Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 6th, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"There was no significant change in the number of illegal downloads. In other words, if people want to combat it ... singling out certain services isn't really going to do anything." – Marie-Alicia Chang



































October 6th, 2012




Bootleg Music Downloading a Thing of the Past? Not So, Study Says
Dawn C. Chmielewski

Americans downloaded nearly 760 million songs using the BitTorrent file-sharing network in the first six months of this year -- surpassing the number of digital tracks purchased over that same period, according to a new report.

BitTorrent's technology allows Web users to share large files by downloading small pieces from many computers at once. Although not all music available on BitTorrent is pirated the majority of the songs delivered through the network are not licensed.

The findings of London researcher Musicmetric suggest that turning to the courts to block access to sites that facilitate illegal downloads -- as happened earlier this year in Britain, where Internet service providers were ordered to block access to the Pirate Bay -- is doing little to deter piracy.

"There was no significant change in the number of illegal downloads," said Marie-Alicia Chang, Musicmetric's co-founder and head of business development. "In other words, if people want to combat it ... singling out certain services isn't really going to do anything."

The U.S. continues to lead the world in BitTorrent use, based on Musicmetric's examination of individual file downloads.

Americans used the file-sharing network to grab 97 million albums and singles in the first half of the year (assuming an album contains 10 tracks, the total number of song downloads would exceed 759 million). By contrast, U.S. consumers bought 698 million digital singles in that period, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Gainesville, Fla.; Albany, Ga.; Fairbanks, Alaska; Lexington, Ky.; and Tallahassee, Fla., lead the nation in per capita downloads. But big cities including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago lead in total BitTorrent use.

The most popular downloads read like a Billboard chart. They include L'il Wayne and Drake's "The Motto," Jay-Z and Kanye West's "Watch the Throne" and Big Sean's "Finally Famous." In Los Angeles, rapper Tyga, music producer and DJ Skrillex and the rock duo The Black Keys are more popular than elsewhere in the country, based on BitTorrent downloads.

Online piracy decreased slightly in countries where people have access to licensed streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora, which serve as alternative sources for free online delivery of millions of songs. Spotify is available in five of the 10 countries where use of BitTorrent is shrinking -- including Britain and the U.S.

"If you’re trying to kill piracy by whatever means, whether it's by legal means or by creating new ways for consumers to get content, you need to know if you're having any effect," said Gregory Mead, Musicmetric's co-founder and chief executive. "We report the numbers."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...,1163340.story





Japan Introduces Piracy Penalties for Illegal Downloads
BBC

Japan-based internet users who download copyright infringing files face up to two years in prison or fines of up to two million yen ($25,700; £15,900) after a change to the law.

Such activity has been illegal since 2010, but until now had not invoked the penalties.

It follows a lobbying campaign by country's music industry.

But critics said that efforts should have remained focused on stopping users making such material available.

In Japan illegal uploads of copyright infringing music and videos carry a maximum 10 year prison sentence and a 10 million yen fine.

Sales figures suggest the country is the world's second-largest music market after the US.
Piracy problem

In theory the new download punishments can be enforced if a user is found to have copied a single pirated file.

The Recording Industry Association of Japan had pushed for the move, suggesting that illegal media downloads outnumbered legal ones by about a factor of 10.

The figure is based on a 2010 study which suggested that people in the country downloaded about 4.36 billion illegally pirated music and video files and 440 million purchased ones that year.

It added that the disparity was likely to have increased over the following months.

"This revision will reduce the spread of copyright infringement activities on the internet," said the body's chairman Naoki Kitagawa, who is also chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment Japan, earlier this year.

Politicians voted through the change in June.

Shortly afterwards the website of the government's finance ministry was defaced and the sites of the Supreme Court, the DPJ and LDP political parties, and the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers were briefly taken offline after cyber attacks.

The following month a group of masked activists associated wearing masks associated with the Anonymous hacktivist movement staged a protest in Tokyo.

About 80 participants picked up rubbish from the ground in the city's Shibuya shopping district for an hour to publicise their opposition to the plan.
Jake Shimabukuro Sony supports the law to prevent illegal downloads of songs by artists such as Jake Shimabukuro

The Japan Federation of Bar Associations, a group representing legal professionals, also issued a statement saying the offence should have remained a civil, rather than criminal, matter.

"Treating personal activities with criminal punishments must be done very cautiously, and the property damage caused by individual illegal downloads by private individuals is highly insignificant," it said.

However, the efforts did not sway the politicians.

International efforts

Japan's action is part of a wider international crackdown on online piracy.

Over recent months the US has taken the digital locker service Megaupload offline; Ukraine has shut down the BitTorrent site Demonoid; the UK has jailed the owner of the Surfthechannel video link provider; and several countries have restricted access to The Pirate Bay torrent service - the founder of which was recently deported from Cambodia to Sweden to face tax charges.

France also recently fined one of its citizens for the first time under its "three strikes" rule which allows it to impose a fine if a suspected pirate ignores three warnings about their activity.

However, attempts to introduce new laws have run into problems elsewhere.

The US put off votes on Sopa (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Pipa (Protect IP Act) in January after Wikipedia and thousands of other sites staged blackouts in protest.

The European Parliament also voted to reject Acta (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) in July after opposition across the continent.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19767970





WikiLeaks' And Pirate Bay's Web Host PRQ Raided By Swedish Police
Andy Greenberg

The Stockholm-based web host PeRiQuito AB, or PRQ, has long attracted some of the most controversial sites on the Internet. Now it’s attracted a less friendly guest: Sweden’s police force.

Stockholm police raided the free-speech focused firm Monday and took four of its servers, the company’s owner Mikael Viborg told the Swedish news outlet Nyheter24.

While a number of bittorrent-based filesharing sites including PRQ’s most notorious client, the Pirate Bay, have been down for most of Monday as well as PRQ’s own website, Viborg told the Swedish news site that the site outages were the result of a technical issue, rather than the police’s seizure of servers. And it’s not yet clear exactly whose servers the police seized: PRQ’s two thousand or so customers have at times included WikiLeaks, the North America Man-Boy Love Association, Pedophile.se, the Chechen rebel site Kavkaz Central, and the defamation-accused Italian blog known as Perugia Shock, among others.

“Even though I loathe what they say, I defend them,” Viborg told me when we spoke last August, regarding his most controversial clients like Pedophile.se and NAMBLA. “We don’t cooperate with the authorities unless we absolutely have to.”

As of last summer, Viborg said that PRQ continued to host WikiLeaks. But he told me that the company no longer had any direction connection with the Pirate Bay, which has instead bounced among temporary hosts since its founders were convicted of copyright theft in 2010.

Two of the three Pirate Bay founders also created PRQ in 2004, and one of them is Gottfrid Svartholm, a 27-year old Swede who was arrested in Cambodia last month after being convicted of copyright crimes in absentia, and is now also being charged with hacking into the IT firm Logica.

PRQ has been raided twice before: In 2006, to gather evidence in the police investigation of the Pirate Bay, and again in 2010, in an operation targeting a filesharing network known as “the Scene.”

WikiLeaks noted the raid in its Twitter feed Monday, describing PRQ as “one of a number of ISPs used by WikiLeaks.” But as of Monday afternoon, the secret-spilling site hadn’t been taken offline.

As I learn more about the PRQ raid, I’ll post an update. For now, even PRQ’s owners may not know the reason behind the raid. Viborg has told me that the company has a policy of no-questions-asked service for many of its customers, even accepting cash payments up front to avoid requiring any bank payment details that might identify its server room’s inhabitants. “Generally we don’t know who our customers are,” Viborg said. “By Swedish law, we’re not required to.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...wedish-police/





Swedish Web Host PRQ Returns Following Government Raid

PRQ, started by a Pirate Bay co-founder, hosts a number of questionable sites.
Cyrus Farivar

On Wednesday, the infamous Swedish web host, PRQ, came back online after it was raided by Swedish authorities earlier this week. In an interview with the Swedish news site Nyheter24, PRQ’s Michael Viborg said Swedish authorities targeted servers that host BitTorrent-related sites.

"They took three servers, and I know two of the sites that were targets of the raid. The first is Tankafetast.com or Tankafett.com, they are different names for the same site" he said (translated from Swedish).

"The other is a site called Appbucket.com," Viborg added. "It has not been on since April when they stopped paying their bills, so no other customer has taken over the server."

Viborg may have actually meant Appbucket.net, whose domain was seized by the United States Department of Justice back in August. (Appbucket.com is actually owned by Photobucket, a photo-sharing site.)

Appbucket.net, meanwhile, offered up various pirated versions of Android apps, and the domain name is owned by Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (a co-founder of PRQ and the Pirate Bay). Svartholm Warg was deported from Cambodia back to Sweden just last month.

The Pirate Bay also went down earlier this week at the exact same time as PRQ. TPB had previously used the host, but told TorrentFreak the two simultaneous downtimes was "mere coincidence," although the group "admitted that the site may have used a PRQ relay."

There has been one unexpected beneficiary to the raid—the Swedish Pirate Party. Following the raid, Tankafetast, one of the world’s top BitTorrent sites, redirected its users to the party’s homepage.

"This resulted in a very welcome onslaught of new members," Anna Troberg, the party’s leader, wrote on her blog.

"Last time I checked, we had about a thousand new members and 12,000 new likes on Facebook in a day."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ollowing-raid/





Evasive Action: How The Pirate Bay Four Dodged Swedish Justice—For a While

The site's founders have moved out of Sweden, but Stockholm wants them back.
Cyrus Farivar

On April 17, 2009, the four Swedish men behind file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay (TPB)—Fredrik “tiamo” Neij, Peter “brokep” Sunde, Gottfrid “anakata” Svartholm Warg, and their original financial backer Carl Lundström—were found guilty of aiding copyright infringement. A Swedish trial court ordered them each to serve a year in prison and to pay a collective fine of 30 million Swedish kroner ($4.5 million).

They appealed the verdict. In 2010, a Swedish appellate court reduced their prison sentences to between four and ten months each; however, their collective fine was increased to 46 million Swedish kroner ($6.8 million).

They appealed again. In February 2012, the Swedish Supreme Court declined to hear the case, effectively ending the legal battle in Sweden, but the government had a tough time enforcing its judgment.

The case hasn't scuttled The Pirate Bay, which just celebrated its ninth anniversary. It hasn't put anyone inside a jail cell (though Lundström did do a few months of monitored house arrest). And it hasn't resulted in full payment of the judgment, which has now increased to 76 million Swedish kroner ($11 million) due to fines, fees, and accruing interest. It hasn't even kept the four inside Sweden—each of the men eventually left the country, with three of them moving outside the European Union altogether.

Still, Swedish authorities remain confident that the judgment—at least the jail time—will some day be served.

“As far as I know, everyone when I was a prosecutor has been forced to serve their time, sooner or later,” Håkan Roswall, the chief prosecutor in the Pirate Bay trial, told Ars. “I have no doubt whatsoever that every one of those four will serve their sentence."

Even if that's true, how did this fearsome foursome manage to evade the full force of the judgment against them for so long?

Carl Lundström

Carl Lundström is, in many ways, the odd duck of the group, although he provided a crucial role in birthing The Pirate Bay. When he was younger, Lundström inherited money from his father, who had founded a well-known Swedish crisp bread company called Wasabröd. In 1982, when the company was sold, Lundström received millions of Swedish kroner. He has since used that money to fund right-wing extremist political groups and has founded Rix Telecom/Port 80. That organization initially sold co-location space to PRQ—the company which hosted The Pirate Bay when the site was raided in 2006, and again just this week. (PRQ was founded by Neij and Svartholm Warg, although they no longer have any connection to the company). As the site took off, Lundström provided servers and bandwidth to get a piece of the action—which eventually led to him being named as a defendant in the Pirate Bay trial.

Peter Sunde told Ars that he and the other two defendants had essentially disassociated themselves from Lundström. “I have no connection with Lundström at all—we have very different political ideals, so we have nothing to talk about,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Also, he has no real connection to TPB, which makes me very annoyed that he's part of the whole case.” (None of the four responded to requests to speak about their own legal cases.)

After the trial, Lundström paid 233,000 Swedish kroner ($35,000)—a tiny fraction of the total amount owed. Earlier this year, the “Wasabröd millionaire” spent his four-month sentence under house arrest in the Swedish city of Göteborg while wearing an “electronic tag” and performing community service. He then left the country and now lives in Rapperwil, Switzerland, just southeast of Zurich.

In September 2012, the Swedish newspaper Ny Teknik (“New Technology”) reported (Google Translate) that Lundström had filed for personal bankruptcy in Switzerland.

The move has been greeted with at least some skepticism because of previous reporting that Lundström once attempted to hide 20 million kroner ($3 million) in a trust in Lichtenstein, one known as the “Tilbert Stiftung” (Tilbert Foundation). Lundström was eventually revealed as one of three Swedes involved with the 2008 Lichtenstein tax affair. As a result, Ny Teknik added, the Swedish Tax Agency forced him to pay a fine of nearly two million Swedish kroner ($300,000) in 2010.

Swiss authorities are set to complete a financial inventory on Lundström this fall. The local Swiss bankruptcy investigator in Rapperswil, Heiner Scheuble, told Ars that Lundström filed for bankruptcy back in May 2012. Scheuble declined on privacy grounds to answer questions about whether Lundström had assets in Switzerland or if his office had been contacted by Swedish authorities. He did tell Ny Teknik that it was within his mandate to determine if Lundström had hidden or removed any assets, but that so far he had not found any “indication” of financial evasion.

While Lundström paid at least a portion of the money owed and served his house arrest, he was an exception—the other three defendants have so far avoided doing either.

Fredrik Neij

While Lundström’s name pops up every so often in Swedish media, Fredrik Neij has been one of the more elusive characters in the Pirate Bay saga. A few years ago, Neij packed up for southeast Asia and set up shop in Laos. In the following two years, Neij met and married a Thai woman; the couple now has two children with a third on the way. Recent Facebook photos of Neij and his family indicate that he is still living in the region (his Facebook profile says his home is in Bangkok, the Thai capital).

While moving halfway across the world might seem like an obvious way for Niej to shirk his legal and financial obligations, Jonas Nilsson, Niej’s attorney back in Göteborg, told Ars recently that this isn't the case.

