Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 7th, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"If we follow the logic employed by the anti-piracy lobby during the past decade, this means that piracy is actually boosting sales." – Ernesto, TorrentFreak



































April 7th, 2012




Judge Rejects Copyright Trolls' BitTorrent Conspiracy Theory
Timothy B. Lee

A federal judge has rejected attempts by several copyright holders to compel ISPs to hand over the identifying information of numerous customers without actually filing copyright lawsuits against them. The Friday opinion by James F. Holderman of the Northern District of Illinois is the latest sign of growing judicial skepticism toward the new wave of copyright trolling campaigns.

While mass litigation against illicit file sharing was pioneered by the recording industry, recent lawsuits have often focused on the sharing of pornography rather than music. Many would-be defendants, regardless of their actual guilt, are anxious to settle to spare themselves the embarrassment of having their names publicly associated with online porn.

Judge Holderman notes that as this dynamic has become clear, the courts have become skeptical of plaintiffs who appeared more interested in harvesting contact information than actually pursuing lawsuits. For example, in some jurisdictions, judges have insisted that plaintiffs sue defendants one at a time, incurring court filing fees for each lawsuit. Some judges have also insisted that each lawsuit be limited to defendants in one specific judicial district rather than targeting defendants across the country.

In response to this "stiffening judicial headwind," as Holderman puts it, some litigators have adopted a new tactic: sue just one Internet user, but use that lawsuit as a pretext to subpoena other defendants who had participated in the same BitTorrent swarm. The plaintiffs in these lawsuits claim that the other users had participated in a "conspiracy" to assist one another in distributing particular copyrighted works.

But courts increasingly find this tactic suspect, and Holderman rejected it, noting that conspiracy charges require evidence of an agreement among the purported conspirators. The mere fact that several BitTorrent users' computers communicated with one another does not constitute a conspiracy among the users, he said.

"BitTorrent users remain anonymous to other BitTorrent users, and have no connection to them beyond the mere fact that they downloaded the same file," Holderman wrote. "It is therefore not a reasonable calculation that the individuals connected to the subpoenaed IP addresses will have any discoverable information related to the current defendants."

Holderman's ruling, on top of last week's ruling in Florida, suggests growing judicial hostility toward the copyright trolling business model. The courts are designed to decide the legal merits of significant disputes between parties. Yet the monetary harm of any specific act of file-sharing is so small—and the legal process is so expensive—that it's rarely in the interests of copyright holders to actually litigate against even guilty defendants.

So instead, some copyright holders use the threat of expensive litigation to extort settlements. Because the copyright holder's threat is based on the cost of litigation (and risk of public embarrassment) more so than the damages a defendant would face in the event of a loss, innocent defendants have virtually as much incentive to settle as guilty ones do. That's not how things are supposed to work, and more and more judges are refusing to play along.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...acy-theory.ars





Court Kicks Out Copyright Troll Who Has “No Desire To Litigate”
enigmax

In yet another mass lawsuit against alleged file-sharers, a California court has said that while it’s sympathetic towards the plight of the copyright holder, it will not assist it to identify BitTorrent users. It’s a shame that technology that enables infringement has outpaced technology that prevents it, the judge wrote, but added that his court won’t work with copyright holders who pursue settlement programs with no intention to litigate.

This particular case, Hard Drive Productions, Inc. -v- Does 1-90, sees the well-known porn company plaintiff follow the now well-trodden copyright troll path.

Gather IP addresses from BitTorrent networks and go to court to obtain the physical identities of those alleged to have infringed their copyrights. From there, approach account holders with an offer to settle for a couple of thousand bucks to make (in almost all cases) an imaginary lawsuit go away.

In this case Hard Drive asked the court to force ISPs to hand over the details of 90 Internet subscribers alleged to have downloaded and shared the movie “Amateur Allure – Natalia” at some point during a 63 day monitoring period.

The court noted that discovery can only be permitted with a court order and after showing “good cause”. The “good cause” standard can be met on four conditions:

(1) the plaintiff can identify the missing party with sufficient specificity such that the Court can determine that defendant is a real person or entity who could be sued in federal court;

(2) the plaintiff has identified all previous steps taken to locate the elusive defendant;

(3) the plaintiff’s suit against defendant could withstand a motion to dismiss; and

(4) the plaintiff has demonstrated that there is a reasonable likelihood of being able to identify the defendant through discovery such that service of process would be possible.

But Judge Howard R. Lloyd had problems, particularly when considering whether the requested early discovery would be “very likely” to reveal the identities of the Doe defendants.

Hard Drive had previously stated that discovery would allow it to “fully identify” each BitTorrent user suspected of violating its copyrights. However, as Judge Lloyd pointed out, while the ISP account holder may have been the infringer, he may also be merely the bill payer. Indeed, anyone with access to the IP address could be the actual infringer.

The court then went on to list all seven of the subsequent “fishing exercise” processes Hard Drive goes through in order to find out who did infringe when the account holder isn’t the person they’re looking for. It was all too much for the court.

“It is abundantly clear that plaintiff’s requested discovery is not ‘very likely’ to reveal the identities of the Doe defendants. Indeed, plaintiff admitted at the hearing that neither it nor any other plaintiff it is aware of has ever served a single defendant in one of these cases where early discovery has been granted,” Judge Lloyd wrote.

And when it came to “good cause” things didn’t improve either.

The plaintiff in the case needed to show all Does to be in the State of California but Hard Drive shot itself in the foot when it admitted that its IP geo-location tool was “…only truly reliable when predicting the country in which an IP address is located.”

Confirming the above, Hard Drive admitted that in other cases where discovery was granted it later found that some of the ISP subscribers did not live in the state where the lawsuit was brought.

The court also had problems with 90 Does being connected together in one lawsuit after Hard Drive admitted that it had no evidence to show that the BitTorrent users ever shared the movie between each other.

“Plaintiff has not shown that the defendants acted in concert simply by appearing in the same swarm at completely different times,” said Judge Lloyd. “Therefore, the court cannot find that ‘a single transaction or series of closely related transactions’ connects these 90 Does and makes joinder proper.”

The court denied Hard Drive its application for discovery of the Doe’s identities and ordered all but one defendant to be severed from the lawsuit. If Hard Drive wants to pursue them it will have to file individual complaints against them.

Judge Lloyd’s summing up will be music to the ears of those who oppose so-called copyright trolls.

“The court realizes that this decision may frustrate plaintiff and other copyright holders who, quite understandably, wish to curtail online infringement of their works. Unfortunately, it would appear that the technology that enables copyright infringement has outpaced technology that prevents it,” Judge Lloyd wrote.

“The court recognizes that plaintiff is aggrieved by the apparent infringement and is sympathetic toward its argument that lawsuits like this one are the only way for it to find and stop infringers. However, the court will not assist a plaintiff who seems to have no desire to actually litigate but instead seems to be using the courts to pursue an extrajudicial business plan against possible infringers (and innocent others caught up in the ISP net).

“Plaintiff seeks to enlist the aid of the court to obtain information through the litigation discovery process so that it can pursue a non-judicial remedy that focuses on extracting ‘settlement’ payments from persons who may or may not be infringers. This the court is not willing to do,” Judge Lloyd concludes.
https://torrentfreak.com/court-kicks...tigate-120406/





Chris Dodd Suggests Backroom Negotiations On New SOPA Are Well Underway
Mike Masnick

Ah, Chris Dodd. It seems like every time he opens his mouth, he makes things worse. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, he responds to a series of questions about SOPA by trying to tiptoe around the issue, but basically admits that there are backroom conversations going on between a small number of people, and that "between now and sometime next year," Hollywood and the tech industry will "come to an understanding." He's asked specifically if there are conversations going on now, and if the White House is pressuring folks to come to such "an understanding."

THR: Are there conversations going on now?

Dodd: I'm confident that's the case, but I'm not going to go into more detail because obviously if I do, it becomes counterproductive.

THR: Did you feel personally blindsided by Obama over SOPA?

Dodd: I'm not going to revisit the events of last winter. I'll only say to you that I'm confident he's using his good relationships in both communities to do exactly what you and I have been talking about.

Yes, you know why it would be "counterproductive" to go into more detail? Because he knows damn well that the problem with SOPA was that it was negotiated in the backrooms with private parties and no participation from the actual stakeholders: the public.

So, yes, admitting that you're doing the same thing all over again would be counterproductive. You know what would be productive? Stopping this political backroom dealing crap, and finally coming out and having a public discussion. But he won't do it, because Dodd is a coward and a DC-insider who only knows how to cut deals, not how to actually respond to the public's best interests.

Later in the interview he trots out a nearly identical line to the one he's been using recently, about how he only just discovered that the movie industry wasn't just about red carpets and movie stars.

There's so much misunderstanding about this business. Before I started this job, I would have said it's about Oscar night, red carpets, movie stars and glamorous lives. But there are 2.2 million people who get up every morning and work in this business. I think it's unfortunate there isn't a deeper understanding of how important this industry is to this country.

Not only does this sound ridiculous (and call into question why someone so clueless about the industry was given the top lobbying job for the industry), but it's entirely false. 2.2 million people do not "get up every morning and work in this business." As has been detailed many times, the actual number is less than 400,000 (and that's from the Congressional Research Service), and the number of jobs for people who actually make movies is growing. The only real decrease has been in those who work at theaters -- and that's due to consolidation.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...underway.shtml





MPAA Targets Fileserve, MediaFire, Wupload, Putlocker and Depositfiles
Ernesto

It is no secret that the MPAA was a main facilitators of the criminal investigation against Megaupload. But while the movie studios have praised the actions of the US Government, they are not satisfied yet. Paramount Pictures’ vice president for worldwide content protection identified Fileserve, MediaFire, Wupload, Putlocker and Depositfiles as prime targets that should be shuttered next.

The file-hosting business has been in a permanent state of chaos since the Megaupload shutdown in January. Many sites were quick to remove their affiliate programs and some went as far as blocking visitors from the US entirely.

It’s clear that site owners are concerned that their business might become a target, and if it’s up to the major movie studios this fear is justified. “We continue to make criminal referrals,” Paramount Pictures’ Alfred Perry said during the On Copyright conference in New York yesterday.

CNET reports that the Paramount Pictures produced a list of five “rogue” file-hosters, presented in a fancy graphic where Megaupload is crossed out. The prime targets on this shutdown list are Fileserve, MediaFire, Wupload, Putlocker and Depositfiles.

The movie studio claims that these “rogue” cyberlockers receive 41 billion page views a year, which translates to five views for every person on the planet.

In recent months the MPAA has criticized the business models of these and other cyberlockers on many occasions.

Last November, for example, we got our hands on an MPAA fact sheet titled“It’s All About the Money: The ‘Business’ Model of Rogue Cyberlockers” with an overview of the several affiliate programs some cyberlockers have in place. According to the MPAA these programs motivate users to share copyrighted material, thereby promoting piracy.

“Rogue cyberlockers aren’t just distribution hubs for stolen movies and TV shows – both the users who upload content and the operators who run the sites can earn money from doing so. As Internet video traffic grows, the threat from rogue cyberlockers that profit from stolen content is rising rapidly,” the MPAA explains in the document.

This fact sheet will most likely be forwarded to the Department of Justice with every new “rogue” cyberlocker that the MPAA reports.

Whether the Department of Justice will act on new referrals from the movie studios has yet to be seen. For now they have their hands full on Megaupload, whose founder told TorrentFreak that his defense teams is working on a killer motion in response to the “nonsense” US indictment.
https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-target...tfiles-120331/





MPAA Wants More Criminal Cases Brought Against 'Rogue' Sites

A Paramount Pictures exec says the studios continue to make criminal referrals against cyberlocker services dedicated to enabling piracy, and he identifies the top five "rogue" sites.
Greg Sandoval

In the wake of the MegaUpload indictment, the top Hollywood film studios are pushing for more cyberlocker services to be charged with crimes.

"We continue to make criminal referrals," Alfred Perry, vice president for worldwide content protection at Paramount Pictures, said during a panel discussion at the On Copyright conference here yesterday. Later he added that "more than 41 billion page views (yearly) are generated by the top 5 rogue cyberlocker services. That's five page views for every person on the planet."

After the panel, Perry provided CNET with the names of the top five "rogue" cyberlocker services. They are (in no particular order): Putlocker, Wupload, Depositfiles, FileServe, and MediaFire. He did not say whether any of those sites are under investigation or face criminal prosecution, so it's still unclear whether the MegaUpload case will trigger a wave of criminal copyright prosecutions.

His comments, however, are consistent with what my film-industry sources have told me since MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom was tossed in a New Zealand jail in January. There's no question that the film studios and major music labels want more arrests made and to link some forms of Internet piracy to criminal conduct.

In a letter sent to CNET on Sunday morning, Tom Langridge, a MediaFire co-founder, has denied that his company is "rogue" or that it violates copyright law (You can read Langridge's full letter here).

A representative for the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, the office that filed an indictment against MegaUpload, declined to comment.

Copyright owners have been engaged in a decade-long battle against online piracy and are looking for a way to shut down the latest iteration of illegal file-sharing: Cyberlockers. Some of the services are absolutely legitimate, but others give users access to digital lockers where many store pirated music, movies, TV shows, videogames, and other media. The content of these lockers is then made accessible to anyone. Large media companies claim that many of the most trafficked cyberlocker sites exist only to profit from the piracy.

They accuse operators of trying to disguise their services as legitimate cyberlockers so they can take refuge in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor, a provision designed to protect qualifying Internet service providers from liability for infringing acts committed by users. But some of the top cyberlocker services are operated by outlaw gangs and are just part of a larger criminal enterprise, according to the trade groups of the film and music sectors, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

The MPAA's antipiracy unit played a big role in helping to inform the U.S. Department of Justice about MegaUpload's operations when the DOJ first began investigating the company in 2010, sources told CNET.

That investigation led to a police raid of DotCom's New Zealand home. The United States indicted DotCom and six other company managers for criminal copyright violations, racketeering, and wire fraud. U.S. officials hope to bring DotCom and the other defendants to this country to stand trial. An extradition hearing is scheduled for August.

Ira Rothken, one of MegaUpload's lawyers, argues that the service is no different under the law than YouTube or any other legitimate service provider. The company is protected by the DMCA and the U.S. case is without merit.

Following Perry's comments, one studio representative reminded me that sending pirates to jail is not new. People in the business of mass producing counterfeit goods, such as CDs, VHS tapes, and DVDs have been prosecuted for decades. Up to now, however, the entertainment sectors have typically filed civil suits against file-sharing services they accused of enabling piracy. The list includes Napster, Veoh, and even Google's YouTube.

The film studios and U.S. government allege MegaUpload was less like those services and more comparable to the mass producers of pirated content.

