Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – August 7th, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week


"People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob." - John Perry Barlow


"There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of photos out there." - Rich Vogel


"It's huge. . . . We're ecstatic." - Bethany Johnson


"If people begin to think P2P stands for 'power to the people,' we've done our job." - John Parres


"It's really a shock to them, they are physically too weak to do the service, and mentally unprepared to deal with people directly and not through the internet." - Jyrki Kivelae






States To Deliver Warning To File-Sharing Networks

Washington -- More than 40 state attorneys general are set to warn major peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that they may face enforcement actions if they do not take steps to stem illegal activity on the networks, such as the trading of child pornography and stolen movies and music.

In a letter to the heads of Kazaa, Grokster, BearShare, Blubster, EDonkey2000, LimeWire and Streamcast Networks, the attorneys general write that peer-to-peer (P2P) software "has too many times been hijacked by those who use it for illegal purposes to which the vast majority of our consumers do not wish to be exposed."

The letter, which could be sent as early as today, is the first time state law enforcement officials have thrown their combined weight against the P2P networks, which allow free sharing of digital files -- movies, music, software and photos -- among millions of computer users.

The letter does not threaten specific action against the networks, but it does say, "We will, as appropriate, continue to initiate such actions in the future to stop deceptive and illegal practices by users of the Internet, including users of P2P software" if the networks do not take "concrete and meaningful steps" to prevent illegal use of their networks.

Courts have ruled that the networks are not liable for acts of their users, but those cases are under appeal.

The P2P networks do not have a central server and thus are hard to police. Files reside on the hard drives of computer users and can be accessed via high- speed Internet connections even when the computer is shut off. More than 40 million Americans use the networks.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...&type=business


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

TiVo File Sharing

TiVo Inc. received approval from the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday for technology that would permit users to share copies of recorded shows over the Internet with friends using a new product called TiVoToGo, according to Reuters. Some organizations, such as the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Football League, have copyright concerns.
http://www.mediapost.com/dtls_dsp_ne...&newsID=262763

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Group Wants to Induce Downloads
Xeni Jardin

A coalition of tech groups and free-speech advocates launched a project Tuesday to distribute video and audio of recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the Induce Act -- using the very peer-to-peer networks the bill seeks to outlaw.

Organizers of P2P Congress said they wanted to prove that peer-to-peer file-sharing technology can be used for a broad range of non-infringing purposes, and they hope the online experiment will help kill the Induce Act, a bill also known as the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (SB2560).

As written, the act would penalize technology companies and consumer electronics makers for creating any device that could "induce" or encourage users to make unauthorized copies of copyright material such as music, movies or software. Critics have said devices like the iPod could be illegal under the law.

The group's founders said the distribution method makes coverage of government hearings accessible in a manner that would not be economically feasible using traditional webcasts or conventional sources like cable TV.

Since Friday, project participants have been "seeding" copies of last week's Senate hearings on P2P services including BitTorrent, eDonkey, Gnutella, Morpheus and TrustyFiles.

The Senate Judiciary Committee broadcasts its hearings online, but does not offer archives for people who couldn't catch the hearings live.

P2P file-sharing networks, in contrast, are effectively free, permanent and become more efficient as popularity increases and more users share the burden of file distribution.

"Government shouldn't be in the business of banning technology that makes free speech possible in new ways, and helps boost political participation and awareness," said P2P Congress founder John Parres.

Movie studios and the Recording Industry Association of America have embraced the Induce Act, introduced by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont). Between 1999 and 2004, Hatch received $159,860 in campaign donations from the TV, movie and music industries, according to Opensecrets.org, which monitors campaign donations. In the same period, Leahy received $220,450. They each received less money from the Internet, computer and telecommunications industries.

But tech companies are banding together to shoot down the Induce Act, arguing that it would give Hollywood veto power over which devices can be brought to market and threaten America's dominance in the software and hardware industries. Everything from Apple Computer's iPod to digital camcorders and CD burners could be threatened, they say.

"If enacted, a lot of useful technology could be found unlawful," said Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Virginia).

"To 'induce' someone to violate copyright -- there's no standard for that, and the bill doesn't define a new standard, so any technology that facilitates copying or recording could be found in violation," Boucher said. "That includes paper, pencils and copy machines. I'm not sure that (the Induce Act's) proponents fully understand how extreme the scope is, but if and when they do perhaps they'll modify it or come to the reasonable decision not to move it forward."

Future plans for P2P Congress involve becoming an online clearinghouse for a broad range of government hearings. People could record Senate webcasts, for instance, then submit audio or video files to the group for broader peer-to-peer distribution.

"If people begin to think P2P stands for 'power to the people,' we've done our job," said P2P Congress' Parres. "We just want to induce free speech."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,64454,00.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Software Gets The News, Displays Headlines
John M. Moran

If you’re like most people, your Internet time is split almost entirely between your browser and your e-mail program.

On occasion, you might download a song file using a peer-to-peer file-sharing program. Or you might also view an online video or listen to an audio clip. You might even send instant messages from time to time.

After that, though, it’s back to the browser and the e-mail program.

But all that could be on the verge of changing — especially if, like me, you’re a bit of a news junkie.

That’s because an emerging Internet software program makes it easy to keep up with the latest additions to your favorite news Web sites.

The software programs are known as RSS feed readers. And what is RSS? It stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” which is a hot new way to distribute news headlines across the Internet.

Here’s how it works:

Install an RSS reader on your computer. Then subscribe to RSS-capable news sites on the Web. Periodically, the reader software will reach out to those sites and pull back new headlines. When you see one that interests you, click on it and the software will summon and display the rest of the story.

Now that’s really simple.

Having the latest headlines automatically come to you, while they’re still fresh, beats surfing through a dozen Web sites in search of the news. It also beats revisiting the same sites over and over to see if anything has changed.

And because they are customizable, RSS feeds don’t force you to scan a bunch of things you don’t want in order to see the things you do.

What’s more, RSS isn’t just for news. It also keeps track of your favorite blogs, alerting you to new entries. This feature is especially helpful for monitoring blogs that are both brilliant and irregular.

Making this all possible is an up-and-coming form of electronic text management known as XML.

Like its cousin HTML, which made the World Wide Web possible, XML is a kind of invisible coding that gives shape and structure to electronic documents. Better still, XML is infinitely flexible, allowing users to define that shape and structure as they please.

Literally hundreds of Web sites now offer RSS news feeds on virtually every subject imaginable.

So why not take an RSS feed reader for a test drive? Type “RSS feed reader” into a search engine to get a listing of available programs, many of which are freeware or shareware. Or visit this site for a start: email. about.com/od/rssfeedreaders.
http://www.qctimes.com/internal.php?...d&c=16,1032175


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Popular Underground Piracy News Website Draws Attention from Lawyers and Satellite Television providers

NewCardNews.net is a website that provides members with an open discussion forum that covers current issues on audio, video and satellite piracy. What started out as a small underground site has now in under three months flourished into a very popular hot spot for thousands of pirates who visit on a daily basis.
Press Release

A web site that goes by the name, Newcardnews.net has only been online for three months and is already a cause for concern to lawyers and leading satellite television companies.

Newcardnews, a not for profit web site with close to ten thousand registered members dedicated to the underground world of piracy, providing audio and video pirates with a discussion forum where they can exchange news, views and even settle out differences in an uncensored environment. All of this comes without a fee and all it's operations are solely financed by a Canadian company that has been a key player in the peer to peer (P2P) music file sharing scene over the past three years.

The news headlines that adorn NewCardNews are always current and up to date, a staff of journalists and insiders from the underground scene contribute to the site's unusually large library of material concerning intellectual property theft, federal wiretap violations, piracy busts as well as a section to dispel various industry rumors that are rampant in this side of the underground.

Several Audio interviews with well reputed individuals in the piracy underground are available on the site alongside several audio and video clips that have been the topic of discussion for many smaller, not so pirate sites.

Recently , Corporate lawyers have began to participate in discussion at NewCardNews while providing commentary on the content of the site and it's members. Due to excessive discussions pertaining to satellite piracy and decryption of signals, the site has also caught the attention of Directv inc. A California based leading Satellite television provider.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/8/prweb146071.htm


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In Competitive Move, I.B.M. Puts Code in Public Domain
Steve Lohr

I.B.M. plans to announce today that it is contributing more than half a million lines of its software code, valued at $85 million, to an open source software group.

The move is one of the largest transfers ever of proprietary code to free software, and I.B.M. is making the code contribution to try to help make it easier and more appealing for software developers to write applications in the Java programming language.

The I.B.M. step is a competitive tactic, to be sure. The company is one of the leading supporters of the Java technology, which was originally developed by Sun Microsystems. The more Java applications that are written, the more potential uses there are for I.B.M.'s software platform that runs and manages those applications, known as WebSphere.

I.B.M.'s WebSphere competes with Microsoft's software platform for handling applications, called .Net. And Microsoft has its own programming language, C#, which competes with Java.

Other companies also offer Java-based software environments, but Microsoft sees WebSphere as its main rival. At a meeting with financial analysts last Thursday, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, singled out WebSphere as the leading challenger to .Net. "Over the next few years, one of those will emerge as a better piece of software," Mr. Gates said.

I.B.M. is handing over the code for Cloudscape, a database written in Java, to an open source group, the Apache Software Foundation. Within the open source group, the database will be called Derby.

The Apache organization is best known as the steward of the Apache Web server, which is the software that powers most Web sites, though it also oversees many open- source Java projects. In the open source model of development, the code is distributed free and programmers are free to modify and debug it, within certain rules.

Apache will hold the licensing and intellectual property rights to the Cloudscape code. By transferring its technology into the public domain, Janet Perna, general manager for data management software at I.B.M., said, "We hope to spur the further development of the Java community."

Most business applications require some database functions like storing and looking up price or customer information, whether in a Web page or a laptop program. Cloudscape is intended for use as a simple database that resides inside a software application instead of as a full-fledged database program that runs on its own in corporate data centers as Oracle, I.B.M.'s DB/2, and Microsoft's SQL or MySQL do.

Placing software into the open source realm does not guarantee that it will succeed in attracting programmers to maintain and improve the code. Still, Java experts say that there is a need for a basic Java database and that the Cloudscape code could prove to be popular. "It is a nice, out-of-the-box database," said Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Foundation.

