people to share MP3 files freely ? sent the industry into a paranoid tizzy. Big time performers such as Metallica and Dr Dre risked their street cred to denounce the software. Dour anti-piracy campaigns were launched to make us feel guilty about illegal file sharing. Keep music coming, they said, as if file sharing was the death blow.

Not only has music survived, it has flourished, at least, in a spiritual sense, if not in CRIA's books.

I believe Napster re-engaged us with music, and reminded us how rewarding the discovery of music can be. It exposed us to sounds we wouldn't have heard through traditional channels, and challenged us to expand our repertoire of listening material. For audiences, it provided an opportunity to sample music from genres that we previously had no access to.

Your neighbourhood record store stocked only the tiniest sliver of music being made around the world.

Now, access to all this new music, and volumes from the pioneers of blues, rock and jazz, is dizzying. It has led, ultimately, into the creation of more complex, informed content.

I chatted with Mark Mothersbaugh of rock group Devo on the subject a few weeks ago. He contrasted our current cultural environment with that of the 1970s. Today's music catalogue is far more diverse than what was available to him in his youth. He says file sharing has helped music mature.

"When I was a kid I went to the record store and there was this one little bin with 30 records in it called `alternative,' " says Mothersbaugh. "Now that bin is gigantic. It's bigger than a record store ? it's the whole Internet."

Mothersbaugh disagrees with the notion file sharing is inherently wrong, and says we need to look at the bigger picture.

"Historically speaking . . . music wasn't always something that you could be charged money for," he says. "Music was something free. (We didn't start charging for music) until recorded music came into place . . . and we were able to say `Hey, if you listen to this music you have to pay me.' That's a relatively new concept in our civilization.''

We hear a lot less about file sharing today ? Napster became a pay site a la iTunes music store. But it still goes on.

For new bands that don't have the backing of major labels, the business model has changed. Instead of recording an album, sitting back, waiting for royalties to come in, whining about how the record label has mishandled your publicity, you hope that young MP3 fans will do your viral marketing for you. So that when you pull into Nowhere USA, there's a venue packed with screaming fans.

It's a more intimate financial relationship between the performer and his or her audience.

While this new model may not benefit the recording industry, it spells good times ahead for the people who make music and love music. It's a better place to be than in the pre-Napster era, when alternative Canadian acts could neither sell records or draw a crowd.

Instead of bringing an end to music, file sharing has, in a sense, saved it.

After last's week's Junos, it dawned on me that the only real threat to music in Canada is the ongoing glorification of pablum over art.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...d=968350072197

Tech Firms: Don't Fence Us In
AP

Media and technology companies warned Tuesday that new European Union broadcasting rules could restrict the growth of emerging media formats such as video broadcasts through the internet and mobile phones.

An alliance of companies, including ITV, Yahoo, Vodafone, Intel and Cisco Systems, warned that a European Commission proposal to impose rules for traditional broadcasters on new media providers could have "unintended consequences" and hurt investment.

The draft legislation proposed in December aims to level the playing field by applying the same rules to everyone.

However, Intellect, a London-based business lobby representing technology companies, said Tuesday that it would be difficult enforce strict rules designed for television broadcasters on video transmitted over the internet or on third-generation mobile phones.

The EU proposal could ultimately mean less investment for an area that has enormous growth potential — leading to fewer firms, less innovation and higher prices, the group said in a statement.

"Many services unconnected to scheduled broadcast television will be unintentionally caught," it said.

"Citizen media such as blogs, video-casts and the like are one of the most exciting developments enabled by new technology. This phenomenon has the potential to create new businesses ... but this proposed regulation severely risks stunting its growth," it said.

EU officials were not immediately available Tuesday to respond to the criticism, but the EU executive has insisted that it has no plans to regulate the internet.

The European Internet Services Providers Association is also concerned about the "lack of clarity" in the EU draft law and is unsure what kind of technologies would be governed by the stricter rules, the association's Secretary General Richard Nash said.

"The U.K. government has taken a pro-active line stimulating the debate. In other countries, there's less awareness of it," he said.

The law will need the backing of the European Parliament and 25 European Union governments before it can enter into force. The Parliament is likely to vote on it later this year.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70681-0.html

Apple to Build New 50-Acre Campus In Cupertino
Katie Marsal

Apple Computer is planning to build a new, 50-acre campus about a mile from its present headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., chief executive Steve Jobs revealed this week.

"What's happened at Apple is that our business has basically tripled in the last five or six years," Jobs said on Tuesday evening at a Cupertino city council meeting. "And what that's meant, is that our headcount in Cupertino has dramatically expanded."

"We are in 30 other buildings now," Jobs continued, "and they keep getting further and further away from the campus."

Having its employees spread over so many locations quickly became "very frustrating" from Apple, Jobs said. So several months ago the company decided that it needed to build a new campus.

"We've rented every scrap of building we could find in Cupertino," Jobs explained.

With a dearth of corporate real estate in Cupertino, Jobs and company initially feared that they would have to shop for expansion space outside the town that has been Apple's home for nearly three decades.

"After looking at a lot of things, we found something in Cupertino that was a possibility.... It was more expensive, a lot more expensive," Jobs told council members.

He explained that Apple had gone ahead and acquired 9 separate properties located next to each other along Interstate 280 near Pruneridge Rd. -- across the street from the 100-acre HP parcel.

Jobs said the company plans to level the buildings that currently reside on the combined 50-acre lot to form what will eventually be the company's second home, about a mile away from its current headquarters.

"We're pretty thrilled," Jobs told the city council. "Since we're your largest taxpayer, I thought you might be happy for us."

Jobs said it would likely take three to four years to design and build the campus that will accommodate 3,000 to 3,500 employees.

"We'll probably get larger still," Jobs said referring to the time period beyond its corporate expansion.
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1682

File-Sharing Still Campus Problem
Josh Hirschland

This year, University administrators have considered subscribing to a legal online music service. Through an agreement with a program like Napster, iTunes, or, most likely, Cdigix, Columbia would join more than 100 colleges and universities nationwide in giving students this kind of service.

I spoke to administrators dealing with the potential agreement in November, expecting that they would talk about the deal as a perk that tour guides could talk about while promoting Columbia. Instead, they wrapped the deal in language not of rights, but of liability.

“It’s a way of being proactive because eventually, universities become easy targets,” Robert Taylor, senior associate director at Columbia’s Student Development and Activities office, said. “We want to figure out what proactive steps we can take, so we can at least demonstrate that we’re serving our educational mission giving students opportunities to not engage in illegal behavior.”

However, schools that have subscribed to the legal services have found wildly uneven responses. In an interview with the Chronicle for Higher Education, administrators from four schools differed in whether their schools had received fewer complaints of file-sharing from the recording industry.

“A key concern is that students can really get into trouble,” Walter Bourne, head of IT Security and Policies for Columbia University Information Technology, noted. “There are a number of students here who are talking to lawyers about paying money.”

In four rounds of lawsuits filed last year against users of i2hub, a file-sharing program shut down in November that allowed those at research institutions to swap songs over a super high speed network, 635 users, including 39 at Columbia, were targeted by the Recording Industry Association of America, and while the RIAA has been quiet on how much these suits actually cost, various reports have put the settlement number at between $3,500 and $4,000. Also, in the last week, there have been reports that RIAA officials have been recommending that students facing fees for sharing music drop out of school.

However, subscribing to a legal service is not a guarantee that people will use it. In studies held last spring by several schools that began using legal music services, they found that many students never switched over to them.

There has been a slowdown as of late. Since i2hub was shut down—an action that founder Wayne Chang has said was due to pressure from the RIAA, no University users have been specifically targeted in lawsuits.

The slowdown appears to be an anomaly. In a statement, the RIAA said, “We have a comprehensive approach to addressing piracy on college campuses: ... [including among other actions,] when necessary, enforcing our rights against individuals who violate the law. We have and will continue to pursue each of these components as part of our overall effort to discourage students from illegal downloading and encourage them to turn instead to legal services.”

It’s not as though the targets have gone away: in total, according to an October release from Internet traffic checker Big Champagne, there are more than 9 million monthly users of p2p programs like KaZaA and eDonkey worldwide, double the number that there were just two years prior. And though i2hub may have shut down, there are still hubs hosted on college campuses that facilitate file sharing. These are all open to the RIAA’s scrutiny and even private hubs have been made the brunt of RIAA action in the past.

The fact remains that the only way to avoid lawsuits is to have individuals stop downloading illegally, and nothing—not the shutdown of i2hub, not schools subscribing to legal services, and not having front page stories about their classmates being sued out of thousands of dollars and potentially having to leave school—has proved effective in doing that.
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vne.../443de916e5658

Until next week,

- js.

Current Week In Review

Recent WiRs -

April 15th, April 8th, April 1st, March 25th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.