The arrest of DotCom and shut down of MegaUpload certainly sent a message to some of the company's competitors. The blog TorrentFreak reported that soon after the raid on DotCom's home, about nine similar services attempted to limit the amount of pirated content on their sites, and several others shut down completely.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57...t-rogue-sites/





MPAA Warns of Megaupload 'Relaunch' If Servers Are Transferred

Giving Megaupload back data would constitute a violation of studio rights, says a legal filing by the MPAA today
Eriq Gardner

The MPAA is objecting to the transfer of Megaupload data, saying in a court filing today that it could pave the way to a relaunch of the controversial file-sharing service.

The response comes two weeks after Carpathia, Megaupload's Virginia-based server host, filed an emergency motion to allow it to do something with the 25 petabytes of data it was holding. Carpathia wanted relief from the $9,000 it was spending per day to retain the data.

The question of what to do with that data has been of some controversy since Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and others were indicted in a massive copyright action in January. The MPAA says that after Megaupload's founders were arrested, it learned that Carpathia has agreed to sell the data back to Megaupload, "with all the film and TV content intact." In addition, one Megaupload user has filed a motion to create a receivership that would allow all users who posted to Megaupload to be allowed to retrieve their data.

The MPAA says it doesn't mind if Carpathia powers down the servers but expresses concern about what might happen if the company is allowed to transfer the data. In a filing today, the MPAA says:

"A sale or transfer of the servers to Megaupload (or any of the defendants) would raise a significant risk that Megaupload will simply ship the servers, hard drives or other equipment -- and all of the infringing content they contain -- to a foreign jurisdiction and relaunch the infringing Megaupload service, which would result in untold further infringements of the MPAA members’ copyrighted works. If so, the renewed criminal enterprise might be beyond any effective legal remedy."

The association of Hollywood studios also asserts ownership over much of the content contained on the servers and is expressing a noteworthy legal theory that distribution of the material would in and of itself be a violation of rights.

"The sale or transfer of those copies from Carpathia to Megaupload or any other third party would constitute an unauthorized “distribut[ion] … to the public” under the Copyright Act," says the MPAA in its legal filing.

The MPAA also says that Megaupload has been given access to inspect the data in preparation of its defense, but adds:

"In these circumstances, it seems likely that the only reason Megaupload and its co-defendants sought to purchase the 25,000 Carpathia servers (and incur the expense of buying, transporting and housing them) was simply to be in position to relaunch the Megaupload service in the near future."

The studios say they are "sympathetic" to users who were caught up in the allegedly illegal activity of Megaupload but insist that users had to know the risks when they signed up for the terms of Megaupload's service, which disclaimed any guarantee of continued access. The MPAA says that if a mechanism is set up so that users can retrieve their data, it has to be carefully set up so that no illegal files are downloaded. As for the full scope of Megaupload data, there's only one party that the MPAA would agree to allow to have it. The studios say they are fine with Carpathia's suggestion that the servers be transferred to the U.S. government.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr...servers-306914





US Government: We Hear There's Child Porn on Those Megaupload Servers, Judge!
Nate Anderson

Carpathia Hosting, which owns over 600 servers leased by Megaupload before the government shut down the file-sharing site, has a problem: those servers are worth serious money, but no one is paying the bills.

Megaupload wants the servers back to help with its defense, but with most of its assets seized by the federal government, it can't pay for them. Carpathia would normally wipe the servers and lease them to new clients, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation is demanding that legitimate users of the site be allowed to retrieve their personal data first. The Motion Picture Association of America doesn't want this to happen without assurances that its copyrighted content won't be retrieved and distributed again; besides, it might want the servers for a future lawsuit of its own. And the federal government yesterday announced that the servers “may contain child pornography,” which would render them "contraband" and limit Carpathia's options for dealing with them.

Carpathia originally housed the servers in a Virginia warehouse on which the government executed a search warrant back on January 19. After making forensic copies of selected servers, the government withdrew. Megaupload couldn't pay the bills, so Carpathia says it spent $9,000 a day in rent to house the servers it couldn't reuse. This quickly got expensive, so Carpathia trucked all the servers (at a cost, it says, of $65,000) and stuck them in some empty space it had in one of its own facilities. Now, stuck with all these servers, Carpathia wants a judge to compensate it for all the money it could be making.

The US government insists that the court has no real jurisdiction over the server issue. In a filing made late yesterday, the government argued that the EFF had highlighted an "unfortunate" situation, but one not before the court (even Megaupload's terms of service warned users not to count on the site as a sole repository for files). As for the MPAA, it hasn't even filed a civil lawsuit yet, and courts should not rule on "speculative matters affecting civil lawsuits that have not yet been filed (and may not be filed at all)." As for Carpathia's request for cash, the government suggests it doesn't deserve any. After all, it's free to wipe and re-lease the servers; the government already has its forensic evidence. The entire dispute is merely a "private contractual matter."

Well, sort of. When it comes to selling or renting the servers back to Megaupload—there the government draws the line. It doesn't want the servers to leave the court's jurisdiction and it worries that they could be used for criminal activity. In addition, "the government recently learned from multiple sources that the Carpathia Servers may contain child pornography, rendering the Carpathia servers contraband."

So Carpathia sits on its servers and waits for the judge's order it has requested. Simply wiping the servers could expose Carpathia to angry rightsholders who want the evidence for cases they intend to file, and to angry Megaupload users whose data would be gone for good. But keeping the hundreds of machines idle costs money, and transferring them to Megaupload—the only interested buyer—may not be possible.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...vers-judge.ars





The Hypocritical Use of Piracy As a Corporate Weapon
Myles Peterson

Rupert Murdoch, media tycoon, founder and Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, has been a fanatical supporter of tougher anti-piracy legislation including PIPA and SOPA in the US. But this week it was claimed that Murdoch’s piracy crusade is a rather hypocritical one, with his News Corporation now at the center of a major piracy scandal in which it’s accused of encouraging piracy to cripple competitors.

Troubled international media giant News Corporation felt the ice crack beneath its feet this week after years of enduring ill winds blowing from phone hacking scandals in the United Kingdom and United States.

The Australian Financial Review and the BBC’s Panorama programme combined to publish a four-year investigation into the operations of News Corporation subsidiaries, unveiling damaging claims of a plot to facilitate and encourage piracy with the aim of crippling pay-television rivals.

The allegations cast shadows across the main-stream media landscape, with implications for the conduct of news outlets and the arguments of anti-piracy lobby groups through to the structure of the pay-television landscape itself.

The reaction of News Corporation’s 81-year-old Australian founder and CEO was swift. Rupert Murdoch used his new love of micro-blogging platform Twitter to rubbish the claims, the publishers and make implied threats of legal action against those raising the allegations.

Murdoch’s sensitivity is understandable. The negative publicity generated by earlier phone hacking scandals could be alleviated in part by suggesting that if immoral – even illegal – activity had taken place, it occurred during the pursuit of journalism, however tawdry or overzealous.

Using piracy as a corporate weapon to damage competitors contains no such narrow mountain trail to the moral high ground. Worse, it undermines a global campaign against piracy led by Hollywood lobby groups such as the MPAA, of whom News Corporation is a major member via its entertainment subsidiary, FOX.

In Australia, the web becomes more tangled, ensnaring a current consultation process to control and limit file-sharing. Leading up to a secretive series of meetings held between the Australian Attorney-General’s department, copyright monopoly lobby groups and internet service providers, News Corporation unleashed an attack on media piracy via its local publications, as noted at the time by Torrentfreak.

The articles were backed by a study commissioned by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), of whom News Corporation is a member, again via its subsidiary FOX.

AFACT now has the onerous task of keeping a straight face during the closed-door discussions while it argues for the criminalisation of not-for-profit piracy as a major backer and publicity partner is embroiled in a corporate piracy scandal.

The Australian pay-television market is small compared to its foreign counterparts. Until last week it contained only two major players whom largely broadcast the same limited number of channels. The tiny size of the industry has been blamed on everything from over regulation to rampant file-sharing. The new piracy allegations suggest a more sinister story.

Last Friday, dominant player Foxtel, part owned by News Corporation, came a step closer to acquiring its smaller rival Austar in a $AU1.9 billion take-over which will deliver Foxtel a virtual monopoly of the cable-television market in Australia.

Moves from internet outsiders such as FetchTV, Netflix and local Netflix-clone Quickflix have made inroads into the medium, but all offer limited content and Netflix currently requires Australians to circumnavigate geoblocking. Television content sold via platforms such as Itunes is also routinely geoblocked and/or suffers from unexplained inflated pricing.

The US Embassy in Canberra views limited options for accessing content as a driver of piracy in Australia. Australia’s stunted pay-television market is part of this problem. Many popular television series appear months or years late, or not at all. The free-to-air television market has suffered decades of audience and revenue decline and can no longer afford to regularly syndicate high-cost content.

Australians are left in a shifting half-light of what is globally popular, forever reading about new content online, watching the trailers, inadvertently seeing spoilers in social media – while often being left with no legal way of participating.

The allegations against News Corporation in Australia have not been heard in any court, and may never be – the Australian Federal Police are reluctant to get involved, despite Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy urging the claims to be investigated.

If the Panorama and Australian Financial Revue’s claims are substantiated and it is proved one of the largest media corporations in the world engaged in predatory piracy to damage rivals, the fallout will be large. News Corporation bases much of its content sales on securing paywalls and selling entry. Competitors, audiences and governments will not be happy if it is established that News Corporation’s other business model was predicated on coldly and clinically facilitating the piracy of the content of rivals.
https://torrentfreak.com/the-hypocri...weapon-120331/





Viacom v. YouTube Ruling is a Bummer for Google and the UGC Community
Eric Goldman

After five years in the courts, the Viacom International, Inc., v. YouTube, Inc. litigation has finally produced an appellate opinion. The result is a loss for Google/YouTube and the UGC community generally. While the court largely agrees with many of YouTube's contentions (and the ruling of the lower court), it nevertheless revives the litigation, ensuring that Google will spend millions of dollars more over the coming months and years.

Furthermore, the opinion identifies at least four "holes" in 512(c) coverage that future plaintiffs will surely attempt to exploit: smoking-gun internal e-mails, willful blindness, right and ability to control, and content syndication. This ensures that other UGC websites will spend a lot of money upfront to try to shut down those holes and spend even more money in litigation to demonstrate that it avoided those holes. So, on balance, I'm characterizing this opinion as a loss for the UGC community because this ruling increases the industry's costs even if the substantive contours of 512 don't change.

Given that the Second Circuit expressly disagrees with the Ninth Circuit's UMG v. Shelter Capital ruling on the right and ability to control issue, I expect future 512 cases will be brought in the Second Circuit, not the Ninth Circuit. I'm not sure if this conflict is strong enough to get the case to the Supreme Court if Google chose to try.

Most importantly, this opinion exposes a structural deficiency of the 512(c) safe harbor. The statute's simply too long and detailed. If a defendant fails to satisfy each and every element, the safe harbor is lost completely. This is reminiscent of military strategy and information security: the defense has to work equally well across its entire border, while the adversary can concentrate its attack and only has to succeed on one point of attack to win. The same is true with a 512(c) defense.

So, it doesn't matter that YouTube won most of the points of contention. If any single point of contention fails, YouTube's 512(c) defense fails. As I've insisted before, this provides a good lesson for drafters of safe harbors and immunities. To work effectively, the safe harbors/immunities must be pithy and categorical, or else they create too many potential points of failure.

Even though Viacom won this ruling, I still don't understand how Viacom is making progress towards any strategic objective that matters to it. Viacom long ago conceded that it didn't object to YouTube's practices after 2008 (after it got access to Content ID). Indeed, Viacom gets upset with YouTube when it removes Viacom's posts made for marketing purposes. And Viacom just expanded its licensing arrangements with YouTube. At this point, Viacom is very clear that it doesn't want YouTube to go away, nor does it want any structural changes to YouTube's current practices.

So what the hell is this fight about? Viacom might still look at this lawsuit for its cash value, but it's hard to be sympathetic towards that or see that as a big strategic objective. Viacom might be looking at this case to establish favorable precedent, but it picked a well-funded and determined defendant to make the point. The Second Circuit ruling—though opening the door for copyright plaintiffs seeking to disqualify 512(c) defenses—doesn't contain a big broad pronouncement that would constitute a strategic win for Viacom. The whole lawsuit is a big waste for all concerned, and the fact the parties can't settle this case after five years of costly trench warfare continues to baffle me.

Analysis of the Court's Discussion

512(c)'s Applicability to Direct and Secondary Infringement

One of the most important rulings of the court comes in an off-hand remark with minimal citation support on page 33: "The District Court correctly determined that a finding of safe harbor application necessarily protects a defendant from all affirmative claims for monetary relief." This is one of the most significant questions in 512(c) jurisprudence: does 512(c) cover only direct infringement, or both direct and secondary infringement? Most courts have assumed the latter without ever saying so, but here the court (echoing, but curiously not citing, the Shelter Capital case) explicitly says 512(c) applies to all flavors of infringement. This makes the safe harbor potentially dispositive to the case—if YouTube gets it, Viacom loses any claim to money damages and, at best, can only get a meaningless limited injunction.

Knowledge of Infringing Activity

The opinion defines three types of service provider knowledge about infringement that might disqualify the service provider from 512(c):

1) Actual knowledge of specific acts of infringement: The court calls this a subjective knowledge standard.

2) "Red flags" knowledge of specific acts of infringement: The court calls this an objective knowledge standard. I've long argued that the "red flags" standard has evaporated in practice because, objectively, it's impossible for anyone other than the content owner to look at a specific item of content and determine if it's legitimately posted or not. In fact, even content owners can't figure this out for themselves. Viacom itself repeatedly mistakenly identified which items of its own content were properly or illicitly posted to YouTube. If the content owner can't make that determination, I'll argue that objectively no one else could do so either.

3) Willful blindness towards specific acts of infringement: Because of the nature of willful blindness, by definition it occurs in situations where the service provider otherwise doesn't have subjective or objective knowledge of the infringing activity. Unfortunately, the court doesn't say what service provider activities would demonstrate willful blindness, and many of us are scratching our heads wondering how willful blindness can occur when the service provider lacks actual or red flags knowledge. Combined with the Tiffany v. eBay contributory trademark ruling, it shows the Second Circuit is obsessed with willful blindness (though it didn't define willful blindness there either—gee, thanks). The Ninth Circuit had a brief and oblique reference to willful blindness in the Shelter Capital opinion, but my guess is that plaintiffs will like the Second Circuit's express discussion about willful blindness even better than they liked the Ninth Circuit's casual reference.

The court identifies three pieces of evidence that YouTube may have had disqualifying knowledge. First are the e-mails from Patrick Walker asking the team to look for and remove Football League clips. The second is an e-mail from Jawed Karim indicating that there were Viacom clips on the site that may have been "blatantly illegal." Finally, there is evidence of an e-mail exchange between Chad Hurley and Steve Chen debating whether to remove clips now or later.

The court expressly says that this evidence may not be enough for Viacom to show disqualifying knowledge (see FN9), but it is enough to get to a jury.