The I.B.M. move, according to industry analysts, is further evidence of its support for open source software. The company has been a contributor of people, code and marketing dollars to 150 open source projects. Its biggest commitment has been to Linux, an open source operating system that is an alternative to the operating systems of two of I.B.M.'s leading rivals, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

If freeing proprietary code will undermine competitors or enlarge support for WebSphere, analysts say, I.B.M. is now willing to do it. "The Cloudscape code is not a major factor in I.B.M.'s overall platform strategy," said Mike Gilpin, an analyst at Forrester Research, an Internet marketing firm. "So this makes sense for I.B.M."

The $85 million value that I.B.M. placed on its code contribution is the price Informix, a database company, paid in 1999 for Cloudscape, a small start-up company. In 2001, I.B.M. acquired Informix for $1 billion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/te...gy/03java.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2 Americans Held in China on Charges of Film Piracy
Michael Janofsky

Two Americans, including a member of a wealthy New York City family, have been arrested in China, where the authorities said an investigation into their business activities had led to the seizure of more than 210,000 counterfeit motion picture DVD's and nearly $100,000 in cash.

The Americans, Randolph Hobson Guthrie III, 37, and Cody Abram Thrush, 34, were among six people taken into custody on July 1 through a collaborative effort of Chinese and United States investigators. Under Chinese law, a suspect can be held for 30 days without a formal arrest, which in this case was announced on Thursday.

All six defendants will stand trial in China, officials said.

"The lure of high profit and a perceived lack of enforcement consequences has increasingly emboldened counterfeiters," said a statement by Michael J. Garcia, an assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

"This joint enforcement action shows a major advance in fighting intellectual property crime around the world, from where it originates to where it flourishes."

The arrests grew out of an effort called Operation Spring that began with federal authorities in Gulfport, Miss., and grew to include officials in Houston, Washington, Beijing and Shanghai. In addition to the seizures, American officials said Chinese authorities destroyed three warehouses that were used to store counterfeit DVD's for distribution around the world.

The Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said Kong Guangming, director of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, told reporters in Shanghai that the Americans had sold 100,000 of the DVD's worldwide.

American officials said they knew little about the Americans arrested in the case. But Mr. Guthrie, the son of a retired doctor, described himself in great length in a profile on a Web site for men seeking brides from Russia.

He said that his father was a plastic surgeon and that his mother ran a charity before she retired. He said he received a master's degree in business administration from Columbia University and moved to China in 1995 "because I thought that it would be an interesting place to live with many business opportunities."

As a resident of Shanghai who speaks English and Chinese, he said he owned a Web site that sold DVD's online. "My gross sales are currently about $25,000 per month, and I have 10 full-time employees," he wrote.

He said he sold the DVD's worldwide in a business he described as "very profitable." He also said that his family owned a bank, Bessemer Trust, a privately held financial management company based in New York. But Richard Davis, the company's general counsel, said no one named Guthrie had a controlling interest of the company.

Mr. Guthrie's father, Randolph Hobson Guthrie Jr., retired from his practice about 15 years ago. A receptionist at his former office provided a telephone number in Connecticut, but a message left seeking comment got no response.

American authorities said they had no information about Mr. Thrush.

The theft of intellectual property has been a major problem for American filmmakers, costing the industry about $3.5 billion a year in lost revenues worldwide. With new technologies making it inexpensive and ever easier to copy films onto DVD formats, privateers have become especially active in Russia, China and other countries.

Jack Valenti, the departing president and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Russia and China accounted for the vast majority of illegal sales and estimated that the ring broken up in China had cost American filmmakers $180 million in lost revenues.

Mr. Valenti, who is retiring next month, said he had pressed American and foreign leaders for years to intensify their efforts against illegal marketers. He said the arrests in China fulfilled a promise made by Vice Premier Wu Yi of China when she visited Washington three months ago.

"This raid is unprecedented," Mr. Valenti said. "She pledged in April that China would significantly reduce piracy by the year's end. This was a very crucial step in redeeming her promise."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/31/ny...31bootleg.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Judge Denies DirecTV Piracy Claim

Just having equipment no longer basis for suit
John Accola

In a court decision that could affect hundreds of TV piracy lawsuits in Colorado, a federal judge has ruled DirecTV can't sue a Colorado Springs man for merely possessing decoding equipment that can hijack satellite signals.

U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn dismissed DirecTV's illegal possession claim in the case, ruling the federal wiretap law making it illegal to purchase piracy equipment can't be used in civil lawsuits.

"Basically, (the judge is saying) you can only go after these people criminally, and only the U.S. attorney can do that," said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group in San Francisco.

The ruling, the first in Colorado on the issue, represents a big setback for DirecTV's mass litigation against Coloradans accused of stealing the satellite TV company's programming, said Schultz and an attorney for DirecTV defendant Basilio Losoya, a Colorado Springs utility worker.

"It's huge. . . . We're ecstatic," said Bethany Johnson at Garlin Driscol & Murray, a Louisville firm that represents scores of other Colorado defendants sued by DirecTV in Denver federal court.

In the future it will be much more difficult for DirecTV to prove its piracy claims in court or to negotiate private settlements that typically have been costing defendants about $3,500 each, Johnson said.

"DirecTV will have to prove someone intercepted its signal . . . and that's pretty hard to do," Johnson said. "What they have is pretty much all circumstantial evidence."

Blackburn, who is overseeing all of the DirecTV litigation in Colorado, didn't provide a written opinion in his July 21 ruling.

But it mirrors a Florida federal appeals court decision in June that said possession wasn't grounds to sue and said the company's interpretation of the law was "constitutionally problematic."

Losoya, the Colorado defendant, now has a motion pending to have the remaining signal interception claim dismissed on grounds of insufficient evidence, Johnson said. He's also filed counterclaims against DirecTV, accusing the nation's leading satellite-TV provider of abuse of process and filing a frivolous lawsuit.

DirecTV's general counsel Chris Murphy insisted Friday the Colorado ruling will have no practical effect on the company's court efforts to recover damages.

"It will be harder to sue . . . but we have never filed a single case based solely on a theory that the person possessed the device," Murphy said.

To date, only one DirecTV defendant - out of more than 200 in Colorado - has gone to trial. That case ended with a mixed verdict on July 1 in which both sides claimed victory.

Nationally, DirecTV has sued more than 24,000 people suspected of intercepting satellite programming without paying for it.

DirecTV sued Losoya last year, alleging his name showed up on purchase orders for two devices at a California mail-order company raided by federal agents for selling illegal decoding equipment.

Losoya, who testified in an affidavit that he's never subscribed to satellite-TV, admitted buying the devices but said they were never installed.

He said he had intended to use the mail-order devices to boost the power of his basic TV antenna but was unable to figure out a way to make it work.

DirecTV's Murphy said the potential ramifications of both the Colorado and the Florida appeals court rulings are being overstated by defense attorneys.

"And, I might add, it's still a crime to possess these devices," Murphy said.

Comments on the case

• Bethany Johnson of Garlin Driscol & Murray, a Louisville firm that represents scores of Colorado defendants sued by DirecTV: "DirecTV will have to prove someone intercepted its signal . . . and that's pretty hard to do. What they have is pretty much all circumstantial evidence."

• Chris Murphy, DirecTV's general counsel: "It will be harder to sue . . . but we have never filed a single case based solely on a theory that the person possessed the device."
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drm...078241,00.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

LAPD Arrests 3 in Raid on Alleged DVD Piracy Lab
James Bates

Los Angeles police continued their crackdown on bootleg movie operations Tuesday, arresting three men for allegedly making counterfeit DVDs in a Los Angeles apartment.

The alleged lab was housed on the second floor of a building on 18th Street near Venice Boulevard and La Brea Avenue.

Inside, police and investigators from the Motion Picture Assn. of America said they found two DVD towers, each containing seven disc burners. Also found were boxes containing counterfeit artwork for films and about 1,500 DVDs featuring camcorder copies of such films as "The Bourne Supremacy," "Spider-Man 2" and "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Arrested were Balfre Medina, 29; Rene Colorado, 34; and Henry Ibanez, 30.

The raid is the second in the last two weeks by a new anti-piracy unit formed by the LAPD. Police earlier raided a much larger operation on Burlington Avenue in the Pico-Union area. That lab had 40 DVD burners and nearly 6,000 counterfeit DVDs.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

F.B.I. To Tap Net Phone Calls
Stephen Labaton

Responding to a request by law enforcement officials, the Federal Communications Commission tentatively concluded Wednesday that new Internet-based telephone services should be subject to some of the same laws that enable the government to monitor conversations of terrorists and criminal suspects with relative ease.

While many crucial details remain to be completed in the months ahead as the agency begins to write new rules, the notice of proposed rulemaking issued by the commission on Wednesday was its first formal step into a subject of considerable controversy.

The Justice Department and F.B.I. have been saying for months that any efforts by the commission and its chairman, Michael K. Powell, to have the new Internet-phone carriers less regulated than traditional phone companies should not allow the Internet carriers to avoid the requirements of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.

That law gives law enforcement agencies the ability to tap into phone systems by requiring telephone carriers to engineer their systems so that federal agents have easy access for surveillance. In addition, the law shifts the considerable costs of surveillance to the industry.

The Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies have said that the Internet telephone services pose significant new difficulties in monitoring conversations of suspects.

Some industry executives have maintained that, although they support efforts of law enforcement, new rules could be both too expensive and too difficult to apply to the new technology. The United States Telecom Association, which represents the nation's largest telephone companies, said earlier this year that the ruling requested by law enforcement officials might "impede technological progress" and impose "unreasonable costs on carriers and consumers."

The rules being developed will determine how much the companies will have to pay and which companies will bear the heaviest burdens and obligations. Complicating the rulemaking is the expectation that as the Internet phone service gains popularity, a huge number of calls will be between an Internet user on one end of a conversation and a customer of a more traditional phone service on the other.

The new technology has posed some challenges to surveillance. Unlike the telephone service, which sends a steady electronic voice stream from caller to receiver over a wire, the Internet telephone service sends out bursts of data packets that are disassembled on one end of the conversation and reassembled on the other, just like e-mail and instant messaging.