“He moved there before the court case started in Stockholm, so he didn’t try to get away from his responsibilities as fast as he could,” he said. When asked why Neij has not returned to Sweden to serve his time and pay his fine, Nilsson did not know. “I can’t answer that question,” he said. “That’s a question for Mr. Neij.” Attempts to reach Neij by e-mail, Facebook, and through Nilsson all went unanswered.

In June 2012, Nilsson filed an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, France on behalf of both Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde. Nilsson argued that under the European Convention on Human Rights, his clients' right to freedom of expression under Article 10 had been violated by the Pirate Bay judgment. “Just spreading information cannot be a crime,” Nilsson said.

“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression,” Article 10 states. “This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” That same article includes this caveat, however: “The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions, or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society…”

Regardless of what happens in the case, the ECHR does not have the power to overturn the decisions of any EU member state. The final Pirate Bay ruling, as decided by the Swedish appeals court, will stand no matter what. So what’s the point of sending an appeal to Strasbourg?

The hope, Nilsson explained, is that if the court agrees to hear the case and if it rules in his clients' favor, then a formal rebuke might be filed against Sweden, which might also include financial damages payable to his client. Such a rebuke, Nilsson hopes, could pave the way for an entirely new trial.

“It could be that we can attack the Swedish verdict, and through another system, get another verdict, but not change the old verdict,” he said.

The chances of this happening are remote, but Nilsson remains hopeful. “I am an optimist. We think the court will take up the case,” he said. “Hopefully [we will know] before the end of next year, but that isn’t sure.”

In the meantime, the Swedish government is stepping up its pressure on Neij. Last month, Swedish media reported (Google Translate) that Neij had submitted a document dated August 6, 2012 to the Swedish Embassy in Bangkok, protesting the revocation of his passport, something the Swedish government seems to have done earlier in the year. The Swedish Embassy in Thailand did not respond to our request for additional information.

“We have appealed the decision to take back his passport, [but] we don’t have a final decision yet,” Nilsson told me.

Nilsson and Neij have argued that the criminal sentence is not serious enough to merit the revocation of Neij's passport, and they say he needs to be at his wife’s side for the birth of their third child.

“The children were born in the hospital on the Thai side of the border, where since birth they have received all necessary medical treatment,” Neij wrote in his appeal. “The reasons for this are primarily dictated by the standard of care and hygiene. As a result the family needs to occasionally cross the border for medical care and as a result of the pregnancy.”

As Neij tries to retain his passport and rope the ECHR into his case, rightsholders have continued their own attempts to collect cash from him. Swedish movie studio Yellow Bird recently tried to have Neij declared bankrupt. That would put all of his remaining finances in a trusteeship—some or all of which could be paid out to Yellow Bird—and Neij would be barred from starting any new businesses in Sweden.

Monique Wadsted, a Swedish copyright attorney representing Yellow Bird, said she had done all that she could do in attempting to seize Neij’s remaining assets, but now it was up to the government. “I really don’t know [if this money can be recovered],” she told Ars. “We will see. It's up to the Swedish Enforcement Agency to handle this.”

The Swedish Enforcement Authority enforces civil and criminal judgements by collecting debts, but the agency isn't equipped to find and seize assets outside of Sweden. Once a judgement has been made, a creditor must apply directly to the agency with a monetary amount due and a deadline. However, there's one major loophole.

"When it comes to your question about the Swedish Enforcement Authority’s possibility to collect assets outside Sweden, it’s almost impossible concerning private claims," wrote Henrik Branstad, of the Swedish Enforcement Administration, in an e-mail to Ars. “There are some agreements among the countries in the European Union, but outside Europe we have no authority—so if a creditor has a claim and suspects that the debtor has assets in another country, the creditor has to turn to a law firm or an international debt collecting agency."

Neij continues to insist he has no money to take. In a comment given last month to TorrentFreak, Neij quipped, “It doesn’t really matter what they do, I still have no assets they can take.”

Until early September, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg had been living more or less quietly in Phnom Penh, Cambodia since 2008, conducting IT work for clients both in Cambodia and Europe. Many who know Svartholm Warg or who have met him describe him as something of a recluse—he preferred to spend most of his time in his apartment above the Cadillac Bar, in a neighborhood frequented by expats.

“I never had the impression that he’s been hiding or something like that, I think he’s just enjoying his life here,” said Niklas Femerstrand, an acquaintance of Svartholm Warg’s, who also lives in the Cambodian capital as a developer for a local Internet provider. (Femerstrand also describes himself as a programmer for Flattr, the micropayment platform company founded by Peter Sunde).

“When The Pirate Bay first started, Gottfrid was [already living] in Mexico, so it’s not unusual for him not to live in Sweden,” Femerstrand added. However, when asked if he knew how Svartholm Warg was able to afford his $750-a month two-bedroom apartment in Cambodia, Femerstrand said: “I would rather not comment.”

According to reports in Cambodian media, Svartholm Warg had a falling-out with a British entrepreneur named Kit Hargreaves, who ran a video game company that sold products to casinos. According to an article in the September 7, 2012 edition of the Phnom Penh Post, Svartholm Warg was tasked with being Hargreaves’ “online security mastermind.”

Svartholm Warg and Hargreaves apparently got into a disagreement over the former’s drug use and the latter’s reluctance to pay what the two had initially agreed. The company has since dissolved.

Femerstrand said he was aware of Svartholm Warg’s drug use—declining to state which drugs he took—but “wouldn’t call [his drug use a] problem,” adding that Gottfrid "is known for his recreational use of drugs."

This account was confirmed by Peter Hogan, the editor of Khmer440, an English-language expatriate website and discussion board. Hogan first encountered Svartholm Warg on his website, where the Swede posted under the name “Agrippa.” Initially, Hogan said, Svartholm Warg was warmly welcomed by the expat community in Cambodia.

“He was an informative and helpful poster and would actually come to other poster's homes in his spare time to fix their computers for free—a nice guy and super smart,” Hogan wrote in an e-mail to Ars. “We were very fond of him.”

During this halcyon period, Svartholm Warg apparently offered to host Khmer440 on PRQ, the Swedish hosting company that he had helped found. Khmer440 took him up on the idea, but things later went downhill, Hogan said.

“Sadly, [Svartholm Warg] got messed up on drugs while working for Kit [Hargreaves] and it changed his personality a lot; he stopped posting on 440 and we lost touch with him,” Hogan added. “[Svartholm Warg] had offered to host 440 on his own personal server back in Sweden and it ended up a nightmare for us as he kept forgetting to pay the fees and we were going down all the time and couldn’t get hold of him to fix things... In the end, he was a total recluse and I’m guessing the only people who had dealings with him were his dealers and landlord."

“I guess he just gave up on people, in a physically social way,” Femerstrand confirmed, adding that he would usually see Svartholm Warg in his apartment a few times a month. He said that Svartholm Warg felt harassed by Swedish authorities during and before the Pirate Bay trial. Femerstrand also accused the Swedish Security Service of conducting surveillance of Svartholm Warg in Cambodia, "since [at least] March 2012." (The Swedish Security Service did not reply to our request for comment.)

“He never wanted to speak on camera,” said Simon Klose, a Swedish filmmaker who has recently completed a movie on the group, entitled TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay - Away from Keyboard. The director told Ars the film was set to be released in early 2013.

Klose described Svartholm Warg as a “child prodigy,” who learned to program at a young age. “He loves writing code,” Klose said.

After spending extensive time with the trio—Lundström did not want to be part of the film—Klose said that the men complement each other’s skills. If Svartholm Warg, who handled the primary programming for the group, was the brains, Klose said that Fredrik Neij was the “hands” and that Peter Sunde—the group’s longtime spokesperson—was the “mouth.”

“Fredrik is more of a hardware guy,” Klose told Ars over Skype. “He is much more of a person—he’s the guy with a screwdriver. He’s the hands on the machines. And Peter [Sunde] is a people person.”

Svartholm Warg did not attend his appeals trial in Sweden, which is why Neij’s attorney Jonas Nilsson says Svartholm Warg was not included on the appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

Just as the Swedish government stepped up the pressure on Neij this year, it has gone after Svartholm Warg even more directly. Last month, Svartholm Warg was deported from Cambodia on a visa violation and sent back to Sweden. Svartholm Warg continues to be held in custody by Swedish authorities who have kept him in connection with a hacking episode against Logica, a Swedish IT firm that works with the Swedish tax authority.

Earlier this year, Logica was hit by an online attack that resulted in around 9,000 Swedes (Google Translate) having their personal identity number and names released to the public. Normally in Sweden, such data is made public, but there are cases where that data can be hidden—and it was this hidden data that was targeted in the hack. (However, there has been some speculation in the Swedish media that the data may not have been genuine).

The International Public Prosecution Office in Stockholm has not yet charged Svartholm Warg with a crime.

Of the four, Peter Sunde has been the most outspoken about the case. That’s probably because between August 2005 and August 2009 he was the spokesperson for The Pirate Bay. Both on his lawyer’s appeal to the European Court of Human Rights and on his own website, he declares his “home base” to be in Berlin. Last month, Sunde wrote to Ars saying that he was in Sweden “for the moment,” but prosecutors haven't kept close tabs on him.

“I’m not sure where Peter Sunde is at the moment,” Håkan Roswall, the chief prosecutor from the trial, told Ars. “He has a lot of work in Germany.”

For years, Sunde has publicly trashed the Swedish justice system over the case against him. Sunde has repeatedly said that he will not pay any money at all. In a personal July 2012 plea to the government for a pardon, Sunde writes that this debt “practically means I don’t have a future in Sweden as a country, if I want to live off of anything other than breadcrumbs or the goodwill of my friends. This debt is equivalent to exile, to deportation. I will need to become an economic refugee from Sweden.”

He has declined donations from TPB supporters. “I don’t need much money anyhow and if I get money it will go to our opponents since I on paper owe them 10M EUR or so,” he wrote on his blog in July 2012. “I don’t want to feed that beast with any cash, especially not from people that really want to change what’s going on.”

Sunde has been quite active in other projects, helping to establish iPredator, a Sweden-based anonymous VPN, creating Kvittar, a digital receipts platform, and also founding Flattr in 2010, a micropayment platform that has become popular with a number of media organizations in Europe. Sunde has also traveled extensively on speaking gigs over the last few years.

Copyright attorney Monique Wadsted has told the Swedish Enforcement Authority that Sunde may still have financial interests in Flattr. However, in a letter dated September 17, 2012, tax inspector Elisabeth Lustig wrote to Wadsted and said that, following an investigation, her agency determined that Sunde was never compensated or employed by Flattr.

Still, Wadsted alleged in the Swedish newspaper Ny Teknik (Google Translate) that Sunde is connected to, or receives some sort of compensation from, shell companies (called Karbon Ventures and The Chromatic Trust) set up in the United Kingdom. Kvittar’s CEO, Anna Oscarsson, confirmed to the paper recently that Karbon Ventures, which she says Sunde controls, owns 15 percent of her company.

If that allegation is true, it wouldn’t be the first time that people associated with The Pirate Bay have used immensely dodgy transactions to obscure ownership and possible income of a business.

How has Sunde managed to avoid jail time, particularly given that he’s returned to Sweden several times in the last three years? It's not clear, and no one involved is talking. Earlier this year, Sunde was reportedly ordered to report to a prison called Västervik Norra for his eight month sentence. When Sunde and the others didn't report, the Swedish Prison and Probation Service (Kriminalvården) had the responsibility to act.

In an e-mail sent to Ars, a representative of the Kriminalvården explained the procedure. “If the convicted person does not report to the prison in question at the decided date or before, the Evaluation and Placement group issues a warrant to the local police office,” wrote Andreas Fällström. "The local police search for the convicted person locally, and report the result of their search back to the Evaluation and Placement group. If the convicted person not has been encountered, a national domestic warrant to all of Sweden’s police offices is issued. If the criteria for an international warrant lay at hand, an international warrant also is issued in connection with the national warrant.”

Due to privacy reasons, Fällström declined to comment on where any of the Pirate Bay defendants might be in this process.

For now, Sunde remains a free man.

Endgame

The money the four men owe may never materialize, and the site at the root of all the controversy has remained up. Still, despite the many delays, Lundström has now served his time, Svartholm Warg is in police custody, and Neij is currently targeted by the Swedish government. It may only be a matter of time before each of the four at least serves out his sentence.

“From a Swedish perspective, it’s [legally] game over [for all of them],” said Mårten Schultz, a law professor at Stockholm University who has closely followed the Pirate Bay trial. “Eventually they probably will serve time. They still have the verdict over their heads. Their lives are affected by this—they cannot come home.”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...edish-justice/





Pirate Bay Accused of Collecting Users' IP Addresses

Summary: The Pirate Bay, used by millions worldwide to file-share copyrighted content and free-for-all works alike, is accused of collecting IP addresses of its registered users.
Zack Whittaker

Torrent file and Magnet link sharing site The Pirate Bay has been accused of logging potentially identifiable information about its users, including email and IP addresses.

@pokex, who describes themselves as a "rootadmin at AnonOps," named after the website thought to be used by hacking collective Anonymous, took to Twitter this week to claim the Sweden-based site kept a database of information, including data that users might not want to end up in the hands of the authorities.

“Oh hey @tpbdotorg, how do you feel logging all your users IPs? pastie.org/4904080 Spread the truth about TPB. Pics > imgur.com/a/07i1f” — 'O.o (@pokex) October 3, 2012

The accusation could be damaging to the reputation of the site's integrity, as the torrent-linking site continues to be bombarded by authorities around the world in ongoing copyright infringement litigation.

The tweet linked to published images alleged to be a behind-the-scenes look of The Pirate Bay's administrative section. In the image, it purports that registered users of The Pirate Bay have their email addresses and IP addresses stored and can banned if deemed necessary.

The images cannot be verified, but have put questions in to representatives of The Pirate Bay, but we did not hear back at the time of writing.

In another image, it suggests that users can be banned by entering their username, change users' passwords, delete their comments, or change the email address associated with an account. Many of these are common features in any administrative console to any website or online service.

However, it does show a panel in which an entire IP address can be barred from uploading torrents, for example if they have published malware or criminally illegal content.

A leaked database table was also uploaded to the Web, suggesting certain entries could allow for information about the user to be stored.