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

20-04-06, 09:34 AM	#1
JackSpratts Join Date: May 2001 Location: New England Posts: 10,017	Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 22nd, ’06 "Because you, Mr. Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I'm a friend of Microsoft." – President Hu Jintao "Leave it to open source hackers to debug and fix aging viral code so that it works correctly. And shame on the anti-viral industry, Kaspersky Lab in particular, for its attempts to deceive the public by passing off old code as something new." – Joe Barr "I venture to guess that on smaller screen sizes, average consumers might not be wowed as much by the High Definition-DVD." – Peter M. Bracke "Quite frankly, my direct comparison between the HD-DVD and standard DVDs of 'Phantom' was no contest -- the HD-DVD blew it out of the water. On a good home theater setup, it is would be hard for anyone to say HD-DVD doesn't offer a considerable improvement over standard DVD, at least with 'Phantom' as your demo material. 'Phantom's images are so smooth and free of any apparent imperfections that I almost couldn't believe it wasn't some new sort of CGI enhancement. (Maybe it is?) But however they did it, this film looks absolutely smashing, and is certainly worth watching just to see how good a HD-DVD disc can look." – Peter M. Bracke "Much of the positive reaction [to Apple's Boot Camp], though, seems to stem from the mistaken supposition that having Windows on a Mac will make OS X look better by comparison, so people will flock to OS X. This is a dubious and dangerous conclusion for Mac heads to draw." – John C. Dvorak "There's no disagreement about where we should end up - No DRM." – Lawrence Lessig April 22nd, ’06 RIAA vs Hollywood In P2P Case p2pnet The RIAA has launched an anti-p2p file sharing lawsuit which, without exaggeration, threatens to take down the Net in the United States. The case is Elektra v Barker, pending in Manhattan federal court before recently appointed Judge Kenneth Karas who is, by coincidence, a former federal prosecutor. And because of its ramifications, it's possibly the most important file sharing case not only in America, but also in the world, On first blush, there's nothing particularly different or unusual about it and in fact, it's the standard text the RIAA has churned out for more than 18,000 similar cases. And it's not just because Tenise Barker, a young former social worker who lives in the Bronx, made a motion for dismissal - ie, she tried to stop the lawsuit on the grounds it would apply fully to ALL the RIAA's cases. As Ray Beckerman says on his Recording Industry vs The People blog, it's because there are probably a dozen other cases pending in which the same motions have been made. And that's set loud alarm bells clanging in Hollywood and elsewhere. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), in its blind obsession with profit, has allowed greed to get in the way of intelligence, provoking a massive, unwinnable confrontation with Hollywood and its MPAA, the American Association of Publishers and the George W. Bush administration in the shape of America's self-described Top Cop, attorney general Alberto Gonzales, all of whom are lining up against not only Barker and all the other RIAA victims out there, but against the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the trade associations which represent most of the giants of the internet and computer industries, says Beckerman. How did it come about? Barker made a simple motion to dismiss the complaint, saying it didn't give her adequate notice of the infringement she's accused of. In response, "the RIAA made its most shocking and outlandish arguments to date, claiming that merely having a 'shared files folder' on one's computer, and thereby 'making files available for distribution', is in and of itself a 'distribution' and a copyright infringement," says Beckerman, ie, "even if the recordings were legally obtained, and even if no illegal copies were ever made of them, the defendant is still guilty of copyright infringement". The EFF, the Computer & Communications Industry Association and the US Internet Industry Association realized that if this "absurd argument" was accepted, the entire Net, "nothing more than a giant network of hyperlinks making files 'available'," might be forced offline in the US. A win for the RIAA would have painful and significant repercussions for vested interests elsewhere in the world. It was also abundantly clear that by herself, Tenerife Barker doesn't have the financial resources to protect the Net or to wage what would amount to a full scale, single-handed war against the rapacious corporate music industry, Recording Industry vs The People adds, so they were quick to file amicus curiae briefs pointing out to Judge Karas the absurdity of the RIAA's arguments. Shortly after, the MPAA filed an amicus brief supporting the RIAA's argument, the American Association of Publishers requested permission to file a similar brief, and the United States Department of Justice wrote to the Court indicating the possibility of filing a "Statement of Interest". And all to collect about $6,000 from a young woman who's now a nursing student and who lives in the Bronx? Beckerman doesn't think so. http://p2pnet.net/story/8552 CRIA Falling Apart Drew Wilson The CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) is going through hard times. It seems as though after several bold steps failed, the industry is paying the price for it. It may explain why their last press release was published on March 15. The Sam Bulte incident last year may have kicked off the beginning of the Record industry troubles. As a result, an MP lost her seat and possibly her career. The incident was sparked shortly after the debate over two controversial reform bills ended. The CRIA then conducted a study with Pollara. The CRIA then claimed that file-sharing is the reason for lost sales. The claims were then tarnished when the full report was publicly released. Michael Geist criticised the CRIA's claims. To his surprise, Pollara responded, defending the CRIA's interpretation. Michael Geist then responded to the criticism. Pollara's move may have backfired as it fuelled speculation about connections between the polling firm and the CRIA. CRIA's Graham Henderson said that he would end the private copying levy. It's a move that would have many effects. The largest effect is the private copying collectives who receive the funds. One effect is the legal consequence of CD burning should the levy be removed. At the same time, Graham Henderson said "we don't want a private copying levy that, in effect, sanctions online theft." Many critics point out that this is confirmation that the private copying levy also applies to file-sharing. The damage done by the two incidents ran far deeper then a PR setback. Shortly after, 6 of Canada’s leading record labels quit the CRIA. According to the article, "(CRIA is) looking out for their best interest, and their best interest is multinationals that are not Canadian," said Ric Arboit, president of Vancouver-based Nettwerk Records. Nettwerk is known for top Canadian artists (such as Sum 41, Swollen Members and Avril Lavign), Save the Music Fan and funding the defence of an RIAA lawsuit. Nettwerk Records, Aquarius Records, the Children's Group, Linus Entertainment, Anthem Records and True North Records (all class "B" labels) all quit with a letter that states, "It has become increasingly clear over the past few months that CRIA's position on several important music industry issues are not aligned with our best interests as independent recording companies". The actions drew concern from the Copyright Board. According to Howard Knopf, a lawyer who defended against the CRIA, "The Board then did something quite interesting. Apparently out of concern for the Indies, it ordered CRIA to send notices to the Canadian Indies in the following language: “CRIA recently opted to change the scope of its representation of its members’ interests in the forthcoming proceedings before the Copyright Board dealing with CSI’ s proposed tariff for the reproduction of musical works by online music services. Subsequently, the Board ordered CRIA to advise you of the following: 1) In these proceedings CRIA has chosen to act only on behalf of (name of each member that CRIA represents). 2) As a result, CRIA will not be allowed to advance any argument or lead any evidence that relates to your situation in particular, or to the situation of any other member of CRIA that CRIA does not represent in these proceedings generally.”" The CRIA strongly opposed this. Not only is the CRIA suffering a tremendous PR blow, but are also suffering commercial blows as well. One may wonder just how Canadian the CRIA is after so much Canadian music labels left. Michael Geist comments how the C is being removed from the CRIA. He even cites these incidents while talking about Canada's 'cultural deficit'. With so much ailing the CRIA, it likely is the reason why the CRIA has been so quiet lately on the PR front. It's likely that the CRIA can't do much except go quiet and heal from this multiple disaster. Perhaps the last thing the CRIA wants to hear is 'MC Lars - Download This Song' at this point in time. http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1154 In Moscow, Protest Over State's Grip On Media AF-P, AP More than 1,000 demonstrators rallied in Moscow on Sunday to protest government efforts to tighten controls over national media. The protest in central Moscow was linked to the fifth anniversary of the takeover of the NTV television station by the state-controlled company Gazprom in what was widely viewed as a Kremlin-orchestrated move to stifle criticism of the government. Several prominent television anchors, who lost their jobs amid the authorities' efforts to tighten control over programming, took part in the rally. "Over the last five years, it became clear that the government only started with NTV and ended up dominating the entire information sector," said Viktor Shenderovich, a prominent NTV program host who was purged from the station by its new owners. Protesters held posters saying, "Censorship Today, Dictatorship Tomorrow," "Channel One, stop lying!" and "Take TV remote control away from Putin." Since President Vladimir Putin's first election in 2000, all nationwide networks have come under tight state control, resulting in blanket positive coverage of government activities and the disappearance of critical reporting. While print media enjoy considerably more freedom compared with broadcasters, top national newspapers are also under pressure of owners who fear that critical reports could jeopardize their business interests. "I have had enough of the lies on television," said Vera Valkovskaia, a housewife. "The government thinks it is king and we are its slaves." Shenderovich said that Russia had changed a lot since the natural gas giant Gazprom, in which the Russian government is the main shareholder, bought NTV in 2001. He said the state's stranglehold on television was preventing the emergence of a strong opposition and an independent justice system. "I hope that the Russian flag will once again symbolize a democratic country and not a KGB colonel," he said, referring to Putin's previous job. Olga Romanova, a former presenter at Ren-TV who was fired in November after complaining about censorship, said TV news channels had become government mouthpieces. "We worked hard so that Russians would understand what was happening," she said. "Today there is no more objective information on television." The purchase of NTV by Gazprom was followed by the departure of many of its leading journalists and a dramatic muting of its famously critical coverage, particularly of the war in Chechnya. Gazprom in June bought Izvestiya, one of the country's most respected newspapers, pushing the state's control of the media into the print press. http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/16/news/moscow.php French Bill Could Chill Open Source Peter Sayer On May 4, the French Senate will debate a copyright bill that is widely expected to have a chilling effect on the development and distribution of open-source software for digital rights management (DRM) or P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file sharing. That's because the bill's provisions include a penalty of up to three years in prison and a fine of €300,000 for publishing, distributing or promoting software in France that is "manifestly intended" for the unauthorised distribution of copyright works. The developers of the open-source multimedia player VLC, which can read DRM-protected DVDs, consider themselves targeted. But the legal uncertainty over the term "manifestly intended" makes the bill's coverage so broad that it could even cover the open-source web server Apache, which hosts over 60 per cent of websites, opponents of the bill say. Open-source projects are thought to be more vulnerable than commercial operations because they typically have few resources at their disposal to defend legal actions. Open-source concerns France has been a strong supporter of open-source software, with many publicly funded bodies either using it or developing it. Legislation that punishes development and distribution of open-source applications could weaken projects based there, and tarnish the image of the open-source movement with users. The text of the bill, entitled "Authors' rights and related rights in an information society", aims to transpose the requirements of the European Copyright Directive into French law. France is one of the last countries to transpose this European directive into national law, a situation that prompted the French government to rush the bill through its first reading in the National Assembly using emergency procedures. The bill will have its second and final reading in the Senate beginning May 4, and then must be approved by the president and finally published in the government's Official Journal before it can become law. Deputies gave their assent to the bill on the afternoon of March 21, and within hours it had claimed its first victim: the French "mirror" of the development site for the open-source file-sharing application Emule. Emule falls The Emule project is hosted by Sourceforge.net, a collaborative workspace for open-source developers run by OSTG. Sourceforge provides discussion boards, tracks source code changes and hosts downloads for around 100,000 open-source projects. A number of web hosting companies around the world, among them OVH SAS of Roubaix, France, offer local copies, or mirrors, of the complete Sourceforge site to spread the load. But soon after deputies voted, OVH CEO Octave Klaba wrote to his customers to tell them: "We are going to remove Emule from our mirror of Sourceforge." As well as announcing Emule's impending removal from the OVH mirror of Sourceforge, Klaba warned customers that they too face a fine or prison for distributing P-to-P software, and said the company will close down any of its servers found running or hosting such software. Developers open application reservation OVH's move has prompted French supporters of open-source software to open a "reserve" for endangered applications. The legal threat posed by the bill is still imaginary until it becomes law, but the fear it is creating is just as damaging, according to Loïc Dachary, a spokesman for the Free Software Foundation France (FSF France). "People are going to say that, to avoid risking prison, they're going to banish open-source software [from their servers]," Dachary said. The prospect that no one will want to host open-source software in France if the bill becomes law has prompted FSF France to step in as host of last resort with a reserve for open-source software. "Anyone who is afraid [of the bill] can announce that they want to host the software in the reserve," Dachary said. The reserve is operated by another campaign group, EUCD.info, hosted on servers in France, but FSF France is taking the legal responsibility, promising to defend the right to host open-source projects in the courts if necessary. The reserve is already home to a handful of applications. For instance, there's Azureus, a P-to-P client for the BitTorrent file-sharing system written in Java, and a number of other P-to-P applications including Emule, Solipsis, Maay and TinyP2P. Is technology criminal? But the campaigners have also placed the Linux kernel and the web server Apache in the reserve, a move which they hope demonstrates how ridiculous the bill's provisions could be. "The Linux kernel contains a component necessary for any exchange over the internet: the TCP/IP stack. All the pirates utilise TCP/IP, and can't commit their illegal acts without this component. Are French publishers distributing the Linux kernel targeted by Article 12bis of the bill? Maybe, maybe not. We just don't know," the reserve's creators write, explaining its inclusion. Putting a piece of software in the reserve is "a symbolic gesture" that challenges senators examining the bill to ask themselves whether they should really be driving development of open-source software out of the country, Dachary said. Flee la France "The law obliges us to flee French territory," he said. Olivier Chalouhi, founder of the project developing the Azureus client for the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, believes the law will harm France more than it will hurt open-source projects like his. "The law won't change anything for P-to-P software, as it is developed at an international level. The only thing is that really smart people working in France may go abroad, and that's not in the French interest," he said. Other European countries are re-examining their implementation of the European Copyright Directive, with varying consequences for open-source projects. Denmark may require DRM vendors to provide the information necessary to make interoperable systems - a plus for the open-source movement as it would allow, for example, the creation of media players that can play protected copyright works on the Linux OS. Meanwhile, Germany may toughen the sanctions for individuals caught sharing copyright works without authorisation, increasing the risks for operators and users of P-to-P applications, whether open source or proprietary. If these measures are being re-examined, could open-source software face the same threat elsewhere as in France? "Today, that's not a worry for us," said Dachary. "The idea that other countries might change their law to introduce restrictions on open-source software seems unlikely." http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index...ge=1&pagePos=4 Has File Sharing Cost The Music Industry £1.1bn Over 3 Years? Charles Arthur Not according to a back-of-the-envelope calculation by Jupiter Research's Mark Mulligan, who reckons the true figure is closer to £290m. "Where's the extra £0.81bn?" he asks rhetorically on his weblog (http://tinyurl.com/j3jtm). Mulligan points out that UK music industry sales in 2002 were just over £2bn; in 2005, £1.85bn, a cumulative decrease that's a long way short of £1bn. The British Phonographic Industry points out the figure, announced along with a new set of lawsuits against some of its customers reckoned to have been illicitly file sharing, was included in a press release (http://tinyurl.com/z6klb). That quoted the independent research company TNS Worldpanel, which put the cost to British music in 2005 of people file sharing rather than paying for music at £414m. Add to that the £278m drop in sales between 2002 and 2003, and another £376m from 2003-2004, and voilá: there's the BPI's £1.1bn figure for the loss to British music. Or, as it quietly adds, "approximately £650m at trade value" - that is, to the music industry rather than the industry and retailers together. Mulligan is unimpressed: "The BPI should (a) know better than to infer that consumer survey data is national market revenue data; (b) accept there are many bigger reasons impacting on declining music sales - prices too high, physical piracy, competing expenditure on DVDs and games consoles, and so on." He points out only 10% of UK internet users are file sharers, or just 5% of the UK population. If they were responsible for all that lost spending, they must have been very big spenders to have left a £1.1bn hole in the music business. "But they're not," Mulligan said this week. "They tend to be young and on low incomes. Physical piracy and the competition from games and DVDs is far more important." The BPI responds that the methodology shows people who start file sharing end up cutting back on spending: "There are other factors but this looked at the behaviour of music buyers." Mulligan says the BPI is hyping the numbers because it fears what will happen when young file sharers grow up - and are used to not paying for music; though studies show they do buy mobile ringtones. Might those compensate for the missing millions? Even there Mulligan has bad news: "The modern ringtones such as polyphonic ones are classified as cover versions - so the composer gets a cut but not the record label." http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...752260,00.html Your Tax Dollars at Work ... for Viacom Fred von Lohmann The Washington DC legal newspaper, Legal Times, is reporting (sorry, subscription link) that Kevin Murphy, a legislative aide to Senator Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), has recently taken a job with cable and film giant Viacom. Senator Smith, you may remember, is one of the Hill's leading proponents of the broadcast flag. Smells fishy, you say? Legal Times thinks so, too: In a potential conflict of interest, a legislative assistant to Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), who is currently sponsoring legislation limiting the use and distribution of digital broadcasts, has been hired by media giant Viacom Inc. In January, Smith drafted the Digital Content Protection Act, which calls for wider use of "broadcast-flag" technology, a code inserted into digital audio or visual transmissions that limits the ability of consumers to redistribute that content. Broadcast-flag technology is opposed by many consumer groups but has broad support in the entertainment industry. The bill has not been formally introduced. Keith Murphy, a legislative aide to Smith who has worked closely on the legislation, is scheduled to begin work for Viacom at the end of April. Viacom's subsidiary, Paramount Pictures Corp., is a member of the powerful Motion Picture Association of America, a forceful advocate for the broadcast-flag proposal. Whether it's actually a conflict of interest or not, it sure has the appearance of impropriety. Murphy, of course, is not the only government insider who has ended up working for the entertainment industry right after carrying water for the industry while in government. David Israelite, right before taking the top job at the National Music Publisher's Association (NMPA), was head of a DoJ task force that recommended stiffening federal criminal enforcement of copyright laws. And perhaps most infamous is Mitch Glazier, who turned up working at the RIAA soon after he shepherded a change into the Copyright Act's "work for hire" provisions that would have benefited record labels at the expense of song-writers. http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004552.php From October Why Everyone Hates The Music Industry Fredric Paul I recently read a research report from Forrester Research with the provocative title "Music Lessons: Is Your Industry At Risk?" That's a very important question these days, as the recording industry struggles with falling sales and critical challenges from new technology. No one wants to be the next passenger on that train. But as I leafed through the exhaustive, well-thought-out report, I started thinking that the authors—along with most observers—may have missed the most obvious, most important points. Subtitled "Why Media Monocultures Are In Big Trouble," the report posits that media businesses that derive all their revenue from a single source tend to exhibit rigid monopoly-oriented thinking behavior that makes them vulnerable to technological and cultural changes. True enough, but if you ask me, that's not what wrecked the record companies. No, the record companies' real problem is that everyone hates them. He Hate Me Musicians hate them for habitually sucking the creativity out of the music and the profits from the CD sales. Usually they do it legally, if not morally, but all too often naïve musicians with few options end up swindled out of their rightful earnings. And music lovers—don't call us consumers; music can't be consumed—see the record companies as greedy, clueless profiteers quick to jack up prices while placing limits on what music gets released and how you can listen to it. Record companies add little real value to the process of creating and distributing music, and technological advancements make their role increasingly irrelevant. Movie studios and publishing houses still stand for something, some artistic orientation, but the big record companies don't. These days, who knows or cares which label their favorite artists happen to have signed with? The only people willing to defend the record labels seem to be a handful of superstar performers who have gotten rich on the blockbuster mentality pervasive in the music industry. Or in the film industry—movie studios seem determined to follow the same antagonistic path. Oh, and a smattering of radio DJs who rake in the payola to play what they're told to play. Forrester report author Josh Bernoff (with Chris Charron, Jennifer Joseph, and Tenly McHang) acknowledges that the music industry "was