Commission officials said that in the coming months they also expected to consider potential privacy issues raised by trying to monitor Internet-based conversations of suspects without also listening in on other conversations. A previous effort by the F.B.I. to monitor e-mail, called Carnivore, raised an outcry of criticism by privacy and civil liberties groups who said the surveillance equipment could tap into communications not subject to wiretap warrants.

Commission officials said Wednesday that they hoped the costs and technological challenges could be overcome by a group of companies.

In recent months, the group has developed a specialty of being able to monitor Internet phone conversations. The companies offering the surveillance technology include Verisign and Fiducianet. Executives and lawyers from the companies have been meeting with senior commission officials in recent weeks, according to documents on file with the commission, to describe their services and propose what the new rules should require.

Under the rules being considered, new Internet telephone companies like Vonage would be able to satisfy their obligations by retaining the companies that offer surveillance technology.

In a statement accompanying the proposal, Mr. Powell, the head of the commission, emphasized that trying to make the Internet-based phone services subject to provisions of the communications assistance act "does not indicate a willingness on my part to find that" such phone services should be subject to other regulations that apply to telephones.

"The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking we issue today," Mr. Powell said "demonstrates that the interests of the law enforcement community can be fully addressed for potential information services, and these interests need not be an excuse for imposing onerous common carrier regulations on vibrant new services."

The commission also determined that the law enforcement requirements applied to the popular "push to talk" services, a kind of walkie-talkie feature, offered by companies like Nextel.

In other developments, the commission approved a proposal to permit Tivo Inc., which sells television-recording devices, to market equipment that would enable users to transmit digital television programs across the Internet. Holders of copyrighted programming, like the Motion Picture Association and the National Football League, have opposed such equipment, arguing that it would encourage the illegal distribution of their programs.

The commission's decision approved 11 other proposed new technologies for copying programs, including those offered by Microsoft, Sony and RealNetworks.

A third measure approved by the commission prohibits sending spam as text messages to mobile telephones. The order approved by the agency does not apply to all unsolicited text messages.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/05/te...LYINV7FZ+wBoAQ


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

John Perry Barlow 2.0
The Thomas Jefferson of cyberspace reinvents his body -- and his politics.

Interviewed by Brian Doherty

John Perry Barlow is one of those fascinating figures that American culture regularly produces to our great benefit and occasional consternation. Born in 1947 in Wyoming, he ran his family’s cattle ranch for 17 years. Unique among Equality State ranchers, his words filled the ears of millions, because he wrote lyrics to the music of his childhood buddy, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. (Among his credits are "Estimated Prophet," "Hell in a Bucket," and "Throwing Stones.") Barlow and Weir met in the early 1960s at a Colorado prep school for, as Dead biographer Dennis McNally gently described it, "boys with behavioral problems."

In the ’80s, Barlow became fascinated by the new world opening up through personal computers, and he helped popularize the term and concept of cyberspace. Barlow took his way with words -- and the objections to authoritarianism that lead boys to display "behavioral problems" -- and launched the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1990 with his computer industry pals Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, and John Gilmore, an early employee of Sun Microsystems. EFF is a San Francisco–based political advocacy and legal action group dedicated to preserving and extending liberty in cyberspace. Barlow is currently its vice chairman.

In its first major case, EFF gave legal support to Steve Jackson Games, an Austin-based company that had been raided -- and had all its computers stolen -- by the Secret Service, which was seeking hacked telephone security documents. This case helped establish the principle that electronic mail, like personal papers, cannot be seized without warrants. Since then, EFF has played a vital role, through legal action and political agitation, in fighting attempts to mandate government access to all encrypted computer communications, stymieing efforts to restrict the free sale and export of cryptography, and battling laws such as the Communications Decency Act, which would have restricted speech on the Internet.

In 1996 Barlow became the Thomas Jefferson of the wired generation by authoring the doc forwarded ’round the world, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." In it, he famously declared to all governments that cyberspace was "naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us....Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter. There is no matter here."

Barlow no longer runs that Wyoming ranch, and these days he calls himself "a free agent and peripheral visionary." His 1994 Wired essay on the future of copyright in a digital world, "The Economy of Ideas," is taught in many law schools; his songs are sung wherever devotees of free-flowing jam bands, from the Dead to his new collaborators String Cheese Incident, gather to celebrate. (These two sides of his persona are not unrelated: Barlow’s views on intellectual property were influenced by his experience with the Dead, who famously allowed audience members to tape their concerts and openly encouraged trading, though not selling, of the tapes. By all accounts, this actually expanded the band’s audience and profits.)

Barlow recently surprised many of his libertarian friends by announcing that merely living a bohemian libertarian lifestyle was no longer sufficient. For most of his public career, Barlow had emphasized staking out one’s liberty in your personal life and in the arena of ideas, not the scrum of partisan politics. Now he feels very differently: He believes that the combination of George W. Bush and the rise of "plutocratic" corporations requires direct political engagement, and that getting rid of Bush overrides any other personal or political concerns.

With characteristic unpredictability, Barlow is set to become the star of a new reality TV show, tentatively titled Walking Time Bomb. It will chronicle extensive attempts to improve the health of Barlow, the titular self-abusing 56-year-old man. It is currently scheduled to air on the Discovery Channel in January.

In March, Barlow met with me in the beautiful loft apartment of a friend of his in downtown Austin. A man of many unfixed addresses, he was there to speak at South by Southwest, the well-known annual music, movies, and technology conference. He wore a tight black T-shirt with an image of a skull with familiar mouse ears. We sat on the couches forming an L in a back corner and talked for a couple of hours about being a libertine, and libertarian, in physical, mental, and political flux, while still exhibiting "behavioral problems" in the eyes of the material world’s authorities.

Reason: You are becoming a reality TV star. What’s that all about?

John Perry Barlow: I got talked into allowing my body to be the data set for a medical documentary/reality show being put together by the Discovery Channel and Canyon Ranch [a high-end spa and wellness center]. They wanted to showcase all the things you can do with virtual body imaging of physical systems, all the data you can assemble about what goes on in a body, and talk about the aging process and stopping the effects of long-term abuse on a middle-aged body.

I’ve been systematically mistreating myself for so long it was going to take something this heroic to turn things around. How often do you get well-funded financial entities to pay for your very expensive rehabilitation? They’ve been scanning me with everything you can imagine -- electron beam scanners and CAT scanners and MRIs -- and assembling all this information so I can see my own nervous system, my own cardiovascular system, in three dimensions. I can also examine the data being generated on a hormonal and endocrinological level, which creates a better sense of the soup that runs you and where levels should be in that soup and how you can alter them with diet and exercise. I make a really unlikely health nut, but I’m suddenly into it.

They’ll be filming me for five months. The interventions are all behavioral, not surgical or biotechnical. It turns out you can do a hell of a lot simply by changing the way you eat and exercise. They are feeding me drugs, and drug- like foods, and food-like drugs, and hypervitamins. So now I’m not smoking, not drinking, going to the gym, not eating refined carbohydrates. I’m much happier about the sight of leafy green vegetables than I used to be.

There are an awful lot of people like me because of the baby boom. Most of the people in my age cohort pretended to be 17 all along, to our detriment. We are not 17, and now it becomes demonstrably obvious we are not. The fact that we pretended we were has added wear and tear on our system.

Reason: Does it make you have second thoughts about your lifestyle libertarianism?

Barlow: No. I’m still strongly opposed to antismoking laws, strongly opposed to any law that regulates personal behavior.

Reason: Not from the legal standpoint, just personally: Should you not have treated yourself the way you have?

Barlow: I don’t really feel that way. I’m glad that it appears to be the case that I can stop doing it now and reap the fruits of not having done it all along. It’s another opportunity to have my cake and eat it too.

I was starting to see the bloody handprints on the wall. This just seemed like providential intervention. There are a lot of things I want to insert into the world in my lifetime, and I don’t want to have a voice that’s diminished by physical decrepitude.

I have a novelty-seeking gene as far as I can tell. Engaging in risky behavior is not something I’d ever be able to avoid. But it all depends on how you define your risk.

What really sticks out in my mind is an hour-and-a-half conversation I had with [Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author] Douglas Adams a couple of years ago. He was extolling the virtues of going to the gym every day, and how I ought do it, and he was so happy he was going to live to be 106. And he went to the gym the very next day and dropped dead of a massive heart attack. So I could go to the gym and it might kill me, as it did kill him. But I don’t think Douglas was under sufficient medical supervision.

Reason: How would you assess the accomplishments of EFF so far?

Barlow: Every existing power relation is up for renewal with cyberspace, and it was only natural there would be an awful lot of fracas where cyberspace met the physical world. EFF has been the primary mediator on that border. We have been very successful at protecting against excessive government encroachment into the virtual world.

Copyright and intellectual property are the most important issues now. If you don’t have something that assures fair use, then you don’t have a free society. If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.

Reason: Is it your goal to annihilate intellectual property?

Barlow: Let me differentiate my own view from ex cathedra EFF. I personally think intellectual property is an oxymoron. Physical objects have a completely different natural economy than intellectual goods. It’s a tricky thing to try to own something that remains in your possession even after you give it to many others.

Reason: You’ve said it’s better to think of intellectual work as a service you are paid for rather than an object of which you retain ownership.

Barlow: The way most people get paid for work done with their minds is on that basis. Lawyers, doctors, and architects don’t work for royalties, and they’re doing fine. Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.

Trying to own intellectual products and creating an economy of scarcity around them as we do with physical objects is very harmful to the development of culture and the ability to speak freely, and a very important principle not talked about much, which is the right to know. I think we have a right to know. It shouldn’t be something we have to purchase.

That’s me. EFF takes a somewhat more moderate view, but they are very concerned about fair use, and they don’t believe present copyright laws, especially as defined by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, are in the service of fair use at all. It was a very dumb piece of legislation, and if we could get rid of it, the world would be a better place.

Reason: What are some things EFF is doing in the intellectual property field?

Barlow: We are involved in some ongoing litigation regarding file sharing, and we’re starting to make some progress. We won Grokster v. MGM [which declared that the makers of software that facilitates potential copyright infringement are not liable for such infringement done by users]. But all that law is still in flux, and who knows how it will eventually shake out? The important principle is that there are noninfringing uses for peer-to-peer [P2P] systems. We are trying to do show the continual validity of the decision in the Betamax case [Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, a 1984 Supreme Court case that declared that neither home tapers of TV shows nor sellers of VCRs were infringing copyright]. When the VCR came into use, [Jack] Valenti [head of the Motion Picture Association of America] tried to stop it. But the Supreme Court ruled that there are significant noninfringing uses of a VCR that were so important to the First Amendment that Mr. Valenti’s concerns had to take the backseat.