More generally, these e-mails remind us that YouTube was an unsophisticated start-up in its early days. They didn't have legal counsel reviewing these e-mails or answering its questions about clip removals. Most UGC start-ups now know that these conversations shouldn't be taking place over e-mail. There should be a tightly enforced e-mail retention policy, and active legal counsel is essential from day one. But the modern protocol also mean that launching defensible new UGC start-ups is much more expensive.

This is especially true for UGC start-ups trying to avoid the willful blindness doctrine. I criticized the Tiffany v. eBay opinion for endorsing eBay's very expensive anti-infringement infrastructure and implicitly requiring start-ups to maintain a similarly expensive infrastructure. This opinion may have the same adverse economic consequences for other UGC start-ups trying to minimize allegations of willful blindness in the copyright context.

Because the ruling creates more ways for plaintiffs to get to a jury in 512 cases, this ruling also means 512 litigation—even if the defendant succeeds—is going to be more expensive. The needle-in-haystack hunt for smoking gun e-mails means both parties will spend a lot on discovery (a point I complained about in the Shelter Capital case too). Furthermore, with respect to willful blindness, unless courts aggressively police plaintiffs' allegations, it seems like plaintiffs can use a willful blindness allegation to defeat a 12(b)(6) dismissal motion. If they can find any colorable evidence, plaintiffs can use that to defeat summary judgment and force jury trials in many future 512(c) cases.

Right and Ability to Control

The court blazes its own trail on what constitutes a service provider's disqualifying "right and ability to control" infringing activity. It disagrees with YouTube and both the lower court and the Ninth Circuit's Shelter Capital case. All of these held that a service provider's right and ability to control only applied when the service provider had specific knowledge of the infringing activity. But the Second Circuit also disagrees with Viacom's proposition that "right and ability to control" imports its meaning from the common law vicarious infringement test. The court rightly recognizes that would render the statute internally contradictory.

The court agrees with no one. Given that it rejected everyone else's definitions, we might expect the court to carefully lay out what it thinks the phrase means. Sadly, no. The opinion doesn't provide an express definition of what qualifies as the "right and ability to control," instead sending that issue back to the district court to figure out both the standard and whether YouTube met it. The clearest clue the court provides about the standard is it "involve[s] a service provider exerting substantial influence on the activities of users, without necessarily—or even frequently—acquiring knowledge of specific infringing activity." I have no idea what that means, other than it's open season for plaintiff fiestas.

UPDATE: Sherwin Siy and I had an exchange on Twitter about this:

@SherwinPK: I don't think that "exerting substantial influence on activities of users" is "open season." A bit vague, yeah, but bounded

@ericgoldman OK, what you think "exerting substantial influence on activities of users" means? That's the goal of every UGC site!

@SherwinPK Not at all. Cybernet, for instance, had the OSP literally giving pointers on layout and content. That's substantial influence.

@SherwinPK Youtube doesn't exercise an editorial function wrt to user videos. That's why there's so much dreck.

My private reply: "That's not how the plaintiffs will put it! They will argue top X lists and exhortations to post constitute "substantial influence""

Stored at a User's Direction

The court rejects several of Viacom's arguments that YouTube's automated handling of user-supplied videos wasn't stored at the user's direction, including YouTube's transcoding and playback functions as well as its display of thumbnails in a "related videos" module. However, the court leaves open the possibility that YouTube's "syndication" of user videos didn't qualify for 512(c). Specifically, YouTube licensed 2,000 user videos to Verizon Wireless. It's unclear if any Viacom videos were included. That fact question goes to trial. If no Viacom videos were included, Viacom won't get any benefit from this exception. However, the ruling leaves open future fights over what constitutes "syndication" as a way of bypassing 512(c). More plaintiff fiestas.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-community.ars





Piracy Cut in Half in France, Yet Music and Movie Revenues Fell
Sal McCloskey

France made waves in the P2P industry by implementing a controversial graduated response program in 2010 that was designed to reduce the amount of illegal downloads by establishing progressively-harsher penalties on file sharers. The results were strong, as shown in Hadopi’s report, with file-sharing activities traffic slashed by two-thirds in 2011. However, the goal of increasing revenues in the French music and movie industries did not materialize and revenues fell in both industries.

The French music market fell 3.9% in 2011 while the video market fell 2.7%.

As Ernesto of TorrentFreak says, “If we follow the logic employed by the anti-piracy lobby during the past decade, this means that piracy is actually boosting sales.”

The declines in revenue were inevitable and will continue as technology makes it less-expensive to be entertained. Legal downloads and streaming services do not generate the revenue nor the profits that DVDs and CDs once did. The obsessive pursuits by governments, lobbyists, and anti-piracy organizations are wastes of energy when the real challenge the industries face are evolutionary. They are simply not adapting fast enough.

Piracy has an effect on music and movie sales in the same way that smoking has an effect on a person’s health. The problem is that the industries have a much bigger problem with understanding the way that their customers operate today and onward into tomorrow. If piracy is like smoking than lack of innovation is like a bullet wound. When you’re getting shot, you don’t take time to quit smoking.

If the money and manpower put into stopping piracy were redirected into innovating the industries, improving their products, and creating new technologies that will make us want to buy songs or movies instead of pirating them, they would have a much better chance of improving their bottom line. Today is a world of instant access and in many cases pirating a television show, movie, or song is simply more convenient. Many who employ P2P aren’t doing it to save 99 cents. They’re doing it because it’s easier.

The real way to make a dent in piracy, increase revenues, and save the industries is through innovation. Clinging on to antiquated models and trying to force people back into them is killing the industries faster than the negative effects of piracy.
http://www.techi.com/2012/03/piracy-...revenues-fell/





Batman Set To Pimp The File-Sharing PirateBox
enigmax

Last month we reported on PirateBox, a super-cheap system for turning any open space into a wireless and anonymous file-sharing system.

The whole system is based on a TP-LINK TL-MR3020 3G Wireless N Router which is available from Newegg at just $39.99.

Although neat, the current PirateBox system is strictly a server/client setup but according to a development reported by Numerama, things might now go to the next level.

A PirateBox software update now includes drivers for BATMAN, a routing protocol also known as Better Approach To Mobile Adhoc Networking.

Although still under development, future BATMAN-enabled PirateBoxes could then network with each other, meaning that accessing users could hop from device to device and have full access not just to a single PirateBox server, but a network of interconnected PirateBox servers.

More information on BATMAN here and the PirateBox update here.
https://torrentfreak.com/batman-set-...te-box-120402/





Pirate Party Refuses to Shutdown Pirate Bay Proxy, Faces Lawsuit
Ernesto

In their ongoing efforts to make The Pirate Bay inaccessible, the Hollywood-backed anti-piracy outfit BREIN is now going after the Dutch Pirate Party. BREIN is demanding that the political party ceases operating a proxy site, and is threatening to sue. The Pirate Party is not impressed by the demands and has sent BREIN their response as a torrent, fittingly hosted at The Pirate Bay.

In January, a Dutch court ruled that Ziggo, the largest ISP in the country, and competitor XS4ALL, must block access to The Pirate Bay.

Both ISPs appealed the verdict, but in the meantime affected subscribers have plenty of ways to route around the blockades. In the space of a few days hundreds of individuals setup proxy websites that allow customers of the ISPs to continue using The Pirate Bay.

Countering this move, local anti-piracy outfit BREIN obtained an injunction from the Court of The Hague which instructed the proxy site tpb.dehomies.nl to shut down or face a 1000 euros a day fine. The group is now using this injunction to press other site owners to do the same.

Last week the local Pirate Party also received a letter from BREIN, demanding the shutdown of their Pirate Bay proxy site hosted at tpb.piratenpartij.nl. However, unlike the site owners that were previously contacted by the group, the Pirate Party is not caving in. They would rather fight the case in court.

Today the Party informed BREIN that the proxy site will stay online. To show that The Pirate Bay can be a useful communication tool the Pirate Party sent the letter through a torrent file, hosted on the BitTorrent site at the center of the dispute.

“The demands are ridiculous,” Pirate Party chairman Dirk Poot told TorrentFreak.

“A private lobbying organization should not be allowed to be the censor of the Dutch internet. We were also amazed to find an ex-parte decision attached, threatening Dutch minors with €1000 per day fines for operating their proxy. If we would have yielded, their trick would immediately be played out against numerous other private citizens.”

According to the Pirate Party chairman BREIN’s efforts are not just going too far, they are useless too.

“There are a plethora of proxy sites on the internet. On almost any them TPB can by reached, even with a single URL. That’s not even mentioning the ways you can get to TPB if you’re willing to put in more effort than saving a single URL. If this keeps going there will be no Internet left by the time BREIN has achieved its goal of making TPB inaccessible.”

“In their self-righteous zealousness they have brought substantial damage to the free and open Internet,” Poot said.

While the legality of The Pirate Bay and reverse proxy sites is for the courts to decide, it is clear that blocking the website hurts legitimate artists as well.

In BREIN’s demand letter the anti-piracy group pasted a screenshot of the proxy site showing the Pirate Bay homepage. But ironically enough, instead of the iconic logo it showed one of the many promotional campaigns the torrent site is running for independent artists.

The Pirate Party believes that the broad censorship BREIN is pushing for goes too far. And although they are not delighted to face thousands of euros in fines, they see it as their duty to fight back in court.

“Unless someone calls them on their tactics, they will be allowed to continue those tactics indefinitely. Yielding does not make the problem go away. We would preferred to tackle this issue in parliament, where it belongs. However, if we have a chance to stop this ex-parte from being reused again and again, we ought to grab it. We’ll need serious donations, though…,” Poot told us.

More news about the upcoming lawsuit is expected to be announced in the coming weeks. BREIN was asked to comment on the issue as well, but the group kindly declined.
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-part...awsuit-120403/





Pirate Bay Promotion 'Promo Bay' Attracts 5000+ Artists, Sticks It To RIAA and MPAA
Dave Smith

While movie studios and record labels would have you think that torrents are a threat to the movie and music industries, thousands of independent artists heartily disagree. That's why more than 5,000 musicians, actors, writers, filmmakers and artists have signed up to be promoted by The Pirate Bay, the world's largest torrent site, based out of Sweden.

Earlier this year, shortly after the Internet thought it had claimed victory over censorship bills like SOPA and PIPA, the FBI began shutting down file-sharing sites, including one of the world's biggest in MegaUpload. To avoid being shut down, The Pirate Bay was forced to switch from the ".org" domain to the Swedish domain ".se," since U.S. law enforcement agencies can seize U.S.-owned domain names, but the company also wanted to combat a negative image.

In turn, The Pirate Bay introduced a new promotion platform for artists called "The Promo Bay," which let independent artists reach tens of millions of people by offering favorable advertising spots on the The Pirate Bay's home page.

The response to The Pirate Bay's promotion platform has been overwhelming: the company has already received more than 5,000 applications from artists; 90 percent of all submissions have apparently come from musicians, and 95 percent of those musicians are male.

"Thus far we've done 14 regular campaigns in three countries each and eight worldwide promotions," said "Winston" from The Pirate Bay, in an interview with TorrentFreak. "When we started the project the plan was to do a few worldwide promotions a year, but the submissions have been too good. So now we're gonna do the worldwide promos every weekend and some regulars every now and then."

So far, The Pirate Bay's promos have been very successful for the featured artists. George Barnett, who was one of the first featured artists on The Promo Bay, said the boost from The Pirate Bay helped him add 4,000 new Facebook fans and 85,000 new views on his video. Filmmaker Tomas Vergara got a healthy boost from The Promo Bay, with his short film "The Chase" earning more than 250,000 views in three days.

"When I had a reply saying that they liked it and I'd have a worldwide display on The Pirate Bay homepage, I pulled off my hair," Vergara said. "I think its been a while since I've opened my eyes that wide. Now 'The Chase' is having massive exposure. I'm so damn happy. This is the kind of things you were not expecting in life, I guess."

Winston said that his initial plan for The Promo Bay has changed, he said it's all about looking for quality content, as well as diversity. He hopes The Pirate Bay can help transform a few artists' lives for the better.

"The future will show what the impact of the Pirate Bay promotions is. I'm absolutely certain that at least 2 or 3 of them have become superstars by then," Winston said. "We're one of the worlds top 60 sites in the Internet. This brings us a responsibility to use the site to do something good. When I think about it, it's insane that all the other top 100 sites only blast ads and self-centered stuff on their front pages."

The MPAA, which represents the film industry, and the RIAA, representing the music industry, still aim to dismantle The Pirate Bay, by claiming the site has caused millions in damages and lost revenue. They also say The Pirate Bay's administrators repeatedly ignored requests to stop distributing their copyrighted material.

Many organizations have threatened to take The Pirate Bay to court. From anti-piracy firms like Web Sheriff to the International Olympic Committee, many groups have asked The Pirate Bay to remove infringing content from its site. Individual countries such as Belgium, Norway, and the Netherlands have all tried to block the site, some more unsuccessfully than others. More times than not, even when governments order their ISPs to close all doors to the site, The Pirate Bay's engineers still manage to open a window for its users.

"Whatever happens with the domain we use or will have to move to in the future is not important," The Pirate Bay said in a statement. "The fight we're doing is important. And you're all part of it, every one of you. Let's keep going!"

The Promo Bay has become a great way for The Pirate Bay to prove the movie and music industries, critics, and the world that The Pirate Bay is more than just a pirate site.

"We do this for fun and for the love of culture, so we're everything the major labels are not," Winston said.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/3246...-riaa-mpaa.htm





Arizona Internet Censorship Bill So Ridiculous, Even The MPAA And RIAA Are Against It
Mike Masnick

A new bill has passed through the Arizona state legislature that would allow for broad censorship of the internet. As with many such bills, this one is weakly "disguised" as an attempt to deal with online "bullying" and "stalking." However, as with many such attempts to outlaw "being a jerk" online, this one goes way, way too far. It says that it's unlawful to "annoy or offend" someone online, for example. The bill is so bad that even Media Coalition -- a group backed by the MPAA and the RIAA is arguing against it.

The specifics of the bill take an existing law meant to stop harassing phone calls and applies it broadly to the internet. As Media Coalition points out, the bill:

... takes a law meant to address irritating phone calls and applies it to communication on web sites, blogs, listserves and other Internet communication. H.B. 2549 is not limited to a one to one conversation between two specific people. The communication does not need to be repetitive or even unwanted. There is no requirement that the recipient or subject of the speech actually feel offended, annoyed or scared. Nor does the legislation make clear that the communication must be intended to offend or annoy the reader, the subject or even any specific person.

As Eugene Volokh notes in his own discussion of the bill, a telephone is a one-to-one device. The internet is many-to-many, and it makes for a very different situation when you're talking about content designed to annoy or offend:

Telephones are basically one-to-one devices, so a phone call that uses profane language to offend is likely meant only to offend the one recipient, rather than to persuade or inform anyone; but computers used to post Facebook messages or send Twitter messages or post blog items can offend some listeners while persuading and informing others.