out of touch with users," but that drastically understates the severity of the problem. It's not that vendors (musicians) and customers (listeners) aren't in touch with the record companies, it's that they know them and loathe them. And that was the rule even before the companies started suing thousands of their best customers. The Five Stages Of Musical Death Forrester's report argues that the music industry is finally coming to terms with its situation. Adapting Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' famous five stages of death and dying to track the music industry's suffering (no, I'm not kidding), it argues that the industry has moved beyond "shock and denial" (stage 1) over Napster to "anger" (stage 2) by suing file-sharers, through "bargaining" (stage 3) by offering digital music subscriptions and into "depression" (stage 4) when it realized that approach wasn't going to work. The fifth and final stage, "acceptance," comes as iTunes exceeds half a billion legal downloads and the industry tries new download services. I'm not convinced. iTunes was a good start, but that service still has more digital rights restrictions than I'd like. And the companies are once again bickering with Apple over pricing and DRM issues. Plus, they're still suing listeners, and they still don't see their own culpability in their demise. Making Money From Those Who Won't Pay One positive sign: Universal Music, the world's largest record company, recently announced that it's "transforming itself into a broader entertainment company that derives more revenue from untapped sources like advertising and apparel," according to Reuters. The goal is to "tap into the enormous demand for free music, and generate revenue from those who can't or won't pay." Instead of being obsessed with controlling how people listen to music, a few record execs may finally be starting to recognize that they need a new business model, that selling recorded performances can no longer be the cash cow it was during the 20th century. (And really, is that such a bad thing? Most of the money from CD sales never reaches the artists anyway, and it makes more sense for records to be loss leaders for live performances and other merchandise. Mariah Carey might have to sell one of her houses, but she'll be OK.) But most insiders still seem to want to finesse the rights issue. I recently chatted with Stefan Roever, CEO of Navio Systems in Cupertino, Calif. Navio supplies technology to record companies so they can "sell rights, and not just files." The idea is that these rights would offer more flexibility, because listeners could use the right to access the content on multiple platforms, for example, or to download the file again if your media was lost or destroyed. But I think that's putting the cart before the horse. People don't want "rights" to the music they buy. They want to own it. Only when everyone accepts that fact will we be ready to worry about what Navio is selling. Don't Hate Me Because I'm Rich It may be too late for the music industry. But what does Forrester's report tell us about other technology and media sectors? Well, I guess if your industry exists in a monopoly monoculture, heavily depends on a single channel and revenue stream, and steadfastly refuses to change along with advancing technology and cultural shifts, it's clearly time to start worrying. According to Forrester, that means TV networks, radio networks, and especially newspapers. But I say all that stuff is just window dressing. If your vendors and customers hate you, you're dead. Fredric Paul is Director of Online Editorial Development for CMP Media LLC, TechWeb's parent company. http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/172300219 Unintended Consequences: Seven Years under the DMCA April, 2006 [Download a PDF of this Paper - 262K] This document is version 4. Previous versions are still available: version 3, version 2, version 1. Contents Executive Summary DMCA Legislative Background Chilling Free Expression and Scientific Research Fair Use Under Siege A threat to innovation and competition DMCA Shoulders Aside Computer Intrusion Statutes Conclusion This document collects a number of reported cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been invoked not against pirates, but against consumers, scientists, and legitimate competitors. It will be updated from time to time as additional cases come to light. The latest version can always be obtained at www.eff.org. 1. Executive Summary Since they were enacted in 1998, the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. Congress meant to stop copyright infringers from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works and to ban the "black box" devices intended for that purpose. 1 In practice, the anti-circumvention provisions have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than to stop copyright infringement. As a result, the DMCA has developed into a serious threat to several important public policy priorities: The DMCA Chills Free Expression and Scientific Research. Experience with section 1201 demonstrates that it is being used to stifle free speech and scientific research. The lawsuit against 2600 magazine, threats against Princeton Professor Edward Felten's team of researchers, and prosecution of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have chilled the legitimate activities of journalists, publishers, scientists, students, programmers, and members of the public. The DMCA Jeopardizes Fair Use. By banning all acts of circumvention, and all technologies and tools that can be used for circumvention, the DMCA grants to copyright owners the power to unilaterally eliminate the public's fair use rights. Already, the movie industry's use of encryption on DVDs has curtailed consumers' ability to make legitimate, personal-use copies of movies they have purchased. The DMCA Impedes Competition and Innovation. Rather than focusing on pirates, many copyright owners have wielded the DMCA to hinder their legitimate competitors. For example, the DMCA has been used to block aftermarket competition in laser printer toner cartridges, garage door openers, and computer maintenance services. Similarly, Apple invoked the DMCA to chill RealNetworks' efforts to sell music downloads to iPod owners. The DMCA Interferes with Computer Intrusion Laws. Further, the DMCA has been misused as a general-purpose prohibition on computer network access which, unlike most computer intrusion statutes, lacks any financial harm threshold. As a result, a disgruntled employer has used the DMCA against a former contractor for simply connecting to the company's computer system through a VPN. 2. DMCA Legislative Background Congress enacted the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions in response to two pressures. First, Congress was responding to the perceived need to implement obligations imposed on the U.S. by the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty. Section 1201, however, went further than the WIPO treaty required. 2 The details of section 1201, then, were a response not just to U.S. treaty obligations, but also to the concerns of copyright owners that their works would be widely pirated in the networked digital world. 1 Section 1201 contains two distinct prohibitions: a ban on acts of circumvention, and a ban on the distribution of tools and technologies used for circumvention. The "act" prohibition, set out in section 1201(a)(1), prohibits the act of circumventing a technological measure used by copyright owners to control access to their works ("access controls"). So, for example, this provision makes it unlawful to defeat the encryption system used on DVD movies. This ban on acts of circumvention applies even where the purpose for decrypting the movie would otherwise be legitimate. As a result, it is unlawful to make a digital copy ("rip") of a DVD you own for playback on your video iPod. The "tools" prohibitions, set out in sections 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b), outlaw the manufacture, sale, distribution, or trafficking of tools and technologies that make circumvention possible. These provisions ban both technologies that defeat access controls, and also technologies that defeat use restrictions imposed by copyright owners, such as copy controls. These provisions prohibit the distribution of "DVD back-up" software, for example. Section 1201 includes a number of exceptions for certain limited classes of activities, including security testing, reverse engineering of software, encryption research, and law enforcement. These exceptions have been extensively criticized as being too narrow to be of real use to the constituencies who they were intended to assist.4 A violation of any of the "act" or "tools" prohibitions is subject to significant civil and, in some circumstances, criminal penalties. 3. Chilling Free Expression and Scientific Research Section 1201 has been used by a number of copyright owners to stifle free speech and legitimate scientific research. The lawsuit against 2600 magazine, threats against Professor Edward Felten's team of researchers, and prosecution of the Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov are among the most widely known examples of the DMCA being used to chill speech and research. Bowing to DMCA liability fears, online service providers and bulletin board operators have begun to censor discussions of copy-protection systems, programmers have removed computer security programs from their websites, and students, scientists and security experts have stopped publishing details of their research. These developments will ultimately result in weakened security for all computer users (including, ironically, for copyright owners counting on technical measures to protect their works), as security researchers shy away from research that might run afoul of section 1201. DMCA Delays Disclosure of Sony-BMG "Rootkit" Vulnerability J. Alex Halderman, a graduate student at Princeton University, discovered the existence of several security vulnerabilities in the CD copy-protection software on dozens of Sony-BMG titles. He delayed publishing his discovery for several weeks while consulting with lawyers in order to avoid DMCA pitfalls. This left millions of music fans at risk longer than necessary.5 The security flaws inherent in Sony-BMG's "rootkit" copy-protection software were subsequently publicized by another researcher who was apparently unaware of the legal risks created by the DMCA. Security researchers had sought a DMCA exemption in 2003 in order to facilitate research on dangerous DRM systems like the Sony-BMG rootkit, but their request was denied by the U.S. Copyright Office. 6 Cyber-Security Czar Notes Chill on Research Speaking at MIT in October 2002, White House Cyber Security Chief Richard Clarke called for DMCA reform, noting his concern that the DMCA had been used to chill legitimate computer security research. The Boston Globe quoted Clarke as saying, "I think a lot of people didn't realize that it would have this potential chilling effect on vulnerability research."7 Professor Felten's Research Team Threatened In September 2000, a multi-industry group known as the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) issued a public challenge encouraging skilled technologists to try to defeat certain watermarking technologies intended to protect digital music. Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten and a team of researchers at Princeton, Rice, and Xerox took up the challenge and succeeded in removing the watermarks. When the team tried to present their results at an academic conference, however, SDMI representatives threatened the researchers with liability under the DMCA. The threat letter was also delivered to the researchers' employers and the conference organizers. After extensive discussions with counsel, the researchers grudgingly withdrew their paper from the conference. The threat was ultimately withdrawn and a portion of the research was published at a subsequent conference, but only after the researchers filed a lawsuit. After enduring this experience, at least one of the researchers involved has decided to forgo further research efforts in this field. 8 SunnComm Threatens Grad Student In October 2003, a Princeton graduate student named J. Alex Halderman was threatened with a DMCA lawsuit after publishing a report documenting weaknesses in a CD copy-protection technology developed by SunnComm. Halderman revealed that merely holding down the shift key on a Windows PC would render SunnComm's copy protection technology ineffective. Furious company executives then threatened legal action. The company quickly retreated from its threats in the face of public outcry and negative press attention. Although Halderman was spared, the controversy again reminded security researchers of their vulnerability to DMCA threats for simply publishing the results of their research.9 Hewlett Packard Threatens SNOsoft Hewlett-Packard resorted to DMCA threats when researchers published a security flaw in HP's Tru64 UNIX operating system. The researchers, a loosely-organized collective known as Secure Network Operations ("SNOsoft"), received the DMCA threat after releasing software in July 2002 that demonstrated vulnerabilities that HP had been aware of for some time, but had not bothered to fix. After the DMCA threat received widespread press attention, HP ultimately withdrew the threat. Security researchers received the message, however-publish vulnerability research at your own risk.10 Blackboard Threatens Security Researchers In April 2003, educational software company Blackboard Inc. used a DMCA threat to stop the presentation of research on security vulnerabilities in its products at the InterzOne II conference in Atlanta. Students Billy Hoffman and Virgil Griffith were scheduled to present their research on security flaws in the Blackboard ID card system used by university campus security systems but were blocked shortly before the talk by a cease-and-desist letter invoking the DMCA. Blackboard obtained a temporary restraining order against the students and the conference organizers at a secret "ex parte" hearing the day before the conference began, giving the students and conference organizer no opportunity to appear in court or challenge the order before the scheduled presentation. Despite the rhetoric in its initial cease and desist letter, Blackboard's lawsuit did not mention the DMCA. The invocation in the original cease-and-desist letter, however, underscores the way the statute has been used to chill security research. 11 Xbox Hack Book Dropped by Publisher In 2003, U.S. publisher John Wiley & Sons dropped plans to publish a book by security researcher Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, citing DMCA liability concerns. Wiley had commissioned Huang to write a book that described the security flaws in the Microsoft Xbox game console, flaws Huang had discovered as part of his doctoral research at M.I.T. Following Microsoft's legal action against a vendor of Xbox "mod chips" in early 2003, and the music industry's 2001 DMCA threats against Professor Felten's research team, Wiley dropped the book for fear that the book might be treated as a "circumvention device" under the DMCA. Huang's initial attempt to self-publish was thwarted after his online shopping cart provider also withdrew, citing DMCA concerns. After several months of negotiations, Huang eventually self-published the book in mid-2003. After extensive legal consultations, Huang was able to get the book published by No Starch Press. 12 Censorware Research Obstructed Seth Finkelstein conducts research on "censorware" software (i.e., programs that block websites that contain objectionable material), documenting flaws in such software. Finkelstein's research, for example, revealed that censorware vendor N2H2 blocked a variety of legitimate websites, evidence that assisted the ACLU in challenging a law requiring the use web filtering software by federally-funded public libraries.13 N2H2 claimed that the DMCA should block researchers like Finkelstein from examining it. Finkelstein was ultimately forced to seek a DMCA exemption from the Librarian of Congress, who granted the exemption in both the 2000 and 2003 triennial rulemakings. The exemption, however, has not been a complete remedy, since it is limited to the act of circumvention, and does not permit researchers to create or distribute tools to facilitate research. 14 Benjamin Edelman has also conducted extensive research into flaws in various censorware products. Edelman's research also led to evidence used by the ACLU in its constitutional challenge to the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which mandates the use of censorware by public libraries. In the course of his work for the ACLU, Edelman discovered that the DMCA might interfere with his efforts to learn what websites are blocked by censorware products. Because he sought to create and distribute software tools to enable others to analyze the list if it changed, Edelman could not rely on the limited DMCA regulatory exception. Unwilling to risk civil and criminal penalties under Section 1201, Edelman was forced to sue to seek clarification of his legal rights. Unfortunately, the court found that Edelman would have to undertake the research and hazard legal reprisals in order to have standing to challenge the DMCA. The case was therefore dismissed without addressing the DMCA's chill on research. 15 Dmitry Sklyarov Arrested In July 2001, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was jailed for several weeks and detained for five months in the United States after speaking at the DEFCON conference in Las Vegas. Prosecutors, prompted by software goliath Adobe Systems Inc., alleged that Sklyarov had worked on a software program known as the Advanced e-Book Processor, which was distributed over the Internet by his Russian employer, ElcomSoft. The software allowed owners of Adobe electronic books ("e-books") to convert them from Adobe's e-Book format into PDF files, thereby removing restrictions embedded into the files by e-book publishers. Sklyarov was never accused of infringing any copyright, nor of assisting anyone else to infringe copyrights. His alleged crime was working on a software tool with many legitimate uses, simply because other people might use the tool to copy an e-book without the publisher's permission. Federal prosecutors ultimately permitted Sklyarov to return home, but brought criminal charges against ElcomSoft. In December 2002, a jury acquitted Elcomsoft of all charges, completing an 18-month ordeal for the wrongly-accused Russian software company. 16 Scientists and Programmers Withhold Research Following the Felten and Sklyarov incidents, a number of prominent computer security experts curtailed their legitimate research activities for fear of potential DMCA liability. For example, when Dutch cryptographer and security systems analyst Niels Ferguson discovered a major security flaw in Intel's HDCP video encryption system, he declined to publish his results on his website on the grounds that he travels frequently to the U.S. and is fearful of "prosecution and/or liability under the U.S. DMCA law." 17 Following the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, Fred Cohen, a professor of digital forensics and respected security consultant, removed his "Forensix" evidence-gathering software from his website, citing fear of potential DMCA liability. Another respected network security protection expert, Dug Song, also removed information from his website for the same reason. Mr. Song is the author of several security papers, including a paper describing a common vulnerability in many firewalls. 18 In mid-2001 an anonymous programmer discovered a vulnerability in Microsoft's proprietary e-book DRM system, but refused to publish the results, citing DMCA liability concerns. 19 Foreign Scientists Avoid U.S. Foreign scientists have expressed concerns about traveling to the U.S. following the arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov. Some foreign scientists have advocated boycotting conferences held in the United States, and some conference organizers have decided to hold events in non-U.S. locations. Russia went so far as to issue a travel advisory to Russian programmers traveling to the United States. 20 Highly respected British Linux programmer Alan Cox resigned from the USENIX committee of the Advanced Computing Systems Association, the committee that organizes many of the U.S. computing conferences, because of concerns about traveling to the United States. He also urged USENIX to move its annual conference offshore. 21 The International Information Hiding Workshop Conference, the conference at which Professor Felten's team intended to present its original SDMI watermarking paper, chose to break with tradition and held its next conference outside of the U.S. following the DMCA threat to Professor Felten and his team. 22 IEEE Wrestles with DMCA The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which publishes 30 per cent of all computer science journals worldwide, has also grappled with the uncertainties created by the DMCA. Apparently concerned about possible DMCA liability, the IEEE in November 2001 instituted a policy requiring all authors to indemnify IEEE for any liabilities incurred should a submission result in legal action. After an outcry from IEEE members, the organization ultimately revised its submission policies, removing mention of the DMCA. According to Bill Hagen, manager of IEEE Intellectual Property Rights, "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has become a very sensitive subject among our authors. It's intended to protect digital content, but its application in some specific cases appears to have alienated large segments of the research community." 23 2600 Magazine Censored The Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes case illustrates the chilling effect that section 1201 has had on the freedom of the press. In that case, eight major motion picture companies brought DMCA claims against 2600 Magazine seeking to block it from publishing DeCSS, a software program that defeats the CSS encryption used on DVD movies. 2600 had made the program available on its web site in the course of its ongoing coverage of the controversy surrounding the DMCA. The magazine was not involved in the development of software, nor was it accused of having used the software for any copyright infringement. Notwithstanding the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press, the district court permanently barred 2600 from publishing, or even linking to, the DeCSS software code. In November 2001, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court decision. 24 In essence, the movie studios effectively obtained a "stop the presses" order banning the publication of truthful information by a news publication concerning a matter of public concern-an unprecedented curtailment of well-established First Amendment principles. 25 CNET Reporter Feels Chill CNET News reporter Declan McCullagh confronted the chilling effect of the DMCA firsthand. In the course of his reporting, he found four documents on the public website of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The website disclosed that the documents contained information about airport security procedures, the relationship between federal and local police, and a "liability information sheet." A note on the site stated that this "information is restricted to airport management and local law enforcement." The documents were distributed in encrypted form and a password was required to open and read them. McCullagh obtained the passwords from an anonymous source, but did not open the documents, citing concerns that using a password without authorization might violate the DMCA. This is particularly ironic, as any foreign journalist beyond the reach of the DMCA would be free to use the password. "Journalists traditionally haven't worried about copyright law all that much," said McCullagh, "But nowadays intellectual property rights have gone too far, and arguably interfere with the newsgathering process." 26 Microsoft Threatens Slashdot In spring 2000, Microsoft invoked the DMCA against the Internet publication forum Slashdot, demanding that forum moderators delete materials relating to Microsoft's proprietary implementation of an open security standard known as Kerberos. In the Slashdot forum, several individuals alleged that Microsoft had changed the open, non-proprietary Kerberos specification in order to prevent non-Microsoft servers from interacting with Windows 2000. Many speculated that this move was intended to force users to purchase Microsoft server software. Although Microsoft responded to this criticism by publishing its Kerberos specification, it conditioned access to the specification on agreement to a "click-wrap" license agreement that expressly forbade disclosure of the specification without Microsoft's prior consent. Slashdot posters responded by republishing the Microsoft specification. Microsoft then invoked the DMCA, demanding that Slashdot remove the republished specifications. In the words of Georgetown law professor Julie Cohen, "If Microsoft's interpretation of the DMCA's ban on circumvention technologies is right, then it doesn't seem to matter much whether posting unauthorized copies of the Microsoft Kerberos specification would be a fair use. A publisher can prohibit fair-use commentary simply by implementing access and disclosure restrictions that bind the entire public. Anyone who discloses the information, or even tells others how to get it, is a felon." 