It was a damn good thing for Valenti that they did, because the movie industry is now heavily dependent on the very thing he was trying to stop. They seem to have forgotten that, and are back saying the only purpose of P2P networks is for illegal trading of owned goods. We claim part of the reason for P2P is for legal trading of what ought to be in public domain. And what is in public domain in many cases.

More important is the ability to quote from movies. The motion picture industry doesn’t think you should be able to show anything from a movie unless you get their explicit permission. I think that creates a deadened culture so bound up in legal proceedings that it’s never able to do anything creative that involves moving images.

Reason: Do you want to change the fact that downloading a movie is illegal?

Barlow: EFF is well aware of the fact that it is not legal to download movies. Personally, I think if you’re downloading movies noncommercially, sharing them with friends as you do when you let them borrow a DVD that you rented last night, that’s perfectly fine.

I can’t speak for EFF on that, but I would like to change it. The motion picture industry should realize in an information economy that when you’ve got a lot of free access to commercial goods it does not necessarily reduce their value, because there is a relationship between value and familiarity in informational goods. Despite the fact that there’s a huge amount of motion picture piracy at the moment, theaters are doing better than ever.

I get pilloried for saying this -- "Oh, Barlow thinks the Grateful Dead model ought to extend to the world" -- but I don’t see any reason why it can’t. It worked for us and it has worked for everyone else I’ve ever seen try it. I think that what we stumbled into was a real deep -- we didn’t know it at the time -- a deep quality of how an information economy works. We really did just stumble into it. We just decided it was morally shaky to toss people out of concerts just because they had tape recorders. It’s bad for your karma to be mean to a Deadhead. And we thought we’d take a hit on it.

Reason: You recently sent out an e-mail to many of your friends in which you announced that you were coming to think that mere "lifestyle libertarianism" was no longer enough -- that the current political crisis now was so severe that actual gritty electoral political activism was a necessity and a duty. Why?

Barlow: I think you can only go so far ignoring the opposing forces in the cultural war now arrayed against bohemian libertarians. It’s like in the ’60s, when there were two distinct camps in the boho scene, one of which was Marxist and ideological and political and engaged and humorless to beat the band. And the other one was acid- laced and freewheeling and took the view that if you could change consciousness, politics would take care of itself. I was of that view to a large extent.

I’ve gone back and forth with politics. I’ve been a Republican county chairman. I was one of Dick Cheney’s campaign managers when he first ran for Congress. But generally speaking, I felt to engage in the political process was to sully oneself to such a degree that whatever came out wasn’t worth the trouble put in. I thought it was better to focus on changing yourself and people around you, to not question authority so much as bypass it whenever possible.

But by virtue of our abdication, a very authoritarian, assertive form of government has taken over. And oddly enough, it is doing so in the guise of libertarianism to a certain extent. Most of the people in the think tanks behind the Bush administration’s current policies are libertarians, or certainly free marketeers. We’ve got two distinct strains of libertarianism, and the hippie-mystic strain is not engaging in politics, and the Ayn Rand strain is basically dismantling government in a way that is giving complete open field running to multinational corporatism.

Reason: What are some of the specific actions or policies of the Bush administration that alarm you more than Clinton did, or Reagan or the first Bush?

Barlow: An unwillingness to engage in any kind of mitigation of the free market. The one thing that I know government is good for is countervailing against monopoly. It’s not great at that either, but it’s the only force I know that is fairly reliable. But if you’ve got a truly free market you only have a free market for a while before it becomes completely regulated by those aspects of it that have employed power laws to gain a complete monopoly.

Reason: You’ve said that Microsoft is in a position where it is achieving control over our minds. Could you elaborate?

Barlow: Any time you engage with information, the reality that you extract from that information is shaped by the tools that deliver it. Microsoft’s information presentation is such a monoculture that it edits out a lot of other realities. So you have a new kind of monopoly that affects the way people think in ways that are invisible to them. It’s a very dangerous form of monopoly, especially now that they are talking about the "trusted computing" model, where it will be very difficult for you to save and then pass on documents on systems without identifying yourself.

That system is supposed to be designed to help control digital rights management. By its nature it will be great for political rights management, because it’s an enormously penetrative surveillance tool, and it makes it hard to do anything anonymously involving a computer. Here is a monopoly in essence, the Wintel monopoly -- Windows/Intel -- which has enormous global power and which no government is willing to stand up to, at least effectively, so far.

The multinationals have reached the point where they are essentially replacing the nation-state. I look at a multinational as an organism. It is not a human being and doesn’t have any characteristics of a human being. It is as much unlike a human being as a coral reef is unlike a coral polyp or an anthill unlike an ant.

It is an extremely advanced piece of evolutionary design that is capable of having its way in the world and competing with human beings for the world’s resources. From a multinational’s standpoint, the best thing that can happen is the best thing that can happen right now. They have to deliver maximum shareholder value today, next quarter, which means that they don’t worry about whether there are going to be resources for them to exploit in 10 years.

We need them. We have a deeply symbiotic relationship with large corporations. I wouldn’t want to eliminate them, because they are the engines of our economic well being at the moment. But we need something -- and I think it’s governmental -- to reregulate the market and make it free, because the multinationals have taken it away.

Reason: What is it you are recommending bohemian libertarians do right now?

Barlow: We have to re-engage in the political process we have. Democracy actually works. You could make the argument that it’s working too well in America -- people are really getting exactly the government that they want. That is to say, the people who bother to engage themselves in the really tedious work of being a political activist -- having meetings in church basements and putting signs on people’s lawns.

I have grave misgivings about John Kerry, but I certainly don’t have misgivings about Kerry that equal the terror I have about another four years of Bush. What he’s done to aspects of the Constitution that are there to assure individual rights is breathtakingly bad.

So I’m becoming an active Democrat. I wasn’t one until just a few months ago, because I felt there was more room for libertarian thought inside the Republican Party. I never found the Libertarian Party was a credible political institution. It holds a pure line, and I’m glad there’s somebody out there defining that point of view, but in terms of actually having power, making a difference....There are libertarian wings in both the Democratic and Republican parties, and in the past I found it most effective to be inside the Republican Party acting as a libertarian. But I’ve switched.

One of the things going on in my mind when I wrote that note [announcing the decision to embrace political activism over lifestyle libertarianism] was that I’d just been busted for having a really trivial amount of marijuana in a checked bag under a PATRIOT Act search. I was arrested, hauled off in irons, an ugly experience. At San Francisco airport, for, like, three joints’ worth of dope.

Before the plane took off, Delta employees came on and said, Mr. Barlow, you have to step off the plane, and bring your personal effects. Then San Francisco cops arrested me. I spent the day in Redwood City in jail. It was a chilling experience. It’s happening, and happening a lot. The Transportation Security Administration is now routinely searching checked bags. They are not just looking for explosives. I’ve taken the government on, subpoenaing their training procedures and search requirements to see whether or not any attention is paid to the Fourth Amendment in these searches.

The Constitution doesn’t say anything about national security. The Fourth Amendment is the Fourth Amendment, and they’re gonna have to show me that it isn’t. Right now they are refusing to answer subpoenas. I’m trying to suppress evidence based on it being an improper search.

Most people in this situation just say whatever, and plead out, but I’m willing to put myself on the line for it. The worst that can happen is they’ll be especially nasty if they convict me. It’s a misdemeanor anyway. But to just plead out would be abdicating my citizen’s responsibility to defend the Constitution. You have to fight for your freedom individually and not say, "Oh well, it’s not worth the trouble."

I’m already being a lot pricklier than they expected. They asked for a continuation at the last hearing because they said that the Department of Homeland Security had been unable to come up with a set of guidelines regarding the release of the subpoenaed materials for national security reasons. So our national security depends on whether or not they can get me for carrying marijuana on that airplane.

The ideal thing would be to have charges dismissed with prejudice, and then I sue the shit out of them. I’m merely defending myself right now.

Reason: Would this situation be any different if John Kerry were president?

Barlow: It would certainly be better. I don’t think anyone is as good as he ought to be.

I had a conversation with Kerry. It was pretty disheartening. I asked how he felt about civil liberties. He said, "I’m for ’em!" That’s great, but how do you feel about Section 215 of the Patriot Act? He said, "What’s that?" I said, it basically says any privately generated database is available for public scrutiny with an administrative subpoena. He says, "It says that?" I say, "You voted for it!"

He says, "Well, it was a long bill...." Then he went off on this riff about how we had to take some serious measures to stop this terrorist threat, etc. I said, "I fail to see how terrorists present anything like as big a threat to liberty in America as you guys do by passing this kind of legislation. The founding principles of this republic are not being defended where they need to be defended."

He seemed somewhat receptive, but he’s a very political guy. Even among his kind. I think he’s been in the U.S. Senate long enough to have his backbone dissolved. This was at a small dinner of mostly wealthy people giving him money. But I think Kerry will be somewhat better than Bush, if for no other reason than he is not on the same side in the culture war. Kerry’s a Deadhead. He inhaled. He said he didn’t like it that much, but he certainly is not out there ready to impose steeper mandatory sentences on possession of drugs.

Reason: But is he ready to eliminate the ones we have?

Barlow: I think so. He’s not about to discuss it publicly. Right now he’s trying to define himself as only slightly to the left of George Bush.

Kerry isn’t perfect, but the alternative is just completely....I hate to keep carping on this, but within the libertarian movement we’re gonna have to actually sit down and talk about where we stand on the two variants, because one of them is actually part of the problem at this point. I used to think of myself as both kinds of libertarian, but I have pretty well parted company with [D.C.-based leader of libertarian-leaning conservatives] Grover Norquist at this point. I don’t see anything particularly free about a plutocracy.

Reason: I’ve been rereading some of your early ’90s writings about the digital future, and you sounded a lot more optimistic then, with a much more "nothing can stop us now" attitude.

Barlow: We all get older and smarter.

Reason: Still, it seems to me you were mostly right. The Internet promise came true. We do have access to more news, viewpoints, opinions, cultural products than could have been imagined 20 years ago. Doesn’t that make worrying about corporate media consolidation a rather antediluvian fear?

