Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 22nd, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"For the first time, we have evidence that blocking Pirate Bay had little effect on BitTorrent downloading." – Gregory Mead


"You can live off your sales and you can allow people to illegally download it and come to your gigs. My gig tickets are £18 and my album is £8, so it's all relative." – Ed Sheeran



































September 22nd, 2012




Metal Record Label Century Media Sues 7,500 Fans for Filesharing

German record company is taking strong action against fans who they say illegally downloaded albums by Lacuna Coil and Iced Earth

Century Media, the rock and metal label which has a roster that features Architects, In Flames, Napalm Death, Iced Earth and Lacuna Coil, has revealed it is taking over 7,500 fans to court over claims of illegal downloading.

The label, which is based in Germany, has filed the charges in New Jersey in the US. It has accused 4,327 people of illegally downloading Iced Earth's album 'Dystopia' and 3,136 users of illegally obtaining Lacuna Coil's 'Dark Adrenaline'.

All those accused are currently referred to as 'John Doe' in the court papers, but all their IP addresses are listed.

This means, if the court finds in Century Media's favour, that their lawyers will instruct internet service providers to supply the personal information of each defendant.

Jay McDaniel, who representing Century and two other media firms, told NorthJersey.com of the label's decision to prosecute: "What many people don't understand is that it's the distribution that's the evil influence. It does the real damage and harm, not just to the client but to the culture industry, and to creative endeavours in general. Illegal downloading has reached epidemic proportions, as thousands of works are pirated on a daily basis through bit torrents that rob copyright holders of the value of their creative work."

He continued: "This kills the little producer and it has an extremely destructive effect on the entertainment industry. Record sales don't drive the music business any more – touring does. So illegal sharing of music on the Internet has killed an entire industry."

If found guilty, all 7,500 file sharers could face a large fine or a payment of $2900 (£1,790) to avoid going to court.

Century Media caused controversy in late 2011 when it announced that it was pulling out of Spotify.

The label has issued a statement detailing their reasons for the decision and have said they believe Spotify in its present shape and form isn't the way forward" and that the service is part of a "downward spiral which will completely kill a lot of smaller bands that are already struggling to make ends meet."
http://www.nme.com/news/architects/66174





Musicmetric Claims 3bn Songs Torrented in First Half of 2012
Stuart Dredge

Music analytics firm Musicmetric is getting lots of press this morning with its first ‘Digital Music Index’ report, which tracks music downloads using BitTorrent in the first half of 2012.

The headline claim is that globally more than 3bn songs were downloaded illegally in that six-month period, based on 405m tracked torrents, with 78% of them being albums and 22% singles.

The US takes top slot in the torrent-volumes chart with 775m estimated BitTorrent song downloads in 1H12, followed by the UK (347m) and Italy (266m).

Rihanna’s ‘Talk That Talk’ was the most-downloaded album with 1.2m torrents, followed by Billy Van’s ‘The Cardigan’ EP – which as we reported recently, was made available by the artist himself as a legal BitTorrent bundle.

Something that’s as interesting for rightsholders is Musicmetric’s separate claim that “lower volumes of torrent downloads relative to GDP occurred where Spotify and iTunes exist around the world”, although that’s not a huge shock.

Another claim in the report: “For the first time, we have evidence that blocking Pirate Bay had little effect on BitTorrent downloading,” says CEO Gregory Mead, with BitTorrent’s Matt Mason also quoted in the press release (“These figures show for the first time that blocking the Pirate Bay had zero effect on piracy. It’s short-sighted to think that we can simply tell people to stop and they will.”)

Unsurprisingly, some of the coverage of this report is trying to put a financial value on the filesharing (witness the Mail’s “More than £340million worth of songs were illegally downloaded in the UK in the first half of 2012″ intro). As ever, figuring out how much of that is actually lost revenues – people pirating who would otherwise have bought – is a much trickier task.
http://musically.com/2012/09/17/musi...-half-of-2012/





BitTorrent Downloads Booming - And Benefitting Musicians
Brian Proffitt

A new report from UK analytics firm Musicmetric has pegged the U.S. as the world's leading downloader of music via BitTorrent. It's the stuff of Recording Industry Association of America nightmares: Despite industry efforts to shut down BitTorrent tracker sites, the frenzy of file sharing continues. And - surprise! - recording artists are embracing illegal downloads as just another way to do business.

Musicmetric's Digital Music Index also reveals that, while BitTorrent is used to download a huge amount of music in the U.S. - about 96.7 million files in the first half of 2012 - it's not all illegal.

The World's Mix Tape

First, let's run down the list of the BitTorrent downloading nations. Coming in at number two on the list is the UK with 43.3 million downloads. That's followed by Italy's 33.2 million downloads, Canada's 24.0 million, and Brazil's 19.7 million files pulled in from BitTorrent. The top five countries pulled down around 217 million files in the first half of 2012, over half of the nearly 405 million files tracked by Musicmetric for the top 20 downloading nations.

The song choices for each of these five nations varied significantly, too.

• US: Drake, "The Motto," Single
• UK: Ed Sheeran, "Plus," Album
• Italy: Laura Pausini, "Inedito," Single
• Canada: Kanye West, "Watch the Throne," Album
• Brazil: Billy Van, "The Cardigan," EP

Billy Van's download success in Brazil is particularly notable… especially when you consider that "success" is meant without irony. Van's position on the BitTorrent chart is a big win. He released "The Cardigan" solely as a BitTorrent download in March. Globally, Van's dubstep album has been downloaded just over 1 million times in the first part of the year, which gives him major international exposure.

This is the Part Where the RIAA Freaks Out

If the RIAA wants to factor in Van's recordings as lost revenue, it will need to rethink its calculations. And what might those calculations show? Figuring an average price of US$1.29 for the singles and $7.99 for the albums for each of the 20 nations' most-downloaded files (not counting Van's album), that's roughly US $32.5 million of music that might otherwise have been purchased.

Of course, there's a lot of supposition in that kind of thinking, number one being that consumers would have bought those songs had the public been completely prevented from downloading them via BitTorrent or other means.

And there's increasing evidence that freely shared music isn't such a bad thing for artists.

How Piracy Drives Revenue

Ed Sheeran, the UK artist who currently holds the distinction of having the most BitTorrented song in that country, is sanguine about pirated songs.

"I sell a lot of tickets. I've sold 1.2 million albums and there's eight million downloads as well, illegally," Sheeran told BBC's Newsbeat earlier this week. "So nine million people have my record in England, which is quite a nice feeling. You get people who actually want to listen to your songs and come to an event like this in London, who wouldn't necessarily buy the album.

"You can live off your sales and you can allow people to illegally download it and come to your gigs. My gig tickets are £18 and my album is £8, so it's all relative," Sheeran added.

Sheeran is not alone. As recording revenue falls, artists have been making up for the loss by increasing concert performances. A 2010 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research demonstrated that "file-sharing reduces album sales but increases live performance revenues for small artists, perhaps through increased awareness. The impact on live performance revenues for large, well known artists is negligible."

This all fits within the theory that "piracy is the new radio," a statement made by musician Neil Young back in January.

"Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around… That's the radio. If you really want to hear it, let's make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it," Young said.

Here are the top 20 downloading nations according to Musicmetric's Digital Music Index:

1. United States 96,868,398
2. United Kingdom 43,314,568
3. Italy 33,226,258
4. Canada 23,953,053
5. Brazil 19,677,596
6. Australia 19,104,047
7. Spain 10,306,829
8. India 8,965,271
9. France 8,400,869
10. Philippines 8,351,260
11. Mexico 7,522,865
12. Netherlands 6,671,428
13. Portugal 5,597,198
14. Poland 5,059,204
15. Greece 4,919,567
16. Hungary 4,470,948
17. Chile 4,210,641
18. Romania 4,152,252
19. Sweden 4,074,594
20. Belgium 3,880,900

http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2012...-musicians.php





Manchester is 'PIRATE CAPITAL of the UK'

Brits snap up Ed Sheeran, Rihanna from '43m BitTorrent' downloads
Brid-Aine Parnell

Manchester is Britain's biggest cove of pirate downloaders, claims a Shoreditch-based music upstart. Mancunians have a particular craving for illegal copies of smirking indie crooner Ed Sheeran's albums and singles, we're told.

The northern city is the piracy capital of the UK, according to a new study by London-headquartered Musicmetric, which also found that Sheeran is the most pirated artist in Blighty.

The music monitoring service said that UK internet users illicitly nabbed 43 million copies of singles and albums from BitTorrent networks: Rizzle Kicks and Rihanna came second and third respectively in the most-downloaded charts.

While ISPs are ordered to block file-sharing sites such as The Pirate Bay - and Google pushes sites that infringe copyright laws down in its search results (unless it's YouTube of course) - ordinary folks are still happily grabbing albums from the net without paying.

The statistics were gathered after Musicmetric "processed an unprecedented amount of data" to analyse BitTorrent activities, we're told. Exactly how the numbers were put together isn't immediately obvious, although the project is said to be part of the "BBC BitTorrent trend visualisation".

"For the first time, we have evidence that blocking Pirate Bay had little effect on BitTorrent downloading," Gregory Mead, chief exec of Musicmetric, said in a canned statement. "The challenge for copyright holders is to find ways to monetise music files torrented online. While the file sharing network is largely ignored as a proactive channel, little progress can be made on figuring out how this might be possible."

Brits are particularly bad for downloading, according to the research which places the country second in the world in terms of pure volume of files fetched. However, the US came first with more than 96 million downloads in the first half of the year.

According to figures, the top 20 places in the UK for downloads per person are: 1. Manchester; 2. Nottingham; 3. Southampton; 4. Liverpool; 5. Sheffield; 6. Leicester; 7. Stoke-on-Trent; 8. Glasgow; 9. Cardiff; 10. Leeds; 11. Bristol; 12. Edinburgh; 13. Wolverhampton; 14. Derby; 15. Reading; 16. Bradford; 17. Kingston Upon Hull; 18. Birmingham; 19. Coventry; 20. London.