27 GameSpy Menaces Security Researcher with DMCA Luigi Auriemma, an independent Italian security researcher, attracted the attention of GameSpy's lawyers after publishing details on his website regarding security vulnerabilities in GameSpy's online services, including a voice chat program, Roger Wilco, and online game finder, GameSpy 3D. Before publishing the information, Auriemma had informed GameSpy and public security mailing lists of the weaknesses. GameSpy, however, had failed to address the vulnerabilities. In November 2003, GameSpy's lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to Auriemma, threatening civil and criminal penalties under the DMCA. According to GameSpy, Auriemma was publishing key generators and other piracy tools, rather than simply vulnerability research. Whatever the merits of GameSpy's claims, the invocation of the DMCA was likely improper in light of the fact that Auriemma resides in Italy and thus is beyond the reach of the DMCA. 28 AVSforum.com Censors TiVo Discussion The specter of DMCA litigation has chilled speech on smaller web bulletin boards, as well. In June 2001, for example, the administrator of AVSforum.com, a popular forum where TiVo digital video recorder owners discuss TiVo features, censored all discussion about a software program that allegedly permitted TiVo users to move video from their TiVos to their personal computers. In the words of the forum administrator, "My fear with this is more or less I have no clue what is a protected system on the TiVo box under copyright (or what-have-you) and what is not. Thus my fear for the site." 29 Mac Forum Censors iTunes Music Store Discussion Macintosh enthusiast website Macosxhints censored publication of information about methods for evading the copy protection on songs purchased from the Apple iTunes Music Store in May 2003, citing DMCA liability concerns. Songs purchased from the Apple iTunes Music Store are downloaded in Apple's proprietary AAC file format, wrapped in digital copy protection. As the webmaster for the site noted, even though information on bypassing the copy protection was readily available on the Internet at the time, republishing user hints on work-arounds risked attracting a DMCA lawsuit and harsh penalties. 30 4. Fair Use Under Siege "Fair use" is a crucial element in American copyright law-the principle that the public is entitled, without having to ask permission, to use copyrighted works in ways that do not unduly interfere with the copyright owner's market for a work. Fair uses include personal, noncommercial uses, such as using a VCR to record a television program for later viewing. Fair use also includes activities undertaken for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research. Unfortunately, the DMCA throws out the baby of fair use with the bathwater of digital piracy. By employing technical protection measures to control access to and use of copyrighted works, and using the DMCA against anyone who tampers with those measures, copyright owners can unilaterally eliminate fair use, re-writing the copyright bargain developed by Congress and the courts over more than a century. Although the Copyright Office is empowered to grant limited DMCA exemptions in a triennial rule-making, it has repeatedly refused to grant such exemptions for consumer fair uses. 31 Copy-protected CDs The introduction of "copy-protected" CDs illustrates the collision between fair use and the DMCA. Sony-BMG, for example, had released more than 15 million copy-protected CDs in the U.S. market as of early 2006. Although the momentum toward universal CD copy-protection faltered after the Sony-BMG "rootkit" scandal in late-2005, no major label has renounced the use of copy-protection on CDs. These copy-protection technologies are certain to interfere with the fair use expectations of music fans. For example, copy-protected discs will disappoint the millions who have purchased iPods or other MP3 players, despite the fact that making an MP3 copy of a CD for personal use qualifies as a fair use. Making "mix CDs" or copies of CDs for the office or car are other examples of fair uses that are potentially impaired by copy-protection technologies. Companies that distribute tools to "repair" these dysfunctional CDs, restoring to consumers their fair use privileges, run the risk of lawsuits under the DMCA's ban on circumvention tools and technologies. 32 Fair Use Tools Banned: DVD Back-up Software We are entering an era where books, music and movies will increasingly be "copy-protected" and otherwise restricted by technological means. Whether scholars, researchers, commentators and the public will continue to be able to make legitimate fair uses of these works will depend upon the availability of tools to bypass these digital locks. The DMCA, however, prohibits the creation or distribution of these tools, even if they are crucial to fair use. So, as copyright owners use technology to press into the 21st century, the public will see fair uses whittled away by digital locks allegedly intended to "prevent piracy." Perhaps more importantly, future fair uses will not be developed for restricted media, because courts will never have the opportunity to rule on them. Fair users will be found liable for "picking the lock" and thereby violating the DMCA, whatever the merits of their fair use defense. Copyright owners argue that these tools, in the hands of copyright infringers, can result in "Internet piracy." But banning the tools that enable fair use will punish the innocent along with infringers. Photocopiers, VCRs, and CD-R burners can also be misused, but no one would suggest that the public give them up simply because they might be used by others to break the law. Fair use of DVDs has already suffered thanks to DMCA lawsuits brought against DVD copying tools. There are many legitimate reasons to copy DVDs. Once the video is on the PC, for example, lots of fair uses become possible-film scholars can digitally analyze the film, travelers can load the movie into their laptops, and DVD owners can skip the otherwise "unskippable" commercials that preface certain films. Without the tools necessary to copy DVDs, however, these fair uses become impossible. In the Universal v. Reimerdes case, discussed above, the court held that the DMCA bans DeCSS software. In another case, federal courts ordered 321 Studios' DVD X Copy product taken off the shelves for violating the DMCA. Major movie studios also used the DMCA to sue Tritton Technologies, the manufacturer of DVD CopyWare, and three website distributors of similar software. 33 Movie fans, film scholars, movie critics, and public interest groups have all repeatedly asked the Copyright Office to grant DMCA exemptions to allow the decryption of DVDs in order to enable noninfringing uses. For example, exemptions were sought to allow movie critics to post movie clips, DVD owners to skip "unskippable" previews and commercials, and legitimate purchasers to bypass "region coding" restrictions on their DVD players. Every DVD-related request was denied in both the 2000 and 2003 triennial rulemakings. 34 Even if an exemption were granted, however, the Copyright Office is powerless to grant an exemption to the DMCA's "tools" ban, which means that fair users would be left without the tools necessary to exercise any exemption that might be granted. Advanced e-Book Processor and e-Books The future of fair use for books was at issue in the criminal prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov and Elcomsoft. As discussed above, Elcomsoft produced and distributed a tool called the Advanced e-Book Processor, which translates e-books from Adobe's e-book format to PDF. This translation process removed various restrictions (against copying, printing, text-to-speech processing, etc.) that publishers can impose on e-books. 35 The Advanced e-Book Processor allowed those who have legitimately purchased e-books to make fair uses of their e-books, uses otherwise made impossible by the restrictions of the Adobe e-book format. For instance, the program allowed people to engage in the following fair uses: read the e-book on a laptop or computer other than the one on which it was first downloaded; continue to access the e-book in the future, if the particular technological device for which it was purchased becomes obsolete; print an e-book on paper; read an e-book on an alternative operating system such as Linux (Adobe's format works only on Macs and Windows PCs); have a computer read an e-book out loud using text-to-speech software, which is particularly important for visually-impaired individuals. Time-shifting and Streaming Media As more people receive audio and video content from "streaming" Internet media sources, they will want tools to preserve their settled fair use expectations, including the ability to "time-shift" programming for later listening or viewing. As a result of the DMCA, however, the digital equivalents of VCRs and cassette decks for streaming media may never arrive. Start-up software company Streambox developed exactly such a product, known simply as the Streambox VCR, designed to time-shift streaming media. When RealNetworks discovered that the Streambox VCR could time-shift streaming RealAudio webcasts, it invoked the DMCA and obtained an injunction against the Streambox VCR product. 36 The DMCA has also been invoked to threaten the developer of an open source, noncommercial software application known as Streamripper that records MP3 audio streams for later listening. 37 embed and Fonts In January 2002, typeface vendor Agfa Monotype Corporation threatened a college student with DMCA liability for creating "embed," a free, open source, noncommercial software program designed to manipulate TrueType fonts. According to the student: "I wrote embed in 1997, after discovering that all of my fonts disallowed embedding in documents. Since my fonts are free, this was silly-but I didn't want to take the time to... change the flag, and then reset all of the extended font properties with a separate program. What a bore! Instead, I wrote this program to convert all of my fonts at once. The program is very simple; it just requires setting a few bits to zero. Indeed, I noticed that other fonts that were licensed for unlimited distribution also disallowed embedding.... So, I put this program on the web in hopes that it would help other font developers as well." Agfa Monotype nevertheless threatened the student author with DMCA liability for distributing the program. According to Agfa, the fact that embed can be used to allow distribution of protected fonts makes it contraband under Section 1201, notwithstanding the fact that the tool has many legitimate uses in the hands of hobbyist font developers. 38 5. A threat to innovation and competition The DMCA has frequently been used to deter legitimate innovation and competition, rather than to stop piracy. For example, the DMCA has been used to block aftermarket competition in laser printer toner cartridges, garage door openers, and computer maintenance services. Apple Computer invoked the DMCA to chill Real Networks' efforts to sell music downloads to iPod owners. Videogame hobbyists have been sued for trying to improve or extend the capabilities of their favorite game titles. Sony has threatened hobbyists for creating software that enables Sony's Aibo robot dog to dance, and has sued to block software that allows gamers to play their PlayStation games on PCs. In each of these cases, it was legitimate competitors and innovators who suffered, not pirates. 39 DMCA Used to Lock Cell Phones to Carriers American cellular phone subscribers have long suffered with phones that are artificially "locked" to a particular carrier's network. This creates a variety of burdens for consumers, including high roaming rates when traveling (by preventing the use of prepaid SIM chips from local carriers) and barriers to switching carriers. In addition, these restrictions make locked phones harder to recycle and reuse. "Locking" phones seems particularly unjustifiable in light of the "minimum term" and "early termination fee" clauses that guarantee carriers will recoup the costs of the phones they are so fond of "giving away" to lure subscribers. Responding to consumer demand, phone "unlocking" services have become widespread. Unfortunately, carriers have responded by threatening legal action (and in at least one case, actually suing) under the DMCA. 40 Apple Threatens Real over Harmony In July 2004, RealNetworks announced its "Harmony" technology, which was designed to allow music sold by Real's digital download store to play on Apple iPods. Until Harmony, the only DRM-restricted music format playable on the iPod was Apple's own "Fairplay" format. Although the iPod plays a variety of DRM-free formats, Real wanted to ensure interoperability without having to give up DRM restrictions, and thus developed Harmony to "re-wrap" its songs using the Fairplay format. Within days, Apple responded by accusing Real of adopting the "tactics and ethics of a hacker" and threatening legal action under the DMCA. Over the following months, the two competitors engaged in a game of technological cat-and-mouse, with Apple disabling Harmony in updates of its iTunes software and Real promising to revise its technology to re-enable compatibility. In the end, however, Apple's threats of legal action led Real to give up its efforts. 41 Tecmo Sues to Block Game Enhancements Enthusiastic fans of the videogames Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive 3, and Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball managed to modify their games to create new "skins" to change the appearance of characters who appear in the game (including making some characters appear nude). The modifications were add-on enhancements for the games themselves-only those who already had the games could make use of the skins. These hobbyist tinkerers traded their modding tips and swapped skins on a website called ninjahacker.net. Tecmo Inc., which distributes the games, was not amused and brought DMCA claims against the website operators and tinkerers who frequented it. The suit was ultimately dismissed after the website was taken down and settlements negotiated with the site's operators. 42 Nikon's Encrypted RAW Format Blocks Adobe In April 2005, the creator of Adobe's Photoshop revealed that camera-maker Nikon had begun encrypting certain portions of the RAW image files generated by its professional-grade digital cameras. As a result, these files would not be compatible with Photoshop or other similar software unless the developers first took licenses from Nikon. In other words, by encrypting the image files on its cameras, Nikon was obtaining market leverage in the image editing software market. Adobe cited the prospect of a DMCA claim as one reason why it was unwilling to reverse engineer the format to facilitate interoperability. Nikon and Adobe ultimately negotiated an agreement, but that option may not be practical for many smaller software developers. 43 HP's Region-Coded, Expiring Printer Cartridges Hewlett-Packard, one of the world's leading printer manufacturers, has embedded software in its printers and accompanying toner cartridges to enforce "region coding" restrictions that prevent cartridges purchased in one region from operating with printers purchased in another. This "feature" presumably is intended to support regional market segmentation and price discrimination. The software embedded in HP printer cartridges also apparently causes them to "expire" after a set amount of time, forcing consumers to purchase new ink, even if the cartridge has not run dry. This "feature" of HP ink cartridges has lead to at least one consumer class action against the company. HP has not yet invoked the DMCA to protect these anti-consumer tactics, but both HP's lawyers and its competitors are doubtless well aware of ways in which the DMCA can be used to buttress these tactics. 44 StorageTek Attempts to Block Independent Service Vendors StorageTek sells data storage hardware to large enterprise clients. It also sells maintenance services for its products. Custom Hardware is an independent business that repairs StorageTek hardware. In an effort to eliminate this competitor in the maintenance services market, StorageTek sued under the DMCA, arguing that Custom Hardware had circumvented certain passwords designed to block independent service providers from using maintenance software included in the StorageTek hardware systems. In other words, StorageTek was using the DMCA to ensure that its customers had only one place to turn for repair services. A district court granted a preliminary injunction against Custom Hardware. More than a year later, a court of appeals vacated the injunction, holding that where there is no nexus with copyright infringement, there can be no DMCA claim. Although this was a victory for competition, it illustrates the ways in which the DMCA continues to be used to impede competition, rather than prevent piracy. 45 Lexmark Sues Over Toner Cartridges Lexmark, the second-largest laser printer maker in the U.S., has long tried to eliminate the secondary market in refilled laser toner cartridges. In January 2003, Lexmark employed the DMCA as a new weapon in its arsenal. Lexmark had added authentication routines between its printers and cartridges explicitly to hinder aftermarket toner vendors. Static Control Components (SCC) reverse-engineered these measures and sold "Smartek" chips that enabled refilled cartridges to work in Lexmark printers. Lexmark then used the DMCA to obtain an injunction banning SCC from selling its chips to cartridge remanufacturers. SCC ultimately succeeded in getting the injunction overturned on appeal, but only after 19 months of expensive litigation while its product was held off the market. The litigation sent a chilling message to those in the secondary market for Lexmark cartridges.46 Chamberlain Sues Universal Garage Door Opener Manufacturer Garage door opener manufacturer Chamberlain Group invoked the DMCA against competitor Skylink Technologies after several major U.S. retailers dropped Chamberlain's remote openers in favor of the less expensive Skylink universal "clickers." Chamberlain claimed that Skylink had violated the DMCA because its clicker bypassed an "authentication regime" between the Chamberlain remote opener and the mounted garage door receiver unit. On Chamberlain's logic, consumers would be locked into a sole source not only for replacement garage door clickers, but virtually any remote control device. Skylink ultimately defeated Chamberlain both at the district court and court of appeals, but only after many months of expensive litigation. In the words of the court of appeals, Chamberlain use of the DMCA was nothing less than an "attempt to leverage its sales into aftermarket monopolies." 47 Sony Sues Connectix and Bleem Sony has used DMCA to sue competitors who created emulation software that permits gamers to play PlayStation console games on PCs. In 1999, Sony sued Connectix, the maker of the Virtual Game Station, a PlayStation emulator for Macintosh computers. Sony also sued Bleem, the leading vendor of PlayStation emulator software for Windows PCs. In both cases, Sony claimed that competitors had violated the DMCA by engaging in unlawful circumvention, even though the development of interoperable software has been recognized by the courts as a fair use under copyright law. Because courts have suggested that the DMCA trumps fair use, however, the DMCA has become a new legal weapon with which to threaten those who rely on reverse engineering to create competing products. Neither Connectix nor Bleem were able to bear the high costs of litigation against Sony and pulled their products off the market. No similar emulation products have been introduced, effectively forcing gamers to use Sony console hardware if they want to play the PlayStation games they have purchased. 48 Sony Threatens Aibo Hobbyist Sony has also invoked the DMCA against a hobbyist who developed custom "dance moves" for his Aibo robotic "pet" dog. Developing these new routines for the Sony Aibo required reverse engineering the encryption surrounding the software that manipulates the robot. The hobbyist revealed neither the decrypted Sony software nor the code he used to defeat the encryption, but he freely distributed his new custom programs. Sony claimed that the act of circumventing the encryption surrounding the software in the Aibo violated the DMCA and demanded that the hobbyist remove his programs from his website. Responding to public outcry, Sony ultimately permitted the hobbyist to repost some of his programs (on the understanding that Sony retained the right to commercially exploit the hobbyist's work). The incident illustrated Sony's willingness to invoke the DMCA in situations with no relationship to "piracy." 49 Sony Attacks PlayStation "Mod Chips" Sony has sued a number of manufacturers and distributors of "mod chips" for alleged circumvention under the DMCA. In doing so, Sony has been able to enforce a system of "region coding" that raises significant anticompetitive issues. "Mod chips" are after-market accessories that modify Sony PlayStation game consoles to permit games legitimately purchased in one part of the world to be played on a games console from another geographical region. Sony complains that mod chips can also be used to play pirated copies of games. As noted above, it is hard to see why an independent vendor of a product with legitimate uses should have to solve Sony's piracy problems before entering the market. Sony sued Gamemasters, distributor of the Game Enhancer peripheral device, which allowed owners of a U.S. PlayStation console to play games purchased in Japan and other countries. Although there was no infringement of Sony's copyright, the court granted an injunction under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, effectively leaving gamers at the mercy of Sony's region coding system. Interestingly, courts in Australia, recognizing the anticompetitive and anticonsumer potential of Sony's region coding system, came to a different conclusion under that country's analog to the DMCA. In Stevens v Kabushiki Kaisha Sony Computer Entertainment, the High Court of Australia held in 2005 that the regional access coding on Sony PlayStation computer games as implemented by the PlayStation console did not qualify for legal protection, as it did not prevent or inhibit copyright infringement. Sony, like all vendors, is free to attempt to segregate geographic markets. If it does so, however, it should have to bear its own costs for the effort, rather than relying on the DMCA, which Congress plainly did not enact to trump the usual legal regimes governing parallel importation. 50 Blizzard Sues bnetd.org Vivendi-Universal's Blizzard Entertainment video game division brought a DMCA lawsuit against a group of volunteer game enthusiasts who created software that allowed owners of Blizzard games to play their games over the Internet. The software, called "bnetd," allowed gamers to set up their own alternative to Blizzard's own Battle.net service. Blizzard has a policy of locking in its customers who want to play their games over the Internet-it's the Battle.net servers or nothing. Although access to Blizzard's Battle.net servers is free, the hobbyists decided to create bnetd to overcome difficulties that they had experienced in attempting to use Battle.net. The bnetd software was freely distributed, open source, and noncommercial. Blizzard filed suit in St. Louis to bar distribution of bnetd, alleging that the software was a "circumvention device" prohibited by the DMCA. According to Blizzard, the bnetd software could be used to permit networked play of pirated Blizzard games. The developers never used the software for that purpose, nor was that the purpose for which the software was designed. It is hard to see why a competitor should have to solve Blizzard's piracy problem before it can offer innovative products for legitimate owners of Blizzard games. Nevertheless, Blizzard prevailed on its DMCA claim, and the bnetd developers ceased distributing the software. 51 Apple Harasses Inventive Retailer When Other World Computing (OWC), a small retailer specializing in Apple Macintosh computers, developed a software patch that allowed all Mac owners to use Apple's iDVD software, they thought they were doing Macintosh fans a favor. For their trouble, they got a DMCA threat from Apple. Apple's iDVD authoring software was designed to work on newer Macs that shipped with internal DVD recorders manufactured by Apple. OWC discovered that a minor software modification would allow iDVD to work with external DVD recorders, giving owners of older Macs an upgrade path. Apple claimed that this constituted a violation of the DMCA and requested that OWC stop this practice immediately. OWC obliged. Rather than prevent copyright infringement, the DMCA empowered Apple to force consumers to buy new Mac computers instead of simply upgrading their older machines with an external DVD recorder. 52 6. DMCA Shoulders Aside Computer Intrusion Statutes The DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions have also threatened to displace "computer intrusion" and "anti-hacking" laws, something that Congress plainly never intended. State and federal statutes already protect computer network owners from unauthorized intrusions. These include the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Wiretap Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), and a variety of state computer intrusion statutes. These statutes, however, generally require that a plaintiff prove that the intrusion caused some harm. The DMCA, in contrast, contains no financial damage threshold, tempting some to use it in place of the statutes that were designed to address computer intrusion. Fortunately, the courts appear to be taking steps to reign in this particular misuse of the DMCA, ruling that the use of authentic usernames and passwords to access computers cannot constitute circumvention, even if done without the authorization of the computer owner. 