According to the table of entries published by Pokex, who claims belong to The Pirate Bay, the entry "banIP" could allow the storing of IP addresses to determine whether they should be banned or not. Meanwhile, "blog_comments" appears to be able to store such data, while "comments" suggests users' who comment on torrents and Magnet link uploads may also have their IP addresses stored at the server level.

The Pirate Bay says on its website claims it is the "world's largest bittorrent tracker." On its separate policy page, it says: "The tracker may not be used by anyone with the intention to track usage, log IP addresses/usage or anything else that we consider intrusion of privacy or disruption of tracker service."

Interestingly and almost confusingly -- without offering much detail -- the policy notes: "We also reserve the rights to publish any information regarding violations. Info hashes, IP addresses and all other information that is supplied to the tracker will be considered our right to publish."

Storing IP addresses of users is not uncommon for websites, online applications or services. But the nature of the site -- which is already on shaky legal ground -- could possibly, if proven true, to damage the reputation of the file-sharing network, that has up to this point managed to fend off almost every legal attack it has faced. Owners of connections linked to those email and IP addresses could also face litigation.

Take this for example. CBS Interactive, who owns ZDNet and sister-sites CNET and CBS News, collects your IP address as stated in our site privacy policy (which you read and agree to because you're here and reading this, right?), but we only disclose certain information "to protect or defend the rights of CBS Interactive or our users" or "when required by law or public authorities."

Seeing as we're very rarely involved in a Gizmodo-like case when we get our doors busted in by the police for allegedly paying for a prototype product that went walk-about at a bar in San Francisco, near Apple's headquarters, your IP address probably isn't going to land itself in the hands of California's finest.

But The Pirate Bay is different. Though it may be home to legitimate torrents and Magnet links, it also has -- likely -- a much higher proportion of links to pirated and copyrighted content stored on home and business computers around the world.

This would be a goldmine for police in any jurisdiction, with a hand in to the U.S. police, and copyright authorities who would no doubt go to town on such intelligence -- in a bid to reclaim lost revenue for Hollywood studios.

Representatives for The Pirate Bay did not respond for comment.
http://www.zdnet.com/pirate-bay-accu...es-7000005328/





Judge Asks for Input Over Fate of Orphaned Megaupload Data

A U.S. federal judge has asked for more information to plan an evidentiary hearing concerning the fate of terabytes of data held in limbo since the shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing site.
Jeremy Kirk

A U.S. federal judge has asked for more information to plan an evidentiary hearing concerning the fate of terabytes of data held in limbo since the shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing site.

U.S. government prosecutors and Kyle Goodwin will submit briefs because "the court finds that it is unable to reach a conclusion as to this matter without an evidentiary hearing," according to the order, signed on Tuesday by U.S. District Court Judge Liam O'Grady in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a motion in March on behalf of Goodwin, an Ohio-based sports reporter who lost access to data he stored on Megaupload after the site was shutdown on January on criminal copyright infringement charges.

The EFF has asked the court to find a way to return data to owners who legally hold the rights. Megaupload's 1,103 servers, which hold upwards of 28 petabytes of data, are still held by Carpathia Hosting, Megaupload's U.S. hosting provider.

"We are glad that Mr. Goodwin will finally get to make his case in court, and we look forward to helping the judge fashion a procedure to make all of Megaupload's consumers whole again by granting them access to what is legally theirs," wrote Julie Samuels, an EFF staff attorney.

Megupload will ask the court to make a special appearance in order to weigh in on the data issue, said Ira Rothken, one of the file-sharing site's attorneys, on Friday.

Rothken said Megaupload can't file a brief without that permission since it is has a motion before the court contending the U.S. doesn't have jurisdiction over the company because it was based in Hong Kong. U.S. federal criminal procedures dictate that a company must be served a summons in the U.S., and Megaupload was never served.

O'Grady has yet to rule on the motion to dismiss the charges against the company.

If it is allowed to make a special appearance, Megaupload will advocate returning data to users. "Megaupload looks forward to having the court determine whether or not the U.S. acted appropriately by turning off all consumer access to data," Rothken said.

The U.S. government along with the Motion Picture Association of America have opposed allowing Megaupload to retake control of the data. The U.S. contends Megaupload encouraged users to upload files without permission of copyright owners and collected US$175 million through advertising and premium subscriptions.

Megaupload's founder, Kim Dotcom, and his colleagues Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, are charged with criminal copyright infringement, money laundering and fraud. Extradition proceedings for the four, now living in New Zealand, are expected to start next year.
http://www.cio.com/article/718061/Ju...egaupload_Data





Suspicion Over Dotcom Net Glitch

Telecom engineers investigating internet irregularities weeks before GCSB has said it started spying on him.
David Fisher

Kim Dotcom's internet connection was being diverted inside New Zealand weeks before the Government Communications Security Bureau says it started spying on him.

The Herald has obtained details showing Telecom engineers and staff at its technology services company Gen-I were investigating irregularities with his internet connection in November.

The revelation has raised suspicion that Mr Dotcom was victim to earlier spying than the GCSB has admitted. It has brought fresh calls for an inquiry amid claims of the spy agency's role in the international "Five Eyes" Echelon Network.

The focus of the early investigation is the dedicated internet connection from Mr Dotcom's mansion in Coatesville to the Sky Tower in Auckland. It was intended to give him the fastest possible internet connection - a factor which would have been critical in his quest to be the best in the online Modern Warfare 3 game.

Mr Dotcom became the "number one" ranked player of the game before his arrest.

During the record-setting effort, Gen-I staff began an investigation into the amount of time it took for an internet signal from Mr Dotcom's home to reach an offshore Xbox computer server.

Information held by the Herald shows Gen-I studied data showing the amount of time it took information on the internet connection to reach the Xbox server. It went from 30 milliseconds to 180 milliseconds - a huge increase for online gamers.

The reason for the extra time emerged in a deeper inquiry, which saw a "Trace Route" search which tracks internet signals from their origin to their destinations. When the results were compared it showed the internet signal was being diverted inside New Zealand.

The data showed the internet signal had previously taken two steps before going offshore - but was now taking five.

The GCSB is under police investigation after admitting it illegally spied on Mr Dotcom between December 16 and January 20, the day of the raid. It is also studying three other cases of possible illegal action carried out after requests from the police.

The other cases emerged after Prime Minister John Key - who is responsible for the agency - ordered an inquiry. Asked about the possibility of earlier spying, a spokeswoman said the Prime Minister had sought and received "a fresh assurance" the GCSB and Security Intelligence Service had not carried out any surveillance before December 16.

Green co-leader Russel Norman said it could not be ruled out.

He said a commission of inquiry was needed to examine the behaviour of the GCSB.

He said it could be conducted in secrecy with sensitive material excised from a final public report.

Mr Norman highlighted the Echelon of Five Eyes agreement where the GCSB worked with intelligence agencies from the US, Australia, Canada and the UK.

Labour leader David Shearer said he also wanted an independent inquiry which could be run by a senior and trusted New Zealander. "The critical issue is who knew what and how all the checks and balances work."

A Telecom spokeswoman said the company would not give information to the police of "any other government agency" unless legally forced to do so.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=10838484





White House Confirms, Plays Down Cyber Attack
AP

The White House is acknowledging an attempt to infiltrate its computer system but says it thwarted the effort

A White House official said the attack targeted an unclassified network. He said the attack was identified and that the system was isolated to prevent spread. He said there was no indication that any data was removed.

The official, who was not authorized to speak on the record about the attack, said there was no attempted breach of classified systems. The official described such "spear phishing" attacks as "not infrequent."

Last year, Google Inc. blamed computer hackers in China for a phishing effort against Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including senior U.S. government officials and military personnel.

The White House would not say whether the recent attack was linked to China.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/201...er-attack.html





PlaceRaider: The Military Smartphone Malware Designed to Steal Your Life

The US Naval Surface Warfare Center has created an Android app that secretly records your environment and reconstructs it as a 3D virtual model for a malicious user to browse

The power of modern smartphones is one of the technological wonders of our age. These devices carry a suite of sensors capable of monitoring the environment in detail, powerful data processors and the ability to transmit and receive information at high rates.

So it's no surprise that smartphones are increasingly targeted by malware designed to exploit this newfound power. Examples include software that listens for spoken credit card numbers or uses the on-board accelerometers to monitor credit card details entered as keystrokes.

Today Robert Templeman at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Indiana, and a few pals at Indiana University reveal an entirely new class of 'visual malware' capable of recording and reconstructing a user's environment in 3D. This then allows the theft of virtual objects such as financial information, data on computer screens and identity-related information.

Templeman and co call their visual malware PlaceRaider and have created it as an app capable of running in the background of any smartphone using the Android 2.3 operating system.

Their idea is that the malware would be embedded in a camera app that the user would download and run, a process that would give the malware the permissions it needs to take photos and send them.

PlaceRaider then runs in the background taking photos at random while recording the time, location and orientation of the phone. (The malware mutes the phone as the photos are taken to hide the shutter sound, which would otherwise alert the user.)

The malware then performs some simple image filtering to get rid of blurred or dark images taken inside a pocket for example, and sends the rest to a central server. Here they are reconstructed into a 3D model of the user's space, using additional details such as the orientation and location of the camera.

A malicious user can then browse this space looking for objects worth stealing and sensitive data such as credit card details, identity data or calender details that reveal when the user might be away.

Templeman and co have carried out detailed tests of the app to see how well it works in realistic situations. They gave their infected phone to 20 individuals who were unaware of the malware and asked them to use it for various ordinary purposes in an office environment.

They then evaluated the resulting photos by asking a group of other users to see how much information they could glean from them. Some of these users studied the raw images while the others studied the 3D models, both groups looking for basic information such as the number of walls in the room as well as more detailed info such as QR codes and personal checks lying around.

Templeman and co say the tests went well. They were able to build detailed models of the room from all the data sets. What's more, the 3D models made it vastly easier for malicious users to steal information from the personal office space than from the raw photos alone.

That's an impressive piece of work that reveals some of the vulnerabilities of these powerful devices.And although the current version of the malware runs only on the Android platform, there is no reason why it couldn't be adapted for other systems. "We implemented on Android for practical reasons, but we expect such malware to generalize to other platforms such as iOS and Windows Phone," say Templeman and co.

They go on to point out various ways that the operating systems could be made more secure. Perhaps the simplest would be to ensure that the shutter sound cannot be muted, so that the user is always aware when the camera is taking a picture.

However that wouldn't prevent the use of video to record data in silence. Templeman and co avoid this because of the huge amount of data it would produce but it's not hard to imagine that this would be less of a problem in the near future.

Another option would be a kind of antivirus app for smartphones which actively looks for potential malware and alerts the user.

The message is clear--this kind of malware is a clear and present danger. It's only a matter of time before this game of cat and mouse becomes more serious.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view...phone-malware/





California Governor Vetoes Landmark Location-Privacy Law
David Kravets

California Gov. Jerry Brown has vetoed legislation that would have required the state’s authorities to get a probable-cause warrant signed by a judge to obtain location information from electronic devices such as tablets, mobile phones and laptops.

The measure passed the state Senate in May and the Assembly approved the plan in August.

The veto of the first-of-its-kind legislation was no surprise.

Brown, a Democrat, last year vetoed a measure requiring police officers to obtain a warrant before searching someone’s cellphone after arresting them. That leaves California police officers free to search through the mobile phones of persons arrested for any crime.

This year, Brown again caved to law enforcement.

“It may be that legislative action is needed to keep the law current in our rapidly evolving electronic age,” Brown wrote in his veto message Sunday. “But I am not convinced that this bill strikes the right balance between the operational needs of law enforcement and the individual expectation of privacy.”

The legislation said that, if there was insufficient time to obtain a warrant due to a threat of serious danger or bodily harm — for example, in the case of a missing child — no warrant would be required.

The veto comes as prosecutors are increasingly using warrantless cell-tower locational tracking of suspects in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling that law enforcement should acquire probable-cause warrants from judges to affix GPS devices to vehicles and monitor their every move, according to court records.

Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which helped craft the legislation along with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the governor’s veto continues a “dangerous trend” of “allowing law enforcement to gorge itself on as much data and information they can eat without a warrant.”

The package was intended to clear up the legal mess surrounding police acquiring location information that can be used to track citizens. Sometimes warrants are required and sometimes the signature of a law enforcement officer is all that is needed to obtain sensitive data of somebody’s whereabouts.

The California District Attorneys Association and the California State Sheriff’s Association opposed the measure, saying it was preempted by federal law.

The Obama administration maintains that Americans have no privacy in their public movements, and that their locational data from their mobile phone, for example, can be obtained without a warrant since it is held by a third party.

The California legislation would have only affected non-federal law enforcement officials conducting business in California.

Similar federal legislation has been stalled for more than a year, and is likely dead.

Meanwhile, the nation’s major cellphone companies objected to the bill because it would have forced them to publicly report the number of times they turn over cellphone location information to police and federal agents. They argued that it would be too burdensome, and would take time away from the important work of sharing customer data with cops “day and night.”

That part of the bill was subsequently deleted.

As it turns out, mobile carriers responded to 1.3 million law enforcement requests, by the states and federal government, for customer data last year alone for everything from text messages to location data to calling records, according to the carriers’ responses to a congressional inquiry. The data did not break down how many of those requests included a court warrant.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...cy-law-vetoed/





National 'Virtual ID Card' Scheme Set for Launch (Is There Anything That Could Possibly Go Wrong?)

Central online identity scheme 'will be a target for criminals'
Ian Burrell

The Government will announce details this month of a controversial national identity scheme which will allow people to use their mobile phones and social media profiles as official identification documents for accessing public services.

People wishing to apply for services ranging from tax credits to fishing licences and passports will be asked to choose from a list of familiar online log-ins, including those they already use on social media sites, banks, and large retailers such as supermarkets, to prove their identity.

Once they have logged in correctly by computer or mobile phone, the site will send a message to the government agency authenticating that user’s identity.

The Cabinet Office is understood to have held discussions with the Post Office, high street banks, mobile phone companies and technology giants ranging from Facebook and Microsoft to Google, PayPal and BT.