So, under the statute, posting a comment to a newspaper article — or a blog — saying that the article or post author is “fucking out of line” would be a crime: It’s said with intent to offend, it uses an electronic or digital device, and it uses what likely will be seen as profane language (see, e.g., City of Columbia Falls v. Bennett (Mont. 1991)). Likewise if a blog poster were to post the same in response to a commenter’s comment. Likewise if someone posts something in response to an e-mail on an e-mail-based discussion list, or in a chatroom, or wherever else. (Note that if “profane” is read to mean not vulgarly insulting, but instead religiously offensive, see City of Bellevue v. Lorang (Wash. 2000), then the statute would be unconstitutional as well.)

The same would be true if someone posts something lewd in one of these places in order to annoy or offend someone, for instance if he posts a comment on a police-run public discussion page that says something like “the chief of police can suck my dick,” to borrow subject matter from a prior Arizona telephone harassment case. And note that, given that case, the speech need not even be about one of the recipients, so long as it’s intended to annoy or offend one of the recipients.

It still amazes me that politicians think that these are good ideas. They're grandstanding against "cyberbullying", of course, but if they're going to pass laws that have a major impact on the internet, can't they at least talk to someone who understands this stuff first?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ainst-it.shtml





EMI, Grooveshark's Only Major Label, Tears Up Contract

The fourth-largest record company alleges that music-sharing service has failed to meet the financial obligations of licensing contract.
Greg Sandoval

EMI, one of the four top record companies and home to such acts as The Beatles and Coldplay, has terminated its agreement with Grooveshark, a well-known music-sharing service, CNET has learned.

Court documents filed in New York state court reveal that the recorded-music division of EMI alleges Grooveshark has failed to meet the financial obligations of its licensing agreement. In January, EMI's publishing arm filed suit against Grooveshark for breach of contract.

Grooveshark is a music service that provides free access to songs by enabling users to post their own music to the site. The company issued a response to EMI's court filing and allegations:

"Grooveshark was recently forced to make the difficult decision to part ways with EMI due to EMI's currently unsustainable streaming rates and EMI's pending merger with Universal Music Group, which we consider monopolistic and in violation of antitrust laws," the company wrote. "To date, Grooveshark has paid over $2.6 million to EMI, but we have yet to find sustainable streaming rates. In spite of this, Grooveshark's dedication to artists and rights holders remains the same."

The loss of EMI is significant for Grooveshark as it was the only major record label to license music to the service. Grooveshark is also being sued by the other three major labels -- Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group -- for copyright infringement.

The Gainesville, Fla.,-based company maintains it is a legitimate Internet service provider that is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Grooveshark's copyright battles with the labels go back years, but this time, the trouble seems to be contractual. EMI said in a motion for summary judgment against Grooveshark that managers there signed "a promissory note on Nov. 29, 2011, unconditionally promising to render payment of the sum certain of $450,000 to (EMI-owned) Capitol Records in accordance with the payment schedule."

On March 15, Grooveshark failed to make a $100,000 installment, EMI asserts. The record label maintains that Grooveshark has yet to pay down any part of the outstanding principle.

As a result, EMI terminated the agreement and began legal action to recover the money it says Grooveshark owes.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57...s-up-contract/





Cord Cutting is Real: 1 Million TV Subscribers Lost to Streaming Services
Brent Lang

Netflix and Hulu are convincing millions of cable, satellite and telco subscribers to cut the cord and dive into video streaming.

That's the conclusion of a new report released this week by the Convergence Consulting Group, which finds that 2.65 million Americans canceled TV subscriptions between 2008-2011 in favor of lower-cost internet subscription services or video platforms.

Also read: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: 'We Expect DVD Subscribers to Decline Forever'

The Canadian research firm estimates that 112,000 U.S. subscribers were added to the rolls in 2011. That represents a more than 50 percent drop from the 272,000 who signed up for the TV services in 2010.

The good news for the folks at Comcast, Time Warner Cable and their ilk is that while Convergence estimates that 1 million subscribers abandoned cable, internet or telco for streaming last year, it projects that cord cutters will begin to put away the scissors in 2012.

Convergence co-founder Brahm Eiley projects that the number of people opting out of TV subscription services will begin to slow in 2012 and 2013.

Part of the problem may be the dicey long-term prospects for Netflix, which has successfully lured away many cable users with its cheap subscription packages and extensive streaming library of older movies and shows.

Eiley argues that the rising price tag for streaming rights to this kind of programming will cause fiscal fits for the red envelope company.

He said that programming costs at the company more than tripled last year. Netflix owed $1.1 billion for streaming rights in 2010, but saw that number balloon to $3.9 billion by the end of last year.

"Unless Netflix achieves sufficient revenue growth it will not be able to sustain its high programming costs," Eiley told TheWrap.
http://movies.yahoo.com/news/cord-cu...230011290.html





Electronic Dance Concerts Turn Up Volume, Tempting Investors
Ben Sisario

One Friday afternoon last month, 60,000 tickets at $100 and up went on sale for a major music festival at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., before the headliners had even been announced.

It sold out in three hours.

The festival with the fervent following was the Electric Daisy Carnival, a two-day event next month dedicated to the concert industry’s new favorite genre: electronic dance music. Long considered a marginal part of the music business that subsisted in clubs and semi-legal warehouse raves, dance has now moved squarely into the mainstream, with a growing circuit of festivals and profit margins that are attracting Wall Street.

For an industry increasingly reliant on aging headliners — like Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and the Rolling Stones — the appeal of a genre with fresh stars and a huge young audience is undeniable.

“If you’re 15 to 25 years old now, this is your rock ‘n’ roll,” said Michael Rapino, the chief executive of Live Nation Entertainment, the world’s largest concert promoter.

Two weeks ago, 165,000 fans went to the Ultra Music Festival in Miami to revel in the pulsating bass and wave glow sticks in the dark. Similar numbers have turned out for events in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Dallas. With the boom, artist fees have exploded. Top D.J.’s like Deadmau5, Tiësto and Afrojack can earn well over $1 million for a festival appearance and $10 million for a Las Vegas nightclub residency, talent agents say.

Having developed on the margins, electronic dance music — high-energy waves of mechanized sound that, at its best, creates a communal experience for a sea of strangers — is dominated by a network of independent promoters.

They include Insomniac, which presents Electric Daisy Carnival; Hard Events, another nationwide promoter; Ultra, whose namesake festival in Miami has expanded to Brazil, Argentina and Poland; and Made Event, behind the Electric Zoo festival in New York.

Their success has attracted a clutch of potential investors from inside and outside the music world. The insiders include Live Nation and A.E.G. Live, the two biggest corporate promoters.

The outsiders include Ron Burkle, the supermarket magnate who made an unsuccessful bid last year for the Warner Music Group, and the media mogul Robert F. X. Sillerman, according to people involved in investment talks who declined to be identified discussing private agreements.

Mr. Sillerman — who transformed the concert industry in the 1990s by consolidating regional rock promoters into what is now Live Nation — declined to comment for this article, as did a representative of Mr. Burkle.

For new investors, getting into the dance business may not all be a party. Determining the value of the promoting companies is difficult, and there are particular risks whenever putting on a musical bacchanal for tens of thousands.

At the Electric Daisy Carnival in Los Angeles two years ago, a 15-year-old girl died of a drug overdose; at the same event in Dallas the next year, a 19-year-old man died and more than two dozen were hospitalized for drugs, alcohol and heat-related illnesses.

Pasquale Rotella, the chief executive of Insomniac, the company behind those raves, has also been implicated in a corruption scandal in Los Angeles. Last month, he and five others were indicted on charges related to the embezzlement of $2.5 million from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. In a statement, his company maintained that the charges against him were “completely baseless and flat-out wrong, both on the law and on the facts.”

The investment talks may be only in the exploratory phase. But for a musical genre that not long ago was mostly associated with secret locations and drugs, it is a startling development, as are the amounts of money involved. According to the people involved in the talks, offers to buy the biggest promoters have ranged from about $20 million to $60 million.

“It feels like the dot-com era,” said Joel Zimmerman, an agent at William Morris Endeavor who books many of the top dance acts. “There’s a little bit of a gold rush going on, with outsiders looking in.”

Electronic dance music, or E.D.M. for short, has been common in one form or other for decades, but only in recent years has its audience become big enough to sustain large-scale touring. Last December, Swedish House Mafia became the first D.J. act to headline Madison Square Garden. (D.J.’s do not spin records so much as command computerized sound systems, playing snippets of songs and using them to create their own protracted rhythms.)

This summer acts like Avicii and Kaskade are touring in some of the same arenas and theaters where fans can see Coldplay and James Taylor.

While record sales for dance music are relatively low — even the biggest recent albums, like David Guetta’s “Nothing But the Beat,” rarely sell more than 300,000 copies — the sound has infiltrated pop radio through acts like Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Katy Perry. At the Grammy Awards in February, Skrillex won three prizes and Mr. Guetta and Deadmau5 (pronounced like “deadmouse”) jammed with the Foo Fighters, L’il Wayne and Chris Brown.

The big dance festivals have built themselves into valuable brands, able to sell tickets on their name alone and the immersive audio-visual spectacle they present. One big company could bring together a handful of promoters and find economies of scale.

“I have been approached by all the big boys you can imagine,” said Gary Richards, the founder of Hard Events. “I’ve been working in this for 20 years and nobody cared. Now it’s so massive that everybody wants a piece of it.”

Yet a marriage between D.J.’s and billionaire investors may be difficult. Live music is a risky and low-margin business for promoters. Pricing tickets too high or too low, for example, can sink an otherwise successful venture. Dance music also faces the perennial fad question: will its popularity stick this time or blow over as it did in the 1990s, when it was called electronica?

How much the promoters need, or even want, outside money is also unclear. Some say outside capital is necessary to expand to new markets, but others have built powerful organizations on their own. Adam Russakoff, Ultra’s director of business affairs, said his company was profitable, debt-free and has no outside investment. The company handles its own ticketing and makes licensing deals for its events overseas.

And then there is simple culture clash. Many dance music promoters and managers are suspicious of big money and the corporate ways of the mainstream concert business. In an interview, Mr. Rotella said he has been approached by many potential investors but was worried of what might become of immersive, multifaceted events like Electric Daisy.

“You don’t want this to turn into what the concert business is today,” he said, “where you just sell people tickets and they come to the show and sit in their seat. There’s not a lot of soul behind that. What we do is more of an experience.”

Mr. Richards agreed, saying that the big investors he spoke with did not understand the market.

“You can’t just franchise this like McDonald’s,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/b...investors.html





Apple, Two Publishers Hold Out Against Settlement: Report

Apple Inc and publishers Pearson and Macmillan are reluctant to agree to terms sought by U.S. and European antitrust authorities investigating possible electronic-book price-fixing, the Wall Street Journal cited sources as saying on Wednesday.
Apple and some of the world's biggest book publishers are suspected of colluding to push up e-book prices and are under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and the European Commission. Reuters reported on March 30 that the U.S. Justice Department could reach a settlement in the case in the next few weeks.

The Journal, citing sources, reported that CBS Corp's Simon & Schuster Inc, HarperCollins Publishers Inc and Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group are inclined to settle. But Apple, Pearson and Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, are unwilling to, according to the report.

The U.S. Justice Department is seeking to unravel agreements Apple secured from five publishers about two years ago as the Silicon Valley company was launching its iPad and was seeking to break up Amazon's dominance in the digital book market.

Officials with the Justice Department declined to comment when contacted by Reuters.

(Reporting By Liana B. Baker; Editing by Matt Driskill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...83400G20120405





Flashback Trojan Reportedly Controls Half a Million Macs and Counting
Jacqui Cheng

Variations of the Flashback trojan have reportedly infected more than half a million Macs around the globe, according to Russian antivirus company Dr. Web. The company made an announcement on Wednesday—first in Russian and later in English—about the growing Mac botnet, first claiming 550,000 infected Macs. Later in the day, however, Dr. Web malware analyst Sorokin Ivan posted to Twitter that the count had gone up to 600,000, with 274 bots even checking in from Cupertino, CA, where Apple's headquarters are located.

We have been covering the Mac Flashback trojan since 2011, but the most recent variant from earlier this week targeted an unpatched Java vulnerability within Mac OS X. That is, it was unpatched (at the time) by Apple—Oracle had released a fix for the vulnerability in February of this year, but Apple didn't send out a fix until earlier this week, after news began to spread about the latest Flashback variant.

According to Dr. Web, the 57 percent of the infected Macs are located in the US and 20 percent are in Canada. Like older versions of the malware, the latest Flashback variant searches an infected Mac for a number of antivirus applications before generating a list of botnet control servers and beginning the process of checking in with them. Now that the fix for the Java vulnerability is out, however, there's no excuse not to update—the malware installs itself after you visit a compromised or malicious webpage, so if you're on the Internet, you're potentially at risk.

If you think one of your machines may be infected, F-Secure has instructions on how to use the Terminal to find out.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...d-counting.ars





Swedish Researchers Uncover Key to China's Tor-Blocking System
Gareth Morgan

Swedish researchers have discovered that Chinese officials have updated the country's 'Great Firewall' to make it harder for citizens to use the Tor network that provides a means of surfing the web anonymously.

It has been long-known that the 'Great Firewall Wall of China' has attempted to block citizens from using the Tor network, by blocking access to some IP addresses or using HTTP header filters to weed out suspect traffic.

But Philipp Winter and Stefan Lindskog of Karlstad University in Sweden have discovered that Chinese authorities have recently increased the sophistication of their filtering tools, making it more difficult for citizens to browse the web freely, by blocking so-called Tor bridges.

Tor bridges serve as entry points to the Tor network – if these are unreachable, a user cannot access the Tor network. While many of these bridges were once published, making it relatively simple to block, users had started to use unpublished bridges.

Last December, Tim Wilde, of security group, Team Cymru, used virtual proxy servers in China to establish that these unpublished bridges were being blocked.

The Karlstad researchers have now established how that blocking is being done and suggested ways in which it may be circumvented.

They discovered that the firewall searches internet traffic that indicate a network connection as Tor and initiate a scan of the host. This scan effectively attempts to “speak Tor” to the host and if successful, the bridge is blocked.

"The scanners are mostly random IP addresses originating from address pools of ISPs. Therefore it is very hard for a bridge to differentiate between a legitimate user from China and a scanner," Winter told V3.

Tor fingerprinting and active scanning is effective for the firewall because Tor traffic can be distinguished from other forms of traffic, allowing the Chinese authorities to block Tor networks, the researchers said.

“Since Tor is being used more and more as censorship circumvention tool, it is crucial that this distinguishability is minimised,” added Winter.

Tools such as "obfsproxy" can help defeat the Great Firewall, he added. This obfuscates the Tor traffic between the user and the bridge, making it appear as Skype traffic, for example.

"Unfortunately, China is blocking the few publicly available obfsproxy bridges at the moment but non-public obfsproxy bridges work," said Winter.

The researchers were able to show that by using so-called packet fragmentation tools, which split TCP streams in to small segments, it is possible to disguise Tor traffic, making it harder to detect.