Ed Sheeran's album + was pirated on average 55,000 times a month in the UK, while Rihanna's album Talk That Talk was illegally shared 1,228,313 times worldwide in the first six months of 2012, making it the globe's most pirated release. The data behind the survey's findings can be downloaded from the Musicmetric website.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09...racy_research/





9 Years and Still Bloody Runnin!

And why do we call ourself 'Pirates For Life'?
Cause if we die we still gon' be larger than life

A 9 years and runnin', MC Winston, I hold the rum
You want me to up a torrent and it's done
Since I'm stereotyped to kill and destruct
Is one of the main reasons, I don't give a fuck

Chances are usually not good
Cause I freeze with my hands on a hot hood
And gettin' jacked by the you-know-who
When in a black and white the capacity is two

We're not alone, we're 100 more brothers, sisters and whatnots
Now wearin' my dyes 'cause I'm not stupid, motherfuckers
They're out to take our heads for we said they're in the past
Point blank, they can kiss my one eyed azz

I didn't stutter when I said, 'Fuck Tha Police'
Cause it's hard for a pirate to get peace
Now it's broken and can't be fixed
Cause police and little devil pirates don't mix

So now I'm creepin' through the fall
Runnin' like a team, well, see, I might have slayed y'all
So for now pack the rum and hold it in the air
Cause The Pirate Bay has a 9 years of runnin'

Into this news, some fugitives are on the run
MPAA sources tell us that the gang are headed
straight to their home base, The Bay
Lend me a mutherfuckin' ear, so I can tell you why

Runnin' with my brothers and sisters, headed for the home base
With a steady pace on the face that we just raced
The road ahead goes on and on
The birthday post is gettin' longer than the mutherfuckin' marathon

Runnin' on but never runnin' out
Stayin' wired and if I get tired, I can still try out
Hitchhikin' if that's what it gotta do
Cause there's always someone to pick up a pirate

Confused, yo but Winona's a pirate with nuthin' to lose
One of the few who's been accused and abused
Of the crime of poisonin' young minds
But you don't know shit 'til you been in my shoes

And Winona is back from the T P B
Droppin' some shit that's S E E D(ed)
So fuck the P O L I C E
And any motherfucker that disagrees

Stuck and runnin' hard, hauling ass
Cause I'm a pirate known for havin' a notorious past
My mind was slick, my temper was too quick
Now the MPAA's all over my dick

Got us tick and runnin' just to find the gun that started the clock
That's when the W jumped off the startin' block
A 9 years from home and yo, it's a long stretch
A little sprintin' motherfucker that they won't catch

Yeah, back to The Bay again
Yo, it's either that or the Federal Pen
Cause pirates been runnin' since beginning of time
Takin' a minute to tell you what's on my mutherfuckin' mind

Runnin' like I just don't care
The Bay's 50 miles but yo, I'ma get there
Archin' my back and on a straight rough
Just like Usain Bolt, I'm ballin' the fuck out

From city to city, I'm a menace as I pass by
Rippin' up shit just so you can remember
I'm a straight up pirate that's done in, seedin' and comin'
Straight at yo' ass, so far a 9 years and runnin'

Runnin' like a pirate, I hate to lose
Show us on the news but we hate to be abused
I know it was a setup, so now I'm gonna get up
Even if the MPAA wants me to shut up

But I've got 10 000 pirates strong
They got everybody singin' my 'We're all The Pirate Bay' song
And while they treat my gang like dirt
Their whole fuckin' family is torrenting our shit

So I'ma run 'til I can't run no more
Cause it's time for MC Winston to settle the score
I got a urge to kick down doors
At my grave like a slave even if the Win calls

Clouds are dark and pirates are hidin'
Dick-tricklin' at the sunny, motherfucker's are ridin'
Started with ten and yo, one couldn't take it
So now there's a hundred 'cause we cant be subtracted

The number's even, now I'm leavin'
We're never gettin' took by a suit with a weave in
Them and their troops are right behind me
But they're so fuckin' stupid, they'll never find me

One more year to go through the dark streets
Runnin' like a motherfucker on my own two feet
But you know I never stumble or lag last
I'm almost home, so I better haul ass

Tearin' up everything in sight
It's a little crazy motherfucker dodging the searchlight
Now that chase, the shit, is done and
100 motherfuckers goin' crazy with a 9 years of runnin'

https://thepiratebay.se/blog/222





Pirate Bay Financier Files for Bankruptcy

Pirate Bay financier and Swedish crispbread heir Carl Lundström, one of four men convicted of facilitating copyright violations for their role in operating the popular filesharing site, has filed for personal bankruptcy.

The bankruptcy filing will make it harder for music and film companies involved in the lawsuit against The Pirate Bay to receive any of the 46 million kronor ($7 million) in damages they were awarded in the case, the Ny Teknik magazine reports.

Lundström, along with Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij, was convicted in April 2009 on charges of being an accessory to copyright violations for his role in bankrolling the filesharing site.

The four were initially sentenced to a year's imprisonment apiece and a combined fine of 30 million kronor.

All four appealed their sentences, with the Svea Court of Appeal ruling in November 2010 to uphold the convictions, with the exception of Svartholm Warg who was absent due to illness.

The appeals court however reduced Lundström's sentence to four months, but increased the damages to a total of 46 million kronor.

Since then, however, the unpaid damages claim has grown to 76 million kronor due to accumulated interest fees.

At the time of the trial, Lundström was the oldest of the four Pirate Bay defendants and the most public.

He had made a fortune estimated at 77 million kronor in the early 1980s when the Wasabröd family business was sold. He then owned the telecom company Rix Port80, which was subsequently sold to Phonera for 35 million kronor.

Lundström has lived in Switzerland since 2008 and over the summer submitted the personal bankruptcy filing to a court in Uznach, according to Ny Teknik.

He was the target of a previous tax avoidance probe in which he was accused of hiding 20 million kronor in a foundation in Lichtenstein and two years ago was ordered by the Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket) to pay nearly 1.7 million kronor in back taxes.

While Lundström confirmed for Ny Teknik that he has filed for personal bankruptcy, he refused to comment on the reasons behind the filing.

The magazine reports that fellow Pirate Bay founder Fredrik Neij filed for personal bankruptcy in August in the face of a 10 million kronor damages claim by Swedish production company Yellow Bird Films AB.

He is believed to be in Thailand or Laos.

Peter Sunde, the former Pirate Bay spokesperson, is facing a probe into whether he has a hidden interest in Flattr AB, an IT company he started in 2008 and is valued at 88 million kronor.

Meanwhile, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, is facing damages claims of 54 million kronor from the Pirate Bay verdict. However, he is now being held on remand after being deported from Cambodia on suspicions that he hacked into the tax agency and IT firm Logica.
http://www.thelocal.se/43320/20120919/





New Anti-Piracy Watchlist Zooms In On File-Sharing Tolerant Countries
enigmax

The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus has just released its 2012 International Piracy Watch List. In addition to countries such as China, Russia and Ukraine, this year Italy and Switzerland make fresh appearances in the list. Both countries are accused of not doing enough to combat online infringement with the latter allegedly proving itself as a “magnet for rogue sites.”

The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus (IAPC) has just released its annual report in which it criticizes countries that in their view simply aren’t doing enough to protect the intellectual property rights of American creators.

It will come as little surprise that the two nations topping the list are China and Russia, with neither country expected to get a clean bill of health from the West now or in the near future.

On file-sharing issues, China’s leading search engine Baidu was cautiously praised for coming to an agreement with rightsholders, a move that led to its removal from the USTR’s Notorious Markets list. Russia was again criticized for its lack of IP protection legislation which has led to “rampant Internet piracy affecting the global market.”

Ukraine, former home to the currently suspended Demonoid BitTorrent tracker, was also subjected to the usual criticisms with the note that instead of improving, things are actually getting worse.

“Ukraine is a hub for infringing content through peer-to-peer networks and hosted websites, and is home to one of the world’s most notorious pirate markets, EX.ua,” write the IAPC.

After local authorities took down the file-hosting service in January the site made an almost immediate return. IAPC say that the Ukrainian government bowed to public protest.

But while the watch list inclusion of the China, Russia and Ukraine trio will shock no-one, there are also two new euro entries – Italy and Switzerland.

“Piracy in Italy continues to hurt both Italian and American creators. To date, there has not been a sufficient legislative framework for addressing the problem, or clear leadership in developing one,” the report notes.

“Without substantial reforms, the piracy problem will continue unabated in Italy and the widespread perception will endure that illegal downloading is not harmful.”

In recent years Italy’s Guardia di Finanza (Financial Guard) has been involved in many file-sharing investigations (1) (2). It has also ordered a trio of prominent ISP-level blocks against leading BitTorrent sites, first against The Pirate Bay, then the now-defunct BTjunkie and most recently KickAssTorrents.

However, following the so-called Peppermint Jam case, Italy’s Data Protection Authority ruled that monitoring P2P users and collecting their IP addresses is illegal.

The IAPC’s complaints about the Swiss go even further, with the landlocked country accused of loose IP protection that makes it a magnet for, apparently, some of the world’s worst sites.

“Switzerland’s copyright law is inadequate, making it a home for rogue sites whose clear purpose is to facilitate and enable massive unauthorized making available of pirated material,” the report warns.

As noted by Ars, the first large site that springs to mind in Switzerland is RapidShare, but Daniel Raimer, General Counsel for the file-locker site, says he believes the report refers to another company.

“RapidShare understands that this action does not pertain to RapidShare,” Raimer said. “We continue to work with the content industry to mitigate copyright abuse and make our services as accountable and transparent as they can possibly be.”

The lack of clarity from IAPC appears to be relatively new. In previous years’ reports the caucus hasn’t shied away from naming sites. However, in recent months TorrentFreak has indeed noticed an upward trend of file-sharing related sites (BitTorrent, streaming and cyberlockers) appearing on Swiss-based hosting. The other possible objection from IAPC is the presence of the Razorback2 eD2K (eDonkey) indexing system which was subjected to huge raids in 2006 but later recovered.

The position on general file-sharing in Switzerland also appears to be a problem. IAPC notes that the country needs to “clarify that copying from illegal sources is illegal.” This is a reference to Swiss copyright law which contains a private copy exception but does not state that the copy has to be made from a legal source. This effectively legitimizes downloading and streaming of pirate content for personal use.

While the IAPC recognizes former watch list entries Canada and Spain as nations “in transition” due to their recent efforts to reform copyright law, neither country escapes completely. Both are encouraged to continue down a legislative path that will see greater protection for US intellectual property.

The full report can be viewed here.
https://torrentfreak.com/new-anti-pi...ntries-120921/





uTorrent Increases Privacy and Counters Mass-Monitoring of Downloads
Ernesto

Downloading files via BitTorrent is about as public as file-sharing gets, and it’s safe to say that most popular BitTorrent swarms are being monitored one way or the other. To protect the privacy of its users BitTorrent Inc. therefore decided to randomize the peer-id uTorrent users display to other peers and the tracker. While the new feature makes it more difficult to track the download habits of individual users, IP-addresses still remain public and trackable.

Privacy is in short supply on the Internet, especially on BitTorrent networks. Those who fail to take measures to hide their IP-addresses leave a prominent trail of information behind them.

Besides IP-addresses there’s a second variable that can be used to gather intelligence on downloaders, namely the peer-id. For uTorrent and BitTorrent mainline users the peer-id has always been constant for connections with trackers and peers.

This means that tracking companies can use the information to build a rather accurate database of downloads that come from the same client, regardless of the IP-address. While this information might be of use to private BitTorrent trackers, on public ones it poses a clear privacy threat.

BitTorrent Inc’s uTorrent developers recognize this security concern and have decided to prevent this type of tracking by implementing a new feature. The change in code was not widely announced, apart from the following update in the changelog of the uTorrent alpha release.

“Feature: don’t use a consistent peer-id (to mitigate tracking)”

TorrentFreak got in touch with BitTorrent Inc. who told us that the new feature only applies to public torrents. It is a change to the core code, so users don’t have to enable it.

“This feature’s operation randomizes peer ids in an n-hour cycle to mitigate tracking of our users when they use non-private torrents. The effect is increased control for our users of their own information and activity which, just like users of any service, our users ask for and are entitled to,” TorrentFreak was told.

Thanks to the new feature it is no longer possible to track BitTorrent users based on their peer-id for a longer period of time. However, users should be aware that IP-addresses are still public and trackable.

According to BitTorrent Inc. the new feature was implemented to protect privacy, which is a great concern not only for BitTorrent users, but Internet users in general.

“Our users are as concerned as anybody about the free flow and use of their personal information and habits,” BitTorrent Inc. told TorrentFreak.

“So we work on features such as this to protect their privacy, just as companies such as Google, Firefox and Microsoft, in particular with IE8, bring their users more control of their information with things like easy, prominent private browsing features.”