Ministers are anxious that the identity programme is not denounced as a “Big Brother” national ID card by the back door, which is why data will not be kept centrally by any government department. Indeed, it is hoped the Identity Assurance Programme, which is being led by the Cabinet Office, will mean the end to any prospect of a physical national ID card being introduced in the UK.

The identification systems used by the private companies have been subjected to security testing before being awarded their “Identity Provider” (IDP) kitemark, meaning that they have made the list of between five and 20 approved organisations that will be announced on 22 October.

The public will be able to use their log-ins from a set list of “trusted” private organisations to access Government services, which are being grouped together on a single website called Gov.uk, which will be accessible by mobile.

A cross-section of social media companies, high street banks, mobile phone businesses and major retailers has been chosen in order to appeal to as wide a demographic as possible.

The system will be trialled when the Department of Work & Pensions starts the early roll out of the Universal Credit scheme, a radical overhaul of the benefits system, in April.

Users who access the Government’s online one-stop-shop of public services will be asked to identify themselves by choosing one organisation from a selection of logos. (This feature is called a “Nascar screen”, in reference to the logo-filled livery of the famous American racing cars.)

Major web sites are able to recognise individuals by their patterns of use, the device they are accessing from and its location. Facebook, for example, asks users who sign on from an unusual location to take a series of security questions including identifying friends in photographs.

Privacy campaigners are not wholly convinced by the programme. “Although this is a fine scheme in principle and is backed by ministers the danger is that it could be side-lined and used as a fig leaf by the data-hungry government departments,” said Guy Herbert, general secretary of No2ID, which has been consulted by the Cabinet Office.

Details of the “identity assurance” scheme are being finalised amid growing concerns over identity theft and other forms of cybercrime. Foreign Secretary William Hague and Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, who is at the head of the Identity Assurance Programme, will today (Thurs) meet international experts at the Budapest Conference on Cyberspace. Mr Maude will give a keynote speech.

The Cabinet Office believes its new identity model will “prevent ‘login fatigue’ [from] having too many usernames and passwords” and save public money by increasing trust in online services. The system is likely to be adopted by local authorities nationwide. The Government hopes the identity system will form the basis of a universally-recognised online authentication process for commercial transactions on the Internet, boosting the economy and strengthening Britain’s position as a leader in e-commerce.

In recent weeks, the Cabinet Office’s Government Digital Service has backed a UK working group of the Open Identity Exchange, which was set up in America to bring organisations including Google, AOL, PayPal and Experian together to find a simple method of online verification that doesn’t require multiple passwords.

Members of the Cabinet Office team travelled to the White House in May to exchange ideas with American counterparts working on the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). The heads of the British and American identity assurance programmes will debate the subject next week in London at the RSA cyber security conference.

The first law passed by the Coalition Government was to scrap the national ID scheme, a move said to have saved taxpayers £1 billion over ten years. But ministers want to use the Internet to cut the cost of public services.

In order to limit concerns over Government snooping, the Cabinet Office has been working closely with a range of privacy campaign groups and consumer organisations including No2ID, Big Brother Watch and Which? The programme’s Privacy and Consumer Group drew up a list of nine Privacy Principles which underpin the framework of the scheme.

As part of the attempt to reassure privacy campaigners, a private identity partner (IDP) which authorises a user of a public service will not know which Government department is seeking authentication.

The Post Office’s involvement in the Identity Assurance Programmes was revealed by a notice placed in the Official Journal of the European Union. The Royal Mail subsidiary sought a third party provider to help in assembling consumer data including name, date of birth, address, gender, passport and driving licence numbers, financial history, electoral roll status and telephone numbers.

Some commercial organisations have been concerned that their consumers will react negatively to their involvement with government. But commercial partners will benefit from marketing opportunities and the trust that comes with IDP status.

Without the identity assurance scheme there are fears that high levels of online fraud will cause the public to lose confidence in digital channels, undermining the amount of business done online.

Civil servants acknowledge that some people will still wish to access public services in person. They argue that the online scheme will release additional resources to assist people who lack confidence in making digital transactions.

Q&A: What the scheme involves

Q. Is this just an ID card scheme by the back door?

A. No, it's a way of combating the menace of identity theft.

Q. Will the Government be able to use it to follow our movements online?

A. Authentication is done by trusted third parties and data will not be held centrally by the Government.

Q. But won't the private companies find out personal information that is none of their business?

A. The identity providers (IdPs) don't know for which government agency they are authenticating.

Q. Is a social media log-in sufficiently secure for a major financial transaction?

A. Individual IdPs will need to convince the Cabinet Office that their security checks are enough to meet the Level of Assurance (LOA) needed for the public service being requested. For example, a passport application is a high-security LOA3.

Q. Will it be possible to apply for a passport on your phone?

A. It is anticipated that part of the process will be offered online but some physical ID will still need to be presented in person to achieve LOA3.

Q. Is this just about public services?

A. No, the Government is helping to bring together online companies and create an icon that would enable online payments to be done securely.

Q. What would be the advantages?

A. It would also reduce the need to memorise multiple passwords.

Q. Will it work?

A. That depends partly on the efficiency of the chosen IdPs.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...g-8196543.html





A Dark Day for the Philippines as Government Passes Cybercrime Act
Jillian C. York

The government of the Philippines today has passed the troubling Cybercrime Prevention Act. The Act covers a range of offenses, but—as we wrote last month—is particularly problematic because of a libel provision that criminalizes anonymous online criticism.

In addition to criminalizing online libel, Section 19 of the Act would also allow the country’s Department of Justice to block access to “computer data” that is in violation of the Act; in other words, a website hosting criminally libelous speech could be shut down without a court order.

Activists in the Philippines believe that the Act is unconstitutional and are petitioning the country’s Supreme Court to declare it so. In their submission, the petitioning groups (including the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, the Philippine Press Institute, among others), write:

In this case of first impression, this Court is asked to rule on a statute that, if allowed to stand, will set back decades of struggle against the darkness of “constitutional dictatorship” and replace it with “cyber authoritarianism”. It is fitting that the words of the President’s own platform be the backdrop against which the looming darkness is to be dispelled.

Petitioners ask this Court to rule on Republic Act No. 10175, a law that establishes a regime of “cyber authoritarianism” and undermines all the fundamental guarantees of freedoms and liberties that many have given their lives and many still give their lives work to vindicate, restore and defend. It is a law that unduly restricts the rights and freedoms of netizens and impacts adversely on an entire generation’s way of living, studying, understanding and relating.

In addition to the petition, activists have taken more steps to demonstrate their opposition. The Philippine Internet Freedom Alliance has been encouraging a SOPA-style blackout protest and yesterday initiated a protest march to the Supreme Court. On social media—where many have referred to the Act as “Cyber Martial Law”— activists are using the hashtag #NoToCybercrimeLaw to register their opposition and encourage action. And one lawyer, Argee Guevara, is seeking to instigate a test case by posting libelous comments about a doctor who filed a libel case against him in 2010.

Others have taken a different approach: Philippines news site GMA News reported that on Monday, numerous government websites were defaced by a group claiming to be ‘Anonymous Philippines.’

Just today, Senator Edgardo Angara, who introduced the Act, filed a bill to amend his own law. According to reports, one of the amendments he intends to make would require the Department of Justice to secure a court order before restricting or blocking access to computer data that violates the law.

These events echo those that followed the introduction of the Stop Online Piracy Act in the US last year. That comparison hasn’t escaped Forbes contributor Paul Tassi, who stated that the Cybercrime Act “makes SOPA look reasonable,” and pointed out that “much like SOPA, these are lawmakers who don’t understand the true implications of the law on the technology they’re attempting to regulate.”

EFF stands with the many local activists in opposing this egregious violation of freedom of expression and offers our support to the petitioners and other activists in standing against the Cybercrime Prevention Act.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/1...cybercrime-act





Lenovo to Open First U.S. PC Plant, Operation to Start in 2013

Lenovo Group Ltd, the world's No.2 PC maker, will open its first PC production plant in the United States with operations expected to begin in 2013.

The Whitsett, North Carolina, facility will manufacture Think-branded laptop and desktop PCs, tablets and servers aimed at the U.S. market, Lenovo said in a statement late on Tuesday.

Lenovo did not provide any investment figures but said it would create 115 jobs.

Over the past two years, Lenovo has invested in new plants and manufacturing joint ventures in China, Brazil and now the United States to produce PCs and mobile Internet devices such as smartphones, it said.

Shares of Lenovo, which analysts said is set to overtake Hewlett Packard Co later this year as the world's largest PC maker, rose more than 2 percent in early trade in Hong Kong on Wednesday to their highest in nearly a month, outperforming the main Hang Seng Index's 0.7 percent gain.

(Reporting by Lee Chyen Yee; Editing by Edmund Klamann)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...89202Y20121003





HP's Profitable Printers to Buy Whitman Time
Poornima Gupta

Meg Whitman has a laundry list of things to do at HP: Arrest a rapid decline in its personal computer unit, compete better on enterprise services, and figure out a strategy as mobile devices eat into personal computer sales.

That leaves one still-bright spot in Hewlett-Packard's beaten-up portfolio - printing.

The HP chief executive in past months has punctuated talk about her years-long turnaround plan with sweeping goals such as battling IBM and Dell Inc on corporate services and products, using Silicon Valley buzzwords such as "cloud" and "social" and "big data." In the short run, however, its printers are buying time for the CEO of one year to turn around the sprawling company with over 300,000 workers.

Whitman on Wednesday will host HP's annual presentation to investors in San Francisco, and Wall Street is keeping one eye on a division that her predecessor once considered spinning off.

Though it has lost some of its shine, the unit still generates close to a fifth of total revenue and 35 percent to 40 percent of HP's annual profit.

Printing is "not as much a problem as some of the other businesses," said Shaw Wu, analyst with Sterne Agee. "It's still a cash-cow business. The profits have declined but they are still very strong."

Revenue from all of HP's main business units fell in the July quarter, with the PC unit seeing a slide of 10 percent. Operating profit declined by 28 percent in the PC group, the largest slide among HP's divisions, followed by a 22 percent slide in services.

Printing revenue declined 2.7 percent last quarter, but operating profit increased by 8 percent. The group accounted for $949 million of HP's $3.1 billion in operating income that quarter.

Wu is expecting HP's annual printing revenue to decline by about $1 billion to $25 billion this fiscal year, which ends in October.

HP's imaging and printing group has historically been a steady business - with an operating margin of 16 percent last quarter, almost double the company overall - because of recurring sales of printer cartridges.

But the industry is facing some fundamental challenges. Most printer makers are struggling with falling sales: Printing has been a target of corporate cost-cutting, and personal computing has moved to tablets and smartphones.

By dint of the printing unit's sheer scale, any small increase in revenue could have a big impact on HP's bottom line. Whitman is trying to stabilize the printing business and reduce excess inventory. She has merged the group into the ailing personal computer business to better package product sales to corporations.

In August, Lexmark, never a dominant player in consumer printers, said it will stop making inkjet printers and focus on its more profitable imaging and software businesses. The announcement reminded investors about the intense competition, falling margins, and gradual mobile migration the sector is now coping with.

Lexmark reflected a broader pattern of problems in the industry: Xerox Corp cut its full-year profit outlook in July, while Canon trimmed its operating profit forecast as the companies braced for tough economic conditions in Europe.

3D OPPORTUNITY

Now, the Silicon Valley giant needs to make a big move into the fast-growing sector of industrial printing or three-dimensional printing, analysts said.

Three-dimensional printing - a process by which an object or prototype is built from a digital model - is commonly used in the automotive, aerospace and dental industries.

"Companies like HP have to look at where the next big opportunity is," said Terry Wohlers, president of research firm Wohlers Associates Inc. "3D printing is a good fit."

The market for 3D printing was at $1.7 billion last year and is expected to reach $2.1 billion this year and grow three-fold to $6.5 billion by 2019, according Wohlers Associates.

"With their strong marketing and distribution muscle, HP is in a very good position to dominate the market, and they could buy up most of the companies in this business if they wanted to because it's a relatively small but fast-growing and vibrant area," Wohlers said.

HP's thinking on this point is unclear. In August, the company ended its relationship with 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys, which has been making HP's exclusive line of 3D printers since 2010. HP mostly marketed the 3D printers in Europe.

The largest U.S. technology company by revenue is trying to keep its core personal computing business profitable as competition from mobile devices erodes sales. HP is trying to transform itself into a major enterprise computing provider, while slashing expenses to boost the bottom line.

The company is laying off 29,000 employees over the next two years, has written off $10.8 billion that was mostly related to the writedown of its EDS services business, and its business continues to be hit by a slowing economy in most of its biggest regions, including Western Europe and China.

Whitman is expected to provide HP's outlook for the next fiscal year and an update on the company's restructuring plans.

The analyst meeting "comes at a crucial point in the company's struggle to maintain its relevancy in an increasingly competitive IT industry," said Topeka Capital Markets analyst Brian White, who expects HP to offer a conservative outlook.

Wall Street analysts on average expect HP's revenue to decline to $120.08 billion in fiscal 2013 from an estimated $121.14 billion this year, according to ThomsonReuters I/B/E/S.

Jefferies analyst Peter Misek said he expects HP's outlook for 2013 to come in well below Wall Street estimates given "cyclical and secular headwinds for HP's PC, services, and printer businesses."

(Reporting by Poornima Gupta; Editing by Prudence Crowther and Ryan Woo)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...89204B20121003





Maker Faire 2012 New York - Attack of The 3D Printer Bots
Dave Altavilla

We headed down to Maker Faire 2012 in New York this weekend to check out the expo's massive spread of engineering awesomeness and creativity in the fields of robotics, electronics, computing and much more. When you arrive at the fair, the first thing that strikes you is how completely organic the whole scene is. Inventors, creators, engineers and entrepreneurs from all walks of life have their gadgets, science projects, creations and wares on display for all to see. Some of the creations you see on display range from downright amazing to completely bizarre.

One of the big attractions, a technology area that has experienced explosive growth recently, is the land of 3D Printing. MakerBot took the open source RepRap 3D replicator project mainstream back in 2009 with the release of the Cup Cake CNC machine, then came the Thing-o-Matic and then a little bot called Replicator. With each iteration, improvements in process and technology are bringing better, more capable 3D printers to market, from MakerBot's new Replicator 2, to new players in the field like Solidoodle, Up!3D, Ultimaker, and Tinkerines.