Barlow: You now have two distinct ways of gathering information beyond what you yourself can experience. One of them is less a medium than an environment -- the Internet -- with a huge multiplicity of points of view, lots of different ways to find out what’s going on in the world. Lots of people are tuned to that, and a million points of view have bloomed. It creates a cacophony of viewpoints that doesn’t have any political coherence at all, a beautiful melee, but it doesn’t have the capacity to create large blocs of belief.

The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.

It’s a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity. In my heart of hearts I’m with you. I’m an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I’m not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

http://www.reason.com/0408/fe.bd.john.shtml

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Unpublished photographs of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison among the items.

Computer Users Share Private Files With Their MP3s
Christopher Borowski

Private photographs, confidential financial documents and even military secrets have joined the list of files that computer users can download as they scour the Internet.

Millions of new users are looking for media files with peer-to-peer (P2P) programmes such as Kazaa, which allow users to share all types of files -- usually illegally -- from designated folders on their hard drives across the net.

This has led to more and more people looking for confidential and private files either for simple amusement but, increasingly, for much more sinister purposes, say the authors of web sites which post some of these documents and pictures.

"One way files are being offered is by people bringing work home from the office and putting it on their home computers where they have a P2P application installed," said Rick Wallace, who last month launched the SeeWhatYouShare.com web site.

"At the office, their computer is behind a firewall that protects the network, but many do not have that protection at home and it can lead to great security lapses."

Security of files and networks has become a hot issue. As more inexperienced users look for MP3 music clips, movies, television shows, pornography and computer programmes, they often leave the digital door to their computers wide open.

BigChampagne, which tracks file sharing, estimates that 8.3 million people used P2P networks in June, off the April peak of 9.3 million.

One does not need the skills of a hacker to grab private files from the thousands of users of programs such as LimeWire or BearShare. Even most home firewalls, which keep out malicious outsiders, don't prevent designated files from being shared.

All that is required is patience and skills sharpened on Google or other Internet search engines.

Variety Of Secrets

Wallace wants his web site to showcase a variety of private files to warn the users who unwillingly share them.

The files he has posted include passwords for various Internet services, personal bank information, confidential police reports, court documents and tax returns. All the information one needs to open up a bank account or virtually assume another person's identity.

Wallace has blacked out the private details from all the documents, but seeing what's out there is scary enough.

He originally posted a screen shot of what appeared to be military documents ready for downloading using one of the P2P programs. The site also included various photos of U.S. soldiers with civilians and burning military vehicles and aircraft apparently taken with digital cameras in Iraq.

"I felt it was important that the (U.S.) Department of Defense see what is going on first hand, without it being filtered through the bureaucracy," Wallace said.

"Since I launched my site, military officials have contacted me to see how I received this information and what they need to do to fix the problem."

He has now removed the files.

One Internet user who asked not to be identified said that in recent months using the popular LimeWire program he found secret military and government documents and unpublished photographs of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Hard Disk Wide Open

Developers of P2P programs encourage users to share their media files by designating which folders other users may have access to, building up a large online library of files.

But some programs, unless instructed otherwise, leave their users especially vulnerable to prying eyes.

They search the entire hard drive not only for media files, but also programs and documents created by Microsoft Word and Excel as well Quicken, which keeps track of financial transactions and account details.

"The LimeWire installation is a little dangerous for people who don't pay attention and we'll have to address this issue in future releases," said Greg Bildson, chief operating officer and chief technology officer at LimeWire LLC.

Bildson said the company must balance the need to make the program simple to use while protecting novice users. There are three million active LimeWire users worldwide.

For now, Bildson and other experts advise users to be very careful when they install any P2P software and designate which folders to share with the outside world. They also should periodically monitor files uploaded from their computer and keep in mind that some programs continue to run in the background even when they appear to be closed.

With the growing popularity of digital cameras, photographs make up the largest percentage of files shared unintentionally as a growing number of people load home pictures onto their hard drives.

"There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of photos out there," said Rich Vogel, who posts many of the images he finds on his 'Found Photos' web site (http://www.10eastern.com/foundphotos.html).

The site includes various everyday shots ranging from the mundane to embarrassing to just plain bizarre.

"I mainly look for pictures that will make you smile or display interesting photography," Vogel said. "But there is a voyeuristic aspect to this."
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle...section= news

Note: Some of the people mentioned in this article are members of p2p-zone.com. – Jack

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Governor's Bobblehead Says Farewell To Arms
Lynda Gledhill,

Sacramento -- The Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger bobblehead will bobble once more.

The governor has settled a lawsuit against an Ohio firm that produces bobblehead dolls in his image, according to a press release from his production company.

The former Hollywood actor, who is fiercely protective of his image on the stump and on the screen, sued the company in April to halt the production of the plastic dolls that featured a gun-toting Schwarzenegger in a business suit.

Under the new agreement, Ohio Discount Merchandise Inc. can produce Schwarzenegger-the-politician dolls -- without the gun. The $19.99 dolls will be available online, according to the statement.

The doll in question featured Schwarzenegger in a gray suit, white shirt and red tie. But he was also carrying what looks like an assault rifle and had a bullet-clip belt draped over his shoulder -- items he has not been known to carry since he became governor but which had been featured strongly in several of his movies.

Ohio Discount also agreed to donate a portion of its sales of the upcoming bobblehead doll to Schwarzenegger's nonprofit Arnold All-Stars after- school program in Los Angeles.

"We are very happy with the settlement," said Todd Bosley, president of Ohio Discount. He said the new bobblehead will be out in three or four months.

But not everyone is happy with the settlement.

The original Schwarzenegger bobblehead was part of a five-doll deal that included several Democratic presidential candidates, organized by Washington, D.C., lobbyist John Edgell, to raise money for two cancer and children's charities.

Edgell, who was also named in Schwarzenegger's suit, said Monday he opposes the settlement and plans to seek an injunction.

He has accused Ohio Discount of not making the promised contributions to the original charities and refusing to disclose its financial data, and he alleges the deal will take money away from the original two charities.

Representatives for Schwarzenegger and his Oak Productions Co. declined to comment.

Bosley said Edgell's allegations are false and that his books were open. He said he severed ties with Edgell when the former congressional staffer sought offers for a "Groping Arnold" bobblehead, after accusations surfaced that Schwarzenegger had groped and sexually degraded several women during his years in Hollywood.

Edgell has now created a prototype for a "Governor Girlie Man Arnold" bobblehead, featuring the governor in a pink suit and heels -- a reference to Schwarzenegger's comments that Democratic state lawmakers who did not agree to his budget proposal were "girlie men."

In the original suit, Ohio Discount, which produces a variety of bobbleheads, such as President Bush, Hillary Clinton and Jesus, had claimed a First Amendment right to produce the Schwarzenegger dolls.

The original lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, said Oak Productions "does not permit Schwarzenegger's name, photograph, likeness or voice to be used on commercial products, on packaging of commercial products or in advertising for commercial products or services" unless authorized.

Edgell said he would continue to seek to produce the assault weapon- toting Schwarzenegger.

"It was a political statement to tweak Arnold because he pledged to support an assault weapon ban and hasn't done anything," Edgell said. "Also because he stars in all these violent movies and has a pro-kid image ... Schwarzenegger should not be the only public figure immune from the public's right to poke fun at him."

But Bosley said they are satisfied with the settlement, even though he maintains his company would have won the lawsuit.

"It made more sense to settle," he said.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NG0H81NHH1.DTL


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For The Record 6 August
ElectricNewsNet

Three US men have pled guilty to charges of using a wi-fi access point to break into the systems of a Michigan store. Paul Timmins, 23, and friend Adam Botbyl, 21, used the store's wireless access point, which they said they discovered while wardriving: driving around with laptops and seeking out wireless networks. Botbyl and his friend Brian Salcedo, 21, allegedly returned later to the same access point and used it to steal credit card numbers from the department store network. Botbyl and Salcedo are likely to face long prison sentences. The case is believed to be the first involving wardriving in the US.

Users of the Opera browser are being urged to upgrade to version 7.54 of the software, which has been modified to patch a hole that could let attackers access the local file system on the user's computer. The vulnerability was first discovered by Israeli company Grey Magic, which has posted full details of the problem on-line. Information and the upgrade are also available from Opera.
http://www.enn.ie/news.html?code=9546497


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Universities Provide File Sharing Services But Can't Police Illegal Activity
Shannon Fiecke

While several universities have agreed to provide digital song subscription programs for students in an attempt to discourage illegal music file sharing, Winona State University's Joe Whetstone is taking a wait-and-see approach.

The vice president of technology said there are arguments for and against contracting with subscription programs that Napster and others offer. Winona State and Saint Mary's University have policies against illegal file sharing, but their technology staff say cracking down on it is a never-ending game they can't win.

This fall, through Napster 2.0 Online, students at several other colleges and universities will receive access to unlimited streaming and song downloads at a discount.

Whetstone said he's looked into similar services. Some argue people won't use them because sharing music is quicker than using a subscription, and it's free, he said. Others believe if subscription downloads become cheap enough, people will rather use them than break the law, he said.

The vice president also is concerned Winona State could be liable if students abuse the subscription service. It could promote more illegal file sharing, Whetstone said, because after a student buys a song they might still share it. And some could be tempted to pass along their password to non-students.

But the verdict on subscription programs is still out, Whetstone said. Though Winona State has led the nation in its laptop policy, he said he's going to let others lead this time.

Monitoring usage

Winona State's technology policy bans students from using university equipment for illegal purposes such as filing sharing, but Whetstone said his department does not actively track abusers.

"We don't want to be in the practice of policing and monitoring and filtering of traffic," he said. "I don't think it's our job."

Not only does Whetstone think it is inappropriate for his department to monitor student activity, he believes doing so would be time consuming.

You'll never win with 8,000 students, he said, and Winona State could employ two to three full-time people alone just to monitor and route out illegal usage.

Francis Speck, the acting director of technology at the St. Mary's Winona campus, concurs that other than education, there is only so much a university can do. Ultimately, it's up to students' personal ethics, he said.

"We can't stop it anyway," Speck said.

Whetstone's department doesn't actively filter or search through student records either, but it does track abnormalities in bandwidth usage.