BitTorrent can be applauded for taking the privacy concerns of its users seriously, but the mass-monitoring of BitTorrent downloads is not going away any time soon. Over the years dozens of tracking companies have specialized in tracking BitTorrent downloads, and this number appears to increase year after year.

That said, the less private information that’s available to these tracking companies, the better.
https://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-ta...nloads-120921/





Swiss Federal Railways Says Apple Copied Its Iconic Railway Clock
Jordan Golson

Switzerland's Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, or Swiss Federal Railway service, has accused Apple of using their iconic clock in its Clock app for iPad without permission, according to a report in the Swiss newspaper Blick [Google Translate].

The clock, designed by Hans Hilfiker, has become an icon of both the Swiss railway and of Switzerland itself. The trademark and copyright for the clock is owned by the Swiss Federal Railways service.

According to the article:

SBB is the sole owner of the trademark and copyright of the railway clock. The railway company will now get in touch with Apple. The aim is a legal, as well as a financial solution. It is not right that one [Apple] simply copies the design.

The paper notes that Apple Switzerland declined to comment and directed reporters to Apple's corporate headquarters in the United States.

The clock's image is widely licensed, with the watchmaker Mondaine selling replicas around the world.

(Thanks for the translation, Dave!)
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/09/20/...railway-clock/





Microsoft Complains to China Over Piracy at State Firms: Report

Microsoft Corp has lodged a complaint with China to stop four state-owned companies from allegedly using pirated and unlicensed versions of its software, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.

Microsoft alleged that China Railway Construction Corp, TravelSky Technology, China Post Group and China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) were using pirated or unlicensed software and filed a complaint last month to a government panel overseen by China's Vice Premier Wang Qishan, Bloomberg reported, quoting three unnamed sources.

Microsoft declined to comment on the article but said the company was having "ongoing discussions" with China about protecting intellectual property.

Wang, in a meeting with Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer in May, promised to crack down on software piracy, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Wang also told Ballmer that central government organs in China were using authorized software since China's push last year to use and purchase only legitimate software.

According to the Bloomberg report, Microsoft alleged last month that 84 percent of its Office software used at China Railway Construction was unlicensed as was 97 percent of its Windows server client software.

Microsoft also said that more than 40 percent of Office and Windows server client software used by CNPC was unlicensed while almost all of Travelsky's Office software was unlicensed and 93 percent of China Post's come from pirated versions. Bloomberg said Microsoft's allegations were based on its own estimates.

A TravelSky investor relations executive declined to comment when contacted by Reuters as did an official at CNPC who only identified himself as Liu. Officials at China Post and China Railway Construction could not immediately be reached.

Bloomberg reported that a China Post executive told the news service that Microsoft's allegations were "inaccurate" while a China Railway Construction public relations executive said estimated use of unlicensed software was greatly exaggerated.

Rampant software piracy in China has made the market difficult for Microsoft to crack, but over the past few years the company has stepped up assertion of its intellectual property rights.

Earlier this year Microsoft sued Gome Electrical Appliances Holding, one of China's largest homegrown electronics distributors, and a Beijing electronics mall, for allegedly infringing on the copyright of its software.

(Reporting by Melanie Lee and the Shanghai Newsroom; Editing by Ken Wills)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...88K0CO20120921





Feds Charge Activist with 13 Felonies for Rogue Downloading of Academic Articles
David Kravets

Federal prosectors added nine new felony counts against well-known coder and activist Aaron Swartz, who was charged last year for allegedly breaching hacking laws by downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription database via an open connection at MIT.

Swartz, the 25-year-old executive director of Demand Progress, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. He surrendered in July 2011, remains free on bond and faces dozens of years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted.

Like last year’s original grand jury indictment on four felony counts, the superseding indictment unveiled Thursday accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading millions of documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals that are normally inaccessible to the public.

Using a program named keepgrabbing.py, the scraping took place from September 2010 to January 2011 via MIT’s network, and was invasive enough to bring down JSTOR’s servers on several occasions, according to the indictment.

Disclosure: Swartz was part of a small team that sold Reddit to Condé Nast, Wired’s parent company, and has done coding work for Wired.

In essence, many of the charges stem from Swartz allegedly breaching the terms of service agreement for those using the research service.

“JSTOR authorizes users to download a limited number of journal articles at a time,” according to the latest indictment. “Before being given access to JSTOR’s digital archive, each user must agree and acknowledge that they cannot download or export content from JSTOR’s computer servers with automated programs such as web robots, spiders, and scrapers. JSTOR also uses computerized measures to prevent users from downloading an unauthorized number of articles using automated techniques.”

MIT authorizes guests to use the service, which was the case with Swartz, who at the time was a fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics.

The case tests the reach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1984 to enhance the government’s ability to prosecute hackers who accessed computers to steal information or to disrupt or destroy computer functionality.

The government, however, has interpreted the anti-hacking provisions to include activities such as violating a website’s terms of service or a company’s computer usage policy, a position a federal appeals court in April said means “millions of unsuspecting individuals would find that they are engaging in criminal conduct.” The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in limiting reach of the CFAA, said that violations of employee contract agreements and websites’ terms of service were better left to civil lawsuits.

The rulings by the 9th Circuit cover the West, and not Massachusetts, meaning they are not binding in Swartz’ prosecution. The Obama administration has declined to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.

The indictment accuses Swartz of repeatedly spoofing the MAC address — an identifier that is usually static — of his computer after MIT blocked his computer based on that number. The grand jury indictment also notes that Swartz didn’t provide a real e-mail address when registering on the network. Swartz also allegedly snuck an Acer laptop bought just for the downloading into a closet at MIT in order to get a persistent connection to the network.

Swartz allegedly hid his face from surveillance cameras by holding his bike helmet up to his face and looking through the ventilation holes when going in to swap out an external drive used to store the documents. Swartz also allegedly named his guest account “Gary Host,” with the nickname “Ghost.”

Most of the new nine charges specify exact dates of the breaches, which include unauthorized computer access, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information. Generally, the original four-count indictment listed those allegations as single counts.

A 13th count on the superseding indictment — recklessly damaging a protected computer — is virtually the same as the final count 4 in the original indictment.

“The pace and volume of his automated requests impaired computers JSTOR used to provide service to researchers and research institutions and caused JSTOR to cut off legitimate MIT researchers for days at a time,” the amended indictment said.

Swartz’s attorney, Martin G. Weinberg, said his client would plead not guilty “to the series of restructured allegations” and intends to make “legal and factual defenses” to the allegations.

His history includes a study that peered through thousands of law review articles looking for law professors who had been paid by industry patrons to write papers. That study was published in 2008 in the Stanford Law Review.

Swartz is no stranger to the feds being interested in his skills at prodigious downloads.

In 2008, the federal court system decided to try out allowing free public access to its court record search system PACER at 17 libraries across the country. Swartz went to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals library in Chicago and installed a small PERL script he had written. The code cycled sequentially through case numbers, requesting a new document from PACER every three seconds. In this manner, Swartz got nearly 20 million pages of court documents, which his script uploaded to Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service.

While the documents are in the public record and free to share, PACER normally charges 10 cents per page.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...swartz-felony/





Appeals Court Halts Proceedings in Google Books Case
Jeff John Roberts

An appeals court granted a stay in the copyright dispute between the Authors Guild and Google so it can review a lower court’s decision to let the class action advance. The literary community is watching to learn if Google’s book scanning will be considered “fair use.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit today granted a stay in the long-running copyright case between the Authors Guild and Google over the search giant’s book scanning project.

In its order, the New York court agreed to stay proceedings in a lower court while it reviews Judge Denny Chin’s decision last May to certify the class action — a move that allowed authors and illustrators to go forward with claims that Google scanned their works without permission.

The proceedings began in 2005 when the Authors Guild filed a copyright suit over Google’s decision to scan the world’s books. The lawsuit was on hold for several years as the parties tried to get court approval for a settlement that would have created a market for the books. The settlement failed, however, and the Authors Guild resumed legal action last December. The Guild is seeking $750 per book, but only a relatively small number of authors would qualify.

Today’s decision means that the overall case will be on hold for several months. If the appeals court upholds the certification order, it will likely return the case to Judge Chin (who is now on the Second Circuit too) with detailed instructions about how to proceed.

The big issue in the case now is whether or not Google’s scanning constituted “fair use,” which is a defense against copyright infringement. Several scholarly and librarian groups have intervened in Google’s favor in the hopes that the massive digital collection can be used for research purposes.

Meanwhile, a parallel case is playing out between the Authors Guild and the Hathi Trust, a coalition of universities that has collected copies of Google’s book scans. If that case is resolved first, it is likely to determine the fate of the Google Books class action.

Here is a copy of today’s order:

CA2 Order Granting AG Stay

http://paidcontent.org/2012/09/17/ap...le-books-case/





An Art History Book, Minus the Art

Students at Ontario College of Art and Design were forced to buy a $180 textbook filled with blank squares
Kyle Chayka

Hyperallergic What is this, October!? According to a blog post published by a disgruntled parent of a student, the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) is forcing students to buy an art history book for $180 — which wouldn’t be unheard of, but the catch is that the publishers of this book didn’t get any of the image rights for the artwork it includes. To reiterate, that’s an art history survey without any pictures.

Instead of having pictures of artwork, the book, “Global Visual and Material Culture: Prehistory to 1800“ (so named for the course it goes with), instead just has placeholders with instructions to see a digital version for the actual image. It’s like a website with only broken image links. Just check out this hilarious sample page from the book:

At first, it seemed that the publisher couldn’t clear the copyright permissions before the book’s print run. But as it turns out, the book is actually a zombie-like combination of parts of three different art history books. A letter from the school’s dean stated that had they decided to clear all the images for copyright to print, the book would have cost a whopping $800.

The disgruntled parent complains, “I’m not particularly interested in paying any amount for an imageless art history textbook.” We’re inclined to agree. In the context, OCAD’s faux-inspiring slogan of “imagination is everything” takes on a whole new meaning. Don’t have any pictures of art? Just imagine them all!
http://www.salon.com/2012/09/19/an_a...minus_the_art/





All the TV News Since 2009, on One Web Site
Bill Carter

Inspired by a pillar of antiquity, the Library of Alexandria, Brewster Kahle has a grand vision for the Internet Archive, the giant aggregator and digitizer of data, which he founded and leads.

“We want to collect all the books, music and video that has ever been produced by humans,” Mr. Kahle said.

As of Tuesday, the archive’s online collection will include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news.

The latest ambitious effort by the archive, which has already digitized millions of books and tried to collect everything published on every Web page for the last 15 years (that adds up to more than 150 billion Web pages), is intended not only for researchers, Mr. Kahle said, but also for average citizens who make up some of the site’s estimated two million visitors each day. “The focus is to help the American voter to better be able to examine candidates and issues,” Mr. Kahle said. “If you want to know exactly what Mitt Romney said about health care in 2009, you’ll be able to find it.”

Of course, if you want to discredit or satirize a politician based on a clip showing some reversal of a position, that will be made easier as well. Or, as Mr. Kahle put it, “Let a thousand Jon Stewarts bloom.”

Many conventional news outlets will be available, including CNN, Fox News, NBC News, PBS, and every purveyor of eyewitness news on local television stations. And Mr. Stewart’s program, “The Daily Show” is one of those 1,000 series that is part of the new news archive.

“Absolutely,” Mr. Kahle said. “We think of it as news.”

The Internet Archive has been quietly recording the news material from all these outlets, which means, Mr. Kahle said, capturing not only every edition of “60 Minutes” on CBS but also every minute of every day on CNN.