MakerBot's Replicator 2 is a proprietary design, a first for the company and a first in a field that historically established its roots in a passionate, collaborative open source community model. Most commercially available 3D printers today are delivered unassembled and as such, modifications and improvements can be introduced easily, spurring new designs, features and capabilities.

To watch a 3D printer in action is like witnessing art, science and engineering all working together in glorious unison. And regardless of your geek status or lack thereof, the objects you can design and build with one of these machines will blow you away. Watch...

Certainly one of the highlights of the "3D Printer Village" at Maker Faire 2012, was MakerBot's Replicator 2 machine but systems like the Ultimaker, Tinkerine's Ditto, and Up!3D's Mini were also very impressive, rivaling the precision (100 micron/1mm or less tolerances) ease of use and speed of the new MakerBot machine.

As you can see, some of the models being built at the event were absolutely amazing. Ultimaker's human statue models were especially stunning, with intricate detail previously only produced by sculptors and artists manually. Some of the mechanical structures like gears and other types of machinery just wowed us as feats of engineering marvel.

We're going to be watching this space closely in the months ahead and may even coordinate a "3D Printer Round-up" of sorts. Stick around!
http://hothardware.com/News/Maker-Fa...-Printer-Bots/





Difference Engine: The PC All Over Again?
N.V.

WHAT could well be the next great technological disruption is fermenting away, out of sight, in small workshops, college labs, garages and basements. Tinkerers with machines that turn binary digits into molecules are pioneering a whole new way of making things—one that could well rewrite the rules of manufacturing in much the same way as the PC trashed the traditional world of computing.

The machines, called 3D printers, have existed in industry for years. But at a cost of $100,000 to $1m, few individuals could ever afford one. Fortunately, like everything digital, their price has fallen. So much so, industrial 3D printers can now be had for $15,000, and home versions for little more than $1,000 (or half that in kit form). “In many ways, today’s 3D printing community resembles the personal computing community of the early 1990s,” says Michael Weinberg, a staff lawyer at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group in Washington, DC.

As an expert on intellectual property, Mr Weinberg has produced a white paper that documents the likely course of 3D-printing's development—and how the technology could be affected by patent and copyright law. He is far from sanguine about its prospects. His main fear is that the fledgling technology could have its wings clipped by traditional manufacturers, who will doubtless view it as a threat to their livelihoods, and do all in their powers to nobble it. Because of a 3D printer's ability to make perfect replicas, they will probably try to brand it a piracy machine.

Manufacturers of famous brands have had to contend with ripoffs since time immemorial. Whole neighborhoods exist in Hongkong, Bangkok and even Tokyo that turn out imitation designer handbags, shoes and watches. China has flooded the world with cheap replacement parts based on designs pirated from the original equipment manufacturers.

But while the pirates' labour rates and material costs may be far lower, the tools they use to make fakes are essentially the same as those used by the original manufacturers. Equipment costs alone have therefore limited the spread of the counterfeiting industry. But give every sweatshop around the world a cheap 3D printer coupled to a laser scanner, and pirated goods could well proliferate.

The first thing to know about 3D printing is that it is an “additive”, rather than a “subtractive”, form of processing. The tools are effectively modified ink-jet printers that deposit successive layers of material until a three-dimensional object is built up. In doing so, they typically use a tenth of the material needed when machining a part from bulk. The goop used for printing can be a thermoplastic such as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), polylactic acid or polycarbonate, or metallic powders, clays and even living cells depending on the application (see “Making it”, November 25th 2011).

As far as intellectual property is concerned, the 3D printer itself is not the problem. But before it can start making anything, it needs a CAD (computer-aided design) file of the object to be produced, along with specialised software to tell the printer how to lay down the successive layers of material. The object can be designed on a computer using CAD software, or files of standard objects can be downloaded from open-source archives such as Thingiverse and Fab@Home. Most likely, though, the object to be produced is copied from an existing one, using a scanner that records the three-dimensional measurements from various angles and turns the data into a CAD file.

This is where claims of infringement start—especially if the item being scanned by the machine’s laser beam is a proprietary design belonging to someone else. And unless the object is in the public domain, copyright law could well apply. This has caught out a number of unwitting users of 3D printers who have blithely made reproductions of popular merchandise.

Earlier this year, for instance, one hobbyist worked out how to print the popular “Penrose Triangle”, an optical illusion that cannot exist in normal three-dimensional Euclidean space, and released a video challenging others to say how it was done. Another 3D modeler not only figured it out but uploaded the CAD file of his own solution to Thingiverse. Whereupon the initial designer threatened Thingiverse with legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998.

The issue was only resolved when it was pointed out that someone else actually invented the Penrose Triangle (a Swedish artist in the 1930s), and the optical illusion itself could be considered a useful object—and therefore did not qualify for copyright protection (which covers only non-functioning intangibles such as art, music and literature). The designer subsequently dropped the case and dedicated the rights to the community. There are now five versions of the Penrose Triangle on Thingiverse.

In another instance, a couple of engineers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh created the CAD files for printing a kit of plug-in parts that allow toy construction sets from different makers to be interconnected. The patents on the various toys involved had long since expired, but any copyright involved still had decades to run. The object was to send “a shot across the bow” of any company that might try to control how their physical designs were copied, remixed or improved upon in future. “We don’t want to see what happened in music and film play out in the area of shapes,” one of the engineers told Forbes magazine.

What they were referring to, of course, were the DMCA “takedown” notices used by record companies and film studios to force file-sharing websites to remove pirated content. While no one can object to a law that penalises those who wilfully infringe the copyright of others, Mr Weinberg is concerned that the ability to copy and replicate can also be used to create, expand upon and innovate. Inhibit that and society gets short-changed. Certainly, DMCA notices can stifle free expression, jeopardise fair use, and impede competition (by, say, blocking designs for aftermarket replacement parts like brake pads or toner cartridges). Similarly, DMCA notices have been used to enforce “walled gardens” surrounding products like the iPod. Such actions limit choice for consumers.

As with any disruptive technology—from the printing press to the photocopier and the personal computer—3D printing is going to upset existing manufacturers, who are bound to see it as a threat to their traditional way of doing business. And as 3D printing proliferates, the incumbents will almost certainly demand protection from upstarts with low cost of entry to their markets.

Manufacturers are likely to behave much like the record industry did when its own business model—based on selling pricey CD albums that few music fans wanted instead of cheap single tracks they craved—came under attack from file-swapping technology and MP3 software. The manufacturers' most likely recourse will be to embrace copyright, rather than patent, law, because many of their patents will have expired. Patents apply for only 20 years while copyright continues for 70 years after the creator's death.

So expect manufacturers to lobby for their own form of DMCA, with copyright protection expanded to cover functional objects that contain elements of design. “This would create a type of quasi-patent system, without the requirement for novelty or the strictly limited period of protection,” says Mr Weinberg.

The biggest lesson the record industry learned from its copyright battles with file-swappers was that going after individual infringers was prohibitively expensive and time consuming. So instead, the record companies lobbied to get copyright liability extended to cover not only individuals who infringe, but also those who facilitate infringement—namely, the internet service providers (ISPs) and file-swapping websites.

In that, the record industry was remarkably successful. Today, websites and ISPs have to block or remove infringing material whenever they receive a DMCA takedown notice from a copyright holder—something that happens more often than actually justified. Google reckons that more than a third of the DMCA notices it has received over the years have turned out to be bogus copyright claims. Over a half were from companies trying to restrict competing businesses rather than law-breakers.

Rallying under the banner of piracy and theft, established manufacturers could likewise seek to get the doctrine of "contributory infringement” included in some expanded object-copyright law as a way of crippling the personal-manufacturing movement before it eats their lunch. Being free to sue websites that host 3D design files as “havens of piracy” would save them the time and money of having to prosecute thousands of individuals with a 3D printer churning out copies at home.

Some also expect incumbent manufacturers to try to stigmatise CAD file-types, in the same way the record companies hounded the bit-torrent and MP3 formats as piracy tools. That could slow the mainstream adoption of 3D printing and imply that anyone uploading CAD files to a public site was somehow infringing on rights, notes Cory Doctorow, a Canadian science writer who blogs for Boing Boing.

Today’s 3D printing crowd—tucked away in garages, basements, small workshops and university labs—needs to keep a keen eye on such policy debates as they grow. “There will be a time when impacted legacy industries [will] demand some sort of DMCA for 3D printing,” says Mr Weinberg. If the tinkerers wait until that day, it will be too late.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babba...ll_over_again_





Judge Decries "Excessive" Copyright and Software Patent Protections

Influential judge and legal scholar argues that "major reforms are necessary."
Timothy B. Lee

Richard Posner, the federal judge who threw out the entire Apple v. Motorola patent battle in June, has penned a new blog post complaining about the proliferation of patents. "I am concerned that both patent and copyright protection, though particularly the former, may be excessive," Posner wrote on Sunday.

The problem of excessive patent protection is at present best illustrated by the software industry. This is a progressive, dynamic industry rife with invention. But the conditions that make patent protection essential in the pharmaceutical industry are absent. Nowadays most software innovation is incremental, created by teams of software engineers at modest cost, and also ephemeral—most software inventions are quickly superseded. Software innovation tends to be piecemeal—not entire devices, but components, so that a software device (a cellphone, a tablet, a laptop, etc.) may have tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of separate components (bits of software code or bits of hardware), each one arguably patentable. The result is huge patent thickets, creating rich opportunities for trying to hamstring competitors by suing for infringement—and also for infringing, and then challenging the validity of the patent when the patentee sues you.

On the copyright front, Posner sees two major problems. One is excessive copyright terms and the resulting "orphan works" problem. "Apart from the fact that the present value of income received so far in the future is negligible," he writes, "obtaining copyright licenses on very old works is difficult because not only is the author in all likelihood dead, but his heirs or other owners of the copyright may be difficult or even impossible to identify or find."

Posner also called for broader fair use rights. "The boundaries of fair use are ill defined, and copyright owners try to narrow them as much as possible, insisting for example that even minute excerpts from a film cannot be reproduced without a license." That's a problem, he argues, because "intellectual creativity in fact if not in legend is rarely a matter of creation ex nihilo; it is much more often incremental improvement on existing, often copyrighted, work, so that a narrow interpretation of fair use can have very damaging effects on creativity."

"The need for reform is less acute in copyright than in patent law," Posner concludes, "but it is sufficiently acute to warrant serious attention from Congress and the courts."

An influential loose cannon

Posner is not a typical judge. While most judges mostly keep their opinions to themselves when they're not on the bench, Posner is a prolific academic and public intellectual. He is regarded as a founder of the law and economics movement, which brings economic analysis to bear on legal doctrines. He has written numerous books, and he shares a blog with fellow University of Chicago scholar (and Nobel prize-winning economist) Gary Becker.

Posner is also something of a loose cannon. Last year, for example, we covered his remarks from the bench that a constitutional right to record the police would lead to "a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers." The copyright scholar (and sometime Ars contributor) James Grimmelmann called one of Posner's recent opinions in a copyright case "astonishingly slipshod, even by Judge Posner’s relaxed standards." He is traditionally regarded as a conservative, but he commented in July that "I've become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy."

And Posner's seat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals doesn't give him a direct role in shaping patent policy because (as we discussed yesterday) the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has exclusive jurisdiction over patent appeals. Posner was able to hear the Apple v. Motorola case because he was temporarily sitting in as a trial judge. But his rulings will be reviewed, and quite possibly overturned, by the patent-friendly judges of the Federal Circuit.

But while Posner doesn't have the power to directly change patent law, he is widely known and respected both in academia and the judiciary. So his views are likely to have an impact on how policymakers—perhaps including Supreme Court justices—view patent law and policy.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...t-protections/





EMI And ReDigi Duke It Out In Court Over The Resale of MP3s
Addy Dugdale

A New York judge will today hear the opening arguments in the lawsuit between EMI and ReDigi. The music giant is suing the upstart startup, which makes its money flogging people's unwanted MP3s to loving homes, for copyright infringement. The year-old upstart, however, claims that its software legally complies with U.S. copyright laws. With technology companies looking on eagerly, the result will not only set a precedent in U.S. law but may transform the industry.

EMI's argument is that the first sale doctrine does not apply to digital music as it does to CDs or books, as it is impossible to guarantee that all copies of an MP3 have been deleted. ReDigi's CEO sees it as giving power to consumers. "Most lawful users of music and books have hundreds of dollars of lawfully obtained things on their computers and right now the value of that is zero dollars," he said. "ReDigi takes zero dollars and we create billions of dollars in wealth overnight."
http://www.fastcompany.com/3001918/e...er-resale-mp3s





Mashery Is the Latest to Be Snared by Craigslist’s Copyright Crusade
Liz Gannes

First, Craigslist went after PadMapper for arranging its apartment rental listings on a map; then, when the start-up shifted to data supplier 3Taps, Craigslist sued them both for copyright infringement (3Taps subsequently countersued for anticompetitive business practices).

Now, Craiglist has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Mashery, the API platform that had helped 3Taps serve customers like PadMapper.

In response to the notice from Craigslist, Mashery on Friday dropped support for 3Taps. 3Taps CEO Greg Kidd said his company is now handling its API services manually, without the help of Mashery infrastructure.

In a conversation today, Mashery CEO Oren Michels said he wasn’t necessarily taking sides. “I’m not a copyright lawyer,” he said. But he added, “This concept of asserting copyright on facts is a tough business.”

However, Kidd is speaking at a Mashery conference tomorrow with the loaded session title, “Looting the Public Domain of the Open Web.” Michels said he invited Craigslist to present, as well, but they didn’t respond.

For once (!), Craigslist actually got back to one of my requests for comment today, but only to say it had no statement at this time.

Meanwhile, PadMapper received a court extension to respond to the Craigslist lawsuit.

Kidd said that while 3Taps’ legal battle with Craiglist is ongoing, the company has pared down its business to serving the two apartment search companies mentioned in its filing, PadMapper and Lovely. “We’ll bring a few other services up shortly again that are under our legal banner once things stabilize in the back office,” he said.
https://allthingsd.com/20121001/mash...right-crusade/





The Most Important Meeting You've Never Heard Of
Tom Wheeler

In December the nations of the world will gather in Dubai for the UN-convened World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT – pronounced “wicket”). The topic of the meeting is nothing less than the regulation of the Internet.