While Tor networks are commonly associated with hackers and groups such as Anonymous where internet users aim to mask their identity, the network has played a crucial role in promoting online freedoms in many countries.
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/21657...-tor-blocking#





Britons Protest Government Eavesdropping Plans
Alan Cowell

British lawmakers and rights activists joined a chorus of protest Monday against plans by the government to give the intelligence and security services the ability to monitor the phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Internet use of every person in the country.

The Home Office said the measures were vital to provide police and security services with “communications data to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public.”

Under the proposal, made public in The Sunday Times of London, a law to be introduced later this year would allow the authorities to order Internet companies to install hardware enabling the government’s monitoring agency, known by its initials, GCHQ, to examine individual communications without a warrant.

A similar effort to enhance the authorities’ powers was made by the previous Labour government in 2006, but it was abandoned after ferocious opposition from groups including the two parties — the dominant Conservatives and the smaller Liberal Democrats — which now form the coalition government.

Currently, government eavesdroppers need a warrant to monitor specific communications. But the new system would permit the authorities to track communications data such as “time, duration and dialing numbers of a phone call or an e-mail address,” the Home Office said in a statement.

“It does not include the content of any phone call or e-mail and it is not the intention of the government to make changes to the existing legal basis for the interception of communications,” the statement said.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister, defended the plan, saying he was “totally opposed to the idea of governments reading people’s e-mails at will or creating a new central government database.”

“The point is we are not doing any of that and I wouldn’t allow us to do any of that,” he said, arguing that the authorities wanted to update “the rules which currently apply to mobile telephone calls to allow the police and security services to go after terrorists and serious criminals and updating that to apply to technology like Skype which is increasingly being used by people who want to make those calls and send those e-mails.”

However, opponents, such as Conservative lawmaker David Davis, said the measures would give the authorities far greater powers to intrude into areas that have traditionally been private.

“It is not focusing on terrorists or criminals. It is absolutely everybody. Historically, governments have been kept out of our private lives,” Mr. Davis said.

“Our freedom and privacy has been protected by using the courts, by saying ‘if you want to intercept, if you want to look at something, fine, if it is a terrorist or a criminal go and ask a magistrate and you’ll get your approval.’ You shouldn’t go beyond that in a decent, civilized society but that is what is being proposed.”

“This is an unnecessary extension of the ability of the state to snoop on ordinary innocent people in vast numbers,” he said.

The authorities argue that the new measures are designed to keep pace with rapidly changing communications technology. But opponents worry that, once gathered, information about personal communications — where they were made, with whom, for how long and with what frequency — might not be secure.

“The problem we have hade in the past is this information has been leaked, lost, stolen,” said Malcolm Bruce, a Liberal Democrat lawmaker. “I think there would be very, very real concerns that it could be open to all kinds of abuse.”

“We have had a situation where police have been selling information to the media,” he said, referring to testimony at a judicial inquiry into media ethics and practices. “I think we are in a very, very dangerous situation if too much information is being passed around unnecessarily,” he said, according to the Press Association news agency.

GCHQ stands for Government Communications Headquarters, which is run in close collaboration with the National Security Agency in the United States.

It is one of three British intelligence agencies, along with the domestic MI5 security unit and the overseas MI6 secret intelligence service. Its operations are conducted mainly from its headquarters near the spa town of Cheltenham, where most of its 5,500 staff members work, according to its Web site.

Information gathered by GCHQ has played a major part in the security service’s efforts to foil purported terrorist plots since the July 7, 2005, London bombings.

In February, electronic surveillance was cited as a significant weapon deployed by the authorities to foil a conspiracy inspired by Al Qaeda to place a bomb in the toilets of the London Stock Exchange, with the hope that the multistory building would catch fire. At the time, Alexander Carlile, a member of the House of Lords and formerly the government’s independent reviewer of counterterrorism legislation, said the monitoring had been “an excellent example of the surveillance and interception capabilities of British intelligence, as good as and probably better than any other country in the world.”

British officials have taken to warning that London will be a target when it hosts the 2012 Olympics this summer, strengthening the case for enhanced powers to intercept communications. But the proposed new legislation has recalled that the coalition came into office promising to respect individual rights.

Nick Pickles, director of a pro-privacy group called Big Brother Watch, said “no amount of scare-mongering can hide the fact the” planned law had been attacked by lawmakers in all major parties. “The government has offered no justification for what is unprecedented intrusion into our lives, nor explained why promises made about civil liberties are being junked,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/w...w-protest.html





Forget SOPA, You Should Be Worried About This Cybersecurity Bill
Mike Masnick

While most folks are looking elsewhere, it appears that Congress is trying to see if it can sneak an absolutely awful "cybersecurity" bill through Congress. We've discussed how there's been some fighting on the Senate side concerning which cybersecurity bill to support, but there's a similar battle going on in the House, and it appears that the Rogers-Ruppersberger bill, known as CISPA (for Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) or HR 3523 is winning out, with a planned attempt to move it through Congress later this month. The bill is awful -- and yet has somehow already gained over 100 sponsors. In an attempt to pretend that this isn't a "SOPA-like" problem, the supporters of this bill are highlighting the fact that Facebook, Microsoft and TechAmerica are supporting this bill.

However, this is a terrible bill for a variety of reasons. Even if we accept the mantra that new cybersecurity laws are needed (despite a near total lack of evidence to support this -- and, no, fearmongering about planes falling from the sky doesn't count), this bill has serious problems. As CDT warned when this bill first came out, it's way too broad and overreaching:

However, the bill goes much further, permitting ISPs to funnel private communications and related information back to the government without adequate privacy protections and controls. The bill does not specify which agencies ISPs could disclose customer data to, but the structure and incentives in the bill raise a very real possibility that the National Security Agency or the DOD’s Cybercommand would be the primary recipient.

If it's confusing to keep track of these different cybersecurity bills, the ACLU has put together a handy dandy (scary) chart comparing them all. And what comes through loud and clear is that the Rogers-Ruppersberger CISPA bill will allow for much greater information sharing of companies sending private communication data to the government -- including the NSA, who has been trying very, very hard to get this data, not for cybersecurity reasons, but to spy on people. CISPA has broad definitions, very few limits on who can get the data, almost no limitations on how the government can use the data (i.e. they can use it to monitor, not just for cybersecurity reasons) and (of course) no real oversight at all for how the data is (ab)used.

CDT has put together a reasonable list of 8 things that should be done if politicians don't want to turn cybersecurity into a new SOPA, but so far, Congress is ignoring nearly all of them. Similarly, EFF is asking people to speak out against CISPA, noting that it basically creates a cybersecurity exemption to all existing laws. If the government wants your data, it just needs to claim that it got it for "cybersecurity purposes" and then it can do pretty much whatever it wants.

This is a really bad bill and it looks like it's going to pass unless people speak up.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ity-bill.shtml





Powerful Senators Demand Giant Spy Blimp
Noah Shachtman

It’s a story so convoluted, only Washington could serve it up. Eighteen months ago, the Pentagon’s chief ordered the Air Force to start building a king-sized blimp that could spy on whole Afghan villages at once. That blimp is almost ready for flight testing. But the Air Force doesn’t want to deploy the thing, for reasons both sensible and not. So now a pair of influential senators are demanding that the Air Force send the blimp to the skies above the warzone.

“We believe it would be a significant failure to stop work and not deploy this much needed platform to Afghanistan,” Senators Thad Cochran and Daniel Ionuye complain in a Feb. 14 letter to Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter (.pdf), obtained by Danger Room.

Just two small problems. These senators, though powerful, are pretty famous on Capitol Hill for backing some rather wacky and useless projects. Oh, and there’s a second giant spy blimp that is also scheduled for a flight test soon, and also promised to the generals in Afghanistan.

The airship that’s attracted the senators’ attention is known as Blue Devil Block 2. At 370 feet long and 1.4 million cubic feet fat, it is one of the largest blimps built in this country since World War II. All that size allows it to stay in the air for days at a time at 20,000 feet. And it enables the airship to carry an enormous array of cameras and eavesdropping gear — enough to keep tabs on at least four square kilometers at a time. No other singular eye in the sky could track insurgents for so far around.

No wonder then-Defense Secretary Bob Gates noted in a Nov. 17, 2010 memo, obtained by Danger Room, that “the Blue Devil Air Ship initiative [is] urgently needed to eliminate combat capability deficiencies that have resulted in combat fatalities.”

A $211 million crash program was begun almost immediately, with the goal of sending the Blue Devil to Afghanistan before the end of 2011. The contract to lead the development was given to Mav6, a tiny but influential shop drawn from veterans of the Blackwater mercenary firm. David Deptula, the general in charge of Air Force intelligence was so excited about the project, he became the company’s CEO right after his retirement from the military.

“It brings to bear a completely different concept for ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance]: multiple sensors on one platform integrated with on-board processing and storage,” Deptula told Danger Room in January of 2011. “We’ve got the world’s largest ISR payload — and ‘real estate’ to host it, and nearly a supercomputer on board to process what they find.”

But Deptula’s colleagues at the Air Force were never too hot on the program, preferring supersonic jets to slow-moving blimps. They asked for all sorts of changes: older cameras, different eavesdropping antennas. Most importantly, the Air Force insisted that the Federal Aviation Administration certify the blimp — since the thing had the option for a man in the cockpit, and since it was going to have to fly over the United States, at least in tests.

That slowed the crash program. So did all kinds of other setbacks you’d expect from an ambitious, first-of-its-kind tool of war. The avionics arrived late. The tail fins came in extra heavy. Schedules started slipping. Costs grew. Fed up, the Air Force put a 90-day hold on the integration of its payload of spy gear.

Things only got worse when the Air Force added up what it thought it would cost to operate the giant blimp in Afghanistan for a year: $188 million, too rich for a Pentagon that’s supposed to be watching its pennies. The Air Force didn’t include a dime for such operations in its budgets for next year. Despite a flight test scheduled for May or June, the Air Force is expected to cancel the Blue Devil airship program shortly.

That ticked off senators Thad Cochran and Daniel Inouye. And that’s not something the Air Force wants to do. Cochran and Inouye, two long-time backers of all things military, run the Senate Appropriations Committee. They are, for all intents and purposes, the Senate’s moneymen.

“Given the Secretary’s determination that this initiative was urgently needed in Afghanistan to address combat deficiencies, we believe it would be a significant failure to stop work and not deploy this much needed platform to Afghanistan.” they note in their Feb. 14 letter.

“The U.S. Central Command continues to maintain a requirement for this capability,” they add — the generals still want the thing, in other words. So maybe it would just be better to reject the Air Force’s change, and take the program back to its roots. “A number of decisions were made to deviate from the program’s execution plan and baseline capability which has resulted in program cost growth and schedule delays,” the senators write. “We strongly urge you to examine the program and if necessary, descope the program back to the original baseline requirements so that combat troops in Afghanistan benefit from this capability as soon as possible.”

Crossing Cochran and Inouye is inadvisable, given their considerable power of the purse. That’s why it’s particularly unfortunate that some of their substantive ideas for defense are, well, batty. Cochran is famous in defense circles for backing one of the most visible technology flops of the war on terror — a bogus lightning gun that never succeeded in its goal of frying homemade bombs. Inouye’s record is, if anything, more spotty. He was one of the prime backers of the bloated Seawolf attack submarine and the notorious $1.3 billion military highway to nowhere in his home state of Hawaii.

And then there’s the question of what to do with the other giant blimp that’s supposed to be sent to Afghanistan. It’s called the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, or LEMV. It’s being built for the Army by the defense stalwart Northrop Grumman, unlike the upstarts behind the Blue Devil. And the LEMV has the vocal support of the Army, unlike the Air Force’s oh-so-reluctant approach to its massive airship.

The word in defense circles is that the LEMV has had just as many technical setbacks as the Blue Devil. And while the LEMV has its own flight test scheduled for this month, it’s still an open question whether the Army giant airships will ever reach Afghanistan, either. And wouldn’t that be a classic Washington end to the story: two football-sized war blimps, neither of them actually making it to war.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/04/hot-air/





Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA
James Bamford

Army General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, is having a busy year — hopping around the country, cutting ribbons at secret bases and bringing to life the agency’s greatly expanded eavesdropping network.

In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia.

Designed to house about 4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators, analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private contractors, it will have a 2,800-square-foot fitness center open 24/7, 47 conference rooms and VTCs, and “22 caves,” according to an NSA brochure from the event. No television news cameras were allowed within two miles of the ceremony.

Overseas, Menwith Hill, the NSA’s giant satellite listening post in Yorkshire, England that sports 33 giant dome-covered eavesdropping dishes, is also undergoing a multi-million-dollar expansion, with $68 million alone being spent on a generator plant to provide power for new supercomputers. And the number of people employed on the base, many of them employees of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, is due to increase from 1,800 to 2,500 in 2015, according to a study done in Britain. Closer to home, in May, Fort Meade will close its 27-hole golf course to make room for a massive $2 billion, 1.8-million-square-foot expansion of the NSA’s headquarters, including a cybercommand complex and a new supercomputer center expected to cost nearly $1 billion.

The climax, however, will be the opening next year of the NSA’s mammoth 1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center. The centerpiece in the agency’s decade-long building boom, it will be the “cloud” where the trillions of millions of intercepted phone calls, e-mails, and data trails will reside, to be scrutinized by distant analysts over highly encrypted fiber-optic links.

Despite the post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the NSA says that citizens should trust it not to abuse its growing power and that it takes the Constitution and the nation’s privacy laws seriously.

But one of the agency’s biggest secrets is just how careless it is with that ocean of very private and very personal communications, much of it to and from Americans. Increasingly, obscure and questionable contractors — not government employees — install the taps, run the agency’s eavesdropping infrastructure, and do the listening and analysis.

And with some of the key companies building the U.S.’s surveillance infrastructure for the digital age employing unstable employees, crooked executives, and having troubling ties to foreign intelligence services, it’s not clear that Americans should trust the secretive agency, even if its current agency chief claims he doesn’t approve of extrajudicial spying on Americans. His predecessor, General Michael V. Hayden, made similar claims while secretly conducting the warrantless wiretapping program.

Until now, the actual mechanics of how the agency constructed its highly secret U.S. eavesdropping net, code-named Stellar Wind, has never been revealed. But in the weeks following 9/11, as the agency and the White House agreed to secretly ignore U.S. privacy laws and bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, J. Kirk Wiebe noticed something odd. A senior analyst, he was serving as chief of staff for the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC), a sort of skunkworks within the agency where bureaucratic rules were broken, red tape was cut, and innovation was expected.

“One day I notice out in the hallway, stacks and stacks of new servers in boxes just lined up,” he said.

Passing by the piles of new Dell 1750 servers, Wiebe, as he often did, headed for the Situation Room, which dealt with threat warnings. It was located within the SARC’s Lab, on the third floor of Operations Building 2B, a few floors directly below the director’s office. “I walk in and I almost get thrown out by a guy that we knew named Ben Gunn,” he said. It was the launch of Stellar Wind and only a handful of agency officials were let in on the secret.