All of this will be available, free, to those willing to dive into the archive starting Tuesday. Mr. Kahle said the method for the search for information would be the closed-captioned words that have accompanied the news programs. The user simply plugs in the words of the search, along with some kind of time frame, and matches of news clips will appear.

Mr. Kahle predicted there would often be hundreds of matches, but he said the system had an interface that would make it easy to browse quickly through 30-second clips in search of the right one. If a researcher wants a copy of the entire program, a DVD will be sent on loan.

The inspiration of the Library of Alexandria, the archive of the knowledge in ancient world in Egypt, was not frivolous. Mr. Kahle said that early effort to assemble the collected works of civilization was in his mind when he conceived the idea to use the almost infinite capacity of the Web to pursue the modern equivalent.

“You could turn all the books in the Library of Congress into a stack of disks that would fit in one shopping cart in Best Buy,” Mr. Kahle said. He estimates that the Internet Archive now contains about 9,000 terabytes of data; by contrast, the digital collection of the Library of Congress is a little more than 300 terabytes, according to an estimate earlier this year.

Mr. Kahle calls himself a technologist and says he moved to the archive project after previously founding and selling off two data-mining companies, one to AOL, the other to Amazon.

The television news project, like his other archive projects, is financed mainly through outside grants, though Mr. Kahle did put up some of his own money to start. He said grants from the National Archives, the Library of Congress and other government agencies and foundations made up the bulk of the financing for the project. He set the annual budget at $12 million, and said about 150 people were working on the project.

The act of copying all this news material is protected under a federal copyright agreement signed in 1976. That was in reaction to a challenge to a news assembly project started by Vanderbilt University in 1968.

The archive has no intention of replacing or competing with the Web outlets owned by the news organizations. Mr. Kahle said new material would not be added until 24 hours after it was first broadcast. “We don’t expect this to replace CNN.com,” he said.

As enormous as the news collection is, it is only the beginning, Mr. Kahle said. The plan is to “go back” year by year, and slowly add news video going back to the start of television. That will require some new and perhaps more challenging methodology because the common use of closed-captioning only started around 2002.

Mr. Kahle said some new technique, perhaps involving word recognition, would be necessary. “We need some interface that is good enough and doesn’t interrupt commerce enough that they get upset with us.”

But the goals for the news service remain as ambitious as all the other services the Internet Archive has embarked upon.

“Yes, we want eventually to be able to make coverage of, say, the 1956 political conventions available,” Mr. Kahle said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/b...ince-2009.html





Success of Crowdfunding Puts Pressure on Entrepreneurs
Jenna Wortham

An effort to build a sleek aluminum charging dock for the iPhone generated fervor online when it was announced last December. The project’s creators raised close to $1.5 million through Kickstarter, a crowdfunding Web site, and promised to start shipping their Elevation Dock in April to those who had backed the project.

But last week Apple announced a redesigned iPhone that is not compatible with the dock — and because of manufacturing delays, some of the project’s original backers were still waiting to receive theirs. The designers are now scrambling to make an adapter and update the product.

“I’m just hoping to get mine before the iPhone 6 ships at this point,” one backer wrote on Kickstarter.

Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and IndieGogo are letting designers and other creative people connect with audiences who want to finance their dreams, and they are becoming increasingly popular. Nearly three million people have helped a total of 30,000 projects meet their fund-raising goals on Kickstarter, the largest such site, to the tune of $300 million in pledges.

But for the creators of these projects, getting the money is sometimes the easy part. They then have to turn their dreams into reality, with a crowd keeping an eye on their progress.

This new model comes with a host of potential pitfalls that are often difficult for project creators to anticipate, and hard for the armchair philanthropists who back them to grasp. Backers are essentially putting their trust in the project creators, giving them cash in return for the promise of a future reward.

Those who give a few dollars to a moviemaking project may get their names in the credits, while someone who puts up $100 to support development of a smart wristwatch might be promised one of the finished items.

Much of the time this works out. But some projects, including several prominent and in-demand ones, have run into missteps and lengthy delays. The permits for a new food truck might not come through. Or a gadget like the Elevation Dock might be harder than expected to manufacture and ship.

The rise of crowdfunding came up often over the weekend here at the debut of the XOXO Festival, a conference that focused on new models and outlets for creativity on the Internet. The conference was co-founded by an early Kickstarter employee, Andy Baio, who sold $400 tickets on Kickstarter itself to gauge interest in the event and raise money for it.

The relationship between creators and backers on crowdfunding sites is still being worked out. The backers play the role of philanthropists, investors, customers — or all of the above. And when promised rewards are slow to materialize, eager backers can get cranky.

“It’s definitely a lot of pressure,” said Eric Migicovsky, whose Kickstarter project to create a line of “Pebble” wristwatches with innovative displays raised more than $10 million — more than 10 times what he had hoped to get. “There are 65,000 people who have preordered a watch that doesn’t yet exist.”

Mr. Migicovsky hired someone to help manage his in-box — nearly 9,000 people have e-mailed him about the project — and to post updates. He originally hoped to start shipping the watches in September, a date that he has had to push back, although he declined to say by how much.

A study by Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, found that 75 percent of design- and technology-related projects on Kickstarter, most of which involve physical products, failed to meet their promised deadlines. In general, project backers seem to be understanding of hiccups and willing to wait as long as they are kept informed.

“The honeymoon period that we are experiencing around crowdfunding is beginning to come to a close,” said Wil Schroeter, co-founder and chief executive of Fundable, a company that is applying crowdfunding to the venture capital process. “People realize there is real risk involved in investing in anything early-stage, whether it’s an idea, a charity or a product, and they’re starting to understand they aren’t buying off of Amazon.”

Kickstarter says it is not responsible for making sure a project is completed on time, or at all. It says project creators are legally obligated to fulfill their promises, but if they do not, Kickstarter has no mechanism for refunding the money that was pledged. Sometimes project creators can be overwhelmed by the success of a crowdfunding campaign.

The four college students behind Diaspora, a project that aimed to build an open alternative to Facebook, began with the modest goal of $10,000. They raised $200,000 from around 6,500 people. But after three years, they still did not have a version to release publicly and turned the code over to anyone who might want to keep working on it. (One member of the team committed suicide last year.)

Max Salzberg, who was part of the team, said they had become so consumed with things like answering e-mails and making T-shirts for their contributors that they had little time to build the software.

“We thought this would be a summer project,” Mr. Salzberg said. “We wanted to make it because it was something we believed in, but we got roped into maintaining a relationship with a lot of people. We weren’t prepared to have to deal with that.”

The hardest part, he said, was the perception they had squandered the money. “It sounds like a lot of money, and people were like, ‘Where did it go?’ But the reality is that for four guys for two years, we scrounged.”

“Going viral was crippling,” he said. “It was mayhem.”

Some retrench before trouble hits. When Kelvin Geis had the idea to create a stylus for use with iPads last spring, he decided to put it up on Kickstarter. “I just really wanted to see if I could make this thing work,” said Mr. Geis, 41, who works in construction in Draper, Utah. “But everything was so much more difficult than I’d anticipated.”

Mr. Geis found that he had drastically underestimated his manufacturing cost and the time it would take to make the stylus. He canceled his fund-raising, consulted designers and manufacturers, and put it back up a few months later. He wound up raising $35,000 in three weeks and shipped out his first order of 1,500 units a few months later.

Several projects on Kickstarter that began with modest goals have taken off and skyrocketed into the millions, sometimes in a matter of days. Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter and who spoke at the conference, said this phenomenon was new for the company, which introduced its site in 2009.

Kickstarter projects are “primarily patronage,” Mr. Strickler said. “But as a product reaches a certain scale, a person is expected to be a corporation.”

“It’s an economy that is being created by the minute,” he said.

The Elevation Dock was the first Kickstarter campaign to soar past $1 million. Casey Hopkins, the project’s founder, said his company would be selling an inexpensive adapter for those who ordered docks and wanted to use them with the iPhone 5.

Mr. Hopkins said that, over all, he was thrilled that he was able to create “a business out of thin air” through Kickstarter.

“When you’re in the trenches, it’s so incredibly stressful,” he said. “But I think we’ve done well.”

The company is close to shipping the last of its 19,000 preordered docks, Mr. Hopkins said.

“It’s definitely been a huge net positive,” he said. “At least, it will be after I take a weeklong vacation.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/t...epreneurs.html





Why Twitter Caved and Handed an “Occupy” Protester’s Data to the Government
Will Oremus

Twitter surprised and impressed civil liberties groups this summer by taking a stand on behalf of an Occupy Wall Street protester’s privacy. Ordered by the judge in a New York criminal case to dredge up and hand over deleted tweets from activist Malcolm Harris (@destructuremal), Twitter fought back and appealed, arguing its users own their own Twitter data. Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU joined the fight on Twitter’s side.

The government, though, played dirty. Judge Matthew Sciarrino, Jr. this week told Twitter on Tuesday that if it didn’t fork over Harris’ data within three days, it would face contempt of court and a stiff fine. That’s not the dirty part. As Sciarrino noted, “I can’t put Twitter or the little blue bird in jail, so the only way to punish is monetarily.” The dirty part is that Sciarrino claimed that, in order to determine the appropriate fine, he would need Twitter’s financial records from the past two quarters. That’s anathema for a private startup clawing to keep its competitive edge, as Sciarrino surely knows.

The company’s response was predictable. “They’re going to tweet like canaries,” the New York Post reported this morning. Indeed, Reuters reports that the company asked the judge “pretty please” one last time in court on Friday, then gave up the goods. Harris’ records will remain under seal pending another appeal from his own lawyers next week.

Some will be tempted to blast Twitter for rolling over. The charges against Harris are petty—disorderly conduct, with a maximum fine of $250, stemming from his arrest along with 700 other protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge last October—but the precedent is significant. Sciarrino is sending the message that Internet companies don’t have the right to fight for their users’ privacy.

For Twitter, though, this was an impossible situation. It’s too much to expect a private company to sacrifice its own right to keep its finances under wraps just so it can pursue a costly legal appeal that it might not win anyway.

Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation doesn’t really blame the company for its decision Friday. “I feel bad for them. I think they were trying to do the right thing,” EFF staff attorney Hanni Fakhoury told me. Given how minor the criminal charges against Harris are, he added, “it feels like the New York City prosecutors are using this as an attempt to get the law shaped in a way that they think is beneficial for them, and to kind of make a point about it. The fact that there won’t be this chance for it to run up the appellate courts is unfortunate.”

Twitter had no comment, but referred me to a statement that its outside counsel, Terryl Brown, made in court Friday morning. Turns out Brown made essentially the same argument:

As a pure matter of law, today Twitter is being given a fundamentally unfair Hobson’s choice that is contrary to the core of our justice system of being compelled to either waive its right to appeal so that novel legal issues may be adjudicated on the merits, or being held in criminal and/or civil contempt. ...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_te..._privacy_.html





Microsoft Battles the Botnets
Richard Lardner

A customer in Shenzhen, China, took a brand new laptop out of its box and turned it on for the first time. But as the screen lit up, the computer began taking on a life of its own. The machine, directed by a virus hidden in its hard drive, started searching the Internet for another computer.

The laptop, supposedly in pristine, direct-from-the-factory condition, had instantly become part of an illegal global network capable of attacking Web sites, looting bank accounts and stealing personal data.