The Internet, coupled with mobile connectivity, has vastly improved the lives of the people of the world. It wasn’t until mobile came to the developing nations of the world that the first billion people could make a phone call (2001). Today there are six billion mobile subscriptions in a world of seven billion people. What’s more, most of the world’s young people will experience the Internet for the first time on a mobile device – opening new worlds of knowledge, commerce and opportunity. In response to these beneficial breakthroughs, some of the governments of the world have decided they should take control.

Under the auspices of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) the governments of the world will review the international treaty known as the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITR). The last review of the ITR was in 1988 when the Internet was just aborning. The remarkable and reshaping growth of the Internet provides the excuse for the new review. What’s really afoot, however, is an effort by some nations to rebalance the Internet in their favor by reinstituting telecom regulatory concepts from the last century.

For countries such as India, South Africa and Brazil, for instance, WCIT is an opportunity to get back into the action, including grabbing a piece of the Internet’s revenue. In the good old days of the telephone network, nations (and their national carrier) could apply tariffs and other regulations to those connecting with their network. Not only does the belief linger that tribute should continue be paid, but also there is a hunger to redirect the Internet’s revenue stream. It is, of course, perverse that the nations that have proportionally benefited the most from the introduction of mobile technology and need to similarly ride the wave of Internet-driven economic growth should seek to redesign the structure that has proven so successful for their people.

For other countries like China and Russia WCIT offers the chance to place controls on the freedom of the Internet. Seemingly benign proposals to allow for regulation related to “crime” and “security” would grant international imprimatur to the exertion of control over Internet content. The recent sentencing of Russian punk rockers Pussy Riot is illustrative in this regard. The Putin-protesting group was sentenced to jail for being a “crude violation of the social order,” a legal construction that WCIT could permit to be extended to the Internet and justified as “within international accords.”

For the ITU itself WCIT is an opportunity to grow its bureaucratic reach. Founded in 1850, at the dawn of the telegraph, the ITU’s power reached its apex in the era of state-run PTTs. The privatization of national phone companies and the introduction of competitive carriers sent the ITU scrambling for relevance. The predecessor of the World Trade Organization (WTO) fought in the 1980s to keep the ITU from regulating new mobile and Internet services (and won). A new set of international regulations, thus, becomes the ITU’s last gasp to reverse the earlier decision and give itself the same role in the Information Age that it enjoyed in the Industrial Age.

Up until this point, the activities of the various WCIT participants are rather predictable. Repressive governments want to curtail Internet Freedom. Developing nations want a share of the Internet revenue pie. International bureaucrats want to keep their jobs and expand their relevance.

The surprise comes from European carriers. Or perhaps, considering their lineage, it shouldn’t be a surprise.

The European Telecommunications Network Operators (ETNO) is lobbying to have the ITR regulate the so-called “over the top” users of the Internet. In a position admirable for its chutzpah if not its substance, ETNO wants the ITR not to regulate carrier activities, but to add new regulation to heretofore regulated companies such as Google, Netflix and others who use carrier networks. It is another last-ditch effort to return to the days when regulators protected carriers from the nasty realities of innovation and competition.

That mobile and the Internet stimulate all of this sturm and drang should not come as a surprise. The self-interested efforts to force the new networks into an old regulatory box are a reflection of the growing pains of a network-defined world. The insecurity and stress of change always stimulates a desire to retreat to the comfort of the past. WCIT represents a venue where the forces of the status quo can make their stand. It is a struggle between nation-states (and their vassals) created in an era when networks aggregated economic and political power, and the new era in which the network’s distributed architecture has a disaggregating effect on both economic and political power.

Interestingly, it was amidst the storm and stress of a previous network revolution that the concept of the nation-state was born. As 16th century printers spewed forth ideas that brought down the Holy Roman Empire, Europe was plunged into more than a century of war. The conclusion of that conflagration was the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and a new world order in which nation-states replaced empires and fiefdoms.

The core of the new sovereignty was the power of geography. Physical borders coalesced groups within their boundaries while at the same time geographic space provided a buffering from outside forces. Today’s network, however, defies geography. Westphalian sovereignty, defined as control of a piece of the map, is increasingly irrelevant to an economy built on information products that can circle the globe in less time than it takes for a keystroke.

In the words of Alec Ross, a senior U.S. State Department official, “Networks are more important than nations.” And in the ultimate anti-hierarchy, the new network has organized itself to be overseen by a “multi-stakeholder process” of independent actors spread across the globe. This new stateless network, in turn, enables others to organize in a similar stateless (or perhaps supra-state) structure. Multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), militant non-state groups such as al Qaeda, and intergovernmental institutions (IGOs) such as the World Bank and European Commission all utilize the new network to supersede the Westphalian structure.

Meetings such as WCIT are certainly preferable to the armed conflict of previous network revolutions. But the issues being argued are in many ways the same: as technology transforms how we connect, the institutions of the day – whether governments or corporations – fight to cling to the comfy world they have known. It’s a tale as old as time.

The U.S. delegation to WCIT, led by telecom veteran Ambassador Terry Kramer, will have its hands full keeping international regulators away from the Internet. Amazingly, the processes of the ITU are traditionally conducted without public transparency. WCIT is no different. The future of the open and free Internet is being determined through a secret closed process. Fortunately, the U.S. government is making the secret submissions available to interested American parties. The open and free Internet has also sprung to its own defense through the establishment of “WCITleaks,” a Web site where the non-public submissions by various nations are exposed to the sunlight. It is a poignant example of why international regulators must not get their hands around the Internet’s throat.

What happens in Dubai is a Big Deal. Far from “just another international meeting,” the consequences of WCIT could be as far-reaching on our future as strategic arms negotiations. It is the most important meeting you’ve never heard of.
http://www.mobilemusings.net/2012/09...uve-never.html





Cable Companies Cap Data Use for Revenue

Home Internet service providers are introducing "usage-based pricing plans" that would replace all-you-can eat packages and place a limit on monthly data usage.
broadband data caps
Roger Yu

Tawnie Knight's Internet diet began Monday.

With Comcast starting a new trial in her area on Oct. 1, Knight had to choose from a new lineup of its service plans that places a firm limit on the amount of data she consumes each month -- and charges she'll incur if she goes over.

The Tucson-based computer technician, whose daughter loves online video games, estimates her family uses about 350 gigabytes of data a month (a 2-hour high-definition movie can eat up 3 GB to 5 GB). "We stream a lot. I don't want to get into a situation where I have to pay $10 here and there and get nickeled-and-dimed to death," she says.

Knight is one of hundreds of thousands of customers in the Tucson region who are part of Comcast's trial of "usage-based pricing plans" that replace all-you-can-use data plans with ones that cap the amount of data a customer can download.

Wireless carriers' quick adoption of capped Internet plans has generated big headlines recently. But the practice of limiting data -- and charging customers according to use -- is gaining just as much traction on the wired side. Cablevision is one of the few large cable Internet providers in the U.S. that doesn't impose a data cap.

While Knight sees such plans as a financial headache to be endured each month, Internet providers are quietly relying on them as new revenue sources needed at a time when their TV and phone businesses are sagging.

The average household worldwide used 26.2 GB of data per month in 2011, according to a study by Cisco Systems. By 2016, more than 84 GB a month will be consumed by an average family, it predicts.

Several providers, including AT&T and Time Warner Cable, have tried to cap broadband use in the past, only to quickly retreat from their efforts following consumer backlash. But wireless carriers have aggressively introduced capped data plans and cable companies are emboldened by the changes, says Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research.

"They're looking to increase revenue. They don't face a whole lot of rosy prospects," he says. "The wireless industry is setting the pace on what the model will look like."

The metered plans, cable operators say, are a more fair way to price data services, because heavy users will pay more. Broadband demand is skyrocketing, and additional revenue will help cable companies invest in the future, they say.

"In the wired world, there is a better path to add capacity, but it's not free," says Michael Powell, CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, a trade group of cable providers. "It's very expensive." The capped plan "ensures the capital that's necessary to make (the networks) better."

But opponents of capped plans contend that they are a product of a price discrimination strategy and charge that they have been rolled out too quickly without clear communication to customers.

Some recent changes include:

-- Data limits in tiers. In May, Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, said it would launch its trial in two markets -- Tucson and Nashville -- that offer six pricing tiers based on download speeds and data limits.

Its cheapest plan, at about $40, will carry a 300 GB limit, while the most expensive plan, about $200, comes with 600 GB. Anyone who exceeds the limit on any plan can pay $10 for each additional data bucket of 50 GB. Those who reach 90% of their limit will get an e-mail alert asking them to pay for additional data allotments or consider upgrading.

In other markets, Comcast currently offers similar pricing tiers that vary by download speeds and have a soft, mostly unenforced, cap of 300 GB.

-- Paying overage in increments. Time Warner Cable launched a trial in Texas in February with a monthly data limit of 5 GB on its three lower-speed tiers that cost $35 to $55.

Customers who choose the option receive a $5 discount. Those who go over the cap pay $1 for each additional gigabyte up to a maximum of $25.

The trial was expanded to North Carolina and South Carolina in August, and the company plans to expand it nationally. "It's targeted to those who don't use the Internet a lot and are looking to save money during these times," says spokesman Justin Venech.
Cable One, which operates in 19 states, charges 50 cents for each additional gigabyte.

-- Simple data caps. Several companies, including Cox Communications, Charter Communications, CenturyLink and Mediacom, have monthly caps that are minimally enforced -- at least for now.

"We don't currently charge overage," says Todd Smith, a spokesman for Cox, which has several price tiers based on download speeds and data limits that were introduced in 2010. Its data limits range from 30 GB to 400 GB per month.

CenturyLink's spokesman Mark Molzen says subscribers who exceed its limit – ranging from 150 GB to 250 GB – are rare, and the company would only cancel the accounts of heavy users if they ignore three requests to curb their use or fail to upgrade to "an unlimited business-class line," says spokesman Mark Molzen.

Partly because data caps are often unenforced and the terms are spelled out in fine-print documents few bother to read, the limits go unnoticed by many customers. Tom An, a restaurant owner in Vienna, Va., says he only recently discovered that his Cox Internet account has a limit of 250 GB. "It came as a big surprise to me," he says. "I don't think they did a good job in letting me know that. I'm not that concerned now. But down the line, with more HD videos coming, it could be a problem."

Seeking clarification

That many consumers aren't aware of their data caps underscores the industry's generosity, industry executives say. Comcast says its median customer use per month is about 8 GB to 10 GB nationwide. "The reality is, a vast majority of consumers don't go anywhere near these (limits)," he says.

While that may be true today, it's inevitable that more customers will reach the limit in coming years, counters Golvin of Forrester Research. "There's nothing unique about bandwidth that says there's a natural limit," he says.

Some critics also are demanding clearer explanation from cable providers on the urgency for new plans. Internet providers have failed to clarify how the caps are set, tiers are created and pricing is determined, says Gigi Sohn, CEO of technology consumer advocacy firm Public Knowledge. "We know nothing about how caps are set or what purpose the cap is supposed to achieve. When they're challenged on it, the cable industry runs away from it," she says.

The new plans are designed mainly to penalize heavy users, since network congestion has not been a pressing issue, she says. "It charges people who value the Internet more," she says. "It's either a price-gouging or price-discrimination strategy."

Not surprisingly, the industry doesn't quite see it that way. While conceding that new pricing plans are "not purely a congestion issue," Powell says that requiring excessive users to pay more will also help modify their data consumption. "If there's a price to your consumption, you'll govern your consumption," he says. "It's a 1% problem."

'Going to be a mess'

After setting up a new account at Comcast, Knight predicts other customers will want clearer, simpler answers as they're herded to new plans.

She says Comcast customer service agents she spoke to were confused or unable to answer detailed questions about the new data caps and prices. "I spent almost a whole day trying to figure this out and order the service. This is confusing. And I know technology fairly well. For the average consumer, this is going be a mess," she says.

Charlie Douglas, a Comcast spokesman, emphasizes that the Tucson trial is new and says its "customer agents are being trained."

In the end, Knight chose a plan that comes with a 450 GB limit, an overwhelming sum for most but not for her bandwidth-loving family. Beyond her daughter's video game habits, Knight also uses TV network apps daily to catch up on shows she misses after work.

Her previous Comcast Internet account, which costs her about $70 a month, came with a soft, unenforced monthly limit without overage charges. The new Internet access is priced at about $115, before cable TV, she says.

"My bill just shot up, and I'm still concerned about going over the limit," she says. "I'm already watching my wireless limits. I don't want to have to watch my cable Internet limit, too."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2...a-cap/1595683/





The Coming Internet Video Crash
Galen Gruman

People are still getting used to the notion that unlimited data plans are dead and gone for their smartphones. The option wasn't even offered for tablets. Now, we're beginning to see the eradication of the unlimited data plan in our broadband lines [1], such as cable and DSL connections. It's a dangerous trend that will threaten the budding Internet-based video business -- whether from Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Windows Store, or Google Play -- then jeopardize Internet services of all sorts.

It's a complex issue, and though the villains are obvious -- the telecom carriers and cable providers -- the solutions are not. The result will be a metered Internet that discourages use of the services so valuable for work and play.

When AT&T broke from the pack and said it would end unlimited data plans for smartphone users, I understood and even supported the rationale [5]: Bandwidth is limited, so giving everyone unfettered access would sap the capacity and let the most aggressive data hogs crowd out everyone else, destroying the value of cellular data.

I also knew that, for the carriers, bandwidth scarcity was an excuse to meter services and, in essence, raise the price of cellular connectivity, as well as favor their own services over those of other providers. However, it makes sense to not take limited resources like water or spectrum and open them up to unlimited use and, thus, waste.

How we got into this mess

Bear with me on the roots of the issue before I get to the coming Internet video crash -- the background will explain why there's no easy solution.

The wireless spectrum belongs to the people, not the carriers, and the federal government rents out the spectrum in exclusive bands in return for accepting regulations on how it's used. But the Federal Communications Commission has done a poor job of overseeing the carriers, which constantly lobby a Congress to which they donate much money. Their goal is to have the rules relaxed so that they can gouge customers at their pleasure. Like the financial service industry, the carriers have learned how to exploit a corrupt relationship with the government.