53 Until more judicial precedents are on the books, however, the improper use of the DMCA as an all-purpose computer intrusion prohibition will continue to muddy the waters for lawyers and professionals. Disgruntled Company Sues Former Contractor For Unauthorized Network Access In April 2003, an automated stock trading company sued a former contract programmer under the DMCA, claiming that his access to the company's computer system over a password-protected virtual private network (VPN) connection was an act of circumvention. Pearl Investments had employed the programmer to create a software module for its software system. In order to complete the work remotely, the programmer used a VPN to connect to the company's computers. Although the contractor created a very successful software module for the company, the relationship turned frosty after the company ran into financial difficulties and terminated the contractor's contract. The company sued the contractor when it discovered the contractor's VPN connection to the its system, claiming electronic trespass, as well as violations of computer intrusion statutes, the CFAA, and the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. Pearl claimed that it had taken away the authorization it had previously given to the contractor to access its system through the password-protected VPN and that the VPN connection was therefore unauthorized. The Court rejected the company's electronic trespass and CFAA claims due to lack of evidence of any actual damage done. Even though the second server was not being used by the programmer at the time, and its hard drive had been accidentally wiped, the court agreed with Pearl that the existence of the VPN was a prohibited circumvention of a technological protection measure that controlled access to a system which contained copyrighted software. 54 7. Conclusion Years of experience with the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the DMCA demonstrate that the statute reaches too far, chilling a wide variety of legitimate activities in ways Congress did not intend. As an increasing number of copyright works are wrapped in technological protection measures, it is likely that the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions will be applied in further unforeseen contexts, hindering the legitimate activities of innovators, researchers, the press, and the public at large. EFF would like to thank the following who helped to create and update this publication: The Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, Deirdre Mulligan, Nicky Ozer, and Nicolai Nielsen. http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/?f=uninte...sequences.html Winternals Gunning For Best Buy/Geek Squads Pirates The Survey: Thank you for your interest in this matter. We really appreciate any information you are willing to provide. You don't have to enter your contact information if you don't want to, but we encourage you to let us contact you about your former employment with Best Buy or the Geek Squad. Thanks again for your help! Are you a former employee of Best Buy or the Geek Squad? Yes No If you are currently employed by Best Buy or the Geek Squad you cannot take this survey. Are you currently employed by Best Buy or the Geek Squad? Yes No 1. In what city and state was the Best Buy store or Geek Squad precinct that you worked in located? 2. Approximately when did you work at Best Buy or Geek Squad? (month) (year /yy ) to (month) (year / yy) 3. While you worked at Best Buy or with Geek Squad, did you witness the use of unlicensed software? Yes No 4. While you worked at Best Buy or with Geek Squad, did you witness the unlicensed use of ERD Commander or any other Winternals' software? Yes No 5. Did someone at Best Buy or with Geek Squad provide you with an unlicensed copy of ERD Commander or other Winternals' software? Yes No 6. Did someone at Best Buy or with Geek Squad provide you with training on the use of ERD Commander or other Winternals' software? Yes No 7. Are you willing to speak with someone at Winternals about your former employment with Best Buy or the Geek Squad? Yes No Contact Information Name Address Phone Number Email 8. Please provide us with any specific information that you think might be helpful. http://www.winternals.com/survey/ BitTorrent Battles Over Bandwidth Spencer Kelly Nowadays, many of us have a lot of media stored on our computers such as software, music, videos. In the last few years users have started to share that content with each other across the net, whether legal or not. This is something that has plagued the music industry for several years. And now, mainly thanks to a system called BitTorrent, the movie industry could face the same struggle. But BitTorrent could also be the solution. Hollywood is definitely interested in distributing its movies over the net. King Kong is the first major film in the UK to be released as a download at the same time as on DVD. Users on the web will visit a download site and pull the data onto their computers. Many users can be served at once but, if demand is huge, users will effectively have to queue up and wait their turn. But there is another way to get hold of content and it has caused a nightmare for the music industry of late, with users sharing content amongst themselves, their peers. Using a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program and a decent internet connection, a user can make all his files available to anyone else who is using the same program. If you wanted to get hold of a particular song, your file-sharing program would hunt for that file on other people's hard drives. When it finds it, it downloads a copy to your own computer. The more users who download the file, the more places there are for other users to get it. This reduces the likelihood of bottlenecks, and is a very efficient way of distributing files across the net. Of course, it is illegal to share copyrighted material like that. But this has not stopped people doing it. Larger files More recent developments include being able to download different parts of the same file from different users. But video files are much larger than music files and have slower upload times. This is where BitTorrent comes in. It is an incredibly efficient way of distributing large files, like video, across the net, even when there is a high demand, and even when only one person has the complete file. The key is that a user's computer does not need to wait until it has downloaded the entire file. As soon as it has downloaded a chunk, it starts uploading it to any other users who do not yet have that chunk. Similarly, your computer finds other users who have chunks that you are missing, and downloads many at once. The group of machines sharing a file is called a swarm, for obvious reasons. And the torrent of data flowing between them is called a torrent. The more people in the swarm, the faster the file spreads. Using BitTorrent is not particularly difficult. There are many different BitTorrent programs freely available for download. These manage the uploading and downloading for you, maximising your internet connection, which can end up shifting gigabytes in a session. Once finished downloading, it is considered good manners to stay online, allowing the program to continue sharing the file with other users. Broadband 'hogs' BitTorrent's efficient use of broadband connections has hugely increased the amount of traffic going across the net, because it runs all users' net connections flat out to deliver huge files. Recent estimates say that around a third of all internet traffic is based around BitTorrent. Some internet service providers think this is unacceptable. Recently BT began clamping down on so-called "broadband hogs", by starting to enforce a 40GB monthly limit. Some ISPs go even further, breaking down customers' net usage into different types of activity, and discriminating against bandwidth-hungry file-sharers. So-called traffic-shaping is part of an ongoing battle between ISPs and BitTorrent programmers. As network providers look for smarter ways to identify torrent traffic, and reduce its impact on their network, more and more help sites are springing up showing users how to encrypt their data to avoid it being tracked and controlled. Bulldog is one ISP which does not feel the need to traffic shape its data flow. The company's Gavin Young says this is because there are different types of ISPs. He told Click: "Some ISPs are what we call infrastructure-based, and that means they build their own networks. "But other ISPs, maybe just for example a brand, are paying money for the fibre, connectivity in that network, and maybe they can't even afford to buy a whole fibre and they're just leasing per megabit units of bandwidth. You're going to be more inclined to try to shape your traffic to keep your cost base down." Jonathan Arber, a technology expert from Ovum, who specialises in file-sharing, believes ISPs are right to be worried about the amount of traffic that something like BitTorrent creates. He said: "Certainly, you could see P2P as one of the killer applications for broadband. What that means is that, if users find that their broadband service is actually limiting the application that they most want to use, they'll simply go somewhere else." New approach According to Bulldog's Gavin Young, a recent online survey which asked people how ISPs should react to P2P traffic found most respondents wanted to slow it down. In other words to traffic-shape. He added: "Basically this is a kind of a robotic application to a lot of people. "They don't necessarily interact that much, they might kick off a download, and go to work or whatever, and so it's not like you're surfing the web, or expecting a response or an instant message. "If something takes three hours instead of two hours, fine. I suspect as people are doing more with video, as opposed to music and songs, that kind of kick-it-off-and-walk-away approach is going to be more common." But instead of traffic-shaping and limiting what could be the killer application for broadband, could not an ISPs just buy more bandwidth? After all, it is their business to provide this data flow. Mr Young explained: "Unfortunately, if you buy more bandwidth, somebody has to cover the cost of that. "What we're seeing is ISPs introducing tiered services, so for example, given the opportunity for light users to maybe have a metered package, who pay per unit at a time or per amount of data you download. So you can control your own costs as a user, and unlimited packages will inevitably cost a bit more. There are many programs that use the BitTorrent protocol, but it is still not a completely user-friendly experience. Ovum's Jonathan Arber said: "The various applications, while they are getting more user-friendly, still require a degree of technical knowledge in order to really get BitTorrent working the way it should. "If you want to kind of get the kind of download speeds that people talk about, you're going to have to know a little bit about configuring the application, a little bit about configuring your own network as well." http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ne/4905660.stm Musical Breast Implants Ananova Computer chips that store music could soon be built into a woman's breast implants. One boob could hold an MP3 player and the other the person's whole music collection. BT futurology, who have developed the idea, say it could be available within 15 years. BT Laboratories' analyst Ian Pearson said flexible plastic electronics would sit inside the breast. A signal would be relayed to headphones, while the device would be controlled by Bluetooth using a panel on the wrist. According to The Sun he said: "It is now very hard for me to thing of breast implants as just decorative. If a woman has something implanted permanently, it might as well do something useful." The sensors around the body linked through the electrical impulses in the chips may also be able to warn wearers about heart murmurs, blood pressure increases, diabetes and breast cancer. http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm...=news.quirkies In Silicon Valley, a Man Without a Patent John Markoff GEOFF GOODFELLOW is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came up with an idea that resulted in a $612.5 million payday. But he will never see a penny of it. He remains little known even in Silicon Valley and, perhaps most surprising, he doesn't really mind. And herein lies one of the stranger tales about innovation and money in the world of technology. A high-school dropout, Mr. Goodfellow had his light-bulb moment in 1982, when he came up with the idea of sending electronic mail messages wirelessly to a portable device — like a BlackBerry. Only back then, there was no BlackBerry; his vision centered on pagers. He eventually did get financial backing to start a wireless e-mail service in the early 1990's, but it failed. So, in 1998, he moved to Prague and bought a bar. While he was there, the BlackBerry did come along. Tending bar, he believed that everyone had forgotten that he had initially come up with the idea of wireless e-mail. Almost everyone had, that is, except for James H. Wallace Jr., a Washington lawyer for one of the companies involved in a patent dispute over Mr. Goodfellow's invention. Mr. Wallace represented NTP, a company aggressively defending its patents for wireless e-mail. He flew to Prague two days after first speaking to Mr. Goodfellow in early 2002 to introduce himself. Mr. Goodfellow says that NTP was concerned that his earlier work might undermine its patent claims, and the company wound up going to some lengths to ensure that it did not. "I kind of had a big grin on my face that someone had dug deep enough to find the person where it all began," Mr. Goodfellow recalled. "He basically wanted to hear my story." On a subsequent visit a year later, as Mr. Goodfellow remembers it, Mr. Wallace introduced him to a travel companion by saying: "Geoff's the inventor of wireless e-mail. My client patented some of its implementation workings." Mr. Wallace, in an e-mail response to a reporter's questions, disputed the quotation. But two things are certain. Mr. Goodfellow, an early participant in Silicon Valley's grass-roots computer culture, disdained the notion of protecting his ideas with patents. And Thomas J. Campana Jr., a Chicago inventor with no such qualms, patented the idea of wireless electronic mail almost a decade after Mr. Goodfellow's original work. Mr. Campana, who died in 2004, was a founder of NTP, and his patent push yielded a bonanza for the company, which will receive $612.5 million in a settlement reached last month in its patent infringement suit against Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. For legal and technology experts, the tale of Mr. Goodfellow's pioneering work is evidence of the shortcomings of the nation's patent system, which was created to reward individual creativity but has increasingly become a club for giant corporations and aggressive law firms. Several legal experts suggested that Mr. Goodfellow's work might have constituted important "prior art" — earlier public information that is relevant to a patent application — that should have been disclosed to patent examiners and the courts by both sides in the dispute. "I think there is a potential ethics issue," said Mark A. Lemley, a Stanford professor who specializes in patent law. "The basic key is the attorneys have the obligation to disclose everything they know about his prior artwork and make him available as a fact witness." DESPITE what might have been, Mr. Goodfellow says he has no regrets. His scorn for patents is widely shared by many innovators in Silicon Valley, especially open-source software developers, whose technology competes with products from companies like Microsoft. But it remains a deeply divisive viewpoint. "You don't patent the obvious," he said during a recent interview. "The way you compete is to build something that is faster, better, cheaper. You don't lock your ideas up in a patent and rest on your laurels." The initial encounter with Mr. Wallace in Prague was only the beginning of Mr. Goodfellow's indirect role in the BlackBerry case. NTP, he says, seemed intent on neutralizing him as a complication to its patent case. NTP hired Mr. Goodfellow as a consultant; invoices show he was paid $4,000 a day — about $19,600 in all — for several days' work in 2002, including two trips to meet with lawyers in Washington. As part of a formal contract, he signed a nondisclosure agreement, prohibiting him from revealing any information or consulting with any other parties during the period of the lawsuit. At one meeting in Washington, when Mr. Goodfellow described his technology at a white board in a conference room, Mr. Wallace insisted that the other lawyers not take handwritten notes for fear of leaving a paper trail, Mr. Goodfellow says. Another meeting, he says, focused on which claims in NTP's patents were least likely to be compromised by Mr. Goodfellow's prior work. In an e-mail response to a reporter's question about NTP's contacts with Mr. Goodfellow, Mr. Wallace maintained that Mr. Goodfellow was retained because he had been mentioned in news articles from the early 1990's "regarding a product called RadioMail" — his effort to commercialize the wireless e-mail idea — but that Mr. Goodfellow "could not locate any documentation beyond these articles regarding the product." As it happens, he had documented his wireless e-mail concept even earlier. In the early 1970's Mr. Goodfellow, then a teenager, was hanging out at SRI International here, generally getting under foot until he was hired in 1974 as an assistant computer operator in the laboratory of the pioneering computer researcher Douglas C. Englebart. By the early 1980's, the Arpanet, the computer network that preceded the modern Internet, was being used by thousands of academics, scientists and military officers — and by Mr. Goodfellow, who realized that it was possible to relay a mail message from the network to a newfangled alphanumeric pager that had just been introduced by a nearby company, Millicom, of Sunnyvale, Calif., which called its service Metagram. In 1982, he published his idea on a widely read Arpanet mailing list called Telecom Digest in a note titled "Electronic Mail for People on the Move." The service, he wrote, "allows Arpanet users to send messages to people on the MetaNet without having to run and find a terminal with a modem on it or go through the human dispatcher, i.e., so you can now do fun things like be driving down the road and have a message appear that says: [YOU HAVE NEW MAIL]." Mr. Goodfellow went on to become a founder of the world's second commercial Internet company, Anterior Technology (later renamed RadioMail), in his apartment here in 1986. Beginning in 1990, at roughly the same time AT&T hired Mr. Campana to develop pager technology into a wireless mail gateway, Mr. Goodfellow set out to commercialize his idea, ultimately receiving $3 million from financial backers such as Motorola. RadioMail was introduced in 1991, and the next year Mr. Goodfellow embarked on a partnership with Research in Motion, a Canadian company, and Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications giant. But like a number of Mr. Goodfellow's projects, RadioMail was ahead of its time, and he left the company in 1996. During the height of the Internet bubble, Mr. Goodfellow, a self-taught software engineer, would speak caustically about the hype pervading the era, referring to the surplus of "zero-billion-dollar industries." He walked away from Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom without the great wealth that it had afforded so many. But if he is miffed, it is because so much of the history has been forgotten. "I don't want to sound bitter," he said. "I'm overjoyed that what I saw more than 20 years ago is now de rigueur." Today, Mr. Goodfellow's invention and its fate are a curious but significant footnote to the bitter patent battle between NTP, whose only assets are the Campana patents, and Research in Motion, which has come to dominate the market for wireless electronic mail handsets. Although the NTP patents have been tentatively invalidated by the United States Patent Office, a jury upheld NTP's infringement suit in 2002, and R.I.M. chose to settle the legal fight for fear of a federal court injunction against its popular service. And Mr. Wallace, the NTP lawyer, rejects the idea that Mr. Goodfellow's work casts any further shadow over his client's patent claims. Mr. Wallace said by e-mail that he was not aware of Mr. Goodfellow's 1982 article — though Mr. Goodfellow says he described his 1982 work in detail to NTP lawyers — and that NTP's patent claims turn on integration with a "destination computer," not a pager. In any case, Mr. Wallace added, "the devil is in the details. "Suppose I write something saying that teleportation is possible by merely converting matter to energy, beaming the energy to a distant location and reconverting energy back to matter," he said. "Does this mean that my statements compromise the patents of the first person to actually make such a system work? No patent attorney would argue such a thing." Others take a different view. "The moral of the story is that for a long time now the patent system has been misused," said Mitchell D. Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Corporation, the software publisher, and an adviser to Mr. Goodfellow in the early 1990's. "If it had been properly used, NTP would never have been issued its patents, and they never would have had a basis to pursue a lawsuit against R.I.M." DURING the court case, R.I.M. and NTP wrangled over three earlier developments: work by some University of Hawaii researchers; a Motorola patent; and work by TekNow, a company in Phoenix. Mr. Goodfellow's company and 1982 system were not mentioned. (R.I.M. executives did not respond to telephone and e-mail requests for comment.) Although his role went unnoticed both by the federal courts and patent examiners, Mr. Goodfellow's invention is woven into the very fabric of the Internet. The computer network assigns different addresses, known as ports, now numbering more than 65,000, to different services like electronic mail or the World Wide Web. To this day, Port 99 remains set aside for Mr. Goodfellow's original brainstorm: pushing an electronic mail message to a wireless pager. Mr. Goodfellow sold his bar in Prague in 2004 and returned to Silicon Valley to help his brother run an Internet photography business. He is now back in the thick of innovation, serving as the chairman of a start-up Eritrean company working on voice-over-Internet-protocol technology. In his spare time he volunteers as a disc jockey at KZSU, the Stanford student radio station. He said his show, beat.net, is his way of continuing to look for the technology edge. "I'm really interested in the intersection of technology and entertainment," said Mr. Goodfellow, who just turned 50. "These days I'm still trying to spend my time doing new things." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/te...erland&emc=rss Write Free Software, Pay $203,000 to Patent Holder Jackson Lenford Ben Jacobsen, a model railroad hobbyist, wrote a bunch of software to let you connect your computer to your model railroad and control trains with it. He chose to not only give the software away for free, but to make the source code available as well, so that the model railroading/hacker community could improve it and customize it to their liking. And then KAM Industries, maker of commercial software that serves a similar role, tried asserting their 'patent rights' over doing just that. When the author of the open source railroad controller asked for additional information about what claims were being infringed, KAM sent him an invoice for $203,000, claiming that the 7000 or so users of his software resulted in damages of at least $29/each. KAM then sent a request to the author's academic sponsor (unrelated to his independent model railroad work), requesting copies of all his email and other correspondence. This was obviously a dirty tactic meant to rattle Jacobsen more than anything else. Several more threatening letters arrived. Finally, in January of this year, Jacobsen pointed out that he didn't believe their patent would withstand a challenge in court, noting that there was plenty of prior art, including his allegedly infringing software, which was available before KAM filed their patent application. He also pointed out that they must have known this all along. In February, KAM's lawyers responded by claiming that they know of no invalidating prior art, and that they still viewed Jacobsen's work as infringing on their patent rights. This is all still ongoing. It isn't clear that KAM will cease harassing Jacobsen, even with the knowledge that their patents are likely illegitimate. But it is abundantly clear that patents like this hurt the efforts of those trying to make the world a better place by producing tools for others to use (for free in this case). It is equally as clear that even small companies can use their patents as bludgeons against individuals. The continuing saga (as well as all correspondence to date) can be followed at Jacobsen's website. http://righttocreate.blogspot.com/20...203000-to.html Lessons from the Browser Wars The first-mover advantage is well chronicled, but it didn't help Netscape when Microsoft launched Internet Explorer. What drives technology adoption, and do browser upstarts such as Firefox stand a chance? A Q&A with professor Pai-Ling Yin. Sara Grant In a famous example of how first movers can lose their advantage, second-mover Microsoft won the Web browser wars from Netscape and continues to dominate the market today. But that competition was the subject of another "war," this one among researchers who study how technology is diffused into the market. The debate was this: Did Microsoft win because its Internet Explorer was the technologically superior product to Netscape Navigator, or was Microsoft just more successful at the distribution end by convincing most PC companies, some argue by anticompetitive tactics, to include IE on every PC shipped in the late 1990s? Researchers line up on both sides of the argument. A recent working paper by Harvard Business School professor Pai-Ling Yin and Stanford professor Timothy F. Bresnahan offers an answer. Looking at both the pace of adoption of new versions of the browsers and the brand choice made by users, "distribution played a larger role than did technical progress in determining the market outcomes," the scholars conclude in the paper "Economic and Technical Drivers of Technology Choice: Browsers." The implications are significant. Browsers simplified access to the online world, transforming the Internet from a communications vehicle for academics into a mass consumer phenomenon. At the same time, the growing usefulness of the Internet drove sales of personal computers off the chart—the installed base of PCs doubled to 213 million computers between 1995 and 1999. Understanding the complex interaction between the two technologies and how a second mover was able to unseat the incumbent market champion will help innovators of all stripes learn how new technology gets diffused into mass markets. In this interview, Yin discusses the results and implications for new browser upstarts such as Firefox and Camino. Do they stand a chance against Internet Explorer? Yin says Microsoft's entrenchment in corporate IT, the maturation of the PC market, and the technical difficulty many consumers have in switching to a new browser make it hard soil for new challengers to take root. Sara Grant: Why did you choose to study Web browsers to look at the idea of diffusion of innovation in a market? Pai-Ling Yin: Web browsers were the turning point in mass commercializing the Internet. They were the easy-to-use user interface that permitted the average person to access information on servers around the world. As a tool for exploring how standards are set when new technologies hit the market, the browser wars exhibit many features we like to study: competition between two viable alternatives, rapidly improving technologies, the ability of firms to use strategic levers such as market power and channels of distribution, growth in demand leading to diffusion of the new technology through the population, and uncertainty. Thus, this is one example from which we can generalize lessons regarding the outcome of diffusion of innovation into a market. Q: In your paper, you explain that your analysis of the "classical concern" in the diffusion of new technologies is based on technological progress versus economic resources. Can you explain this? A: The classical debate in economics has been whether the market always produces the "best" outcome. Best can be defined in different ways. In one stream of the debate, "best" has been defined as "technologically superior" (again, a term that can be defined differently). So, does the market always lead the "technologically superior" outcome, or can economic actors take actions to influence the market outcome so that a "technologically inferior" outcome arises? We conclude that while both technological progress (measured by releases of newer and better versions of browsers: version 1, version 1.1, version 2, etc.) and strategic actions (distribution browsers with PC purchases) increase the rate of diffusion of browsers into the population, the strategic actions (distribution or restrictions on distribution in the case of Netscape) are twice as important as technical progress. Q: Your findings show that at the height of the competition between Netscape and Microsoft during the 1990s, Microsoft's Internet Explorer became the de facto browser standard. What does this say in regards to first-mover versus second-mover advantage, and about future browser battles? A: What is interesting are the lessons we can learn about how a fast second mover can upset the normally strong barriers to entry that a first-mover advantage in a network setting can create. In short, the big lesson learned is that a window of opportunity exists for a second mover to challenge a first mover in this setting early on when the new technology has not yet diffused through the entire population—the second mover can try to influence new users rather than get the small installed base to switch over. The second mover has to have some sort of asymmetric advantage, such as control over the distribution of a complement (in this case, the PC), in order to slow the build-up of network effects around the first mover and ensure that the second mover's product begins to build up a critical mass. A number of smaller strategic elements converge to generate this window of opportunity, but I encourage people to read the paper as well as a chapter on this phenomenon which is forthcoming in Shane M. Greenstein & Victor Stango (Eds.), Standards and Public Policy, Cambridge University Press. As for the future of Web browsers, the standard has been set, and it will be very hard to displace IE. Although Firefox is touted as the new challenger, its share of end-users is only estimated at 10 percent, and end-users are less of a barrier to further market share than are Webmasters. Q: What are the chances for browsers like Firefox and Camino for the Mac to become mainstream products? A: Firefox and Camino claim only a small market share, and those users are on the tech-savvy end of the user spectrum. In particular for Mac-centric browsers, we still live in a PC-dominated world. Until IT managers in large enterprises are willing to support these browsers, they will not hit the mainstream in any major fashion. Why won't an IT manager support these versions? The biggest headache with these browsers is that the majority of Web sites are optimized on IE. Try going to some of the major commercial airline sites, or to the Web sites of older and smaller companies. If you use Firefox, sometimes you will find missing menus, missing pictures, links that don't work, etc. Even Netscape doesn't work with all of our Harvard Business School applications. But its Webmasters who are the real barrier to a late-to-the-game second mover in the browser market. Because different browsers require slightly different code to be viewable, it is costly for Webmasters to write for different types of browsers. They will tend to pick the browser that is most used by the majority of end-users. Thus, the source of network effects in this market is indirect. While end-users don't know which browser other users are using, the developers of the content that make the browser so useful do care that everyone is using a similar browser. Q: So Firefox and other new browsers, no matter that they have new features and refinements that IE lacks, remain at a competitive disadvantage? A: Game over. Firefox and the others have to get the installed base of IE users to switch to their browser, a much harder proposition than IE faced in the '90s when all it had to do was get new users to pick IE rather than Netscape as their first browser. Either the innovations would have to be huge improvements over what IE can currently do, or a huge problem would have to arise with current IE use to create an opening for such a late second mover to make headway and lead people to go through the hassle of switching their browser. Even with the security issues that plague IE, Microsoft has a huge amount of cash. If any browser really became a threat, Microsoft could easily imitate their innovation, or fix the IE problem with a patch. Indeed, IE successfully caught up to Netscape's quality by throwing a lot of money and manpower into IE browser development. Q: What are you working on next? A: Most closely related to the browser wars is research with professor Estelle Cantillon on how a second mover tipped the derivatives exchange market in the German Bund. These works contribute to a more general theme in my research on how firms can change industry structure. The market tipping work addresses one part of that question: How can second movers break incumbent control? Casework and early-stage research attack a second aspect of that general theme: Can technology drive changes in demand? In a world of growing information resources, what are the drivers of search? How do people search, really? What would the answers to these questions imply for industry structure and business models in the next twenty years? http://workingknowledge.hbs.edu/item...8&t=technology Europe, Too, Takes Harder Line in Handling Terrorism Suspects Katrin Bennhold As his wristwatch edges toward 3:26 p.m., the 32-year-old Algerian moves his wooden chair closer to the back door. At 3:30 sharp, his leg needs to be inside his North London house. The man, whose name, by court order, cannot be divulged, wears an electronic tag around his left ankle and is allowed to leave his home just four hours a day. He was arrested in London four years ago on suspicion of links to the Armed Islamic Group, an Algerian terrorist organization, and spent more than three years in high-security prisons before being put under partial house arrest in October. Now the British government wants to send him back to Algeria. But no formal charges have been brought, and, he and his lawyer said, he has not been interrogated once, or informed of evidence against him. "Since the day they arrested me, I have never been asked any questions or told what the case is," the man said. "How can you defend yourself in a situation like that?" Four and a half years after the Sept. 11 attacks, and after deadly bombings in Madrid and London since then, the troubled debate within Western democracies over how to weigh security against basic freedoms has only grown and spread, as the legal tools for dealing with terrorism suspects multiply. The clashing of priorities has been clear in the United States, in the domestic debates preceding the renewal of the Patriot Act, and in the international uproar over prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. But many European governments, including some that had criticized the United States for its antiterrorism measures, have been extending their own surveillance and prosecution powers. Officials, lawyers and human rights experts say that Europe, too, is experiencing a slow erosion of civil liberties as governments increasingly put the prevention of possible terrorist actions ahead of concerns to protect the rights of people suspected, but not convicted, of a crime. Most of Britain's new counterterrorism legislation, which outlaws the vaguely worded "glorification" of terrorism, came into force on Thursday. Italy and the Netherlands have relaxed the conditions under which intelligence services may eavesdrop. French legislation recently gave investigators broader access to telephone and Internet data. German legislation being drawn up seeks to allow intelligence services easier access to bank and car registration records. "We are fiddling with rights that only a few years ago seemed untouchable," said Álvaro Gil-Robles, human rights commissioner at the Council of Europe, an intergovernmental group that monitors human rights. The most contentious areas concern treatment of terror suspects, he said. Several European countries are extending the length of time suspects who have not been charged may be held or restricted in their freedom. Some nations have been seeking ways to deport suspects even if torture is practiced in the suspects' home countries. That brushes uncomfortably against major United Nations and European treaties that forbid deportations if the suspect faces a risk of torture. "Something pretty fundamental is going on," said Gareth Peirce, a lawyer at Birnberg and Peirce in London who represents the Algerian man under surveillance in North London and nine other Middle Eastern and North African men arrested without formal charges within months of Sept. 11. "A number of countries have been trying to avoid their treaty obligations in relation to arbitrary detention and torture," she said. As in the United States, defenders of tighter security say that international terrorism demands new approaches and that criminal law is ill-equipped to handle the threat. "We always think about the rights of the terrorists," said August Hanning, Germany's deputy interior minister and a former intelligence chief. "But if there is an attack that you could have prevented, you also have to be able to look into the eyes of the relatives." One broad trend has been the extension of police custody and restriction of legal representation. In December, France increased its period of detention without charge for terror suspects to six days from four; it retained rules that have allowed uncharged suspects to be denied access to a lawyer during the first three days. Italy last year extended custody to 24 hours from 12 and authorized the police to interrogate detainees in the absence of their lawyers. In 2003, Spain extended the period in which suspected terrorists can be held effectively incommunicado to a maximum 13 days, according to the advocacy group Human Rights Watch. Britain has gone furthest. The latest law doubles the period during which a terror suspect can be held in custody without charge to 28 days. It was just 48 hours in 2001, and Prime Minister Tony Blair fought for an extension to three months. The new law followed one filed soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that allowed foreign terror suspects to be held indefinitely without charge. The House of Lords declared that measure unlawful in late 2004. The government, scrambling to find a new way to deal with 10 men held under the provision at Belmarsh Prison in London, introduced a form of partial house arrest known as a ontrol order, which severely restricted their freedom of movement. Since last summer, Britain has also been seeking ways to deport eight of the men back to home countries that are known to practice torture. One of them is the unidentified Algerian, who is allowed to leave his house only between 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. and may not venture more than a mile away. He is not allowed to use cellphones or the Internet, and any visitor to his house has to be cleared by the Home Office. Last week a British High Court judge, Jeremy Sullivan, sharply condemned a control order on another terrorism suspect, identified as M.B., as "conspicuously unfair," saying that suspects' rights are being determined by "executive decision untrammeled by any prospect of effective judicial supervision." The government said after the ruling that it would appeal, and the Home Office issued a statement, defending its counterterrorism legislation as striking "the right balance between safeguarding society and safeguarding the rights of the individual." In the Netherlands, a bill likely to pass in coming weeks would introduce something like the British control orders for terrorism suspects the authorities have been "unable to convict." For a maximum of two years, such suspects can be restricted in their freedom of movement, be obliged to report to the police regularly and prohibited from contacting certain individuals. In some countries, restrictive tools predate the Sept. 11 attacks, but their use has increased. In France, where a combination of Basque, Corsican and Islamic terrorism prompted the government to lay the groundwork for its antiterrorist legal arsenal as early as 1986, suspects can be held for four years on vague charges. As of November 2005, some 80 suspects were being held under this provision, more than in any other European country, according to Alain Marsaud, who was France's chief counterterrorism coordinator in the 1980's and is now a lawmaker. "We're not going to wait until the bomb goes off," said Mr. Marsaud, who wrote a recent parliamentary report on counterterrorism efforts. "That's why we give more power to the judicial system: to arrest people before they act." The number of Muslim men arrested for "association with wrongdoers involved in a terrorist enterprise" has soared since Sept. 11. According to the French Interior Ministry, it increased from 58 people in 2002, to 77 in 2003, 101 in 2004 and 170 last year. Lawyers say the British, Dutch and French practices are milder forms of the detention of "enemy combatants" in the United States. "There is a clear parallel with what is going on in the United States," said Jacques Debray, a Lyon-based lawyer specializing in immigration and penal law, who has represented several terrorism suspects. "They detain people on administrative grounds, while we create a legal framework first. But the logic is the same: preventive detention." The United Nations Convention Against Torture and the European Convention on Human Rights, ratified by all European Union member countries and the United States, ban torture and other cruel or degrading treatment. They forbid the deportation of people to countries where they risk torture, and the admission in court of evidence possibly obtained under torture. But several European countries have sought diplomatic assurances from countries with poorly regarded human rights records that if they deport suspects there, the suspects would not be ill-treated. Sweden allowed two Egyptian terror suspects to be repatriated on a C.I.A. plane in December 2001 after Cairo gave such assurances. The United Nations Committee Against Torture subsequently said that Sweden had violated its obligations under the United Nations Convention. Germany, the Netherlands and Austria have also sought to return suspects to Turkey and Egypt by obtaining such pledges. In Britain, the government has received diplomatic assurances from Libya, Jordan and Lebanon, and was working on similar accords with Egypt and Algeria. Human rights activists say that such assurances are not reliable. "Why should a country that fails to respect major international conventions against torture respect a mere bilateral agreement?" asked Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch in New York. "It's a legal fig leaf." The British government is also trying to make deportations possible without such assurances, seeking to intervene in a case before the European Court of Human Rights that involves the Netherlands. In that case, an Algerian terror suspect, Mohammed Ramzy, who was acquitted on charges of links to a terrorist group, has appealed to the court to prevent his deportation by the Netherlands to Algeria on the grounds that he might face torture. Britain is asking the court to set a precedent by ruling that the risk of torture faced by the suspect has to be weighed against the security risk faced by the host country. A spokeswoman for the British Home Office called the European Convention on Human Rights a "cornerstone" of the European Union, but added, "There is a valid question about how rights and freedoms are balanced and interpreted in a phase of the current heightened security threat that Europe faces." http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/13/news/limits.php A Sinister Web Entraps Victims of Cyberstalkers Tom Zeller Jr. Claire E. Miller, a 44-year-old publishing executive in Manhattan, recently stripped her nameplate from the tenant directory at the entrance to her Kips Bay apartment building, where she has lived for more than 11 years. She has also asked the landlord to disconnect the buzzer and is in the process of changing her phone number. Drastic measures, all, for an otherwise cheerful and outgoing person. But Ms. Miller has been unnerved by a sudden and, since last September, steady onslaught of unsolicited and lusty phone calls, e-mail messages and even late-night visits from strange men — typically seeking delivery on dark promises made to them online by someone, somewhere, using her name. "I wouldn't even try to guess at the motivation behind this," Ms. Miller said. She is being harassed — cyberstalked, by modern definition. The term has by now found its way into dozens of state legislatures, police reports and talk-show lineups, joining other unsavory byproducts of the Internet age. State legislatures took notice around 1999 and began passing laws that make cyberstalking a crime. Three months ago, President Bush signed federal anti-cyberstalking legislation. But cases like Ms. Miller's make it clear that the problem is not easily legislated away and show how devastating it can be to individuals caught in its web. One profile posted at the "adult personals" site iwantu.com included Ms. Miller's full name, address and phone number, along with a solicitation for eager suitors to call or drop by her home. "My name is Claire E. Miller," the ad began. It concluded: "I can make you very happy and satisfied. In my den of love pad." It is the online equivalent of scrawling "for a good time, call Jane Doe" on a bathroom wall, but the reach of the Internet has made such pranks — if they are only that — far more sinister. And the problem is only likely to grow, fueled by the availability of personal data online and the huge growth in social networking and dating sites, which are attracting investment from big companies. "Cyberstalking is the hidden horror of the Internet," said Parry Aftab, an attorney and executive director of WiredSafety.org, a network of 9,000 volunteers who patrol the Web and assist victims of cyberstalking, child pornography and other online ills. "Nobody talks about it. They think they have to live with it." Ms. Miller suspects that her perpetrator is a stranger who may have found her personal information while snooping around in the AOL e-mail account of an old high school friend. But late at night, in the topsy-turvy churn of an anxious brain, all kinds of people — old lovers, acquaintances — become possible culprits. "That's when the self-doubt and fear comes in," Ms. Miller said. There are no statistics on how often this particular breed of online impersonation takes place, but Jayne A. Hitchcock, the director of Working to Halt Online Abuse, an organization that assists victims of Internet harassment, says it is common enough. "I think I've seen everything," Ms. Hitchcock said. Participants in online fantasy football leagues, angered by some nuance of the competition, silently turn on and anonymously harass one another, and in eBay auctions, either the seller or the buyer turns stalker, she said. They channel that "Internet road rage," Ms. Hitchcock said, into a variety of anonymous vendettas. After receiving informal requests for information about cyberstalking from the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies, Ms. Hitchcock's group began tracking demographic details in 2000. In February, the group — which she says handles an average of 50 new cases each week — released a five-year analysis of data on the victims and, to the extent possible, the stalkers. The data is sketchy; victims volunteered to fill out a questionnaire, and harasser data is, in most cases, provided by the harassed. But there are some insights. For example, increasing numbers of men appear to be applying for help, and overt threats of offline harm occurred in about a quarter of the cases last year. In about half the cases, victim and perpetrator appear to be strangers. For the rest, it can be deeply, disturbingly personal. Earlier this month, a Suffolk County police officer, Michael Valentine, was indicted on 197 counts of stalking, unauthorized use of a computer and other charges after hacking into the Yahoo e-mail account of a woman he had briefly dated and posing as her in online communications. The Suffolk County District Attorney's office also charges that Mr. Valentine, of Lake Grove, accessed the woman's personal profile on the dating site Match.com, sending electronic "winks" and other communications to 70 different men on the site. At least two showed up at the woman's home for dates. That case, and Ms. Miller's, echo that of Gary S. Dellapenta, of Los Angeles, a former security guard who spent the summer of 1998 trolling chat rooms and personals sites posing as his ex-girlfriend. He posted rape fantasies under her name and, providing her home address, begged strangers to deliver on them. Six men arrived at the former girlfriend's door before Mr. Dellapenta was eventually tracked down. He was sentenced in 1999 to six years in prison under California's then-new cyberstalking law. J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and the author of several books on criminal personalities, said that the universe of cyberstalkers runs the gamut, from "jokesters and pranksters to people who have clear criminal intent." He called this particular brand of harassment — in which the perpetrator deploys third parties, wittingly or not, to haunt the victim — "stalking by proxy." "With any new technology that comes along, you have the shadow of criminality that follows," Mr. Meloy said, although he added that the Internet, with all its distance and anonymity, provided a unique vehicle for the unleashing of hidden furies. "It's a much more veiled, shielded, disinhibited way of communicating," Mr. Meloy said, "and much more raw in the expression of aggression." Mari J. Frank, an attorney and privacy consultant