For years, online investigators have warned consumers about the dangers of opening or downloading files sent by e-mail from unknown or suspicious sources. Now, they say, malicious software and computer code could be lurking on computers before the bubble wrap even comes off.

The shopper in this case was part of a team of Microsoft researchers in China investigating the sale of counterfeit software. They suddenly had been introduced to malware called Nitol. The incident was described in court documents unsealed Thursday in a U.S. court in Virginia. The records describe a new front in a legal campaign against cybercrime being waged by Microsoft, the maker of the Windows operating system, which is the biggest target for viruses.

The documents are part of a computer fraud lawsuit filed by Microsoft against a Web domain registered to a Chinese businessman named Peng Yong. The company says that domain is a focal point for illicit Internet activity. It is home base for Nitol and more than 500 other types of malware, making it the largest single repository of infected software that Microsoft executives have ever encountered.

Mr. Peng, the owner of an Internet services company, said he was not aware of the Microsoft lawsuit and denied the allegations, saying his company did not tolerate improper conduct on the domain, 3322.org. Three other unidentified individuals accused by Microsoft of establishing and operating the Nitol network are also named in the suit.

What emerges most vividly from the court records and interviews with Microsoft officials is a disturbing picture of how vulnerable Internet users have become, in part because of weaknesses in computer supply chains. To increase their profit margins, some computer manufacturers and retailers may use counterfeit copies of popular software products to build machines more cheaply. Plugging the holes is nearly impossible, especially in less regulated markets like China, and that creates opportunities for cybercriminals.

“They’re really changing the ways they try to attack you,” said Richard Boscovich, a former U.S. government prosecutor and a senior attorney in Microsoft’s digital crimes unit.

And distance does not confer safety. Nitol, for example, is an aggressive virus found on computers in China, the United States, Russia, Australia and Germany. Microsoft has even identified servers in the Cayman Islands controlling Nitol- infected machines. All these compromised computers become part of a botnet — a collection of compromised computers — which is one of the most invasive and persistent tools of cybercrime.

Nitol, meanwhile, appears poised to strike. Infection rates have peaked, according to Patrick Stratton, a senior manager in Microsoft’s digital crimes unit who filed a document in the court case explaining Nitol and its connection to the 3322.org domain.

For Microsoft, pursuing cybercriminals is a smart business. Its Windows operating system runs most of the computers connected to the Internet. Victims of malware are likely to believe their problems stem from Windows instead of a virus they are unaware of, and that damages the company’s brand and reputation.

But more than Microsoft’s image is at stake when counterfeit products are tainted by rapidly spreading malware, Mr. Boscovich said. “It’s more than simply a traditional intellectual property issue,” he said. “It’s now become a security issue.”

The investigation by Microsoft’s digital crimes unit began in August 2011 as a study into the sale and distribution of counterfeit versions of Windows. Microsoft employees in China bought 20 new computers from retailers and took them back to a home with an Internet connection.

They found forged versions of Windows on all the machines and malware preinstalled on four. The one with Nitol, however, was the most alarming because the malware was active.

“As soon as we powered on this particular computer, of its own accord without any instruction from us, it began reaching out across the Internet, attempting to contact a computer unfamiliar to us,” Mr. Stratton said in the document filed with the court.

Mr. Stratton and his colleagues also found Nitol to be highly contagious. They inserted a thumb drive into the computer and the virus immediately copied itself onto it. When the drive was inserted into a separate machine, Nitol quickly copied itself onto it.

Microsoft examined thousands of samples of Nitol, which has several variants, and all of them connected to command-and-control servers associated with the 3322.org domain, according to the court records.

“In short, 3322.org is a major hub of illegal Internet activity, used by criminals every minute of every day to pump malware and instructions to the computers of innocent people worldwide,” Microsoft said in its lawsuit.

Mr. Peng, the registered owner of 3322.org, said he had “zero tolerance” for the misuse of domain names and worked with Chinese law enforcement whenever there were complaints. Still, he said, his huge customer base made policing difficult.

“Our policy unequivocally opposes the use of any of our domain names for malicious purposes,” Mr. Peng said in a private chat via Sina Weibo, a service like Twitter that is popular in China. “We currently have 2.85 million domain names and cannot exclude that individual users might be using domain names for malicious purposes.”

But past warnings by other online security firms have been ignored by Mr. Peng, Mr. Boscovich said. The 3322.org domain accounted for more than 17 percent of malicious Web transactions worldwide in 2009, according to Zscaler, a computer security firm in San Jose, California. In 2008, the Russian security company Kaspersky Lab reported that 40 percent of all malware programs linked, at one point or another, to 3322.org.

Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of U.S. District Court, who is presiding in the case, granted a request from Microsoft to begin steering Internet traffic that has been infected by Nitol and other malware away from 3322.org to a special site called a sinkhole. From there, Microsoft can alert affected computer users to update their anti-virus protection and remove Nitol from their machines.

Since Judge Lee issued the order, more than 37 million malware connections have been blocked from 3322.org, according to Microsoft.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/t...t-virus17.html





Sophos Antimalware Software Detects Itself as Malware, Deletes Critical Binaries
Emil Protalinski

On Wednesday, Sophos antivirus products did something very wrong: they started detecting false positives. The company has since fixed the issue, but only on Thursday did it become clear what the fiasco was all about: the Sophos software was detecting its own binaries as malware.

Here’s what happened. Earlier in the day Sophos warned its customers in a blog post of the following problem:

Some Sophos customers have reported detections today of Shh/Updater-B. Sophos would like to reassure users that these are false positives and are not a malware outbreak, and apologises for any inconvenience.

The prompt looked something like this.

Sophos then offered its customers instructions on what to do based on their configuration of its security solution. If your automatic updating system was working, it looked like the issue would fix itself as the software grabbed the latest updates. False positives happen, so I wasn’t too surprised. If anything, it was great to see Sophos get on top of the issue so quickly.

Yet there were cases where updates weren’t being delivered, and the company of course offered steps to perform workarounds. That should have sent alarm bells ringing, as the reason the updates weren’t working was because “files in the warehouse are failing to be decoded as they are being falsely detected as Shh/Updater-B.”

Yes, that’s right, the company’s product was categorizing parts of itself as a threat. The company also warned its corporate customers of something that I should have picked up on immediately: “Please double check your SAV policy under cleanup; You want to ensure your secondary option (when cleanup is not available or does not work) to be set to ‘deny access’ and not delete or move.”

I’ve heard of antimalware products detecting critical Windows components as malware and rendering computers unbootable, but this is arguably more mind boggling. Not only was Sophos’ detecting itself as malware, it was moving or deleting said components and effectively castrating itself.

This problem wasn’t officially confirmed until later in the day, in a Sophos Advisory last updated on Thursday: “An identity released by SophosLabs for use with our Live Protection system is causing False Positives against many binaries that have updating functionality.”

Again, the kicker is at the end:

In the case that the ‘Anti-Virus and HIPS’ policy has been set to delete files if they are unable to be cleaned up it will be necessary to re-protect these endpoints as certain Sophos binaries required for updating may have been removed.

Remember: no security company has perfect track record though, so don’t let this one issue scare you away completely. You’re allowed to laugh, however.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/0...ical-binaries/





Exclusive: News of the World Hired Detective Firm Linked with Murder to Spy on Met Chief

Revealed: Yard had undercover officer inside Southern Investigations for 9 years. Derek Haslam claims police failed to act on his intelligence
Tom Harper

The News of the World hired private detectives to spy on a former Metropolitan police commissioner, Independent Voices can reveal.

Lord Stevens, who led Scotland Yard between 2000 and 2005, was placed under surveillance by Southern Investigations, a firm of private investigators linked to one of London’s most notorious unsolved murders.

Its co-founder Jonathan Rees claims the defunct Sunday tabloid hired his company to watch Britain’s most powerful policeman in 1999. He said Southern Investigations received a tip that the then-deputy commissioner was using taxpayer funds to fly a Metropolitan police plane up to Northumbria to see a mistress. There is absolutely no suggestion the tip off had any foundation.

At the time, it can also be disclosed that Scotland Yard had an undercover officer – Derek Haslam - inside Southern Investigations who warned police that the firm was also trying to obtain other embarrassing information on the former Commissioner.

As well as selling the story to the News of the World, Haslam claims Southern Investigations also wanted to use the sensitive information to “control” Lord Stevens.

Haslam said: “I told my handler ‘you’d better tell him they are on to him and they are looking at anything’. They saw filth on police and politicians as a way to control them.”

However, in an interview with Independent Voices, Rees rejects the bombshell allegation as absurd.

Asked if he had Lord Stevens put under surveillance, he replied: “We were given instructions and an allegation that he was using a Met police plane from Biggin Hill to see his mistress in Northumbria.

“Now we did organise a surveillance team because it’s what the News of the World wanted and we had team in Northumbria and here, but he never showed so whether the allegation is true or not, who knows.

“The allegation was that he was using…a Metropolitan police federation plane bought by donations from charity, and the petrol, the fuel, to travel up to Northumbria to see his mistress. You can see why people wanted…that story.”

Haslam’s take on Southern Investigations’ activities is very different. During his nine years as a police “mole”, he claims he told the Yard the firm was committing a vast array of crimes – often on behalf of the News of the World.

Given the widespread criminality he was reporting back to his handlers, Haslam was astonished and confused when no-one was arrested. However, his suspicions were raised last July when the relationship between the Murdoch media empire, Scotland Yard and senior politicians came under intense scrutiny after it emerged that the News of the World hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, 13.

The scandal led to the resignations of David Cameron’s chief spin doctor Andy Coulson, two Scotland Yard police chiefs, ex-Murdoch lieutenant Rebekah Brooks and cost almost 300 jobs when the News of the World was forced to close after 168 years.

Following the recent revelations, Haslam now believes one reason for the Yard’s inaction was “an unhealthy association between senior police officers and News International”.

He refused to speak to Independent Voices because he is currently suing the Met. However, we obtained a confidential briefing he passed to investigators. The 65-year-old claims he told the Met that Southern Investigations was “a corrupt organisation that was corrupting police officers and illegally accessing all sorts of confidential information”.

He added: “I told my handlers that MPs, ministers and Home Secretaries were targets. They fell into two categories, one they could earn money from and the other was to use blackmail, influence, to do their own thing. Anything that put the Met in a bad light, or anybody they could infiltrate or put in a bad light. It was about money and influence.”

Rees described Haslam’s allegations as “nonsense”. He claims Scotland Yard asked Haslam to infiltrate Southern Investigations to invent “blatant lies” and smear them at a time when the firm was uncovering police corruption on behalf of the press.

He said: “Haslam was tasked by senior officers to…come in there and mix with us again and…to find out…what we were doing against CIB3…they knew we were investigating CIB3…it was a force within a force, they were given total autonomy to do whatever they liked, their own accounts, their own finances…history tells us that when you allow policemen to do that it goes wrong….if you let these squads run themselves it leads into trouble.”

Rees claims to have seen the Met’s applications for audio probes inside Southern Investigations’ offices and said the Yard justified the intrusive surveillance because the firm might “undermine the structure and the moral wellbeing of the Metropolitan Police…or even bring it down”.

He added: “We’ve got this poxy little firm of private investigators, half a dozen men, suddenly they are alleging that we were going to bring down the Met police. Good arguments to get your surveillance and come in and listen to what we are saying about them. They were abusing and using the process to see what we’re doing against them. So a battle started….things got very dirty indeed.”