Before the university installed a "packet shaper" through a company called Packeteer, Winona State Systems Manager Dave Gresham said some students took up so much bandwidth, others didn't have enough to Web surf or do research.

"Napster came out, and it was a problem over a night," he said.

The department received complaints from dorm residents with poor Internet access, but finding offenders was time-consuming, Gresham said. Technology services would focus on excessive abusers and work with Housing and Residential Life to inform students that their behavior violated school policy and clogged the system.

"For a lot of students it's a learning curve," Whetstone said. Some students didn't know their behavior was illegal, he said.

"I think our job is to educate and talk about integrity," he said.

Preventing abuse

The packet shaper works, Greshman said, by decreasing the amount of bandwidth available to those using file-sharing servers when other students get on to use the Internet for purposes that are typically more academic-related. It's not a filter, Whetstone said, but essentially squeezes "the pipe" for certain kinds of activity.

In the past couple years, St. Mary's has used a similar system called rate-limiting, which controls the amount of bandwidth each student gets over a period of time. It still allows downloads, Speck said, but slows down excessive use of them. He hopes the system will continue working well but said there is always the possibility of someone hacking into it and change settings.

Before rate-limiting, St. Mary's expended much effort trying to hamper peer-to-peer sharing by blocking the affects of certain server protocols, Speck said. The university's focus switched when computer viruses and worms, which can be caused by file sharing, became problematic.

Speck said file sharing servers try to get past road blocks, and some use encryption.

"We reached a point where we had to get ahead of the game and try to stay ahead," Speck said.

As far as installing filtering systems, which Winona State doesn't use, to hamper illegal activity, college students would eventually learn how to get around them, Whetstone said.

"I don't think you can win," he said. "(The tools) are only as good as you keep updating them."

He said there was one case of student who brought his computer into the computer help desk who had a lot of pornography on his machine. After staff determined that it wasn't child pornography, they requested the student remove it and cited the appropriate use policy, Whetstone said.

Enforcing the law

The Recording Industry Association of America has subpoenaed the identities hundreds of users, who trade copyrighted music files, from Internet service providers and universities, including the University of Minnesota.

Whetstone said the RIAA has not contacted Winona State, but if it did, the university would need a court order to give out student information.

St. Mary's has the same policy in regards to identifying students, Vice President and General Counsel Ann Merchlewitz said.

However, the Catholic university has received e-mail complaints from the RIAA, as well as people claiming St. Mary's students tried hacking into their computers, Speck said.

In these instances, Speck said he's forwarded the e-mails along to the offending students and copied the messages to the university's legal counsel.

But as of Wednesday, Speck said St. Mary's hasn't received subpoenas requesting user identification.

Sometimes the Winona State technology desk comes across what appears to be copyrighted information on students' laptops. While staff haven't asked for receipts to prove students own the screensavers or MP3s stored on their machines, if a student has an excessive amount of music files, Whetstone said staff will ask the student to remove them.

Whetstone also said there have been "young entrepreneurs" who have sold a password to access their files on the network neighborhood.

This is against policy which says students can't be running a business out of the dorms, he said, and offenders have been told they can't do it.
http://www.winonadailynews.com/artic...ilesharing.txt


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

State's Colleges Pull Plug On Illegal Sharing
James Malone

John Gibson gleefully remembers hooking his new computer into the high-speed Internet network at Murray State University and joining the world of illegal music downloading.

"I was like a kid at Christmas times 10,000," the 24-year-old said. "It was like my parents had gone out and brought me every G.I. Joe ever made."

Christmas on campus is over, school and music industry officials warn.

Under pressure from music industry lawyers, Kentucky colleges say they are boosting efforts this fall to stop illegal downloading.

They say they have installed new equipment and software to block downloading, will fine and even expel violators and are working with the recording industry to provide students legal access to music.

If those measures don't work, they're warning students that the recording industry could sue, they said.

The recording industry filed its first file-swapping suits against 40 Kentuckians in federal courts in May, including 37 "John Doe" defendants in two Eastern District lawsuits and three alleged copyright violators in Munfordville, Oak Grove and Guthrie in Kentucky's Western District.

It was not immediately clear whether any of those defendants are students using college networks, but Kentucky college officials said the recording industry has warned them of specific instances of illegal downloading on their campuses.

Illegal downloading is done through software that allows computer users to swap music and files containing movies.

The Washington Post reports that more than 40 state attorneys general are set to warn major peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that they may face enforcement actions if they do not take steps to stem illegal activity on the networks.

In a letter to the heads of KaZaA, Grokster, BearShare, Blubster, eDonkey2000, LimeWire and Streamcast Networks, the attorneys general write that peer-to-peer software "has too many times been hijacked by those who use it for illegal purposes to which the vast majority of our consumers do not wish to be exposed."

The letter, which could be sent as early as today, is the first time state law enforcement officials have thrown their combined weight against the networks, which allow free sharing of digital files.

The Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry, estimates that piracy costs the industry $4.2 billion a year worldwide. It also affects the schools because of the enormous amounts of space the practice takes up on their computer networks.

According to a Duke University study, illegal downloading of music and movies can consume more than half of a school's bandwidth, the electronic pipeline that carries data.

That can slow legitimate research and educational file transfers to a crawl, according to the study and network administrators.

Educators said they do not monitor content to and from student computers but can measure the traffic and take action when the music industry identifies violators.

Security experts working for the record industry can identify the unique electronic address of a computer hosting a copyrighted file for download on a peer-to-peer network. They get in touch with the owner of the account by tracing the address.

Janice Thomasson, a network administrator at Murray State University, said before the college took new anti-downloading measures, it received about 20 warnings a month of potential illegal downloading.

The number of such record company notices varies from about 150 a semester at the University of Louisville to about 130 last year at Morehead State.

After Murray State installed an electronic choke on its network 18 months ago that effectively halted peer-to-peer music swapping, the copyright notices disappeared, Thomasson said.

The school's message to student downloaders: "It's just not cool anymore," she said.

The University of Louisville does not actively police for illegal downloading but acts when told of infringement, said Alice Radmacher, an analyst in the university's information technology department.

Brandon Vincent, a network security analyst at Western Kentucky University, said his school plans to install more equipment this fall to monitor and control bandwidth.

Other countermeasures

Almost all Kentucky colleges, including Morehead State University and the University of Kentucky, yank Internet access from copyright violators. Some, including Morehead State, demand students complete counseling before going back online.

Repeated violations can invoke a permanent ban.

Morehead recently imposed charges of up to $200 apiece for student violators to reconnect to the university network, said Jeff Liles, assistant vice president for university marketing.

At Eastern Kentucky University, violators are referred to the student court before campus Internet privileges are returned, said Marc Whitt, a school spokesman. Penalties can range from a reprimand and fine to expulsion.

"We had notices of copyright violation in 2003, but none in 2004," Whitt said.

In another effort to help keep students out of court, some schools are working with businesses that sell music, such as Napster and iTunes, the popular Apple downloading service.

Indiana University, for example, plans to hold its first music fair this fall, inviting companies that sell online music. Duke University is giving 1,600 incoming freshmen iPods, the Apple iTunes player that it says students will be able to use to download lectures and course materials.

And Morehead State will include a link on its Web site to the Apple service.

Students listening?

The threat of legal action for music trading has worried Anthony Bush, 20, a Western Kentucky University student from Hopkinsville.

"You never know who will get you," he said. He would not say whether he downloaded music.

Bush and roommate Dejuan Johnson, 23 of Hopkinsville, said that rather than risk being caught while downloading illegally, they would be willing to test a paid download service, if the cost was reasonable.

"A lot of people are scared about the fines," Johnson said.

Evan Hildebran, 22, a senior computer science major at Western from Muldraugh, said he thinks the industry lawsuits show that the prospect of getting caught is real. "People ask, `Why do I need to download music and get into trouble?'"

For Murray State senior Adam L. Mathis, downloading is like stealing a compact disc.

"I decided it wasn't the Christian thing to do," said Mathis, a 21-year-old Boaz resident who intends to become a Lutheran minister.

John Dillon, a communications professor at Murray State who studies Internet influences on culture, said some students who download music illegally believe they are invulnerable.

"Students seem to be ethically challenged," said Dillon, who is in his 20th year of teaching.

Gibson, who used to be a resident assistant in a Murray State dorm, said students seem to believe they are savvy about potential sanctions.

One student was so concerned after downloading a movie that he formatted his hard drive, removed it from the computer and shipped it to his parents for disposal, Gibson said.

But others, he said, simply look for ways to thwart countermeasures aimed at stopping music trading.

A music aficionado, Gibson has built a large music collection. Now pursuing a master's degree in communications at Murray State and living off campus, Gibson said he and his friends still download. But he also knows that times have changed.

"It's like a war," he said. "A war they just can't win. Each side comes up with something new."
http://www.courier-journal.com/local...805-10083.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The File Sharing Experiment

Introduction
Jonathan A. Zdziarski

The file sharing experiment is an attempt to catalog some financial figures about how much revenue the industries backing organizations such as the RIAA, MPAA, and SPA have gained by file sharing. The file sharing database consists of a list of items and prices which contributing users have both purchased, and would not have purchased if they hadn't first downloaded/shared identical or related files. The ultimate goal is to show what (if any) significant revenue the RIAA, MPAA, and SPA have to credit to the file sharing community, and hopefully convince some of the organizations supporting them that their money would be better spent taking advantage of this market rather than trying to exterminate it.

It has always been my belief that various industries have actually earned more revenue as a direct result of file sharing, and that file sharing works FOR the industry. Recent figures such as the music industry's latest earnings report have shown results contrary to what the RIAA has consistently complainted about in that file sharing hurts the industry. So if you would like to contribute, click submit above. Post your merchandise, how much you paid, and why you wouldn't have bought it if you first hadn't downloaded something. No IP addresses or personal information is logged - so there's nothing to subpoena. The complete (growing) catalog is available for review by clicking here. The totals shown below are only temporary, and may be reduced later once the logs are crunched through a filter (to detect bogus entries or flooding), or as users help identify suspect or bogus entries.
http://www.nuclearelephant.com/projects/sharing/


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hail To The Musical Thieves

MP3 fans have the weight of numbers, says Dominic Knight, so make personal copying legal or else.