who specializes in cases of identity theft, called Ms. Miller's situation "identity theft for revenge." "I speak about it all the time," Ms. Frank said, adding that the rise of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, where young people often naïvely divulge too much information to a world of potential stalkers, has made the situation worse. "Even teens are becoming the victims of cyber ID theft and cyberstalking," she said. About 45 states now have laws similar to California's. And the new federal law — tucked into the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act — updated telephone harassment law to include computer communications. Some advocates of civil liberty have complained about what they see as overly broad language of the federal update, which prohibits not only anonymous communications intended to threaten, abuse and harass, but also those intended to "annoy" — a term that might characterize a wide range of anonymous Internet banter that falls far short of cyberstalking. Others, though, have argued that such banter would be protected by the First Amendment, and only cyberstalkers have anything to fear. That is, of course, if they can be found. Ms. Miller filed an initial complaint with the New York City police department in October, but said she was not contacted after that. Using a number provided by a friend, she called a detective with the department's units on computer crimes last week, and is now working with investigators there. (A deputy chief, Michael Collins, a police spokesman, said a clerical error in the processing of Ms. Miller's initial complaint apparently delayed her case.) Ms. Miller has also found two dating sites where her name has been used — imatchup.com and iwantu.com — and had the profiles either removed or hidden. According to Ms. Hitchcock, the director of Working to Halt Online Abuse, federal cyberstalking legislation can provide needed leverage in pursuing what are often complicated cases. Perpetrator and victim might reside in different states, for instance, and the evidence might be in the hands of Internet companies all over the country, or the world. The law also gives the F.B.I. and other federal law enforcement agencies greater purview over cyberstalking. But getting that far, Ms. Hitchcock said, is a long road. Using a Web site usually involves leaving tracks in the form of an I.P. address, which can be traced back to an Internet service provider and perhaps the computer of a stalker. Under most circumstances, a subpoena or a search warrant is required to obtain that information from an online service, so filing a police report is crucial. After that, contacting an organization like WiredSafety.org or Working to Halt Online Abuse, at haltabuse.org, can help. They work with both victims and law enforcement to help move cases forward. Ms. Miller has taken all these steps — and worked diligently on her own. Late last month Ms. Miller asked the support staff of iwantu.com, which has offices in Seattle and Canada, Costa Rica and Britain, for data that would reveal the Internet service provider of the person who set up the account there. On April 3, the company put its position succinctly in an e-mail message to Ms. Miller: "Please note that unfortunately, we cannot supply I.P. addresses. Sorry." That is precisely what they should have done, said Mark Brooks, an online personals industry analyst and the editor of Online Personals Watch, an industry newsletter. "They can't possibly give that out to another user," said Mr. Brooks, who is a former executive of dating and social networking sites like Cupid.com and Friendster. "It might be a stalker calling to get that information." Executives for iwantu.com did not return phone calls or e-mail messages seeking comment, and the contact number provided on the imatchup.com Web site for the media relations representative and "Romance Director," Dan Levine, connected to the customer service department instead. A representative reached last weekend said he was not sure why that number was listed, and suggested sending an e-mail message or a letter. These are delicate issues for an industry that is in the throes of a debate about client safety and security. Several states are considering legislation that would require online personals services to disclose whether they conduct background checks on their members. According to Mr. Brooks, most members of the industry are sensitive to issues of online safety, but argue that background checks — which must rely on third-party commercial data brokers with spotty information — are expensive and by no means foolproof. And yet one service, True.com, has quickly become one of the most popular personals sites by conducting background checks on anyone seeking to make a connection. Its staff promises to prosecute those who misrepresent themselves on the site — a concept that Ms. Miller might endorse. She said she planned to pursue her tormenter until he is found. "I do feel that the Internet is a wonderful tool," she said. "I just want to make sure it's kept safe for everyone." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/17/te...rtner=homepage China's Bid For 'Respect' Biz watching Hu visit for anti-piracy commitment Brooks Boliek Chinese President Hu Jintao is on his first visit to the U.S. as that nation's leader, and when he leaves the White House Thursday, entertainment industry executives hope he takes a commitment to fight copyright piracy back to his homeland. Among the litany of complaints Washington has with Beijing is the seemingly endless addiction the rising Asian economic, political and military powerhouse has for bootleg movies, music and other intellectual property. Estimated U.S. losses to Chinese copyright piracy range from $2.5 billion-$3.8 billion a year, according to the U.S. Trade Representative. According to the USTR's April review, the country's lackadaisical enforcement actions allowed infringement levels of 90% or more "for virtually every form of intellectual property" in China during 2004. On Tuesday, Hu toured Microsoft Corp.'s suburban Redmond, Wash., campus and dined at company chairman Bill Gates' home. Hu said he admired what Gates had achieved. He also sought to reassure Gates that China is serious about protecting intellectual property rights, a key concern for the company as it battles widespread piracy of its Windows operating system there. "Because you, Mr. Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I'm a friend of Microsoft," Hu said through a translator, according to the Associated Press. "Also, I am dealing with the operating system produced by Microsoft every day," he added, to laughter. Gates responded: "Thank you, it's a fantastic relationship," and then quipped, "And if you ever need advice on how to use Windows, I'll be glad to help." Hu, Gates, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and an entourage of Chinese dignitaries saw some business technology demonstrations and toured Microsoft's Home of the Future, which features experimental technology. That Hu's American visit began with a tour of Microsoft and dinner with Gates could be viewed as a sign of a newfound seriousness the Chinese government has pertaining to intellectual property theft. His visit comes after years of battling widespread software piracy in the potentially lucrative China market. Chinese government officials say they are serious about cracking down on sales of illegal copies of Windows, and some computer makers are pledging to ship more computers with legitimate Windows software installed. One of those companies, Lenovo Group Ltd., met Monday with Microsoft officials to reaffirm Lenovo's five-month-old commitment to ship computers with genuine operating systems. Microsoft held a similar meeting last week with Chinese computer manufacturer Founder Technology Group Corp., also among the companies that have pledged to promote legal Windows use. There also have been recent shows of force by the Chinese regarding piracy of entertainment products; authorities there have closed a half-dozen illegal optical disc plants and said they have eight more under investigation. Last month, the government also announced the creation of a new court that will prosecute pirates, amid increasing international pressure to protect the intellectual property of industries making everything from movies to medicine (HR 3/13). The government also claims that Chinese courts last year sentenced 741 violators of intellectual property rights, adding that there were 16,583 civil cases against pirates in 2005, a 21% jump from the year before. In late 2004, China lowered the threshold for prosecution of piracy cases; individuals who sell more than 5,000 pirated discs can be imprisoned for three to seven years. In advance of Hu's visit, Zhang Pimin, deputy director general of China's powerful State Administration of Radio, Film and TV, touted his country's attempts to curb piracy. "Personally, I hate piracy," Zhang said in an interview through an interpreter. "It hurts the domestic industry as well as the international industry. Piracy leads people to illegal activity and illegal people." He enumerated the anti-piracy measures the Chinese have taken, saying it will take time for them to take effect. China only recently embraced a market economy with its attendant property rights, Zhang explained. "We are in a kind of education," he said. "Manufacturing is illegal, and now buying is illegal, too." Like the high-profile war against illegal downloads in the U.S., it is difficult to get people to understand the problems caused by rampant copyright theft, he said. The average Chinese has only eight years of schooling and per-capita gross domestic product is about one-twenty-fifth that in the U.S., according to the Chinese government. While industry officials said they realize that changing the Chinese mind-set is difficult, they point out that piracy is not a new problem for Beijing; it's one that they promised to fix before joining the World Trade Organization. "I'm willing to give a little slack on that point," MPAA chairman and CEO Dan Glickman said. "As long as they have a clear direction." The Chinese have talked a good anti-piracy game at least since 1996, when the U.S. under then-President Clinton threatened to slap tariffs on Chinese imports unless they took steps to rein in piracy and other unfair practices. Since then the country has been admitted to the WTO and is required to meet fair trade obligations, which include copyright protections, or face lawsuits that could result in sanctions. The studios, record companies and other intellectual property holders have asked the Bush administration to take WTO action, but so far it has not taken that drastic step. "One of the things that strikes me is that the talking points they use are almost a mirror to those I use when I lobby up on the Hill," RIAA chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol said. "From the standpoint of rhetoric and understanding the issue, they have it down. The question is: Will they back the rhetoric with action?" On a recent visit to China, Glickman found reason to question the Chinese commitment because pirated DVDs were an easy score. "Street piracy was ubiquitous," he said. "They give a lot of lip service, backed by limited action. Some of the local government officials are serious about it, but it is haphazard at most." Hu's visit is as much about polishing his country's image at a time when the copyright piracy helps exacerbate a U.S. trade deficit that is soaring above $200 billion. China is playing economic footsie with countries Washington considers tyrannical, and its undervalued currency hampers U.S. competition. "Part of President Hu's challenge is also to speak to the U.S. public," Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, a leading administration voice on China, said in a speech this week. "China does not want to be seen as a threat; it's seeking respect." U.S. and Chinese officials must "demonstrate to the United States public that the economic relationship with China offers a fair, two-way street -- that there are mutual opportunities and benefits." Entertainment industry executives look at China's billion-plus population and instantly see how it could benefit their business -- only the government would take steps to protect their products. To that end, execs hope that Hu's visit will work as another pressure point for the entertainment industry. "It's on the president's agenda list, we know that," Glickman said. "And when their film people talk to me, they know it's a priority." Bainwol said the Chinese don't have to change their entire world to make a positive impact. A few concrete steps within the next few weeks or months would leave an indelible mark. Giving copyright holders the exemplars -- fingerprints left on CDs and DVDs by the machines that make them -- left in the plants they closed would be considered a show of good faith. "Hu's visit is a moment in time," Bainwol said. "This is a journey, but there are critical moments coming up in the next few months that will make a difference." http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr..._id=1002383350 Gov't Ensures Computers Will Use Genuine Software China Daily All the computers produced and sold in China must install authentic operating system software, spokesman for the National Copyright Administration Wang Ziqiang said yesterday. Governments are especially required to purchase computers with genuine operating system software. "As the operating system is necessary to a new computer, the requirement at this time is specifically focussed on this type of software," Wang said. No detailed list was given regarding the type of operating system required for installation. According to a notice issued by three relevant central government departments, computer manufacturers and retailers that install pirate software will be punished. The government document also noted that operating system software producers should provide a favourable price to computer companies. Wang predicted that the price of computers will not go up after the new policy is adopted. Computer manufacturers and operating system software producers are required to report their sales to the Ministry of Information Industry every year in February. Those who refuse to do so, or those who provide fake figures, will be exposed to the public. As for government, various levels of departments were required by another notice to establish a special fund on purchasing further software besides the operating system. "This is a measure to ensure that all software used on government computers is authentic," Wang said. Those computers with trademarks normally install authentic software, while most computers that are assembled by individuals do not, according to the spokesman. http://english.people.com.cn/200604/...11_257472.html First P2P Infringement Case Heads To Court Beijing Secondary People's Court has begun to hear a lawsuit filed by Shanghai Busheng Music and Culture Company against Beijing Feixingwang Music Software Development Company, who is accused of software copyright infringement. This is the first court case in Beijing concerning P2P music downloading technology. Shanghai Busheng accuses Beijing Feixingwang of illegally providing 59 songs whose copyright belongs to Shanghai Busheng for users to download, share and search. Busheng says that Feixingwang has made as much as RMB2.944 billion from these illegal downloads. Beijing Feixingwang argues that the P2P software it provides was developed by a Taiwan company, not itself, so it requests the court to reject the accusers' appeal. No judgment has been released and another hearing is expected soon. http://www.chinatechnews.com/index.p...e=news&id=3828 Pretentious prattle The Man Behind Scrambled Hackz Eliot Van Buskirk I saw a video the other day that really stood out from the rest of the links making the rounds. It depicts a man demonstrating software that appears to parse what he's saying fast enough to reassemble the same words by pulling and reordering bits from a recorded Michael Jackson interview. The result: Jackson appears to speak the same sentence right back to him. The man goes on to explain how the software behind this process works, and his video closes with a live performance of the software in which a performer appears to employ the beat-box method to control the playback of audio and video on a large video screen behind him, in front of what I can only imagine must be a dazzled crowd. If you haven't seen it yet, you can watch the video here. It might look like a fancy parlor trick, but if the Scrambled Hackz (or "sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!") software does what it appears to do in the video, its ramifications extend far beyond. Sven König does a fine job of explaining how the software works in the above video, but here's the general idea: 1) Scrambled Hackz analyzes the audio portion of a video file to determine the tempo of the incoming audio, and then slices it up into discrete chunks of a quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note and so on (a process also used by audio editing programs such as Ableton Live and Sony's Acid software). 2) Using a large number of vectors, those slices are classified into a database according to their sonic characteristics. 3) When you send new audio information to the program (using, say, your voice and a microphone), it follows approximately the same process, becoming classified in the database. The software then outputs the pre-analyzed sample that is most similar to that newly cached sample. 4) The result, as you can see in the video, is that König is able to reconfigure a Michael Jackson interview or any number of '80s music videos on the fly, so that they produce a sound similar to whatever he inputs. On screen, the software plays the frames of video that accompany the selected audio. I must admit to having been enthralled by this video, because Scrambled Hackz appears to have countless possibilities. One could use the system as a virtual guitar pedal onstage, or as an audio interface to a massive library of longer samples. Producers looking for something that "sounds something like this" would be able to find exactly that in seconds. Or, live performers could use it as it's already been used (see video), as an audiovisual instrument in its own right. König says Scrambled Hackz was designed specifically to infringe copyright. But it has substantial non-infringing uses, so it passes the main litmus test for whether a piece of software is legal. Users could record audio or video of themselves and use the program to pull together samples of various past performances into a real-time performance. For instance, I could take every bass line I've ever recorded and create new ones out of them merely by humming a few bars. An established artist could perform a single song in a live setting that encompassed his or her entire recorded audio and video catalog. People might load their entire media collections into Scrambled Hackz and play around with them in their homes, in art galleries or on a stage, using only their vocal cords or any instrument. The list goes on and on. Scrambled Hackz' potential uses, both infringing and non-infringing, are mind-boggling. I can't wait to see what people build on top of it, either. Wired News was not able to test the program, although it should soon be compiled into something that anyone can use. On the strength of the demonstration video alone, Scrambled Hackz is seriously exciting. An interview with its creator, König, was in order. Wired News: How did the idea to create Scrambled Hackz initially come to you? Sven König: My background is more conceptual media art than it is music, and my current main interest is intellectual property, the history of this concept and how it will shape future societies in which most valuable goods are immaterial: ideas/knowledge and information. I believed (and still do) that IP is fundamentally wrong, and if that's the case it must be possible to show that, not just by writing a text but by an artistic project. So the original idea of (Scrambled Hackz) was just to somehow "hack copyright." I'm a music lover so it was quite clear that I wanted to work with music. In the beginning I just wanted to show that any of my own music could be completely reconstructed out of very small samples of copyrighted music, to ask the question of who now owns that music? Do I own it or do 30 other musicians/labels own my song? WN: How long did you develop it after that? SK: From the first idea above (that was in early 2004) it took just one month to write a small command-line program that would do what I wanted. But its functionality was very limited and it took 60 minutes to synthesize a song of five minutes' length. That was actually already enough to illustrate the original concept but I've realized that if I could get it working in real time it could become a "discursive software." Since then I'm working on the real-time version. WN: What sort of response have you received from people who have seen the video? SK: Since I got Boing Boinged I've received thousands of mails from people telling me what a great idea this is. Most of them also want the software badly. WN: Have you received any commercial or open-source-collaboration interest? SK: A few commercial inquiries and a lot of people offering help for the open-source development. WN: When might Scrambled Hackz be released to the public, and under which license and operating systems? SK: I'm currently very busy with lots of other things, but because there's such a great interest I hope to find the time to launch (Scrambled Hackz) on SourceForge in mid-May. The initial release will be just the core so the nerds can already start to play with it. All code will be licensed under the GNU GPL and it will be platform-independent. WN: I was astounded by the speed with which the program is able to reassemble the Michael Jackson interview once the sound sample database has been created. Can users of the eventual release expect that sort of performance on a normal machine? Will any special hardware be required? SK: Michael works in real time on my 2-year-old laptop, a 1.7-(GHz) Centrino with 1.5 (GB of) RAM. No special hardware is needed; any recent computer will do it. WN: Could the sample lengths be made longer to enable Scrambled Hackz to act as the search mechanism for full measures of music? I'm picturing using it to find the right four-measure sample in a large database, for instance. SK: Scrambled Hackz is not made for that, but with some tweaking and improvements it should be possible. WN: Will users be able to analyze their own video and audio libraries using Scrambled Hackz? SK: Yes, of course. WN: Are you taking the installation on the road, or are there permanent places where people can try it for themselves? SK: I'm currently mainly focusing on the improvement of my performance. The installation is shown only at some media art festivals. But I'm getting many inquiries from artists who want to use the software for installations, so maybe it won't take very long and we will see many (Scrambled Hackz) installations everywhere. My installation is very basic anyway. I'm really looking forward to what other people come up with. http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,...?tw=wn_index_2 Apple Needs to Make OS X Open-Source John C. Dvorak A cloud is rising over Mac OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project. That would make the battle between OS X and Linux the most interesting one on the computer scene. With all attention turned in that direction, there would be nothing Microsoft could do to stem a reversal of its fortunes. Let's start at the beginning. There's been a lot of fuss over Apple's rollout of the unsupported Boot Camp product, which lets Mac users run Microsoft Windows easily on an Intel-based Macintosh. I got into various levels of trouble when I suggested that Apple was going to gravitate towards Windows since it would be easy to do and there was some evidence that the company might want to do it. Some people saw this prediction as somewhat contradictory, because I've also been advocating that Mac OS X be ported to all PCs and become an alternative OS for the rest of us on our standard systems. Getting OS X onto PCs might be even more doable today, since researchers are reporting that as many as half of the business-owned PCs in operation now may not be capable of running Microsoft Vista. It seems like an ideal time to roll OS X over to the PC. So what's actually happening? Well, here's what I think is going on, and also what I think should be going on. Let's start with what's going on. The Boot Camp product is pure test marketing. It's so obviously test marketing that it's hard to believe that people are foolish enough to get worked up about it. You watch a test-marketing scheme to see the results. You use the results to make predictions. We do not have enough results yet to determine what's going to happen next. The test-marketing scheme is likely to be carefully orchestrated and segmented as follows: Step 1: Testing for level of interest. Will this initiative of running Windows on a Mac increase or reduce computer hardware sales in any noticeable way among the hacker nerds who bother to go through the process? Will this translate to a broader acceptance? Step 2: Determining functionality without risk. Does Windows works well on Mac hardware, or not? The idea here is to put it into the wild and see what happens in a support-free environment where Apple has no responsibility to help make it work. Step 3: Blowback analysis. Apple needs to analyze the reaction to Windows on a Mac. This includes seeing whether there is massive rejection of the idea—protests, picketing, egg-throwing, and flaming. In other words, can the community at large live with the idea of Windows running on a Mac? That cannot be known or assumed without this test. So this testing scheme essentially breaks down to practicality, functionality, and political marketability. So far, everything seems to be going well except for the blowback, which seems to be mixed but mostly positive. Much of the positive reaction, though, seems to stem from the mistaken supposition that having Windows on a Mac will make OS X look better by comparison, so people will flock to OS X. This is a dubious and dangerous conclusion for Mac heads to draw. So what do I think will happen now? And specifically, what is Apple going to do with OS X? If the Windows test keeps going the way it's going, the results may indicate that Mac users are more likely to shift to Windows than we used to think. But what will happen to Mac OS X? I suspect that the testing of Windows on a Mac might be duplicated in reverse, with a similar test of the Mac OS X running on a conventional PC. Here again, we'd need to look at the test-marketing results. In this scenario, the idea would again be to determine—by testing—whether or not getting OS X onto PCs would help or hurt Apple as a company. The same three factors would be assessed: practicality (is anyone interested?), functionality (does it work at all?), and political marketability. In the case of political marketability, one additional variable enters the picture: Microsoft perceiving this as a threat to its business. Since no company, including massive IBM, has been able to compete with or unseat Microsoft from the desktop, Microsoft's stance alone may prevent any universal acceptance of OS X on the desktop from ever happening. In fact, I assume that as this is being written, Microsoft has coders in its skunk works tearing into OS X looking for deep flaws that it can exploit and publicize. Don't think otherwise. It only makes sense that they'd do this. Thus a cloud is rising over OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project. That would make OS X versus Linux become the most interesting battle within the computer scene. With all the attention turned in that direction, there would be nothing Microsoft could do to stem a reversal of its fortunes. But I repeat myself. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1950226,00.asp U.S. Advised To Promote Open Standards, Source, Innovation A business- and university-led public policy group has issued a downloadable 72-page report examining open standards, open source software, and "open innovation." The report concludes that openness should be promoted as a matter of public policy, in order to foster innovation and economic growth in the U.S. and world economies. The report was released by the Committee for Economic Development (CED), a non-profit, non-partisan public policy research organization comprised of about 200 senior corporate executives and university leaders. The report resulted from a project within CED's Digital Connections Council (DCC), which is chaired by Paul M. Horn, SVP of research at IBM. The project was directed by Elliot Maxwell, described as "a key advisor on digital economy issues in the Clinton Administration." The CED report concludes that intellectual property (IP) law and business practices designed for the trade of physical goods threaten economic development and innovation in digital information product markets such as software. It recommends several specific steps aimed at helping public policy makers promote openness, innovation, and economic growth: • Open Standards • Governments should "encourage the development and use of open standards, through processes as open to participation and contribution as possible" • The results of government-supported research should be readily available for inclusion in open standards • Governments should create incentives for early disclosure of intellectual property rights affecting open standards, because historically, companies have waited, in order to maximize damage claims • Open Source Software • Governments should not mandate any particular license, such as requiring open source software only; however... • No citizen should be required to use the hardware or software of any particular vendor • International procurements should also supprt inter-operability requirements • Open Innovation (such as 'peer production' systems like WikiPedia and eBay user ratings) • To foster open innovation, federally funded, non-classified research should be widely disseminated, following the example of the NIH (National Institute of Health) • "Any legislation or regulation regarding intellectual property rights [should be] weighed with a presumption against the granting of new rights ... because of the benefits to society of further innovation through greater access to technology." • The NSF (National Science Foundation) should fund research into "alternative compensation methods, similar to those created to facilitate the growth of radio, to reward creators of digital information products" The full 72-page CED report is available for download, here (PDF download). A brief summary, on which this story was largely based, is also available, [urlhttp://www.ced.org/projects/ecom.shtml#open]here[/url]. http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2542131185.html ODF Alliance Continues to Grow and Build Out As you may recall, a new organization called the ODF Alliance was formed on March 3 of this year to support the uptake of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) by governments. It's formation was in large part intended to make the adoption of ODF less difficult for future states (and less dangerous for state CIOs) than it had been for Massachusetts last year. Yesterday, the ODF Alliance issued a press release announcing that it has more than tripled its membership to 138, and has also appointed a Managing Director. As I reported one month ago today when I decided to look in on the Alliance a few weeks after its launch, this highly targeted initiative got off to a very rapid start. It appears that the pace of recruitment has slowed (membership leaped from 38 to 113 in the first two and a half weeks, while an additional 25 members have joined in the past month), but I expect that the rate of recruitment may pick up again with the addtion of the new Managing Director, Marino Marcich. The membership now comprises quite an intriguing list of members, including Corel Software, EDS, EMC, IBM, Novell, Opera Software, Optaros, Inc., Oracle, Software AG, and Sun Microsystems (among many others), on the vendor side, and BellCom OpenSource A/S, Free Standards Group, GNOME, Mandriva, OpenOffice.org, OSDL, and Red Hat (again, among many others) on the open source side. There are many other for profit and not for profit members of all types as well. Or, as sponsor organization Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) President Ken Wasch phrases it in the press release, membership, "ranges from the City of Bloomington, Indiana and the National Archives of Australia to the Indian Institute of Technology and the Bristol City Council (UK)." (For a more detailed analysis of the membership at formation, see my earlier blog entry on March 3.) The hiring of a Managing Director indicates a degree of commitment and longevity for the initiative, as it is difficult to attract good talent for transient efforts. Marcich's credentials for the job are listed in the press release as follows: Marcich brings more than a decade in working internationally on technology, standards and open market issues. Prior to joining the Alliance, Marcich was vice president of Dutko Global Advisors, an international strategy and management firm. A former senior official at the U.S. Department of State, Marcich has worked in Brussels advising companies on global strategies relating to regulation, standardization and trade issues. The European connections are particularly apt, as active and public interest in open standards/open source is much higher in European governmental agencies than in the U.S. counterparts, where support for and adoption of open source software is ongoing but less visable. The membership of the Alliance also reflects a very strong showing of European based companies and organizations of all types. The press release does not include a great deal of additional information about the activities being conducted by the Alliance (nor has the ODF Alliance Website been updated with anything interesting in the last month), but it does close with this intriguing note: The ODF Alliance is now actively supporting adoption of the Open Document Format as a worldwide standard of the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The six month approval ballot began November 1, 2005, and ends May 1, 2006. The ODF Alliance and its members have contacted various national voting entities recommending approval and are optimistic of a positive outcome. In other words, it sounds like the Alliance is engaged in global lobbying for approval of ODF by ISO. From what I understand from other sources, a favorable vote, perhaps involving the participation of an unusually high percentage of eligible members, is not in doubt. As previously, I'll check in on the Alliance from time to time and report on further developments as they occur. For further blog entries on ODF, click here. http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standa...60419061204507 GoDaddy.com Donates $10K to Open Source Development Project GoDaddy.com, the No. 1 registrar of domain names worldwide, recently donated $10,000 to the OpenSSH free secure server management tools project. According to the company, OpenSSH has become a staple of all free Unix and Linux operating systems in the world. With a long history of security and quality, OpenSSH is the core component used by millions to log in and manage servers. SSH, or Secure Shell, is a service used to log into computers over a network and then execute commands on the remote machine and move files from one machine to another. The service encrypts connections, thus protecting the security of the host machines and the connection itself. OpenSSH is provided and managed by the OpenBSD project. Like most open source projects, OpenBSD is composed solely of volunteers throughout the world who contribute their time and expertise to creating critical software free of charge. Support from companies like Go Daddy help ensure the continued success of the vibrant open source engineering community and the introduction of new technologies for the benefit of all. Donations help the project fund acquisition of test hardware and maintenance of needed equipment. The assistance also allows OpenSSH to organize conferences for volunteers to meet and share ideas. Bob Parsons, GoDaddy.com Founder and CEO commented, ''OpenSSH and the work of the OpenBSD project volunteers are integral to online security. Go Daddy is pleased to be able to help them continue their great contributions to the Internet community. At Go Daddy, we use OpenSSH extensively to manage our large and rapidly expanding technical infrastructure. Our engineering staff relies on it on a constant basis. Go Daddy is very grateful and we want to show our appreciation to this extremely vital organization.'' Theo de Raadt, Founder and Leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects added, ''We are very thankful Go Daddy has the vision to financially support the mission of OpenSSH. This will allow us to keep improving the quality and security of the product which system administrators around the world rely on to do their jobs.'' GoDaddy.com, Inc. is the ''on-ramp'' to the Internet for individuals and businesses worldwide, providing a one-stop shop for acquiring, creating and safeguarding a unique online identity. GoDaddy.com offers a comprehensive line of Internet products and services, including domain name registration, web hosting solutions, personalized email packages, SSL certificates, web development tools, eCommerce utilities and more. GoDaddy.com is the world's No. 1 domain name registrar, both in terms of new registrations and domains under management. The Go Daddy Group includes three ICANN-accredited domain name registrars: flagship registrar GoDaddy.com, Inc., membership-based registrar Blue Razor Domains, Inc., and reseller registrar Wild West Domains, Inc. The Go Daddy Group also offers private domain name registration services through Domains By Proxy, Inc., as well as SSL Certificates through its SSL Certificate Authority, Starfield Technologies, Inc. The Go Daddy Group registers or renews a domain name every 3 seconds and more than 13 million domain names in its portfolio. The Go Daddy Group is also the world's largest web host in terms of hostnames. http://www.thehostingnews.com/article2217.html Code for Unbreakable Quantum Encryption Raw code for 'unbreakable' quantum encryption has been generated at record speed over optical fiber at NIST. The work is a step toward using conventional high-speed networks such as broadband Internet and local-area networks to transmit ultra-secure video for applications such as surveillance. The NIST quantum key distribution (QKD) system uses single photons, the smallest particles of light, in different orientations to produce a continuous binary code, or "key," for encrypting information. The rules of quantum mechanics ensure that anyone intercepting the key is detected, thus providing highly secure key exchange. The laboratory system produced this "raw" key at a rate of more than 4 million bits per second over 1km of optical fiber, twice the speed of NIST's previous record, reported just last month. The system also worked successfully, although more slowly, over 4 km of fiber. After raw key is generated and processed, the secret key is used to encrypt and decrypt video signals transmitted over the Internet between two computers in the same laboratory. The high speed of the system enables use of the most secure cipher known for ensuring the privacy of a communications channel, in which one secret key bit, known only to the communicating parties, is used only once to encrypt one video bit. Compressed video has been encrypted, transmitted and decrypted at a rate of 30 frames per second, sufficient for smooth streaming images, in Web-quality resolution, 320 by 240 pixels per frame. Applications for high-speed QKD might include distribution of sensitive remote video, such as satellite imagery, or commercially valuable material such as intellectual property, or confidential healthcare and financial data. In addition, high-volume secure communications are needed for military operations to service large numbers of users simultaneously and provide multimedia capabilities as well as database access. http://www.it-observer.com/news/6127...um_encryption/ Mafia Boss's Encrypted Messages Deciphered Rossella Lorenzi The recently arrested "boss of bosses" of the Sicilian Mafia, Bernardo Provenzano, wrote notes using an encryption scheme similar to the one used by Julius Caesar more than 2,000 years ago, according to a biography of Italy's most wanted man. The biography, written by journalists Salvo Palazzolo and Ernesto Oliva, is published in Italian on www.bernardoprovenzano.net, which is the most exhaustive Web site on Provenzano. Accused of numerous murders, including the 1992 killings of two judges for which he was sentenced to life in jail, the 73-year-old boss was arrested last week in a farmhouse about just a few miles from his Sicilian hometown Corleone, a place forever associated with the Godfather saga. Also known as "Binnu u tratturi" (Binnu the tractor) because of his reputation for mowing down people in his youth, Provenzano had been on the run for more than 40 years, many of them spent writing cryptograms on little pieces of paper, known in Sicilian dialect as pizzini. The Italian police found about 350 pizzini in Provenzano's hideaway. A few dozen of these notes contained requests to his family, such as having lasagne on Easter. All the others, featuring orders to his lieutenants, displayed numeric sequences that concealed the names of people. Caesar Cipher At least one coded note, published in the Web site's biography, has a strong resemblance to what's known as Caesar cipher, an encryption scheme used by Julius Caesar to protect important military messages. The letter, written in January 2001 by Angelo Provenzano to his father, was found with other documents when one of Provenzano's men, Nicola La Barbera, was arrested "...I met 512151522 191212154 and we agreed that we will see each other after the holidays...," said the letter, which included several other cryptograms. "The Binnu code is nothing new: each number corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. "A" is 4, "B" is 5, "C" is 6 and so on until the letter Z , which corresponds to number 24," wrote Palazzolo and Oliva. While the classic Caesar cipher moves everything three letters later (A becomes D, B becomes E, etc.), the "Provenzano code" assigns a number to each letter by simply increasing by 3 the value given to the 21 letters of the Italian alphabet listed in order. So, A becomes 4 (1+3), B becomes 5 (2+3), C becomes 6 (3+3), etc "In the Provenzano code the key is the +3 shift," mathematics expert Alessandro Martignago told Discovery News. As the code is cracked, the "512151522 191212154" person becomes "Binnu Riina." Most likely, it refers to Bernardo Riina, arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of aiding Provenzano while he was on the run. According to Martignago, the Provenzano code might have been made more secure by changing the + 3 key with other shift characters ( +5, +7, +8, etc.) from time to time. "Looks like kindergarten cryptography to me. It will keep your kid sister out, but it won't keep the police out. But what do you expect from someone who is computer illiterate?" security guru Bruce Schneier, author of several books on cryptography, told Discovery News. Indeed, no high-tech ran the Mafia network under Provenzano's rule. Top Mafia businesses were conducted on an obsolete Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter. Pizzini were delivered by a chain of messengers. The fact that the boss code was rather straightforward may be explained by Provenzano's lack of education. It stopped when he dropped out of school at about eight. Anna Petrozzi is an editor at Antimafia 2000, a magazine that Provenzano read, as copies found in his hideaway attest. "The police are not new to these coded messages. When they arrested in 2002 Antonio Giuffré, one of his right-hand men then turned informer, and about 30 pizzini came to light," she told Discovery News. Those pizzini helped investigators enormously. Once the cryptograms were decoded, several members of Provenzano's close circle were identified, a step which ultimately led to his arrest. "Now we will have to work on the newly discovered pizzini, which contain several coded names. We have known the system used to code them since 2002," assistant state prosecutor Giuseppe Pignatone told state television RAI 2 on Thursday. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs...tml?source=rss 'Scary Movie' Sends Weinsteins to the Top AP Bob and Harvey Weinstein returned to the box-office lead as ''Scary Movie 4'' debuted with $41 million, the first No. 1 opening for the new company founded by the former Miramax bosses. It was the best Easter weekend debut ever, beating the $30.1 million opening of ''Panic Room'' in 2002, according to studio estimates Sunday. With the success of ''Scary Movie 4,'' Bob Weinstein said he hopes to have a fifth film in the horror-spoof franchise in theaters over Easter weekend next year. ''I say the Weinsteins should be getting `Scary Movie' 5 through 10 ready right away,'' said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations. Weinstein said director David Zucker and writer Jim Abrahams, collaborators on ''Airplane!'' and the ''Naked Gun'' movies, would reteam for the next sequel. ''Scary Movie 4'' was released under the Weinstein Co.'s Dimension label, which the brothers brought with them after their departure from Disney-owned Miramax last year. Disney continues to share half the proceeds from the ''Scary Movie'' flicks and any future installments in pre-existing Dimension franchises, such as the ''Scream'' or ''Spy Kids'' series. The Weinsteins will have sole control over any new franchises Dimension undertakes. ''We've got four or five new franchises in development, so it's not just like I'm going to go ad infinitum on the old stuff,'' Bob Weinstein said. ''We've got other ideas that I'm really excited about starting.'' The animated hit ''Ice Age: The Meltdown,'' which had been No. 1 the previous two weekends, slipped to second place with $20 million, raising its total to $147.2 million. The weekend's other new wide release, Disney's animated tale ''The Wild,'' debuted at No. 4 with $9.6 million. Fox Searchlight's acclaimed satire ''Thank You for Smoking,'' a hit in limited release, expanded nationwide and took in $4.45 million to come in at No. 8. Hollywood's overall revenues rose for the fourth-straight weekend, with the top-12 movies grossing $110 million. That was up 23 percent from 2005's Easter weekend, which came three weeks earlier last year. It was up about 45 percent compared to the mid-April weekend last year. The industry has pulled ahead slightly from its slow pace last year, when movie attendance fell 8 percent. The ''Ice Age'' and ''Scary Movie'' sequels have provided a solid lead-in to what analysts consider a strong early-summer lineup that launches next month with ''Mission: Impossible III,'' ''The Da Vinci Code,'' the animated tale ''Over the Hedge'' and ''Poseidon,'' a remake of ''The Poseidon Adventure.'' ''Scary Movie 4'' continued the success of 2003's ''Scary Movie 3,'' which had rejuvenated the fading franchise by softening the tone from the R ratings of the first two installments to PG-13. The first ''Scary Movie'' opened at No. 1 in 2000 with a $42 million take. The latest version features longtime ''Scary Movie'' player Anna Faris and co-stars Leslie Nielsen, a Zucker and Abrahams favorite who starred in ''Airplane!'' and ''The Naked Gun'' comedies. Bob Weinstein said 40 to 50 percent of the audience was in the 12- to 17-year-old range. The movie also drew well among older audiences lured in by the Zucker-Abrahams brand of humor, Weinstein said. Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. Final figures will be released Monday. 1. ''Scary Movie 4,'' $41 million. 2. ''Ice Age: The Meltdown,'' $20 million. 3. ''The Benchwarmers,'' $10 million. 4. ''The Wild,'' $9.6 million. 5. ''Take the Lead,'' $6.7 million. 6. ''Inside Man,'' $6.3 million. 7. ''Lucky Number Slevin,'' $4.6 million. 8. ''Thank You for Smoking,'' $4.45 million. 9. ''Failure to Launch,'' $2.6 million. 10. ''V for Vendetta,'' $2.2 million. ------ Universal Pictures and Focus Features are owned by NBC Universal, a joint venture of General Electric Co. and Vivendi Universal; DreamWorks is a unit of DreamWorks SKG Inc.; Sony Pictures, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount and Paramount Classics are divisions of Viacom Inc.; Disney's parent is The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is a division of The Walt Disney Co.; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight Pictures are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros., New Line and Warner Independent are units of Time Warner Inc.; Lionsgate is owned by Lionsgate Entertainment Corp.; IFC Films is owned by Rainbow Media Holdings, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Box-Office.html AT&T Aims For Internet Television Laurie Sullivan In an effort to secure a position in Internet-based television, AT&T Inc. reported an agreement Tuesday with Akimbo Systems to offer Internet-based video-on-demand to its Homezone TV service subscribers. The service begins this summer. The AT&T Homezone service, being trialed within several states, integrates AT&T Yahoo! high-speed Internet and AT&T DISH Network programming. The service provides video on demand, digital video, and Internet content, such as photos and music through a set-top box. Akimbo's digital content library offers more than 10,000 television programs and movies-on-demand. The company said it adds daily more than 150 titles in 85 categories, from music and sports to movies and educational programs. The service, which combines Internet and Dish Network programming, intends to complement AT&T's Project Lightspeed, a multi-billion dollar fiber upgrade that will let AT&T sell Internet protocol television (IPTV) service to homes, as the offering continues to roll out, an AT&T spokeswoman said. An online guide with video search functions provides full program descriptions and previews. Remote access with an Internet-connected computer lets subscribers browse and download programs, so new shows are available for viewing when they get home. http://www.techweb.com/wire/networking/185303601 Panasonic Unveils 103-Inch TV Screen AP Home TV screens just keep getting bigger. And there's no end in sight. Panasonic pitched a tent outside the New York Stock Exchange yesterday to show off the biggest high-definition plasma screen yet. At 103 inches, it's an inch bigger than versions being produced by Samsung and LG. Panasonic vice president Andrew Nelkin says the new screen weighs 400 pounds. If you buy one, and have a wall big enough to fit it, you'll want professional installation. He also says he wouldn't be surprised to see someone come up with an even bigger screen before long. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT

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