Haslam’s undercover work for the Met began in 1997 when he was asked to infiltrate Southern Investigations to gather evidence on Rees, who was a suspect for the murder of Daniel Morgan, the firm’s co-founder who was found with an axe embedded in his skull in a south London pub car park in 1987.

He claims one of Southern Investigations main clients was former News of the World executive editor Alex Marunchak whose name was “constantly mentioned” inside the firm.

Haslam alleges the veteran journalist paid Southern Investigations to source confidential information from corrupt serving officers on celebrities and high-profile police chiefs, that reportedly included Tony Blair, Kate Middleton, Alastair Campbell, Jack Straw, Lord Mandelson, Lord Stevens, and John Yates – a claim both Southern Investigations and Marunchak strongly deny. When asked about these allegations Mr Marunchak stated that he has never commissioned Southern Investigations to obtain any confidential information relating to celebrities, politicians, the Royal Family, police investigations, any third party or to commit any illegal acts.

Working under the codename “Joe Poulton”, Haslam alleges he also told his handlers at the Met that Southern Investigations tried to obtain the new identities of people inside Scotland Yard’s witness protection programme.

In one of his confidential reports to the Yard in 2006, seen by Indy Voices, Haslam warned the Met that Rees was paying visits to Epsom police station in Surrey “in an attempt to ingratiate himself with serving officers…to the detriment of the service”. He added Rees described the trips as a “loss leader” as he could make money from his efforts.

In another section of the report, Haslam told the Met: “(Rees) still asks about accessing police sources for saleable information.”

Perhaps the most shocking allegations from Haslam was that Southern Investigations burgled MPs’ homes and photocopied documents in a bid to obtain embarrassing titbits they could sell to the News of the World.

Rees totally denies he was ever involved in anything illegal. He said: “The allegations in that report are not true…They know it’s not true and the people who were instructing him didn’t care. I think he was directed to make the worst report, the worst allegations he could…”

“He alleges that…(Southern Investigations) burgled an MP’s garage to remove a briefcase, photographed the contents of the briefcase and put that back…that is a lie.”

Later, he added: “We’ve got nine years of (Haslam) claiming we were involved in criminality. If there was one iota of evidence in there, CIB3 would have liked nothing better than to kick our door in and arrest us. They never did that, because there was no evidence there. It’s in Haslam’s fabricated reports …it’s smoke and mirrors at its best…they will continue to do that to justify all the wrongdoings and corrupt gathering of evidence.”

Haslam started his undercover work around the same time the Met launched a separate third investigation into the Morgan case, which the Yard publicly admits has been plagued by police corruption and remains unsolved 25 years later.

Codenamed Operation Nigeria, the seven-month probe – which was separate to Haslam’s work - was led by former Detective Superintentendent Bob Quick, who later rose to Assistant Commissioner rank in charge of Britain’s fight against terrorism. The covert operation included bugs installed inside Southern Investigations’ offices in Thornton Heath to record any discussion of the Morgan murder. During the inquiry, Quick said Scotland Yard became aware of the firm’s close links to News International.

He told the Leveson Inquiry he recommended establishing an investigation into the relationship between journalists, private investigators and police officers in 2000. However, Quick claimed the Met never took up his proposal. In his witness statement to the Leveson Inquiry, he said Southern Investigations, acting on behalf of various News International journalists, obtained confidential information from serving police officers in order to sell stories to newspapers. “One of the journalists suspected was Alex Marunchak, an executive with the News of the World,” he said. “During the operation it became clear that officers were being paid sums of between £500 and £2000 for stories about celebrities, politicians, and the Royal Family, as well as police investigations.” Mr Marunchak was the News of the World’s chief crime reporter before being promoted to the roles of executive editor and, finally, the paper’s Irish editor.

This allegation is supported by a witness statement provided to police by Southern Investigations’ book keeper Marjorie Williams, who claimed the News of the World used to invoice Southern Investigations up to 500 times a month via Marunchak.

She also alleged the firm paid £7,000 off his credit card and used to fund his child’s school fees. Marunchak strongly denies any claim that Southern Investigations paid his debts. He stated that it is categorically untrue that Southern Investigations has ever paid monies into his credit card accounts or towards his children’s school fees. He also stated that he has a “signed, witnessed, dated statement of truth” from the then bursar of his children’s’ school that confirms no-one except Marunchak ever paid fees .

Rees backs Marunchak’s version of events. He said: “It is a serious allegation…why she says those things, I suspect there’s some ill-feeling there…the police, right from the early days, have had our accounts…and there is not one slip or iota of evidence to show any of that is true.

“We never paid Alex Marunchak any monies… he never, ever asked us to pay his childrens’ school fees.”

During Operation Abelard – the Met probe into the Morgan murder that followed Nigeria in 2002 - detectives managed to persuade another former employee of Southern Investigations, Richard “Boris” Zdrojewski, to give evidence against Rees. In his witness statement to police, seen by Indy Voices, he said one “particularly memorable job” was when the firm “fitted up” a police officer for a News of the World story. He stated that he arranged to meet a chief inspector in a McDonalds car park with some information on a bogus crime.

Mr Zdrojewski added: “I shoved (the papers) into his hands. He was photographed and his photo and report appeared in the News of the World to look like he was taking a bribe.”

Rees said this is yet another allegation invented by police to discredit him. He added: “It is a ridiculous allegation…it’s nonsense. The truth is that we were serving an injunction on a senior police officer who happened to be the head of the domestic violcene unit…we were serving an injunction from his wife because of domestic violence on her…that was a story.”

Independent Voices can reveal that Lord Stevens had lunch with Rebekah Brooks, then editor of the News of the World, Alex Marunchak and Dick Fedorcio, the Yard’s former press chief, in 2000 – just months after the conclusion of Operation Nigeria.

Further links between Scotland Yard and News International emerged during Abelard, which commenced in June 2002. The senior investigating officer, detective chief superintendent Dave Cook, discovered that News International had apparently agreed to use photographers and vans leased to the News of the World to run surveillance on him and his family.

The defunct tabloid allegedly collected a huge amount of personal information on Cook and his wife Jacqui Hames following the policeman’s appearance on BBC Crimewatch, when he appealed for information to solve the Morgan murder.

But when the Met discovered what was happening, the only action it took was to summon the then News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks into a meeting in January 2003 where she was told about the surveillance of Cook and about Marunchak’s relationship with Rees. Brooks said the newspaper suspected the couple of “having an affair with each other” - despite Hames and Cook being married for four years with two children, and a profile of them appearing in Hello! Magazine. Marunchak denied any involvement in any attempt to target the couple and stated that he never commissioned Southern Investigations to obtain confidential information relating to Hames and Cook . He said his sole link was to receive a tip that Hames, who presented Crimewatch, was having an affair with a senior officer who appeared on the BBC show and passed it on to the News of the World newsdesk.

Ms Hames told the Leveson Inquiry that Brooks' excuse was “utterly nonsensical”. She said: “I believe the real reason they placed us under surveillance was that suspects in the Daniel Morgan murder inquiry were using their association with a powerful and well-resourced newspaper to try and intimidate us and so attempt to subvert the investigation.”

Rees said: “That anyone would try to intimidate a very senior high-ranking officer in charge of one of the most notorious investigations for the Met police…it’s as if common sense has gone completely out the window.”

During all this time, Haslam worked undercover at Southern Investigations until his cover was eventually blown in 2006 when his computer was allegedly hacked by his colleagues, who had become suspicious. Haslam said Scotland Yard offered him the chance to go into the witness protection programme – a system he claims he saw repeatedly compromised by the agency.

Rees said this was “wholly untrue”. It is understood Haslam turned down the offer of protection, decided he would look after himself and asked for a payout. However, this is thought to have been rejected by the Met.

The fifth and final investigation into the Daniel Morgan murder collapsed last year after Scotland Yard failed to disclose vital evidence to the defence and Rees was released from jail after spending 23 months on remand. In all, the probes have cost more than £30 million.

Detectives working on the various criminal probes into News International have arrested around 80 different people so far. Rees and Marunchak, who supplemented his News of the World income by working as a Ukrainian translator for the Met for 20 years, are not among them.

A spokesman for Lord Stevens denied flying a Met police plane to Northumbria and denied ever having a mistress. He added the ex-Commissioner was unaware he was under surveillance.

News International declined to comment. However, a source emphasised the company was now co-operating vigorously with the Met.

A Scotland Yard spokesperson said: “We are not prepared to discuss these matters.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...f-8144285.html





British Regulator Declares BSkyB ‘Fit and Proper’
Ravi Somaiya and Alan Cowell

British regulators concluded on Thursday that the country’s biggest satellite pay-TV group, British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, was “fit and proper” to hold a broadcast license, offering a victory for its biggest shareholder, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, after months of embroilment in the phone hacking scandal engulfing Mr. Murdoch’s British media outpost.

In a lengthy and detailed ruling, the Office of Communications, known as Ofcom, appeared to exonerate Mr. Murdoch in the hacking scandal while raising questions about the “competence” of his son James, who oversaw his family’s British media holdings for many years. The regulator found that James Murdoch “fell short” in his handling of the hacking scandal and in his “attitude toward the possibility of wrongdoing in the companies for which he was responsible.”

The ruling spared BSkyB a potentially bruising and expensive legal battle to hold on to its license for broadcasting operations that earned a net profit of $1.4 billion in the year ending June 30, making it one of the most lucrative Murdoch investments.

Ofcom announced its conclusions in a statement after months of inquiries about the standing of BSkyB, in which News Corporation holds a 39 percent stake.

Mr. Murdoch had been promoting a $12 billion bid to acquire full control of BSkyB when the scandal involving phone hacking by newspaper journalists broke over other parts of his British media outpost, particularly The News of the World tabloid, raising questions about BSkyB’s status as a broadcaster. It was not immediately clear whether the ruling would encourage a revival of the bid.

“Ofcom considers that, on the evidence currently available and having taken into account all the relevant factors, Sky is fit and proper to hold its broadcast licenses,” the regulator’s statement said.

But it cautioned, “Ofcom’s duty to be satisfied that a licensee is fit and proper is ongoing. Should further relevant evidence become available in the future, Ofcom would need to consider that evidence in order to fulfill its duty.”

The statement said: “To date, there is no evidence that Sky was directly or indirectly involved in any of the wrongdoing either admitted or alleged to have taken place at News of the World or The Sun,” another Murdoch tabloid in Britain. Rupert Murdoch closed The News of the World after the scandal engulfed it in July 2011.

But the regulator also found that James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s younger son who was closely involved in the running of BSkyB from 2003 until his resignation as nonexecutive chairman in April, “repeatedly fell short of the conduct to be expected” of a senior manager in his handling of the hacking scandal. There was no evidence, however, that he deliberately engaged in “widespread wrongdoing” or a cover-up of the scandal.

Ofcom said that, on the evidence currently available to it, Rupert Murdoch did not act in a “way that was inappropriate” in the scandals engulfing his British papers. James Murdoch was the chairman of BSkyB when the regulatory inquiry got under way. He remains on the BSkyB board as a nonexecutive director.

In a statement after the ruling, BSkyB said: “Ofcom is right to conclude that Sky is a fit and proper broadcaster. As a company, we are committed to high standards of governance, and we take our regulatory obligations extremely seriously. As Ofcom acknowledges, our track record of compliance in broadcasting is good.”

“We are proud of our contribution as a broadcaster, the investments we make to increase choice for U.K. audiences and the wider benefits we create for the economy. After a lengthy review process, we are pleased that Ofcom has now reached its conclusion, and we look forward to continuing to develop our business for the benefit of customers and shareholders alike.”