I used to be just another one of those tossers who couldn't stop boasting about their iPod. But according to Tuesday's Herald, using my overpriced music player on the train doesn't just identify me as another iPoseur.

Like a yakuza's tattoo or the telltale colours of the Crips and Bloods, those ostentatious white headphones mark me as an outlaw. I'm no longer merely conforming to the latest hipster trend. I'm sticking it to The Man.

Julian Lee's article ("Click at your own risk", Herald, August 3), said it was legal to make a copy of a recording for personal use in the US, but in Australia, even copying it onto my computer or iPod is illegal. So when I shelled out $30 to buy my mum a Norah Jones CD for Christmas, I only bought a licence to listen to the recording. (And having done so, Norah can have it back.)

This legal quirk has made me a rebel. And this is great news, because I've always wanted to rage against the machine, but have never really known how.

Now, my iPod no longer houses my CD collection. It's the safehouse for my stash of contraband. Defying those faceless corporations is as easy as firing up my little buddy for those few moments before its battery sputters out. Who would have thought that listening to Coldplay could be so subversive?

Upon learning I was a dangerous musical renegade, I thought about parading my iPod outside the Australian Federal Police offices, hoping to get arrested for Fighting the Power. I fantasised about becoming the first revolutionary leader of the digital era - a kind of Malcolm X- Box.

But unfortunately, even though it should result in a jail sentence, I doubt anyone will ever get arrested for copying a few Shannon Noll tracks. There are 100,000 MP3 player owners in Australia, and it just isn't practical to throw us all in prison. For one thing, it would decimate the nation's supply of interior designers.

Since the cassette deck, there has been no effective way of stopping home users from copying music. Apple instructs you not to steal music on the iPod's box, but that's as unrealistic as the stern warning on my VCR brochure that tells me not to record anything off the television because it would breach copyright.

Even the latest "copy-protected" CDs are totally ineffective - Radiohead's last CD refused to play in my car stereo, so I had to use my computer to copy it onto a blank disc. No wonder they called their album Hail to the Thief.

As common as music copying is, situations where everyone flouts the law are problematic. Laws need to be enforced if they're good or changed if they're not, because otherwise the whole system is undermined.

If we stop caring about the illegality of copying CDs we've bought, what is there to make us care about the illegality of downloading albums we haven't?

Record executives - whose MP3 players presumably contain only recordings of themselves singing in the shower - constantly complain that illegal downloading hurts CD sales.

So it's amazing that they want to discourage people who've actually stumped up for a disc from transferring their music onto their iPods. They should support legalising personal copying and beg Apple to launch its iTunes Music Store service here, so there are legal options available.

As long as we're buying the discs, they're still making money - which, in the age of free file-sharing services, can no longer be guaranteed.

Renegades like me who laugh in the face of danger and delight in flouting the system are not going to stop using our iPods, because they're so vastly superior to CDs.

So record companies need to decide whether they're going to adapt to consumers by offering legal ways of using MP3 players, or go broke as illegal use becomes even more widespread. Because as the Village People once said, you can't stop the music.

Nobody can stop the music. Not the record companies, not the Feds, and not even The Man.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...oneclick=true#


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Apple, RealNetworks Live in Never Never Land
Jon Newton

Apple FairPlay "consumer control" technology prevents people from playing iTunes tracks, which cost a dollar per track, on players Apple doesn't like, which is just about everything -- except iPods, of course.

Apple wouldn't deal with RealNetworks to allow music from the RealPlayer music store to be transferred to music players in general -- including iPods. So Real came up with Harmony Technology to allow people to buy Real tracks and play them on any player, whether Apple likes it or not.

Consider this statement: "The purpose...is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. It allows you to free your iTunes Music Store (protected AAC / MP4) purchases from their DRM restrictions with no sound quality loss. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes."

Is the quote above from the Real statement? Nope. It's from Hymn, the latest incarnation of a free application that's been available in the real world for some time. Not at all incidentally, Apple tried to crush it, issuing cease and desist orders, and generally being unpleasant.

Major Storm

Apple would refer to the Hymn site as a hacker page offering a hacker application, because its software is designed to let people who have paid good money for iTunes tracks play them on any device they want. There was a major storm in April when PlayFair, Hymn's similarly home-made predecessor, turned up. It decoded iTunes protected-AAC files to unencrypted AAC files without quality loss.

"I buy all of my music," the author said at the time.

He explained: "In fact, most of the music I buy, I buy from the iTunes Music Store. However, I want to be able to play the music I buy wherever I want to play it without quality loss, since I PAID FOR that quality."

He added: "I want musicians to make money. I want Apple to make money. I don't condone sharing music through P2P networks with the masses, though I believe making a mix CD or playlist for a friend is okay. I also think the RIAA are a bunch of crooks, but that's another story."

Fair Use

Apple stomped PlayFair, it reappeared, Apple stomped it again, and then it turned up yet again, only this time as Hymn. Meanwhile, Jon Lech Johansen of Hollywood, QuickTime for Windows AAC memory dumper and DeDRMS fame recently released FairKeys for retrieving FairPlay keys from Apple's servers.

It's called fair use.

"Compatibility, choice and quality are critically important to consumers, and Harmony provides all of these to users of the iPod and over 70 other music devices, including those from Creative, Rio, iRiver and others," RealNetworks says. "Consumers, and not Apple, should be the ones choosing what music goes on their iPod."

RealNetworks claims its Harmony Technology follows "a well-established tradition of legal, independent development that bypasses proprietary formats to achieve compatibility," citing the first IBM-compatible PCs from Compaq as an "ample and clear precedent for this activity."

"Harmony creates a way to lock content from Real's Music Store in a way that is compatible with the iPod, Windows Media digital rights management [DRM] devices and Helix DRM devices," RealNetworks declares.

Irritating Piece of Software

It explains: "Harmony technology does not remove or disable any DRM system. Apple has suggested that new laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [DMCA] are relevant to this dispute. In fact, the DMCA is not designed to prevent the creation of new methods of locking content and explicitly allows the creation of interoperable software."

British technology observer Bill Thompson begs to differ:

"Real managed to turn the RealPlayer that we all loved when it launched in the mid-1990's into one of the least usable and most irritating pieces of software ever written, filled with features that nobody wanted, pushing popup ads for their paid-for service at regular intervals and generally annoying everyone."

And of Apple, he said: "It sold its integrity to the record business when it agreed to pay their inflated royalties for each song sold from the iTunes Music Store and to lock them up using FairPlay, a proprietary technology which they refuse to license to anyone else."

Real and Apple live in Never Never Land where the Big Four record labels are kings, with the owners of the various corporate music sites and "services" -- that is, Apple and Real -- carrying "product" and dancing to their tunes.

Wide Boy

It's like Farmer Jones growing the same type of cabbages loaded with growth hormones and genetically altered so they're an identical shade of green, and then offering them in a brutal hard-sell to the same grocers.

Because the cabbages have been artificially produced, they're bland, wormy and tasteless, but the grocers -- packed together in the same shopping mall -- are nonetheless trying to sell them at grossly inflated prices to a very small group of people who don't know any better, or who just don't care.

In the UK, Farmer Jones would be called a Wide Boy and you'd see him selling off the back of a truck, one eye open for the police.

And while they wait for the market to equalize and settle, millions of discerning shoppers who long ago figured out there's no point in trying to deal reasonably with Jones -- he's congenitally programmed to rip them off -- are helping themselves to a huge range of tasty, organically grown cabbages and other produce from an equally vast range of farmers.

In the meanwhile, Apple's very own software can create unprotected song files that can be played on any computer without recompression, circumventing iTunes' DRM protection.

"iMovie users can use the 'Share' feature of iMovie to export any imported [protected] song from the iTunes Music Store," Germany's Macnews.de says. "The exported songs can either be stored in the unprotected AAC file format (used by Apple at the iTMS) or in the raw WAV file format; both of these formats are supported by iTunes," it says.
http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/35545.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Music Bosses Head Royalties Fight
BBC

A campaign is under way to protect music copyrights due to expire on 50-year-old records by Elvis Presley and other rock legends.

The UK music industry has begun the fight over a legal loophole on royalty payments.

Starting on 1 January 2005, copies of songs can be issued in Europe 50 years after their release without the need for payments to copyright owners.

It could affect records by Chuck Berry, James Brown - and by 2013, The Beatles.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is spearheading the campaign.

Landmark rock 'n' roll recordings such as Presley's That's All Right and Shake, Rattle and Roll by Bill Haley and his Comets come out of copyright in Europe in January.

Prized catalogue

Over the next few years major hits by acts such as Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Bo Diddley and Fats Domino will also come into the public domain.

The Beatles' catalogue would begin to become freely available from 1 January 2013, with their first single Love Me Do. The band's entire repertoire - the most prized catalogue in rock music - would follow over the next eight years.

Recordings by other key British acts such as Cliff Richard, The Shadows, Tommy Steele and Lonnie Donegan are also at the centre of the campaign.

Once out of copyright, the BPI fears such potentially lucrative recordings could be exploited without recompense to the performers or the copyright holders.

Unlike Europe, copyright protection exists in the US for 95 years after the recording was made. Australia and Brazil have 70-year terms, and India 60 years. Composers and writers also enjoy 70 years' protection.

Peter Jamieson, the BPI's executive chairman, said less favourable copyright terms could put the UK's record industry at a commercial disadvantage to the US.

He said it was unfair to performers and investors to fail to get a return for a "free-for-all" in Europe - often within the artist's lifetime.

Record labels argue that their ability to invest in new talent often depends on money generated by their back catalogue.

The BPI is leading about 20 recording bodies including the Association of Independent Music (Aim) in lobbying the government over its concerns.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/3925975.stm


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Jibjab Showdown

Bush-Kerry parody draws the ire of the music publisher that owns the Guthrie song.
Allen Wastler

With something as fun as a cartoon Bush and Kerry hurling musical epithets at one another, you knew lawyers would have to get involved.

And, unfortunately for JibJab.com, they have.

You know the Jibjab thing I'm talking about, right? The flash animation movie swirling around the Internet with President George Bush and Senator John Kerry singing to the tune of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land."

Bush: "You're a liberal sissy!"

Kerry: "You're a right wing nut job!"

Both: "This land will surely vote for me!"

The bit is hilarious. Unless you are The Richmond Organization, a music publisher that owns the copyright to Guthrie's tune through its Ludlow Music unit.