Still, a basic principle is enshrined in the law, no matter how weakly enforced, that restrains the highly profitable cellular carriers' worst instincts. Under President Barack Obama, the FCC finally started to do its job and block some egregious practices the carriers wanted to introduce, such as ending Net neutrality [6] so that they could discriminate against competitors and steer us to services of their choosing. The FCC is now publicly musing about revisiting the issue of cellular data caps, which it supported a few years ago, as it sees what carriers have done with them [7].

That government counterweight is less available in the world of wired broadband, where there is no limited spectrum that justifies ownership by the government to ensure fair use. The broadband industry builds its own "spectrum" by adding more and more capacity in its cables and networks. Much of that infrastructure runs through public property, such as streets, but broadband carriers can add capacity theoretically forever. That's why the government has less power to stop egregious practices, even if wanted to. It doesn't, again thanks to carriers' lobbying power.

Where the government does have a role is in granting licenses to carriers to offer cable and DSL service, a power that municipalities gained for two historic reasons:

1. Cable started as a competitor to TV, which was distributed through the public airwaves. Government wanted a level playing field so that local TV would be available to all citizens, no matter whether through antennas or cable jacks.

2. Carriers wanted to ensure a large enough customer base to justify the massive capital investments, so they were willing to trade exclusive service for the "must carry" rules for local TV and some regulation over rates. In the 1980s, Congress took away local officials' rights over most cable providers, leaving that to a federal government unwilling to confront industry.

All this explains why the cable and DSL providers, having seen cellular carriers impose data caps as part of pricey data plans this summer, are confident they can do the same. But unlike cellular carriers, they can't claim scarcity, which exposes the caps as moneymaking schemes, both through higher rates via tiered plans and by steering customers to their services rather than those of competitors. The risk of the latter is much greater in the world of cable connections than in cellular ones.

Internet video will be the first victim

Cable and DSL carriers say their caps will be very high: several hundred gigabytes per month, though some are testing lower caps. Almost no one will be affected because, they claim, most people use a couple dozen gigabytes or less.

That's the same argument the cellular carriers made, and we'll see a similar result. There's a big shift under way as users get more video over the Internet rather than though standard TV channels. Premium channels such as Showtime and HBO have limited their shows' availability in the rental market (physical and streamed) to stem the loss of subscribers, but that's the tip of the iceberg.

Within a decade, people might get most of their video content from the Internet rather than watch traditional TV. When that happens, the cable and DSL carriers stand to lose billions of cable TV fees as households drop their "triple play" services to Internet-only. The phone portion of the triplet is also migrating fast to cellphones, and calling in general is shrinking as people send texts and email instead.

That's why Verizon Wireless and AT&T now charge a "network access" fee instead of a calling fee -- they know call volume is going down, and people have been dropping their minutes. The solution: End the notion of minutes and charge a flat fee whether you call or not. You can easily predict the same pattern in the cable and DSL industry (the main DSL providers offer TV services).

But just as delivering voice is cheaper for a carrier than delivering VoIP, delivering video for a cable or DSL provider is cheaper than delivering Internet video. It gets to send the same video bits to lots of homes at the same time, reducing the bandwidth usage everywhere but the endpoints. For that reason, the carriers want you to watch their channels, not video from the Internet. Given that an hour of video takes between 1GB and 4GB, households that drop their cable TV subscriptions at $60 or more per home and instead watch online video exclusively will quickly consume hundreds of gigabtes per month for no extra income to the carrier -- that video traffic will ride on the Internet service that now costs $30 to $50 per month.

Data caps for broadband will increase the costs for the Internet video crowd and dissuade many people from switching from traditional video to Internet video, maintaining the carriers' revenues. This will stifle the Internet video industry -- not just for TV and movies, but also YouTube, online learning, videoconferencing, telemedicine, and other uses.

The economics, of course, are more complex than I describe. Content providers -- InfoWorld, Hulu, Netflix, and so on -- pay to have their material carried over the Internet, both to content delivery networks (CDNs) and the underlying broadband providers. Thus, broadband providers get some money from Internet video users -- but only a fraction of what they get for their own TV services.

The closest thing to a fair approach

If we had an FCC with the desire and power to regulate the cellular, cable, and DSL providers -- even when the FCC is willing, Congress cuts off its funding or otherwise blocks it -- there are several steps it could take to lessen the damage.

• Prevent providers from charging more for Internet service when ordered by itself than when ordered as part of a bundle. The practice of tying one service to another is rightfully frowned upon in antitrust situations. Given that wired broadband service is provided by just two companies (one cable provider and one DSL provider) in almost every area of the country, it's clear we're dealing with a duopoly that should be subject to antitrust rules.

Tying usually involves using one product to create a market for another by bundling; here, the carriers are tying TV with Internet to protect the market for a service that people would begin to abandon, as they are doing with landlines and voice plans in the telephony world. Carriers will argue such a no-tying policy will raise rates, except that most customers can't afford more than what they are now paying -- often $150 to $200 per month. Customer budgets will act as a natural cap in a way that doesn't occur with after-the fact fees added for overages and cap bumps. (That's why hidden fees are so popular at banks, mortgage lenders, airlines, and the like -- people would say no upfront but not when they're too far down the road to turn back.)

• Require providers to count their services' bits last, so any overages or cap bumps can't be blamed on competitors. You know the carriers will try to offer "free" or "included" video services that eat up the data cap, while others' services push people over the edge and end up being the first to be cut. When providers charge for access to services that compete with their own, they can't be trusted to be fair.

• Require progressive rates, so the rates per gigabyte increases with more use. Progressive rates are effective for other utilities and once were effective for income taxes, so they are proven. For example, the first 300GB in a wired broadband service might cost $40, the next 100GB $20, and the next 100GB after that $30. Progressive pricing should definitely be the standard for cellular carriers, which now start with a high base rate, then add more data at increasingly large tranches for the same incremental cost (usually $10) -- penalizing light users and giving a price break to the data hogs. Today, for example, Verizon charges $50 for the first 1GB of cellular data, $10 more for the next 1GB, and $10 more for the next 2GB. It should be $20 for the first 2GB, $10 for the next 1GB, $15 for the next 1GB, and $20 for the next 1GB.

• Disallow double-charging for network access. This is another practice already in place for cellular carriers and surely to be copied by cable and DSL providers. For example, Verizon (the most egregious example) charges a $40 "network access" fee to use your smartphone, then it starts its data plan at $50 for 1GB. It's essentially charging you twice: one for voice and text and once for data, though they're the same network. That's just wrong. If the network access is built into the first tier's price, it should not be charged for elsewhere. A fair approach would entail a $40 network access fee, then a $10 charge for the first 1GB, or there would be no network access free, but charge $50 for the first 1GB -- not both as it is now.

At the end of the day, businesses will get away with as much as they can -- that's what they're supposed to do to make profits. But certain types of providers are essentially public utilities -- Internet access these days is as essential as water, electricity, telephone, and postal mail -- and need to be more accountable to the public good.

Left to their own devices, they will skew their services in a way that will stunt if not destroy Internet video services, then threaten other bandwidth-using services such as cloud storage, telemedicine, and remote computing. In other words, they won't stop at Internet video.

You can't use the Internet without having available bandwidth, and if that bandwidth costs too much, you price the Internet out of reach. Bandwidth should not be free, but it should not be expensive or channeled, either.
https://www.infoworld.com/d/consumer...o-crash-203876





Analysis: YouTube Alienates Amateur Users by Courting Pros
Gerry Shih

After struggling for years, in late 2010, Driving Sports TV, a scrappy, two-person video production outfit led by Ryan Douthit, finally began supporting itself with advertising income from YouTube.

It didn't matter that the channel's production set was simply a green screen in Douthit's cramped garage in a leafy Seattle suburb; Driving Sports TV's revenues were roaring like the rally car engines it featured.

Achieving self-sufficiency on YouTube was Douthit's dream. Then it became a nightmare.

Over the past year, Driving Sports TV's popularity and revenues have plummeted as much as 90 percent, Douthit said, as viewers abandoned him for slicker, more professional and better-marketed fare that's suddenly streaming onto YouTube.

Douthit is among thousands of amateur video producers who helped Google-owned YouTube become the Internet's most popular video-sharing site.

But YouTube's thriving amateur core now feels squeezed out by the site's sweeping transformation from user-generated clips to more professionally produced content, posing a potential dilemma for Google's long-term ambitions in online video.

"I drank their Kool-Aid," Douthit said. "I believed their whole pitch, that anybody with talent and drive could make a living out of YouTube."

A year ago this month, YouTube embarked on an initiative to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire original, professional content in an effort to compete for ad dollars against traditional television networks, digital streaming services such as Netflix and rival Internet companies like AOL and Yahoo.

Tom Hanks, Amy Poehler and other big-name talent are now backing YouTube projects, while Madonna, Jay-Z and Ashton Kutcher have signed up to curate YouTube "channels," bringing hierarchy to an ecosystem that looks more like Hollywood by the day.

The influx of cash, celebrity and structure has left many small "YouTubers" - the bedroom pundits and aspiring guitar heroes who helped make YouTube popular - feeling alienated and shunted aside.

In July at Vidcon, an annual conference for the YouTube creator community, Jim Louderback, the chief executive of Revision3, a well-known digital video network recently purchased by Discovery Communications, said disenchanted YouTubers were fleeing for other platforms. As he spoke on stage, a slide presentation behind him showed a picture of rats scrambling off of a ship named "YouTube."

Louderback's presentation proved prescient - in the past year, as their frustration has mounted, some young YouTubers have begun uploading content elsewhere, a potentially damaging prospect for Google.

In an interview with Reuters at Revision3's 4,000-square foot studio space in an industrial building in San Francisco, Louderback said many successful YouTubers were exploring how to stream video in their own apps, totally independent of YouTube.

He has poached some of YouTube's biggest stars himself, signing them to Revision3's talent roster and shifting some of their videos onto its own website.

"If you've got great content, you can find an audience anywhere," he said.

MONEY VERSUS LOYALTY

YouTube executives say they've made a concerted effort to keep all the site's content-providers happy. However, there is little doubt that the move to more professionally produced content is proving good for business.

"Our big advertisers like the path that YouTube has taken," said Andy Chapman, head of digital investment at Mindshare, an ad agency that counts Unilever, Kimberly Clark and LG Electronics among its clients. "A number of clients say this looks and feels like the direction the market is going."

Wall Street analysts like Citigroup's Mark Mahaney say YouTube already contributes about $3.5 billion to Google's top line every year, a figure that is expected to climb.

In the U.S. market, for instance, total revenue from digital video advertising is expected to grow from $2.3 billion this year to about $7 billion to 2015, when roughly 40 percent of the U.S. population will be watching TV online, according to advertising industry analyst eMarketer.

In recent years, YouTube has shared ad revenues with its content creators, based on how many views their videos get. But tensions between the company and video creators came to a head in March when YouTube, which says its streams more than 4 billion videos per day, changed an algorithm that governed which clips were recommended to viewers.

The tweaks, which lowered the number of overall views across the site but boosted the average time viewers spent in each video, prompted many of YouTube's amateur providers to cry foul, arguing that the move favored longer, professionally produced content. A group of young users started circulating the #saveyoutube hashtag on Twitter and, in May, when a Google employee sought feedback on the situation on the Google+ social network, she received more than 150 responses from users, many concerned and some bitterly angry.

Douthit, the producer of Driving Sports TV, said he was stunned recently when he saw YouTube promoting Drive - a competing professional program that received investment funding from the site - in ad slots shown before his own videos load.

"It felt like being kicked," he said. "They're forcing independent producers like us to go other routes."

Douthit has since sold his segments to a TV network in South Africa and uploaded segments to Apple Inc's iTunes, where, he said, they were downloaded 800,000 times last month.

For its part, YouTube executives say they recognize the importance of their "community" and that they are working hard to cater to both the "heartland, heritage YouTube" and the name-brand content streaming in from Hollywood.

"Any time you have a lot of changes, people get nervous," said Tom Pickett, the company's global head of content operations. "We're trying to listen as best we can to the concerns coming out and coach folks through these changes."

In recent months, company employees have held Google+ video chats to talk creators through their concerns, and next month, Google will open a sprawling, 40,000-foot facility in Marina del Rey, California, offering free studio space and equipment rentals to independent creators who otherwise wouldn't have access to such resources.

"YouTube is nothing without its content creators," Pickett said. "One of our key differentiators is that breadth and depth of content, so we're totally about making it possible for anybody to have that opportunity for success."

YouTube has in fact deepened its investment in its young would-be stars. Last March, Google acquired video start-up Next New Networks, and turned it into an academy of sorts teaching videography skills and publishing a Creator's Playbook offering tips on how to promote videos.

The company invited up-and-coming YouTubers with fewer than 300,000 subscribers to apply for $35,000 in funding and four-day stays at a "Creator Camp" to hone production skills with help from pros.

STRIKING DIGITAL GOLD

To a great extent, the frustration among YouTube's amateur users stems from the ever-mounting competitiveness amongst their peers. Not unlike aspiring actors, aspiring YouTubers have flocked to Los Angeles with hopes of joining the handful of stars rumored to make million-dollar salaries.

An entire industry of production start-ups, perhaps ironically called "networks," has sprung up, signing YouTube stars to contracts and helping negotiate ad deals and merchandising tie-ups.

These networks, among them Revision3, Maker Studios, Big Frame, the Collective, Machinima and Fullscreen, use subtle programming techniques to make YouTube's recommendation engine to highlight their videos more often and also call on their roster of stars to cross-promote rising talent.

YouTubers say it's becoming impossible to rise to the top without the support of these networks, who increasingly control the levers of stardom.

"The sad thing was when YouTube was first starting out, we didn't need networks," said Philip Wang, 28, an independent YouTuber who has made videos professionally since college. "It was people working together and exploring. But now there's more at stake. People are all fighting for ad dollars, fighting for views."

YouTube also benefits from the new networks. For instance, the ad deals Big Frame has independently struck with Home Depot, Levi's and Electronic Arts in turn burnish YouTube's reputation as an ad vehicle, said Jamie Byrne, the site's head of original programming.