For its part, News Corporation said it was “pleased that Ofcom recognizes BSkyB as a fit and proper holder of a broadcast license.” It added that it was proud of James Murdoch’s record at the company, and that it disagreed with the sections of the report that criticized his conduct.

The regulator’s approval of BSkyB’s corporate probity had been widely anticipated, but the criticism of James Murdoch was more rigorous than some analysts had anticipated.

The Ofcom report is a “mixed picture,” said Claire Enders, a media analyst in London who has followed the Murdochs’ travails. “The tone on James Murdoch was very harsh but then, on the other hand, Ofcom also intimated that it is happy with the general corporate governance of BSkyB.” Had Mr. Murdoch not stepped down as chairman in April, she added, “he would have found his situation today impossible.”

News Corporation, and its shareholders, can also take solace in the fact that the report was released relatively quickly, Ms. Enders said. “Ofcom could have taken the view, which would have been quite punitive, that it could have kept this investigation hovering in the background.”

But the danger has not passed, she said. Ofcom noted that its “judgments are effectively temporary,” she said. An ongoing public inquiry, police investigations and the trials next year of senior Murdoch executives charged with illegal activity over the phone hacking scandal could all produce further revelations challenging evidence given so far.

BSkyB offers a palette of entertainment, news and sports channels, including Sky News.

In May, a parliamentary panel issued a damning but disputed report on the hacking scandal saying Rupert Murdoch was “not a fit person” to run a huge international company, adding new momentum to the regulator’s scrutiny of his controlling interest in BSkyB.

After the publication of the parliamentary report a month later, BSkyB, distanced itself from News Corporation when Jeremy Darroch, BSkyB’s chief executive told reporters: “I would emphasize that it’s important to remember that Sky and News Corporation are separate companies.”

The police have arrested dozens of Murdoch journalists and managers in a criminal inquiry into phone hacking, computer hacking and bribery of public officials, particularly the police. A separate judicial inquiry is investigating the behavior and practices of the British press and has heard testimony from scores of witnesses, including Rupert and James Murdoch.

Ravi Somaiya reported from London, and Alan Cowell from Berlin.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/w...nd-proper.html





Sky Wins Exclusive Warner Bros. Movie Rights, Dealing a Blow to Netflix and its Rivals
Matt Brian

Pushing back against Netflix and its satellite, video-on-demand and pay-per-view rivals, Sky has signed a new movie deal with Warner Bros., which sees it granted exclusive access to movies six months after they end their run in theaters.

The agreement demonstrates Sky’s ability to win first window rights in the pay TV and pay-per-view markets, allowing it to show Warner Bros. titles on its Sky Movies channels but also on its VOD services and pay-per-view services on Sky Movies Box Office and Sky Store.

This extends to the company’s services, which include its 11 dedicated Sky Movies channels and Sky Go; its TV service that is available on iOS, Android and other consumer devices. Movies will also be available to subscribers of Sky’s new subscription service Now TV (often touted as a Netflix killer), which can operate on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Currently, Now TV subscribers can sign up for a Sky Movies Pass, which offers over 600 movies from the major players such as Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Warner Bros., and Universal for £15 a month. The service already supports PC, Android, Mac, iPhone, iPad, YouView and Xbox.

Sky will gain exclusive access to Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, The Dark Knight Rises, Dark Shadows and Wrath of the Titans, Man of Steel, The Hangover Part III and The Great Gatsby. The deal will also include access to classic titles including all Batman movies, The Matrix franchise, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and all Superman movies.

The movies will be available in HD and 3D where they are supported.

Today’s announcement will be a blow to Netflix, particularly after its CEO Reed Hastings declared he was prepared to be “aggressive” in bidding for films from Hollywood’s six biggest studios.

Hasting said that Netflix, which has already amassed over 1 million users in the UK and Ireland, would be able to win access to first window movie rights:

“We will be really aggressive in our bidding,” he said. “It may be that we win in the first round. It may be that it takes two or three years, but we’re incredibly confident that we will win the bidding for some of Pay 1 [the first window rights].”

It isn’t known if Sky outbid Netflix, or whether Netflix was involved in the bidding process for Warner Bros. movie rights. However, the films will be available on Sky’s services exclusively for more than a year, so Netflix will have to wait until 2013 to deliver access to some of of the more popular Warner Bros. titles.
http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/09/...etflix-rivals/





European Regulators Approve Universal’s Purchase of EMI
Ben Sisario and James Kanter

European regulators on Friday approved a reduced version of Universal Music’s $1.9 billion takeover of EMI Music, allowing Universal to expand its dominance as the world’s largest music company but significantly paring down its ambitions.

To win the approval of the European Commission, Universal agreed to divest itself of about a third of the assets of EMI, including most of Parlophone, its flagship label in Europe, along with a number of formerly independent labels and nine national subsidiaries of EMI across Europe. Universal will also sell a handful of its own assets, and it agreed to a set of market behavior controls that will govern how it handles contracts with digital music services.

The divestments include global rights to release the music by the artists on those labels, which means that EMI will no longer release records by some of its biggest acts, including Coldplay, Pink Floyd, Kylie Minogue and David Guetta. One consolation for Universal is that it will not have to sell recording rights for the Beatles or Robbie Williams, one of EMI’s biggest acts in Britain.

The commission, the executive arm of the European Union, said in a statement that the asset sales allayed its concerns about the combined group’s market power, and that it paid particular attention to the merger’s effect on the digital music market.

“Competition in the music business is crucial to preserve choice, cultural diversity and innovation,” Joaquín Almunia, the E.U. competition commissioner, said in the statement. “In this investigation, we have paid close attention to digital innovation, which is changing the way that people listen to music. ‘The very significant commitments proposed by Universal will ensure that competition in the music industry is preserved and that European consumers continue to enjoy all its benefits.”The total value of the assets to be disposed of was unclear. They are said to generate about $450 million in annual revenue in Europe, but the global rights could add considerably more.

Even with such large concessions, opponents of the deal complained that it would allow Universal to grow even bigger. “It’s good to see that the commission has seen this deal as such a threat to the market that it has demanded and received truly swinging commitments on divestments,” said Martin Mills, chairman of the Beggars Group, an independent company whose acts include Adele and Vampire Weekend. “However, that should not conceal that fact that Universal’s arrogance has paid off for them, that they have destroyed a significant competitor, and that even with these divestments their ability to dominate and control the market has reached even more unacceptable levels.”

The deal, which has already been cleared in Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand, is being reviewed in the United States by the Federal Trade Commission, with a decision expected in the coming days. The F.T.C. could demand further divestments from Universal, but that is considered unlikely.

The takeover will advance the corporate consolidation of the music industry that has been under way for more than a decade. But for Universal and its parent company, the French media and telecommunications conglomerate Vivendi, the EMI ruling is a painful victory.

The negotiations with European regulators went on for months and were tense because of serious concerns that the deal would have allowed Universal to worsen the licensing terms it offers to digital platforms such as Spotify and those operated by Apple that sell music to consumers.

“This has been one of the most difficult discussions,” said Mr. Almunia, who said one of the main challenges he faced was preservation of cultural diversity and innovation amid a further consolidation of the music industry.

The difficulty for Universal was rooted in the unusual structure of the deal, which was struck with Citigroup in November: in it, Universal agreed to pay Citi the full price of EMI, regardless of regulatory approval. (Its first payment — about $1.75 billion, or 90 percent — was made earlier this month, and the balance is due when the deal closes.)

Citi seized EMI in early 2011 after the label’s previous owner, the private equity firm Terra Firma, defaulted on a $5.4 billion loan. In a parallel deal reached last November, an investor group led by Sony paid $2.2 billion for EMI’s music publishing assets. That deal closed in June.

Universal’s agreement with Citi put pressure on its executives to preserve as much of EMI as possible, since the company would face losses if it were forced to sell assets for less than it paid. In addition, Universal had estimated $160 million a year in savings by merging the two companies, but not all of those savings would be realized from a diminished EMI.

In late July, Universal offered to sell about two-thirds of EMI’s holdings in Europe, including much of Parlophone and top acts like the D.J. David Guetta. Also included were the former independent labels Chrysalis, Mute and Ensign; EMI Classics and Virgin Classics; EMI’s share of the profitable pop compilation series “Now That’s What I Call Music!”; and EMI’s subsidiary companies in Belgium, France, Sweden and other countries.

The divestment package that the European Commission agreed to will include those pieces with some additions, as well as global rights.

Universal also agreed to sell some of its own properties, including the Sanctuary label and Co-op Music, a label licensing business, as well as its share in Jazzland label and its Universal Greece subsidiary.

The commission said that Universal cannot reacquire the divested assets. According to European law, it also must sell the assets within six months, with the sale subject to monitoring by European authorities.

Universal’s divestment package is widely considered in the music industry to be very large, although quibbles surfaced quickly on Friday about the true value of some of the headline names in the package.

“Pink Floyd has a contract with EMI that expires in 2015, so that divestment is not worth as much as the artists signed to long-term contracts,” Alice Enders of the British firm Enders Analysis wrote in an e-mail. “Pink Floyd had famously sued EMI in 2010 to prevent the unbundling of the tracks on their iconic albums on iTunes, which it won based on the terms of its 1999 contract, and it restricts the exploitation of its catalog on Spotify and other digital music services.”

The damage to Universal and Vivendi could be minimized if Universal can get good prices for the divested assets. Several parties are said to be interested, including BMG Rights Management, a joint venture between Bertelsmann and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Daniel Miller, who founded the Mute label in 1978 and sold it to EMI in 2002, has also expressed interest in buying it back.

Mr. Almunia said the new market share on average across Europe would be below 40 percent after the merger, and he explained that under the terms of the clearance, that two-thirds of the total divestitures by Universal should go to one buyer to create another heavyweight competitor with market power.

Mr. Almunia said that the remaining third of divestitures should go to create another significant player in the industry.

“We cannot impose a buyer,” said Mr. Almunia, but he warned that if he saw “new threats to competition” emerging as a result of the divestitures he could take further action to ensure a competitive music market.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/b...-approved.html





Comcast Data Caps Hit Test Cities, Range from 300GB to 600GB

Caps hit Nashville and Tucson in trials, broader deployment coming later.
Jon Brodkin

When Comcast decided to suspend its 250GB per month caps on Internet service, the reprieve for customers was only temporary. New caps of 300GB to 600GB would hit two test markets by the end of the year, Comcast said, with the caps presumably affecting customers nationwide at some later, not-yet-announced date.

Comcast has now revealed some details on how those caps are being implemented as they hit test cities. The caps began in Nashville, Tennessee, on August 1, and go into place in Tucson, Arizona, on October 1. In Tucson, customers are getting at least 300GB, as promised, and can get up to 600GB if they pay for the Extreme 105 service, which offers 105Mbps download speed:

Those who go over their caps will automatically be billed $10 for another block of 50GB. Customers can view their usage online, and when they exceed their caps they will get an e-mail and an in-browser notification like this one:

In Nashville, the cap is 300GB no matter what tier of service you subscribe to. The difference between Nashville and Tucson makes sense given that Comcast said in May that it will pilot “at least two approaches in different markets.”

The automatic $10 charge for each additional block of 50GB applies to both Nashville and Tucson. Comcast customers in both test markets also get three “courtesy passes,” meaning that customers won’t be billed the first three times they exceed their monthly allotment in a 12-month period.