“He was the one who organized it,” said Bill Binney of Gunn. A former founder and co-director of SARC, Binney was the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks. Troubled by the unconstitutional nature of tapping into the vast domestic communications system without a warrant, he decided to quit the agency in late 2001 after nearly forty years.

Gunn, said Binney, was a Scotsman and naturalized U.S. citizen who had formerly worked for GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, and later become a senior analyst at the NSA. The NSA declined Wired’s request to interview Gunn, saying that, as policy, it doesn’t confirm or deny if a person is employed by the agency.

Shortly after the secret meeting, the racks of Dell servers were moved to a room down the hall, behind a door with a red seal indicating only those specially cleared for the highly compartmented project could enter. But rather than having NSA employees putting the hardware and software together and setting up walls of monitors showing suspected terrorism threats and their U.S. communications, the spying room was filled with a half-dozen employees of a tiny mom-and-pop company with a bizarre and troubling history.

“It was Technology Development Corporation,” said Binney.

The agency went to TDC, he says, because the company had helped him set up a similar network in SARC — albeit one that was focused on foreign and international communications — the kind of spying the NSA is chartered to undertake.

“They needed to have somebody who knew how the code works to set it up,” he said. “And then it was just a matter of feeding in the attributes [U.S. phone numbers, e-mail addresses and personal data] and any of the content you want.” Those “attributes” came from secret rooms established in large telecom switches around the country. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says.

Formed in April 1984, TDC was owned by two brothers, Randall and Paul Jacobson, and largely run out of Randall’s Clarkesville, Maryland house, with his wife acting as bookkeeper. But its listed address is a post office box in Annapolis Junction, across the Baltimore-Washington Parkway from the NSA, and the company’s phone number in various business directories is actually an NSA number in Binney’s old office.

The company’s troubles began in June 1992 when Paul lost his security clearance. “If you ever met this guy, you would know he’s a really strange guy,” Binney said of Paul. “He did crazy stuff. I think they thought he was unstable.” At the time, Paul was working on a contract at the NSA alongside a rival contractor, Unisys Corporation. He later blamed Unisys for his security problems and sued it, claiming that Unisys employees complained about him to his NSA supervisors. According to the suit, Unisys employees referred to him as “weird” and that he “acted like a robot,” “never wore decent clothes,” and was mentally and emotionally unstable. About that time, he also began changing his name, first to Jimmy Carter, and later to Alfred Olympus von Ronsdorf.

With “von Ronsdorf’s” clearance gone and no longer able to work at the NSA, Randy Jacobson ran the company alone, though he kept his brother and fellow shareholder employed in the company, which led to additional problems.

“What happened was Randy still let him have access to the funds of the company and he squandered them,” according to Binney. “It was so bad, Randy couldn’t pay the people who were working for him.” According to court records, Ronsdorf allegedly withdrew about $100,000 in unauthorized payments. But Jacobson had troubles of his own, having failed to file any income tax statements for three years in the 1990s, according to tax court records. Then in March 2002, around the time the company was completing Stellar Wind, Jacobson fired his brother for improper billing and conversion of company funds. That led to years of suits and countersuits over mismanagement and company ownership.

Despite that drama, Jacobson and his people appeared to have serious misgivings about the NSA’s program once they discovered its true nature, according to Binney. “They came and said, ‘Do you realize what these people are doing?’” he said. “‘They’re feeding us other stuff [U.S.] in there.’ I mean they knew it was unconstitutional right away.” Binney added that once the job was finished, the NSA turned to still another contractor to run the tapping operation. “They made it pretty well known, so after they got it up and running they [the NSA] brought in the SAIC people to run it after that.” Jacobsen was then shifted to other work at the NSA, where he and his company are still employed.

Randall Jacobsen answered his phone inside the NSA but asked for time to respond. He never called back.

In addition to constructing the Stellar Wind center, and then running the operation, secretive contractors with questionable histories and little oversight were also used to do the actual bugging of the entire U.S. telecommunications network.

According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon, which I first reported in my book The Shadow Factory in 2008. Verint did not return a call seeking comment, while Verizon said it does not comment on such matters.

At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004. Narus did not return a call seeking comment.

What is especially troubling is that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of spying on the U.S.

In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee, apparently with close connections to the country. The employee, a technical director in the Operations Directorate, “who was a very strong supporter of Israel,” said Binney, “gave, unbeknownst to us, he gave the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the Israelis.”

Because of his position, it was something Binney should have been alerted to, but wasn’t.

“In addition to being the technical director,” he said, “I was the chair of the TAP, it’s the Technical Advisory Panel, the foreign relations council. We’re supposed to know what all these foreign countries, technically what they’re doing…. They didn’t do this that way, it was under the table.” After discovering the secret transfer of the technology, Binney argued that the agency simply pass it to them officially, and in that way get something in return, such as access to communications terminals. “So we gave it to them for switches,” he said. “For access.”

But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic and diplomatic information back to them. “And then five years later, four or five years later, you see a Narus device,” he said. “I think there’s a connection there, we don’t know for sure.”

Narus was formed in Israel in November 1997 by six Israelis with much of its money coming from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture capital company. Its founder and former chairman, Ori Cohen, once told Israel’s Fortune Magazine that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. And among the five founders was Stanislav Khirman, a husky, bearded Russian who had previously worked for Elta Systems, Inc. A division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta specializes in developing advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli defense and intelligence organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the chief technology officer.

A few years ago, Narus boasted that it is “known for its ability to capture and collect data from the largest networks around the world.” The company says its equipment is capable of “providing unparalleled monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and government organizations around the world” and that “Anything that comes through [an Internet protocol network], we can record. We can reconstruct all of their e-mails, along with attachments, see what Web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice over Internet Protocol] calls.”

Like Narus, Verint was founded by in Israel by Israelis, including Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800 employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel, primarily working in research and development and operations, according to the Jerusalem Post. Among its products is STAR-GATE, which according to the company’s sales literature, lets “service providers … access communications on virtually any type of network, retain communication data for as long as required, and query and deliver content and data …” and was “[d]esigned to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications.”

In a rare and candid admission to Forbes, Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, noted his former organization’s influence on Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market. “Take NICE, Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology,” said Gefen. “Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse’s main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.”

According to a former chief of Unit 8200, both the veterans of the group and much of the high-tech intelligence equipment they developed are now employed in high-tech firms around the world. “Cautious estimates indicate that in the past few years,” he told a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’artez in 2000, “Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”

Equally troubling is the issue of corruption. Kobi Alexander, the founder and former chairman of Verint, is now a fugitive, wanted by the FBI on nearly three dozen charges of fraud, theft, lying, bribery, money laundering and other crimes. And two of his top associates at Comverse, Chief Financial Officer David Kreinberg and former General Counsel William F. Sorin, were also indicted in the scheme and later pleaded guilty, with both serving time in prison and paying millions of dollars in fines and penalties.

When asked about these contractors, the NSA declined to “verify the allegations made.”

But the NSA did “eagerly offer” that it “ensures deliberate and appropriate measures are taken to thoroughly investigate and resolve any legitimate complaints or allegations of misconduct or illegal activity” and “takes seriously its obligation to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and comply with the U.S. laws and regulations that govern our activities.”

The NSA also added that “we are proud of the work we do to protect the nation, and allegations implying that there is inappropriate monitoring of American communications are a disservice to the American public and to the NSA civilian and military personnel who are dedicated to serving their country.”

However, that statement elides the voluminous reporting by the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Wired on the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. Also not reflected is that in the only anti-warrantless wiretapping lawsuit to survive the government’s use of the “state secrets” privilege to throw them out, a federal judge ruled that two American lawyers had been spied on illegally by the government and were entitled to compensation.

So take the NSA’s assurances as you will.

But as NSA director Alexander flies around the country, scissors in hand, opening one top-secret, outsourced eavesdropping center after another, someone might want to ask the question no one in Congress seems willing to ask: Who’s listening to the listeners?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...companies-nsa/





These Are The Prices AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Charge For Cellphone Wiretaps
Andy Greenberg

If Americans aren’t disturbed by phone carriers’ practices of handing over cell phone users’ personal data to law enforcement en masse–in many cases without a warrant–we might at least be interested to learn just how much that service is costing us in tax dollars: often hundreds or thousands per individual snooped.

Earlier this week the American Civil Liberties Union revealed a trove of documents it had obtained through Freedom of Information Requests to more than 200 police departments around the country. They show a pattern of police tracking cell phone locations and gathering other data like call logs without warrants, using devices that impersonate cell towers to intercept cellular signals, and encouraging officers to refrain from speaking about cell-tracking technology to the public, all detailed in a New York Times story.

But at least one document also details the day-to-day business of telecoms’ handing over of data to law enforcement, including a breakdown of every major carrier’s fees for every sort of data request from targeted wiretaps to so-called “tower dumps” that provide information on every user of certain cell tower. The guide, as provided by the Tucson, Arizona police department to the ACLU, is dated July 2009, and the fees it lists may be somewhat outdated. But representatives I reached by email at Sprint and AT&T both declined to detail any changes to the numbers.

Here are a few of the highlights from the fee data.

• Wiretaps cost hundreds of dollars per target every month, generally paid at daily or monthly rates. To wiretap a customer’s phone, T-Mobile charges law enforcement a flat fee of $500 per target. Sprint’s wireless carrier Sprint Nextel requires police pay $400 per “market area” and per “technology” as well as a $10 per day fee, capped at $2,000. AT&T charges a $325 activation fee, plus $5 per day for data and $10 for audio. Verizon charges a $50 administrative fee plus $700 per month, per target.
• Data requests for voicemail or text messages cost extra. AT&T demands $150 for access to a target’s voicemail, while Verizon charges $50 for access to text messages. Sprint offers the most detailed breakdown of fees for various kinds of data on a phone, asking $120 for pictures or video, $60 for email, $60 for voice mail and $30 for text messages.
• All four telecom firms also offer so-called “tower dumps” that allow police to see the numbers of every user accessing a certain cell tower over a certain time at an hourly rate. AT&T charges $75 per tower per hour, with a minimum of two hours. Verizon charges between $30 and $60 per hour for each cell tower. Sprint demands $150 per cell tower per hour, and Sprint charges $50 per tower, seemingly without an hourly rate.
• For location data, the carrier firms offer automated tools that let police track suspects in real time. Sprint charges $30 per month per target to use its L-Site program for location tracking. AT&T’s E911 tool costs $100 to activate and then $25 a day. T-Mobile charges a much pricier $100 per day.

In an emailed statement to me, a Verizon spokesperson told me that the company doesn’t charge police in “emergency cases, nor do we charge law enforcement for historical location information in non-emergency cases.” He added that the company doesn’t “make a profit from any of the data requests from law enforcement.” A Sprint spokesperson sent me a statement saying that the company similarly doesn’t charge law enforcement for data requests in “exigent circumstances.”

“Fees are charged to law enforcement in other circumstances such as court ordered requests and it’s important to note that any fee charged is for recovery of cost required to support these law enforcement requests 24/7,” she writes.

T-Mobile declined to comment, and an AT&T spokesperson referred me to the company’s privacy policy, pointing out a specific line that reads, “We do not sell your personal information to anyone for any purpose. Period.”

That claim is “simply misleading,” says Catherine Crump, an attorney with the ACLU who coordinated the group’s FOIA project. “That’s a curious definition of ‘sell,’ given that they seem to be charging money for people’s information on a regular basis and handing it over to law enforcement agencies around the country.”

I’ve embedded the Tucson police department document below. The ACLU has created a summary of the very large collection of data it’s obtained here, and the full collection can be found here.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...hone-wiretaps/





Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool
Eric Lichtblau

Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.

With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.

But civil liberties advocates say the wider use of cell tracking raises legal and constitutional questions, particularly when the police act without judicial orders. While many departments require warrants to use phone tracking in nonemergencies, others claim broad discretion to get the records on their own, according to 5,500 pages of internal records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from 205 police departments nationwide.

The internal documents, which were provided to The New York Times, open a window into a cloak-and-dagger practice that police officials are wary about discussing publicly. While cell tracking by local police departments has received some limited public attention in the last few years, the A.C.L.U. documents show that the practice is in much wider use — with far looser safeguards — than officials have previously acknowledged.

The issue has taken on new legal urgency in light of a Supreme Court ruling in January finding that a Global Positioning System tracking device placed on a drug suspect’s car violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches. While the ruling did not directly involve cellphones — many of which also include GPS locators — it raised questions about the standards for cellphone tracking, lawyers say.

The police records show many departments struggling to understand and abide by the legal complexities of cellphone tracking, even as they work to exploit the technology.

In cities in Nevada, North Carolina and other states, police departments have gotten wireless carriers to track cellphone signals back to cell towers as part of nonemergency investigations to identify all the callers using a particular tower, records show.

In California, state prosecutors advised local police departments on ways to get carriers to “clone” a phone and download text messages while it is turned off.

In Ogden, Utah, when the Sheriff’s Department wants information on a cellphone, it leaves it up to the carrier to determine what the sheriff must provide. “Some companies ask that when we have time to do so, we obtain court approval for the tracking request,” the Sheriff’s Department said in a written response to the A.C.L.U.

And in Arizona, even small police departments found cell surveillance so valuable that they acquired their own tracking equipment to avoid the time and expense of having the phone companies carry out the operations for them. The police in the town of Gilbert, for one, spent $244,000 on such equipment.

Cell carriers, staffed with special law enforcement liaison teams, charge police departments from a few hundred dollars for locating a phone to more than $2,200 for a full-scale wiretap of a suspect, records show.

Most of the police departments cited in the records did not return calls seeking comment. But other law enforcement officials said the legal questions were outweighed by real-life benefits.

The police in Grand Rapids, Mich., for instance, used a cell locator in February to find a stabbing victim who was in a basement hiding from his attacker.

“It’s pretty valuable, simply because there are so many people who have cellphones,” said Roxann Ryan, a criminal analyst with Iowa’s state intelligence branch. “We find people,” she said, “and it saves lives.”

Many departments try to keep cell tracking secret, the documents show, because of possible backlash from the public and legal problems. Although there is no evidence that the police have listened to phone calls without warrants, some defense lawyers have challenged other kinds of evidence gained through warrantless cell tracking.

“Do not mention to the public or the media the use of cellphone technology or equipment used to locate the targeted subject,” the Iowa City Police Department warned officers in one training manual. It should also be kept out of police reports, it advised.
In Nevada, a training manual warned officers that using cell tracing to locate someone without a warrant “IS ONLY AUTHORIZED FOR LIFE-THREATENING EMERGENCIES!!” The practice, it said, had been “misused” in some standard investigations to collect information the police did not have the authority to collect.

“Some cell carriers have been complying with such requests, but they cannot be expected to continue to do so as it is outside the scope of the law,” the advisory said. “Continued misuse by law enforcement agencies will undoubtedly backfire.”

Another training manual prepared by California prosecutors in 2010 advises police officials on “how to get the good stuff” using cell technology.