"This puts a completely different spin on the song," said Kathryn Ostien, director of copyright licensing for the publisher. "The damage to the song is huge."

TRO believes that the Jibjab creation threatens to corrupt Guthrie's classic -- an icon of Americana -- by tying it to a political joke; upon hearing the music people would think about the yucks, not Guthrie's unifying message. The publisher wants Jibjab to stop distribution of the flash movie.

Of course the creators behind Jibjab don't agree.

JibJab fun at song's expense?

"We consider it a case of political satire and parody and therefore entitled to the fair use exemption of the copyright act," said Jibjab attorney Ken Hertz.

So far there isn't a lot of money involved. The brothers who made the movie, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, have been distributing it pretty much for free (a paid- download option was available, but abandoned as most folks went for the free- on-the-Internet route). But the two are getting a lot of media attention as more news organizations and talk shows feature the flash bit (I think CNN was first, by the way, when we featured it on "In The Money" in early July).

"We're just trying to catch our breath," said Gregg Spiridellis, before sending me on to his lawyer.

Right now lawyers for both sides are just hurling threatening letters at one another. If the dispute ends up in court, it'll be interesting.

TRO: "You've hurt our music!"

Jibjab: "You've got no humor!"

Both: "This judge will surely side with me!"
http://money.cnn.com/2004/07/26/comm...tler/wastler/#


JibJab Asks for Court's Help
Rachel Metz

JibJab Media, a small Web animation outfit, on Thursday asked a California district court to declare that it did not violate the copyrights of Ludlow Music, the owner of Woody Guthrie's song "This Land Is Your Land," which is the basis of a satirical JibJab cartoon lampooning the presidential candidates.

Ludlow Music has been threatening to sue JibJab for infringing its copyright, saying JibJab never asked for permission to use the song. JibJab's creators have said they believe they have a right to use the song since it was used in a parody and as such is protected speech.

Ludlow Music sent a cease-and-desist order to the JibJab creators more than a week ago. On July 23, Paul LiCalsi, an attorney for Ludlow, sent another letter demanding "an accounting for all income received from the exploitation of the unauthorized movie. In the event that we do not receive written confirmation by July 30, 2004, that JibJab will comply with the foregoing, we may conclude that all steps short of litigation are exhausted."

In the complaint filed Thursday, JibJab asked a district judge to issue a judgment to clarify the copyright issues between JibJab and Ludlow Music -- essentially asking the judge to tell Ludlow to leave JibJab alone.

The complaint was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of JibJab. Fred von Lohmann, an attorney for the digital-rights organization, declined to give further details about the complaint.

Neither JibJab Media nor Paul LiCalsi, attorney for Ludlow Music, could be reached for comment.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64428,00.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ILN News Letter

One Man Said To Be Responsible For 70% Of Computer Viruses

Sophos, an antivirus company, says that Sven Jaschan, the self-confessed author of the Netsky and Sasser viruses, is responsible for 70 percent of virus infections in 2004. The 18-year-old Jaschan was taken into custody in Germany in May by police.
http://news.com.com/2100-7349-5287664.html

Federal CT. To Hear Suit Against ISP Over RIAA Disclosure

A federal court in Texas has determined that it has jurisdiction over a suit launched by a customer of Comcast Communications' Internet service. The plaintiff's name was disclosed to the RIAA who later filed a file sharing suit. The plaintiff argues that the disclosure violated the ISPs published privacy policy. Case name is Garrett v. Comcast Communications.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Federal Trade Commission OKs Sony-BMG Merger

U.S. antitrust authorities approved on Wednesday a deal for record companies Sony Music and BMG to merge, creating a rival to market leader Universal Music.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said it would not oppose the combination of Sony Music, a division of Japanese electronics giant Sony, and BMG, a unit of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann.

"Upon further review of this matter, it now appears that no additional action is warranted by the commission at this time," the agency said in a letter to each of the companies.

BMG said in a statement that the reviews by U.S. and European antitrust officials had been "diligent."

"We now look forward to creating a global recorded music company comprising many of the world's most successful artists as well as a vast catalog of recordings," BMG said in its statement.

Combining Sony Music and BMG creates a company with revenues of as much as $5 billion and brings under one roof such artists as Britney Spears, Usher, Elvis and Beyonce.

The FTC approval comes a week after the European Commission endorsed the deal. The EC imposed no conditions but warned that it would look closely at any further proposed consolidation in the industry.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5288032.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

321 Studios Folds
Jim Suhr

Against long odds and a movie industry with far deeper pockets, Robert Moore fought what he cast as a David-and-Goliath struggle over his company's software that let users copy DVDs or computer games.

Hollywood and makers of computer games finally finished off 321 Studios Inc. on Tuesday, when Moore's once self-described "magnificent venture" quietly folded under the mounting weight of piracy-related lawsuits and unfriendly court orders.

Still, an online civil liberties group argues, the fact that 321 sold a million copies of its DVD-cloning software suggests broad appeal for its arguments - even to Congress - that consumers should have the right to innocently make backup copies of their DVDs and computer games.

To the Electronic Frontier Foundation' Fred von Lohmann, 321 may be dead. The company's cause isn't.

"I think help will come too late for 321 Studios," said von Lohmann, a senior intellectual property attorney for the foundation, which has filed briefs in support of 321 in some of the company's legal battles.

"But this year, next year or the year after, consumers will get back some of their fair-use rights. I think 321 really raised the profile of this issue. In the long run, I'm convinced the American consumer is going to prevail."

In announcing on its Web site it no longer would sell, support or promote its products, 321 on Tuesday blamed unfavorable court rulings by three U.S. federal courts this year for assuring its demise.

The company, based in the St. Louis suburb of St. Charles, warned in June that it could file for federal bankruptcy protection to free itself of copyright-related lawsuits by Hollywood and makers of computer games.

Tuesday's announcement came just five days after 321 suffered another legal setback. On July 29, a federal judge in New York imposed a worldwide ban on the production and distribution of 321's Games X Copy software, which had fetched $60 and let users make what 321's Web site had called "a PERFECT backup copy of virtually any PC game."

That injunction came as part of a June lawsuit by three leading makers of video games, marking a new legal front against a company that already was at odds with Hollywood over the DVD-copying software.

Hollywood and the computer-gaming companies - Atari, Electronic Arts Inc. and Vivendi Universal Games - accused 321 of violating the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law bars circumvention of anti-piracy measures used to protect DVDs and other technology.

Federal judges in New York and California have barred 321 from marketing the questioned DVD-cloning software. After those rulings, 321 shipped retooled versions of its DVD- copying products, removing the software component required to descramble movies.

Messages left Tuesday with 321 were not returned. Repeated calls to the company in recent weeks have gone unanswered.

Moore lamented in June that in a matter of months this year, 321 went from having nearly 400 employees and expectations of doing $150 million to $200 million in sales this year to about two dozen workers and less than $400,000 in monthly income.

In May, Moore told a congressional panel the court rulings in Hollywood's favor have put his company "on the brink of annihilation."

Even in possible bankruptcy, Moore has said, 321 would make good with creditors, satisfy customers seeking rebates and press its case against Hollywood that consumers "should have the right to make copies of their own legally obtained digital materials."

In its announcement Tuesday, 321 said anyone seeking customer support should do so by Aug. 1, 2005, at the company's Web site, "where you should be able to resolve most of your concerns." The company said it no longer can offer telephone, e-mail or live chat support for any of its products.

Customers looking to check the status of any rebates also were directed to 321's Web site.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ws/9312457.htm


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Drink or Die, Con’t

Washington State Man Sentenced For Copyright Infringement
AP

A man from Washington state received a $6,000 fine and three years probation for his part in a copyright infringement operation that copied and illegally distributed material over the Internet.

New Haven U.S. District Judge Ellen Burns also sentenced Travis Myers, 30, of Yakima, Wash., to perform 200 hours of community service, urging him to educate others about the consequences of copyright infringement.

Myers pleaded guilty on Oct. 1, 2003, to participation in the "warez scene," an underground online community that uses the Internet to distribute copyrighted material. The illegally copied products included software, video games, DVD movies and MP3 files, often before the titles were available to the general public.

Myers admitted uploading and downloading material to and from Web sites for the warez group DrinkorDie.

Burns departed from minimum sentencing guidelines of 33 to 41 months imprisonment, noting Myers' cooperation in exposing and breaking up several warez groups.

Myers' case was among the first prosecutions in a national investigation of massive software piracy.

Operation Safehaven was a 15-month investigation that resulted in the seizure of thousands of pirated CDs, DVDs and dozens of computers and servers, including the largest warez site ever seized in the country, authorities said.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...entenced_x.htm


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Shape up or shove off

Finland Dismissing Net-Addicted Conscripts
Helsinki - AFP

A growing number of conscripts have to be dismissed from Finland's armed forces every year due to an internet addiction that makes them unsuited for service, an official said on Tuesday.

"It's an increasing problem. More and more young people are always on the internet day and night. They get up around noon and have neither friends nor hobbies. When they get into the army, it's a shock to them," Jyrki Kivelae, head of the conscription division at the Finnish defence staff, said.

The military has been aware of the phenomenon for some years but has seen the problem grow steadily as more Finns equip their homes with computers and internet access.

There are no specific figures, however, as the military has yet to give the condition a proper dismissal code in its health records.

Kivelae said the internet addicts were unable to adjust to boot camp routines that mean getting up at six every monring, undergoing hard physical training, and sharing living and sleeping quarters with 10 others.

"It's really a shock to them, they are physically too weak to do the service, and mentally unprepared to deal with people directly and not through the internet," Kivelae said.

Finland's defence relies solely on conscripted forces, with nearly 30,000 male Finns undergoing six to 12 months of compulsory military training every year, typically after graduating from high school and before going to college or starting work.

Though most conscripts complete their service, some nine percent are dismissed due to medical reasons, including internet addiction that is now classified as a temporary mental condition, Kivelae noted.

"So we send them back home, where they can stay for two or three years more, then they can come back to the army later when they are more grown-up and able to carry out their duty."

http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/0...557883381.html
















Until next week,

- js.














~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Current Week In Review.





Recent WiRs -

July 31st, July 24th, July 17th, July 10th, July 3rd, June 26th, June 19th

Jack Spratt's Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black