And not all of YouTube's amateur providers feel disenfranchised by its move to more professional content. Many argue that the corporate dollars and Hollywood attitudes have had a net positive effect for them. In May, the company disclosed that "thousands" of its young stars now make six-digit salaries from YouTube, up from just a handful a few years ago.

"This is real money - and real businesses - being made. The ecosystem is getting that much stronger," said Shira Lazar, who hosts the "What's Trending" show on YouTube.

"It's incredible," Lazar said, "if you think how this has all happened in the past three years."

(The story corrects to read "...Lazar hosts the 'What's Trending' show on YouTube," instead of "... Lazar, a YouTube star who went on to host the 'What's Trending' show on the CBS News website.")

(Editing by Peter Lauria and David Brunnstrom)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8931K420121004





Google and Publishers Settle Over Digital Books
Claire Cain Miller

After seven years of litigation, Google and book publishers said on Thursday that they had reached a settlement to allow Google to digitize books and journals.

It was a small step forward for Google’s plan to digitize every book and make them readable and searchable online, known as the Google Library Project, but it did not resolve the much bigger issue standing in Google’s way — litigation between Google and authors.

Thursday’s agreement, between Google and the Association of American Publishers, had been expected since last year. The publishers involved in the settlement are the McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, the Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons and Simon & Schuster.

The deal allows publishers to choose whether to allow Google to digitize their out-of-print books that are still under copyright protection. If Google does so, Google will also provide them with a digital copy for their own use.

For books that it has digitized, Google allows people to read 20 percent of them online and purchase the entire books from the Google Play store. The two parties did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement.

But the bigger case, between Google and the Authors Guild, remains tied up in court. An agreement between those two parties will determine whether Google can move forward with its broader, more ambitious digitizing plan.

The settlement between Google and the publishers is a small part in the transition to e-books. Digital books were a new and daunting prospect when the publishers first sued Google seven years ago, but they have now become commonplace.

“They had this lawsuit hanging around for years, and basically the publishers have all moved on. They are selling digitally now,” said James Grimmelmann, a professor at New York Law School who has closely followed the case. “That’s the future. This just memorializes the transition.”

It also codifies agreements that Google and publishers have long had in place.

“It means very little, because Google’s been offering publishers the opportunity to sell books or not for years,” he said.

The action brought by the Authors Guild, on the other hand, is “the lawsuit with high stakes,” he said.

The settlement with the publishers, though, could give Google some help in its litigation with the authors, Mr. Grimmelmann said, “because the publishers are now explicitly not claiming to try to stop Google from scanning. Maybe the fact that the publishers don’t think this is a lawsuit worth pursuing will help Google slightly.”

The groups representing authors and publishers sued Google in 2005, arguing that its digital book-scanning violated their copyrights. After years of litigation, they agreed to a $125 million settlement, but it was rejected last year by a federal judge, Denny Chin, who said it went too far and raised copyright, antitrust and other concerns.

After that, the publishers and authors, who had partnered when negotiating with Google, split. While the authors remain in court, the publishers reached the agreement with Google privately, so it is not subject to court approval.

“We are pleased that this settlement addresses the issues that led to the litigation,” Tom Allen, chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement. “It shows that digital services can provide innovative means to discover content while still respecting the rights of copyright holders.”

David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said, “By putting this litigation with the publishers behind us, we can stay focused on our core mission and work to increase the number of books available to educate, excite and entertain our users via Google Play.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/t...tal-books.html





Web Rivals Want What Google Got
Shalini Ramachandran

To entice Google Inc. to build its ultra-high-speed fiber network there, Kansas City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo., offered the Internet company sweeteners including several free or discounted city services. Now, Time Warner Cable Inc. and AT&T Inc., the incumbent Internet and TV providers in town, are angling to get the same deal.

Among the sweeteners granted Google by both cities are free office space and free power for Google's equipment, according to the agreement on file with the cities. The company also gets the use of all the cities' "assets and infrastructure"—including fiber, buildings, land and computer tools, for no charge. Both cities are even providing Google a team of government employees "dedicated to the project."

For the past few months Time Warner Cable has been negotiating with Kansas City, Kan.,to get a "parity agreement" granting it the same concessions as Google got, the city and the company says. Time Warner Cable has already signed such a deal with Kansas City, Mo.

AT&T also has approached Kansas City, Mo., for the same deal, according to a person familiar with the matter.

"There are certain portions of the agreement between Google and Kansas City, Kan., that put them at a competitive advantage compared with not just us but also the other competitors in the field," said Alex Dudley, a Time Warner Cable spokesman. "We're happy to compete with Google, but we'd just like an even playing field."

AT&T declined to comment on any negotiations but said, "It's time to modernize our industry's rules and regulations…so all consumers benefit from fair and equal competition."

Google is building a fiber network in the Kansas City area that will offer pay-TV and Internet at extremely fast speeds of one gigabit per second—a speed that the company boasts would allow a person to download a season of "30 Rock" in 30 seconds. The Internet company chose Kansas City from more than 1,100 cities in the U.S. that had expressed interest in having the Google Fibert network built in their areas.

Google plans to start providing service in the first neighborhood, Hanover Heights, later this month.

The Google Fiber project was so desired that the local governments rolled out the red carpet. In Kansas City, Mo., for instance, the city is allowing Google to construct "fiberhuts," small buildings that house equipment on city land at no cost, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The cities are discounting other services, as well. For the right to attach its cables to city utility poles, Google is paying Kansas City, Kan., only $10 per pole per year—compared with the $18.95 Time Warner Cable pays. Both cities have also waived permit and inspection fees for Google.

The cities are even helping Google market its fiber build-out. And both are implementing city-managed marketing and education programs about the gigabit network that will, among other things, include direct mailings and community meetings.

Several cable executives complain that the cities also gave Google the unusual right to start its fiber project only in neighborhoods guaranteeing high demand for the service through pre-registrations. Most cable and phone companies were required by franchise agreements with regional governments to build out most of the markets they entered, regardless of demand.

The concessions made by the Kansas cities raise an unnerving question for existing pay-TV and Internet providers: whether other cities across the country could offer similarly sweet deals that could encourage Google to expand its Fiber build-out. Jenna Wandres, a Google Fiber spokeswoman, affirmed Monday that "right now we're focused on Kansas City, but we hope to expand to other communities in the future."

Google's rights "appear to be significantly more favorable than those cable, Verizon or any other fiber overbuilders achieved when striking deals with local governments in the past," said Goldman Sachs analyst Jason Armstrong. "We're surprised Time Warner Cable hasn't been more vocal in its opposition."

Already, the situation has given the cities new bargaining power. The Kansas cities are asking Time Warner Cable and AT&T to promise new, improved community services comparable to the ones Google has offered—which include hundreds of free connections to government-picked locations—before they'll give them a deal like Google's.

As part of its new "parity" deal with Kansas City, Mo., Time Warner Cable said it will make certain improvements in its services still to be finalized. The city has brought up speed and performance improvements to the network, for instance, according to a person familiar with the matter. In exchange, the cable operator will be getting Google's discounts and a refund for the difference it paid the city in fees between March 2012 and August, the new agreement shows.

Similar discussions are under way with Kansas City, Kan. "Our goal is to encourage innovation. Whether that is Google or an existing provider or someone else, we want to help this to happen over and over again," says Kansas City, Kan., Mayor Joe Reardon.

Cable executives defend their current Internet offerings by pointing out that most Web applications don't yet require gigabit-speed Internet, and the residential market isn't demanding such offerings. As one top cable executive recently put it, Google Fiber is just "an expensive PR stunt."

Google dismissed that criticism.

Kansas City government officials also disagree. "Google has completely disrupted [Internet service] business models," says Rick Usher, assistant city manager of Kansas City, Mo. "Our citizens are more aware than ever before of what's available out there."
http://professional.wsj.com/article_...TAwODE3Wj.html





FreedomPop's Pay-As-You-Go Data Service Launches in Beta, Offering 500MB of Free WiMAX Per Month
Dana Wollman

It was almost a year ago that we first heard about FreedomPop, a startup built on the manifesto that every American (yes, you) should have access to free wireless broadband. Ten months later, the pay-as-you-go service is launching in beta, with "free" meaning 500MB of data per month. For the time being, the touted 4G service will come courtesy of Clearwire's WiMAX network, but FreedomPop says it will switch to Sprint's LTE spectrum sometime in early 2013. In the meantime, though, you can expect speeds anywhere between 4 and 10 Mbps down, and 1 to 2 Mbps up.

To take advantage of the service, you'll need to either buy or rent some compatible hardware. Your options include the "Freedom Spot" hotspot capable of serving eight devices simultaneously, or the "Freedom Stick," a USB dongle. Both of these are free, but require that you put down a refundable deposit ($89 for the hotspot and $49 for the stick). As we previously reported, too, the company will be selling $99 iPhone and iPod cases that double as hotspots, though these won't actually be available for another four to six weeks. The iPhone version, in particular, does triple-duty as a charging case.

If you do venture past that 500MB data cap you'll pay $10 for every subsequent gigabyte. Packaged deals will also be available. As we had heard, though, FreedomPop is hoping to recoup the costs of that free data by selling premium services, with three to start and more coming later. At launch, these add-ons will include device protection (24/7 customer service and replacement service within 48 hours) and notification alerts if you're about to hit the data cap. You can also pay for speedier 4G, though the company's claim of "up to 50 percent faster" performance is a vague one, given that the range of possible speeds is so broad to begin with.

There's one last piece about how FreedomPop works, and it might help if we drew a comparison to Dropbox, or Zynga, even. As you would in Farmville, you can earn extra Farmville cash free data by following through on certain tasks. Watch a 20-second ad, for instance, and you win three megs of data. Sign up for a Netflix trial and you get 1.2GB added to your coffer. And, similar to Dropbox, if you recommend a friend, you get 10MB for every month that pal stays on with the service. Finally, you can share data with a friend, but it really does have to be a friend: that person's email address has to be in your contact list.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/01/f...nches-in-beta/





Why The MPAA Can't 'Win The Hearts And Minds' Of The Public: File Sharing Is Mainstream
Mike Masnick

A few weeks ago we wrote about a new "digital music index" from London-based Musicmetrics looking at the popularity of file sharing by location in the UK. The results showed that the act of file sharing was mainstream, rather than a limited activity. The same group has now released a US version of its report, which more or less shows the same thing.

Americans downloaded more than 97 million albums and singles using BitTorrent during the first half of 2012, with Gainesville, FL named as the country’s “pirate capital” in an influential new report. Of the 97 million torrents downloaded across the USA, around 78 percent were albums and 22 percent singles. Assuming an album contains 10 tracks, the total number of songs downloaded would have surpassed 759 million in six months.

The report admits that not all of the songs being downloaded were unauthorized, but suggests that since many of them are, the characterizations are fair. Of course, just as we saw in the UK, all this really seems to show is how widespread file sharing is. It's not a marginalized effort hidden away from society, as some would have you believe, but something that a very large percentage of the population engages in on a regular basis.

A much more interesting (and relevant) report comes from Joe Karaganis who is teasing a larger new report that's about to be released concerning "copy culture" in both the US and Germany. The first tease discusses the attitudes of file sharers in the US about whether or not "it's reasonable" to do certain types of file sharing. And the results suggest that the MPAA's (and many politicians) belief that all they need to do is "educate" people is based on very little evidence. The key point is that, contrary to the assertions of some, the "moral" questions around file sharing are rarely black and white.
Karaganis explains that some seem to think that there are just two views of file sharing:

Let’s recall that there are two conventional ways of talking about the ethics of copying–both in relation to the theft of material property. First: that copying is not like theft because it is non-rivalrous–making a copy does not deprive the owner of the use of the good. For short, call this the Paley position–the defense of digital culture as a culture of abundance. Second: that copying is like theft because it deprives the owner of the potential economic benefit from the sale of that good (in the case of downloading, to the copier). Call that the MPAA position–the defense of culture as a market that depends on the scarcity or controlled distribution of digital goods.

Then, he notes that copyright laws were really built up around a specific type of copying: commercial copying rather than personal copying. And the data above certainly suggests that the views of people on any sort of "moral" question change depending on the context. But... also (and this is important) based on age. The younger generation just seems to believe that basic sharing with friends and family should be seen as perfectly reasonable. The different ways of slicing the data certainly suggest that the blanket argument that "piracy is theft" is going to completely miss its mark in educational campaigns. People just don't buy it.

First, that strong moral arguments against file sharing mistake the structure of public attitudes. Not surprisingly, the public engages in many of the same negotiations of context as the law. For most people, like theft and not like theft are not diametrically opposed moral judgements about copying. Rather, they operate on a continuum. They depend on the context and scale in which copying takes place. Copying, our data makes clear, is widely accepted within personal networks, reflecting a view of culture as not only shared but also constructed through sharing. Outside networks of family and friends, in contrast, a commercial and property logic tends to prevail. Support for more active forms of dissemination and ‘making’ available’ through such networks is quite low. Support for commercial infringement–selling copied DVDs–is minimal.

No matter what sort of "education" campaign you create, you're not going to convince most people that constructing a shared culture is somehow immoral. Furthermore, the generation gap issue is significant, especially given that much of the "education" efforts are aimed at the younger generation who seems a lot less willing to buy the argument.

...there is a strong generational divide in attitudes, with 18-29 year olds far more likely than older groups to view a wide range of copying practices as reasonable. This shift is strongest in relation to sharing within networks of ‘friends’–a category that has become very elastic in the last few years through the rise of online social networks. Among 18-29 year olds, sharing with friends is entirely normalized and large in scale. On average, ‘copying from friends/family’ accounts for nearly as much of music file collections as ‘downloading for free.’ What are the reasonable boundaries of such a network? My siblings? My five closest friends? My 500 Facebook friends? Or the 5000 music aficionados who subscribe to a private file sharing network? This is where the rubber hits the road as people develop their own digital ethics. The law has not begun to address it, and educational efforts to convince people that sharing within communities is theft are likely doomed.

This, of course, is the point that we've been trying to get at for many, many years. No matter what your personal feelings are, you're not going to convince everyone else just by making a blanket moral argument that they just don't buy into. Instead, it's time to move to a more reasonable strategy (more on that shortly...).
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...instream.shtml

















Until next week,

- js.



















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