The presentation said that since the Supreme Court first ruled on wiretapping law in 1928 in a Prohibition-era case involving a bootlegger, “subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government.”

Technological breakthroughs, it continued, have made it possible for the government “to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet.”

In interviews, lawyers and law enforcement officials agreed that there was uncertainty over what information the police are entitled to get legally from cell companies, what standards of evidence they must meet and when courts must get involved.

A number of judges have come to conflicting decisions in balancing cellphone users’ constitutional privacy rights with law enforcement’s need for information.

In a 2010 ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, said a judge could require the authorities to obtain a warrant based on probable cause before demanding cellphone records or location information from a provider. (A similar case from Texas is pending in the Fifth Circuit.)

“It’s terribly confusing, and it’s understandable, when even the federal courts can’t agree,” said Michael Sussman, a Washington lawyer who represents cell carriers. The carriers “push back a lot” when the police urgently seek out cell locations or other information in what are purported to be life-or-death situations, he said. “Not every emergency is really an emergency.”

Congress and about a dozen states are considering legislative proposals to tighten restrictions on the use of cell tracking.

While cell tracing allows the police to get records and locations of users, the A.C.L.U. documents give no indication that departments have conducted actual wiretapping operations — listening to phone calls — without court warrants required under federal law.

Much of the debate over phone surveillance in recent years has focused on the federal government and counterterrorism operations, particularly a once-secret program authorized by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks. It allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on phone calls of terrorism suspects and monitor huge amounts of phone and e-mail traffic without court-approved intelligence warrants.

Clashes over the program’s legality led Congress to broaden the government’s eavesdropping powers in 2008. As part of the law, the Bush administration insisted that phone companies helping in the program be given immunity against lawsuits.

Since then, the wide use of cell surveillance has seeped down to even small, rural police departments in investigations unrelated to national security.

“It’s become run of the mill,” said Catherine Crump, an A.C.L.U. lawyer who coordinated the group’s gathering of police records. “And the advances in technology are rapidly outpacing the state of the law.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/u...acy-fears.html





Wealthy Smartphone Users Less Likely to Play Games, Tweet
Natasha Baker

Wealthier smartphone users are less likely to play games or tweet and will opt for news, travel or finance apps, according to a new study.

The research by The Luxury Institute focused on app usage among wealthy consumers, who earn an annual income of $150,000 or more. They tend to be older, with a mean age of 52.

"As you get older and have family and significant others, aging parents, and a lot more assets and investments, you're going to need apps for far more relevant things than playing games and chatting with your peers," said Milton Pedraza, CEO of The Luxury Institute.

The findings are in contrast to smartphone usage as a whole, which research firm Nielsen showed is dominated by games and social networking categories.

The wealthy use Facebook and Angry Birds, the two most downloaded apps of 2011, but overall, higher-income consumers use apps for entertainment far less than the average smartphone user, according to Pedraza.

While wealthy consumers are only slightly more likely to have a smartphone than the general population, Nielsen said the breakdown of devices owned differs considerably.

Forty-five percent of wealthy smartphone users own an iPhone, followed 35 percent with an Android device and a quarter who had a Blackberry. But Nielsen found that overall Android had 46 percent of market share, followed by the iPhone with 30 percent and Blackberry with 15 percent.

"Google's strategy with Android is that they have multiple manufacturing partners," explained Jonathan Carson, the CEO of digital at Nielsen. "There's a broader choice with Android in the number of devices, and that may offer some opportunities for lower-end consumers."

He added that the iPhone has always done quite well with high-income consumers.

Carson also noted an upswing in the number of smartphone users adopting iPhones within the last few months, which he attributes to the iPhone 4S, and Apple's strategy to keep lower-priced models on the market at lower-price points to appeal to a wider range of consumers.

The study also showed that more than 80 percent of affluent consumers have downloaded apps and many have opted for paid apps and in-app upgrades. But on average, wealthier consumers download about half as many apps as the average consumer.

Among wealthy smartphone users, 67 percent have used their mobile device to shop for products or services online with tickets, gift cards, food or electronics the most popular purchases.

"There are a large number of people that still love to shop in the store, and I don't think it's only older people," Pedraza said, adding apps can augment the in-store experience.

The marketing firm Plastic Mobile polled 603 consumers whose mean income was $295,000 and net worth was $2.8 million for The Luxury Institute study.

(Editing by Patricia Reaney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...83108920120402





As Smartphones Become Health Aids, Ads May Follow
Milt Freudenheim

With smartphones changing the culture in so many ways, more and more young people are using their mobile devices to keep track of their health, and the trend is not going unnoticed by advertisers.

Older patients often use their PCs to look up side effects of medications, said Dr. Audrey K. Chun of Mount Sinai Hospital.

Young adults are much more likely than older people to have a smartphone and to use it to look for health information, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which surveys technology trends. And their health concerns differ markedly from those of older people.

Nearly 100 million Americans own a smartphone, but “younger people use them very differently,” said John Mangano, a vice president of comScore, an online research firm. Three of the top five symptoms searched for on Yahoo Mobile in January were early pregnancy, herpes and H.I.V. None of these symptoms showed up among the top searches on desktop computers, which are more likely to be used by older people.

The most popular symptom searches on PCs included gastroenteritis, heart attacks, gout and shingles, Yahoo said, adding that the encyclopedic medical symptoms checker on WebMD was the most popular site of its kind among PC users. On WebMD, the top symptoms searched for in January were muscle strain, gastroenteritis and irritable bowel syndrome.

Older patients often use their desktops to look up side effects of their medications, said Dr. Audrey K. Chun, a geriatrician who heads Mount Sinai Hospital’s Martha Stewart Center for Living in Manhattan. For example, George Yourke, 79, a retired architect, said he used his iMac to learn more about injections prescribed for his knee.

Besides tracking signs of pregnancy and various sexually transmitted diseases, mobile device owners frequently downloaded apps to help manage their eating, drinking and exercise, according to Everyday Health, an online company that has 30 million visitors a month to its health, diet and exercise Web sites.

The number of visits coming from mobile device users increased fivefold during the last 24 months, said Benjamin Wolin, chief executive of Everyday Health.

About a third of smartphone users tracked diet and exercise electronically in January, comScore said. The numbers were slightly higher for iPad and other tablet users — 35 percent for diet watchers and 39 percent for exercise fans.

Ariel Young, 20, a biology major at George Washington University, said she exchanged text messages “at least 75 times a day.” Part of that traffic is with close friends who trade tips on healthy foods and recipes. “I’m checking calories,” she said.

Susannah Fox, an associate director of the Pew Internet project, said, “Once they have a smartphone, people are more likely to participate in online conversations about health.”

Advertisers are taking note. Led by auto companies and packaged goods makers, they spent $3 billion online in 2011, including $818 million for mobile ads, PricewaterhouseCoopers reported. That was more than for print or radio, although television still got the largest share of the ad dollars.

Geoff McCleary, group director for mobile innovation at Digitas Health, which is owned by the Publicis Groupe, the Paris-based ad giant, said some health care companies were noticing that more people were using a mobile device to visit their Web sites.

Some companies are using surveys and social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to learn more about customers they could reach via smartphone.

“It may change the way we craft strategy,” Mr. McCleary said.

Health care companies have been slow to advertise online. ComScore said health ads were only 1 percent of all online display ads at the end of last year.

As for placing their ads on smartphones, many drug companies are struggling with the challenges of fitting safety information required by regulators, like side effects, onto the smaller screens of phones, Mr. McCleary said.

Heartbeat Ideas, a privately held ad agency, advises health care clients to “max out” the portion of their ad budget allocated to mobile devices. “The return on investment is much higher than radio or TV,” Lee Slovitt, Heartbeat’s media director, said.

“If searchers are actively looking for information on a given condition or a specific drug, they are much more likely to respond to a commercial message,” he said.

Mr. Slovitt said online viewing had “pretty much reached parity with television, with around 40 hours a week spent online and 40 hours watching television.”

Some of those viewers may be doing both at once.

In a world of multimedia and multitasking, “a person watching a commercial on a TV show or looking at a print ad can be spurred to go online on her phone to get more information about that specific treatment,” Mr. McCleary said.

“Mobile is not just used when you are out and about,” he said. “Close to 75 percent have actually done searches in their homes.”

ComScore said 17 million people used their phone to get health information in September, October and November last year. But there is a downside. In a study in January, many said they were worried about the potential for privacy violations.

Seventy percent of people seeking health information on smartphones said they had privacy concerns, Mr. Mangano said, while well over half of those using a tablet, a desktop or laptop had similar worries.

Smartphones are more likely to be used in public places where they can be lost, he noted. But that has not stopped the youthful searchers.

“I do health searches all the time,” said Brittany Lashley, 20, who is majoring in Chinese at the University of Maryland at College Park. She surfs the Web on her iPod Touch for food and drinks that she hopes will increase her energy level and help her stay awake and sharp for late-night studying.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/02/t...ay-follow.html





A Privacy Manifesto in Code: What If Your Emails Never Went to Gmail and Twitter Couldn't See Your Tweets?
Alexis Madrigal

A new tool under development by Oregon State computer scientists could radically alter the way that communications work on the web. Privly is a sort of manifesto-in-code, a working argument for a more private, less permanent Internet.

The system we have now gives all the power to the service providers. That seemed to be necessary, but Privly shows that it is not: Users could have a lot more power without giving up social networking. Just pointing that out is a valuable contribution to the ongoing struggle to understand and come up with better ways of sharing and protecting ourselves online.

"Companies like Twitter, Google, and Facebook make you choose between modern technology and privacy. But the Privly developers know this to be false choice," lead dev Sean McGregor says in the video below. "You can communicate through the site of your choosing without giving the host access to your content."

Through browser extensions, Privly allows you to post to social networks and send email without letting those services see "into" your text. Instead, your actual words get encrypted and then routed to Privlys servers (or an eventual peer-to-peer network). What the social media site "sees" is merely a link that Privly expands in your browser into the full content. Of course, this requires that people who want to see your content also need Privly installed on their machines.

Right now, Privly is a proof of concept running on a few computers at Oregon State. But McGregor and fellow coders Balaji Athreya and Jesse Hostetler have a $10,000 Kickstarter running to take it to the next level. (For example, in the current product, they don't yet encrypt your posts, but will add that into next-generation tool.)

What's intriguing about all this is that it, as McGregor puts it, violates many assumptions we have about the way the web works. When we post to a site, we are used to that site controlling whatever it is that we've sent to them. That seemed like the tradeoff you had to make in exchange for a service like Facebook. But McGregor and his team argue that it's simply not necessary to give away that level of control. And they are building the technology to prove it.

The fact that the content is user-controlled, however, has some fascinating repercussions. Email that sits in the cloud -- like Gmail -- could be edited by the sender even after its been received. Tweets could change on a tweeter's whim. The semi-permanence and dependability of the social web could break down. Giving users power doesn't only affect the corporate services they use, but other users of those networks as well.

Still, Privly is a radical departure from the hat-in-hand begging that users have previously had to do to gain control over the information they share. If something like Privly were to catch on, it could have several important impacts. Especially once the peer-to-peer service were established, Privly could be a useful tool for activists who want to use social networking tools but don't want their opponents to be able to see their posts. That its to say, it could provide a new avenue for free speech on the Internet. As noted earlier, we assume cloud-based email and applications to be durable records of communication. That would not longer be the case. And of course, this model runs directly against the standard social network business model of running ads against the specific type of content you've posted.

On Privly's Kickstarter, several prospective backers have made comments questioning pieces of the proposal. Namely, do we want a social web that's so easily editable? That's a tough question, but McGregor wants us to think about something else: do we want a social web in which users actually own nothing?

For what it's worth, we aren't trying to change the internet, but we do want a new deal where participation doesn't require giving companies the right to sell your data. We wish this wasn't necessary, but we've seen too many examples of sites violating their users privacy, and of everyone from stalkers to employers to governments tracking and misusing information. You should have the right to protect your content. You should have the right to delete your content. We'll deliver the tools that allow you to do so, and hope the need doesn't grow further.

I think Privly is best viewed as an argument in code. It's an attempt to expand the philosophical and technical terrain on which the privacy debate is playing out. Privly is saying, "The deal between users and services just doesn't have to be the way that it is." I may not agree with the specific implementation of the tool, but its existence changes the ways we can think about privacy.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...tweets/255414/





Web Privacy Rules Turn Poachers Into Gamekeepers
Claire Davenport

When you 'like' something on Facebook or read an online newspaper, perhaps a dozen or more companies are squirreling away data on your tastes, your habits, whether you're male or female, old or young, gay or straight.

They mean no harm. They just want to give you, the customer, exactly what you want - it's the grandfather of all business slogans. Their dilemma, now regulators' noses are twitching, is how to serve you, and serve themselves, when what you want is to be left alone.

There are thousands of analytics companies, audience targeters, ad brokers, ad exchanges and the like that can collect and sell data-based services on internet users for 5,000 euros a time to big brands, which then buy ad space where their potential customers might be lurking.

You only know these trackers are at work if you read the fine print. The New York Times has a disclaimer saying it hires WebTrends and Audience Science to interpret its readers' interests, and Britain's Guardian newspaper says it pays Criteo and Quantcast, among others, to do the same.

Sometimes a website can sell ad space to, for example, a luxury hotel, within three seconds of knowing a person with a penchant for spa breaks is on their site. The website running the ad earns money when people click on it. It is their lifeblood.

"There is no way websites will survive without targeting," said Kimon Zorbas from the Internet Advertising Bureau, an online ad lobby in Brussels.

Analysts estimate that targeting has almost tripled what brands pay websites to run their ads. In the United States, online ad revenue was just shy of $15 billion in the first half of 2011, 23 percent higher than the previous year. Figures for the European Union are harder to come by.

In Europe, outfits like Nugg.ad, which serve big brands such as L'Oreal and Eastman Kodak Co, place small parcels of code, or "cookies", on a site visitor's computer so they can see what kind of content a person clicks on. Then they write algorithms that make assumptions about what people might buy online.

L'Oreal thus increased its ability to reach their ideal buyer by 168 percent, according to figures from Nugg.ad.

Now regulators want to put the brakes on tracking.

CONSUMER CHOICE

The United States and the European Union both say they want people to choose whether ad firms can collect their data or not, but disagree over how much choice readers should have.

European regulators want companies to seek explicit consent for tracking, while the United States is happy to leave the initiative with the web user.

The EU agreed new rules on internet privacy in May last year, putting the onus on member states to ensure that companies store user data only if the user is provided with "clear and comprehensive information" about the purposes of and access to that data and has given their consent.

The ePrivacy Directive does not give any guidelines as to what constitutes user consent, but says that cookies, unless "strictly necessary for the delivery of a service requested by the user", cannot be placed without it.

Many countries are struggling to put the rules into effect. In Britain, the regulations allow for consent to be signified by future browser settings that have yet to be introduced, and companies have been given until May 28 this year to comply. In Germany, regulators are not that far along. They are trying to please the EU without turning the Internet into a jungle of pop-ups.

"We have a big problem matching regulatory demands with technical practicalities," said Ninja Marnau, a lawyer from the data protection commissioner's office in Schleswig-Holstein.

"This is operationally and technically a nightmare," said Phil Lee, a lawyer from Field Fisher Waterhouse.

Based in London, Lee is advising companies in the United States and EU on how to walk the tightrope of satisfying EU requirements without going much further than the U.S. standard.

Given the choice, nearly half of web users in the United States and Britain want some distance between their data and ad companies, surveys by analytics firms show.

And the job of developing a tool to give users cover from prying ad firms has fallen to the companies that benefit from the services of the ad firms. The poachers are now guarding the grouse.

Up to 50 blue-chip companies from Facebook to Walt Disney Co are holding weekly conference calls with a handful of data privacy experts on how users can turn off targeting and how companies can get the regulators off their backs.

Collectively, they are part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and European regulators have given them until June to deliver something called Do Not Track, a tool first developed by Mozilla's Firefox, one of the world's leading web browsers.

Aleecia McDonald from Mozilla, who co-chairs the W3C's tracking group, said she does not know if they will have the application nailed down by June.

The group is trying to invent a tool that covers all kinds of tracking "to end the arms race" between tracking developers and regulators.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

In the meantime, companies who depend on the Web for a significant portion of their business are left wondering how painful Do Not Track will be.

Nugg.ad said it was impossible to say how much revenue would be lost if some regulators get their way and people are forced to choose whether a website can track them or not, "but it could definitely hurt our business".

European regulators' insistence on explicit consent to tracking could mean that those who simply forget to switch it on are out of companies' targeting reach for good, McDonald said.

Until now retailers have enjoyed almost unfettered access to the 75 percent of European consumers that have Internet access, and they fear an effective shrinking of the market.

In 2012, online sales in Europe are forecast by the British-based Centre for Retail Research to grow by 16.1 percent to 233 billion euros.

McDonald said it was likely that the overall rate of using Do Not Track would be higher in the European Union than in the United States.

There are already products to shield consumers from trackers, some as standalone software or as add-ons to browsers, and Nugg.ad's Chief Executive Stephan Noller said the firm had already noticed a slightly higher likelihood among European users to switch some tracking off.

Ironically, there is one form of tracking, geolocation - perhaps the most invasive of all, since it knows where you live, work, eat and play - that could come through the tighter regulation relatively unscathed.

"Because where someone is located may affect how they are treated under law," said Mozilla's McDonald.

(Editing by Will Waterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...83208320120403





Ugly New Reputation-Smearing Tactic: Going After A Toddler's Internet Footprint
Kashmir Hill

These days, you shouldn’t worry just about your own online reputation but that of your children, should you get on the bad side of a person who is willing to resort to ugly tactics in digital battles.

Crystal Cox, a Montana woman who calls herself an “investigative journalist” was slapped with a $2.5-million judgment last year for defaming an investment firm and one of its lead partners. Cox had taken control of the Google footprint of Obsidian Finance and its principal Kevin Padrick by writing hundreds of posts about them on dozens of websites she owned, inter-linking them in ways that made them rise up in Google search results; it ruined Obsidian’s business due to prospective clients being put off by the firm’s seemingly terrible online reputation. After Obsidian sued Cox, she contacted them offering her “reputation services;” for $2,500 a month, she could “fix” the firm’s reputation and help promote its business. (In some circles, we call that ”extortion.”)

Nonetheless, when the outrageously high judgment came down, some bloggers rushed to Cox’s defense, in great part because the judge declared Cox not to be a member of the media in a poorly-written opinion that some interpreted to mean that bloggers generally couldn’t claim legal protections for members of the press. So First Amendment-loving lawyers, including Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy and Matthew Zimmerman at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offered Cox their services in appealing the case and attempting to get a new trial. (They were denied this week, with the judge clarifying that bloggers can be journalists, but that Cox is a serial harasser, not a journalist.) Another lawyer, Marc Randazza had also spoken with Cox about her case; after deciding not to work with him, Cox sent him an email letting him know that she “needed to make money” and was willing to offer him her reputation management services. In fact, she had already bought his domain name — marcrandazza.com. Randazza writes on his blog:

Apparently I was not sufficiently threatened by this tactic, so Cox went on to register:

fuckmarcrandazza.com, marcrandazzasucks.com, marcjrandazza.com, marcjohnrandazza.com

She also registered a great many Blogger accounts bearing my name, including markrandazza.blogger.com.

(For disclosure’s sake, I should mention that Cox also began blogging about me repeatedly around this time, using the same tactics she used on Obsidian and Padrick, because I was the first to write a critical article about her tactics. When David Carr of the New York Times followed suit, he also attracted her ire. In addition to frequent blog posts about Carr, she bought the url ‘davidcarrsucks.com’.)

Because Randazza (like David Carr and myself) writes frequently online, he had a pretty solid handle on his online reputation (unlike bankruptcy lawyer Kevin Padrick), so Cox was unable to make much headway in ruining his Google search results with her domain-name buying and blogging. So she moved on to Randazza’s family members, who did not have much online content associated with their names. She bought the domain name for Marc’s wife, Jennifer Randazza (and has already started dominating her first page of Google results with her hyperbolic posts). When Randazza still wouldn’t buy her services, Cox moved on to a younger member of the family:

When this didn’t get the desired response, Cox turned to a place where even the lowest of the low would not stoop — she focused her stalkerish attention on my three-year-old daughter and registered NataliaRandazza.com.

The search engine results for three-year-old Natalia Randazza are at this time dominated by content from her father, including a ‘the baby has arrived’ blog post with accompanying wrinkly newborn photo and a few YouTube baby videos (classics like “Natalia’s first bath”). There’s also a page by some confused data grabber that suggests Natalia and Marc Randazza are business associates. Perhaps due to the negative attention, Cox took down the content she had started publishing on the nataliarandazza.com site.
Randazza’s struggle with Cox is representative of a much larger battle being waged on the Internet pitting free speech against our rights to protect our reputations. Randazza, a lawyer who has in his career fought to protect lots of troubling speech, understands this tension more than most. Yet, he writes:

Fortunately, I had a large enough public reputation and the Google juice to withstand her attacks.

Kevin Padrick didn’t have that luxury.

Other people won’t have that luxury.

My three year old daughter doesn’t have that luxury…

There is no doubt that the blogging community needs as many protections as it can get, and I believe many bloggers who I read, talk to and work with would qualify for protection under Oregon’s shield statute. Crystal Cox did not, does not, and cannot advance this goal. If the blogging community wishes to stand among those with the title of “journalist,” then it must reject people like Crystal Cox, and relegate them to their own bizarre, obsessive and child-targeting corner of the Internet.

She is not one of us.

She harms us.

Cox is an outlier. Her tactics are extreme ones. But we do now live in a world where money can be made from ruining reputations and then offering to fix them. In the business world, there is RipOffReport.com, a site that hosts negative reviews of businesses and offers a paid “ambassador program” to those businesses to help them improve the reviews on the site. There’s also a series of sites that dig up people’s mug shots from public records and post them so that they appear in those people’s search results; they then offer to take them down for a fee.

How do we draw the line between speech rights and digital forms of extortion? It is not a new question for us in the Internet age, but it remains an unanswered one.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirh...net-footprint/





Washington is First State to Take On Escort Sites
William Yardley

For more than three months, she was sold online for sex. She had run away at 15, gone back home, then run away again. Finally, an undercover police officer caught her, and her pimp. This time she went home and stayed, but she was not the same.

“She was a different child after that,” her father said. “It was like she was programmed. She spoke different. She looked different. They cut her hair, they dyed her hair, they bought her new clothes.”

Now 17, the girl is in counseling and in college, “on her way,” her father said.

She is also evidence. When one of the men who raped her was sentenced in February, one of the exhibits that prosecutors used was an advertisement selling her services as an escort on backpage.com. The ad said she was 18.

That same month, the Washington Legislature was debating a bill that would require sites within the state to obtain documentation that escorts advertised there are at least 18. On Thursday, Gov. Christine Gregoire signed that bill into law, the first of its kind in the country.

“It’s a start, and it’s a precedent,” the girl’s father said, “and it will make a difference.”

The Washington law was praised last week by groups working to stop child sex trafficking. Other states, including Connecticut, are considering similar legislation. Yet even some supporters of the law question how effective it will be — paperwork can be easy to fake, after all. And will shutting down one Web site simply prompt another to open? Some also wonder how it will fare against potential legal challenges that it limits free speech.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Andrea Powell, the executive director of FAIR Girls, which seeks out and helps girls who have been sexually exploited. “But I don’t think it’s going to be the solution they’re looking for. It might reduce the volume of ads, but the ultimate goal is to shut that section down. There’s no way with an escort section that pimps aren’t going to post there. They’re not going to just stop posting on backpage.”

After public and political pressure led Craigslist to remove its escort sections in 2010, experts say backpage became the biggest mainstream platform for similar ads. Yet unlike Craigslist, backpage, which is owned by Village Voice Media Holdings, says it has no plan to remove its escort sections and it has not ruled out challenging Washington State’s law. The company says that the role it plays is vastly overstated by critics and that it screens and reports ads to try to prevent exploitation of children.

“There’s going to have to be a challenge to it,” said Liz McDougall, general counsel for Village Voice Media Holdings. “Otherwise it would effectively shut down an enormous portion of the Internet that currently permits third-party content.”

Ms. McDougall said the law could potentially affect Web site forums and chat rooms that are unrelated to escort sites, but where illicit content might be reposted. She also made arguments that even some law enforcement investigators make, that some sites that promote child sex trafficking can lead investigators and advocates to victims and their abusers.

That argument falls flat for many advocates.

“That just doesn’t work because, of course, they’re causing far more harm than they’re helping prevent,” said Washington State’s attorney general, Rob McKenna, a Republican who is running for governor. “There’s no excuse for being part of the problem.”

Human trafficking has been a prominent issue in Washington State for at least a decade. Following a series of high-profile trafficking-related episodes beginning in the 1990s, Washington passed the first state law, in 2003, to criminalize human trafficking. In 2010 it significantly increased prison sentences for child sex-trafficking. Last year, Mayor Mike McGinn of Seattle pulled city advertising from The Seattle Weekly, which is owned by Village Voice (but requires age verification for escort ads that run in print). Mr. McKenna, the current president of the National Association of Attorneys General, made the issue the centerpiece of the group’s meeting here last week.

He and others say they want Congress to amend the federal Communications Decency Act. The act, passed in 1996, provides broad free-speech protections for Internet sites that opponents of trafficking say did not anticipate the way the Web is now used — but that could make the Washington law vulnerable in court.

State Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles, the sponsor of the new law, said she and others spent more than a year working on language that the American Civil Liberties Union and some newspaper groups eventually supported.

“We provide the means for them to have an affirmative defense,” Ms. Kohl-Welles said of the escort sites. “That is, if they can document they verified the age of the individual being portrayed. We think that’ll do it.”

Ms. McDougall, of Village Voice Media Holdings, said it “took some convincing” before she recently agreed to take her job, because she also had questions about backpage. But she also questioned the need for the new Washington law.

“If we’re not already the industry leaders based on what we’re doing, we are going to be the industry leaders in fighting trafficking online,” Ms. McDougall said. “My goal is to get us there.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/02/u...afficking.html





Robert R. Beezer Dies at 83; Judge on 9th Circuit Court of Appeals

Beezer, who was appointed to the appeals bench in 1984 by President Reagan, was author of landmark decisions on judicial authority and digital media sharing.
Carol J. Williams

Robert R. Beezer, a federal judge on the nation's busiest court for the last 28 years and author of landmark decisions on judicial authority, digital media sharing and capital punishment, has died of lung cancer. He was 83.

Beezer's death Friday at a Seattle hospital was the sixth among U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judges in little more than a year, dealing yet another blow to the overwhelmed bench that hears cases from nine Western states and two Pacific territories.

Four of the 9th Circuit's 29 authorized active judgeships are vacant due to partisan wrangling in the U.S. Senate over nominees of President Obama, and Beezer's death now drops to 18 the number of semi-retired senior judges who help shoulder caseloads twice that of the other 12 federal appeals courts.

Like most of the senior judges, Beezer continued to hear cases long after resigning his active judgeship in 1996. As his eyesight failed in recent years, he turned to computerized text-to-audio translation technology to keep up with the voluminous reading required for each case, the court said in its report on his death.

Just two years ago Beezer wrote the opinion in the Anna Nicole Smith bankruptcy case that has been described as one of the most significant rulings on the power and authority of federal judges appointed to lifelong terms. His opinion was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court last year, resolving a long-running dispute over the authority of Congress to delegate judicial power that was provoked when the 9th Circuit took over Smith's case from a Texas bankruptcy court.

Beezer also wrote what his peers described as a trailblazing decision in 2001 in A&M Records Inc. vs. Napster Inc., one of the first cases to address whether file sharing was fair use of copyrighted materials, setting the judicial tone for much of the law that has followed on digital media sharing. Beezer wrote that Napster and other file-sharing services could be held liable for contributing to copyright infringement.

While still an active judge in 1994, Beezer wrote for the majority of a divided full court that execution by hanging in his native state of Washington didn't amount to cruel and unusual punishment as prohibited by the Constitution. As a result, the gallows remain a legal alternative to lethal injection in Washington and New Hampshire.

Beezer also left an indelible mark on the judiciary's standard for determining sexual harassment, instituting a "reasonable woman" test in place of what he deemed a "male-based" orientation in examining whether a reasonable person would find certain behaviors offensive.

Beezer's colleagues at the Seattle federal courthouse where he served throughout his tenure described him as tenacious, dedicated and insightful.

"Judge Beezer was the model and epitome of wise judicial statesmanship," said Judge Ronald M. Gould. "His opinions were formed of plain language, forceful and direct. He stood up to power whether private or governmental, in the name of the Constitution's requirements."

Judge Richard C. Tallman, another Seattle-based judge on the appeals court, was in private practice with Beezer 30 years ago and said his friend and mentor had "an intelligent, insightful approach to resolving client problems through creative applications of the law." Tallman, who like Beezer was seen as aligned with Republican politics before joining the bench, once described Beezer as "the thinking person's conservative."

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski praised Beezer as a distinguished jurist who "was devoted to the law and placed great emphasis on courtesy and civility in its practice."

Born in Seattle on July 21, 1928, Beezer earned his undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Virginia. After earning his bachelor's degree in 1951, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps for two years before entering law school. He remained in the Marine Corps Reserve for 20 years before retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

He practiced real estate, probate and trust law with the Seattle firm of Schweppe, Doolittle, Krug, Tausend & Beezer until his appointment to the 9th Circuit by President Reagan in 1984.

Prior to his federal court appointment, Beezer served from 1962 to 1979 as a judge pro tem on the Seattle Municipal Court.

The judge is survived by his wife of 54 years, Hazlehurst; sons Robert and John; daughter Allison; and two grandchildren.
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituari...,6080026.story

















Until next week,

- js.



















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