Comcast is not saying whether these details will remain the same when caps are implemented beyond Nashville and Tucson. “We need to run these trials for a few months so we can assess the customer experience and our network,” a Comcast spokesperson told Ars, adding that “we don’t have any additional plans to announce at this time.” An article in Broadband Reports citing a "reliable source" claims that Comcast's national rollout will adopt tiered caps, but this has not been confirmed.

How high can the caps go? Comcast is planning 305Mbps service in some markets, but not in Tucson or Nashville. If Comcast continues with the Tucson approach of giving progressively bigger caps to customers who pay for higher speeds, those who opt for 305Mbps could end up getting more than 600GB per month.

Even the previous 250GB cap affected less than 1 percent of customers, and median monthly usage is only 10 to 12GB per month, according to Comcast. But, people and families with multiple devices who download and stream lots of video could find themselves hitting Comcast’s limits.

Of course, Comcast makes exceptions. If you’re using Comcast’s Xfinity TV On Demand on an Xbox 360, for example, that traffic does not count against your usage cap. Criticism that Comcast is prioritizing its own services over those of video streaming companies like Netflix and Hulu has led to a Department of Justice investigation into possible antitrust violations.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012...00gb-to-600gb/





Consumer Groups to Fight AT&T FaceTime Restrictions

Three public interest groups plan to file a formal complaint accusing AT&T Inc of violating U.S. Internet rules if the wireless service provider goes ahead with a plan to limit use of Apple Inc's FaceTime application to certain customers.

The groups -- Free Press, Public Knowledge and the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute -- gave AT&T notice in a letter on Tuesday that they plan to file a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, unless the No. 2 U.S. mobile provider changes its policy.

Both AT&T and the FCC declined to comment on the letter.

Apple's FaceTime video conferencing application will work on cellular networks after the iPhone 5 hits store shelves this week. Until now, the service was only useable over Wi-Fi short range wireless connections, which are often free to use but have a limited coverage range.

AT&T's iPhone 5 customers will still be able to use the service without charge on Wi-Fi networks.

But the advocacy groups are complaining because AT&T is only allowing subscribers to its shared data plans, which include its highest rates for data, to use FaceTime on its cellular network.

In comparison, AT&T's bigger rival Verizon Wireless says all of its data customers can use FaceTime. Use of the service would be counted against their monthly data allowance rather than their voice minutes allowance.

The advocacy groups say AT&T is breaking FCC rules as they believe that it should give all customers who pay for its mobile Internet service the option to use any Internet application they want to use regardless of which data plan they buy.

"When you sign up to use the Internet, you're allowed to use the Internet," said Free Press legislative director Joel Kelsey.

He noted that some consumers may want to use FaceTime to talk without having to dip into their monthly allowance for voice minutes.

Sarah Morris, policy counsel for the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute said the AT&T decision was a "direct contradiction" of FCC rules.

"For those rules to actually protect consumers and allow them to choose the services they use, the Commission must act quickly in reviewing complaints before it," Morris said.

Kelsey said the group sent a letter to AT&T's General Counsel Wayne Watts, as it is required to give the company 10 days notice before it files the official complaint.

(Reporting By Sinead Carew; editing by Gunna Dickson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...88H1DP20120918





DC Lobby Group Internet Association Lists Full Roster Of Tech Giants And Outs Manifesto
Natasha Lomas

Washington DC-headquartered lobby group The Internet Association — which named its president and CEO earlier this year — has now unveiled its full membership roster and policy platform.

The list of 14 companies signed up to the lobby group are: Amazon.com, AOL, eBay, Expedia, Facebook, Google, IAC, LinkedIn, Monster Worldwide, Rackspace, salesforce.com, TripAdvisor, Yahoo!, and Zynga.

In its inaugural press release, the group describes itself as “an umbrella public policy organization dedicated to strengthening and protecting a free and innovative Internet” — and says the three key target areas for its lobbying activities are: protecting Internet freedom; fostering innovation and economic growth; and empowering users.

“A free and innovative Internet is vital to our nation’s economic growth,” said Michael Beckerman, President and CEO of The Internet Association, in a statement. “These companies are all fierce competitors in the market place, but they recognize the Internet needs a unified voice in Washington. They understand the future of the Internet is at stake and that we must work together to protect it.”

Educating policymakers about the myriad economic benefits and creative freedoms afforded by the Internet and Internet companies is also a key focus for the group’s work.

“The Internet is the fastest growing sector of the US economy with an unparalleled record of job creation and innovation across all sectors. It is the Internet’s decentralized and open model that has unleashed unprecedented entrepreneurialism, creativity and innovation. Policymakers must understand that the preservation of that freedom is essential to the vitality of the Internet itself and the resulting economic prosperity,” Beckerman added.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/19/dc-...uts-manifesto/





UK's IPv4 Stocks Not For Sale
Juha Saarinen

The UK Government department holding a large block of unused IPv4 addresses has argued it would cost more to reallocate to others than it could bring in.

Coder and blogger John Graham-Cunning discovered the UK Department of Work and Pensions had control of an /8 block of IPv4 addresses — equating to roughly 16.8 million individual addresses — that he suggested was "completely unused".

The address stock, he argued, could bring in between $US500 million to $1.5 billion ($A478-1434 million) for the Government, based on a valuation of approximately $12 per address in recent sales.

The discovery coincided with a move by the European regional internet registry to restrict the number of addresses allocated to internet service providers in the area to just 1024 each, as it deals with depleting stocks.

However, the department had already pushed back against such suggestions prior to Graham-Cunning's discovery.

In a December 2011 response to a Freedom of Information request, the department said that the cost of reallocating such a large number of addresses "is too high to make this a viable proposition".

While "no significant block of addresses is visible from the public Internet" as of last year, approximately 80 percent of the address space had in fact been allocated for use in Britain's Public Services Network, a whole-of-government departmental network the Government is currently in transition to.

Due to this, the department argued there were no plans to release any of the address space for use on the public internet.

"DWP are aware that the worldwide IPv4 address space is almost exhausted, but knows that in the short to medium term there are mechanisms available to ISPs that will allow continued expansion of the Internet, and believes that in the long term a transition to IPv6 will resolve address exhaustion," it said.

"Note that even if DWP were able to release their address space, this would only delay IPv4 address exhaustion by a number of months."

Geoff Huston, chief scientist of the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre and recognised expert on IPv4 exhaustion, told iTnews that address pools not visible in the public routing system was not a reliable indicator of whether it was being used or not.

"Indeed, I'd state strongly that 'unused' is a misnomer," Huston said.

"The address allocation procedures used since the inception of the internet allow for the use of unique addresses in both private and public contexts."

An address in private or corporate networks could be used for VPNs, for back-end data centres, private shared space, infrastructure within a public network, and other situations where the shared private address blocks (so-called RFC1918 space) would not work, according to Huston.

"To call this unused without a clear understanding of the local situation is an entirely unjustified assertion in my opinion," he said.

There are 870 million allocated, but unadvertised, IPv4 addresses as of today.

Huston argued that the address transfer policies being implemented by a number of regional internet registries, such as APNIC, allowed those holding existing allocations to avoid transfering them to others.

They hoped to avoid becoming directly involved in commercial transactions for such address transfers.

Huston said that while registries will accept any voluntary returns of unused address space, they have no power to force that to happen.

"If a party wants to continue to hold an address block, advertised or unadvertised, then obviously the RIRs respect that choice," he said.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/316071...-for-sale.aspx





AT&T Chief Speaks Out on Texting at the Wheel
Matt Richtel

Randall L. Stephenson, the chairman and chief executive of AT&T, spoke Wednesday morning at a conference in New York to hundreds of major investors, including Fortune 500 executives. The topic was the state of the telecom businesses, but he began with a request on a different topic: Please don’t text and drive.

He’s been saying it a lot lately, at investor conferences, the annual shareholder meeting in April, town halls and civic club meetings, and in conversations with chief executives of other major companies.

AT&T is not the first or only carrier to raise awareness on this issue, but the message is starting at the top and it’s personal.

Mr. Stephenson said in an interview that a few years ago someone close to him caused an accident while texting. As he has become more vocal about texting and driving, he said people were coming up to him and writing him with their own stories of tragedy, including admissions that they caused accidents.

The smartphone, he says, “is a product we sell and it’s being used inappropriately.” For him, that means the company he runs has to get involved in a public awareness campaign. “We have got to drive behavior.”

Safety advocates say for the moment that they are particularly impressed by AT&T’s persistent and broad efforts to draw attention to the problem of texting while driving.

They say history shows that public service campaigns have had limited success on issues like drunken driving or seat belt use unless they are paired with strong laws, something Mr. Stephenson opposes.

“AT&T in particular has invested quite a bit in messaging and I’m hopeful it will make consumers aware,” said Bill Windsor, the chief safety officer at Nationwide Insurance. “It certainly can’t hurt,” he added, “But law enforcement is the other step that’s needed to curb behavior.”

David D. Teater, senior director of the National Safety Council, whose son was killed by a driver talking on her phone, said he was pleased to see telecommunications companies, including AT&T, no longer lobbying against laws aimed at curbing driver distraction caused by electronic devices.

“We’d love their support on the legislative side,” he said of AT&T’s position. “But the fact they’re not opposing us is good.”

Mr. Stephenson said he would prefer market-driven solutions to legislative ones. He hopes that changing the culture can work. Verizon Wireless supports state and federal legislation to ban texting by drivers and has been credited by safety advocates for raising awareness years ago.

Currently, 39 states ban texting while driving. Research shows that the activity sharply increases the risk of a crash, even beyond the risk posed by someone driving with a .08 blood alcohol level, the legal limit in many states. Yet researchers say that there is no indication drivers are less inclined to text and drive, and there is some indication that the behavior is increasing.

To that end, Mr. Stephenson also appeared on Wednesday at an event in Washington with Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary, who has called distracted driving an epidemic. They called on people to take a lifelong pledge not to text and drive.

On Sept. 30, AT&T will offer a free, revised version of its DriveMode app for Android and BlackBerry phones that will automatically disable texting when the phone is traveling more than 25 miles an hour. There is no app, though, for the popular iPhones.

The motivation is to bypass a driver’s urge to answer the chime of the incoming text or e-mail. Mr. Stephenson said the technology might eventually block phone calls to drivers. There are several such apps like DriveMode on the market, from Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint, but they have thus far had limited adoption, said Mr. Windsor, from Nationwide Insurance.

The app is part of a broader campaign called “It Can Wait,” that began in 2010. It has included gripping and graphic videos and commercials, like a recent one with a testimonial from a young man who suffered brain damage in an accident caused by a texting driver. The tagline is, “Last Text.”

The company won’t say exactly how many millions it is spending on the campaign.

“I told people that what we’re going to do is make people a bit uncomfortable and maybe be a bit impolite,” Mr. Stephenson said.

He added that he had to curb his own behavior, too. “When I went public, I told my wife: ‘You know what this means? I can no longer touch this iPhone or BlackBerry in the car.’ ” He puts his devices in a cup holder and silences them. “It was a habit I had to break.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/t...e-driving.html





New Philippines Law Bans ‘Cybersex’
Stephen C. Webster

The president of the Philippines signed a cyber crime bill into law on Tuesday that, much to the chagrin of Internet freedom activists, outlaws “cybersex,” bans “unsolicited commercial communications” online and imposes criminal penalties on people convicted of libel.

Activists with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an Internet policy group in the U.S., said they are “gravely concerned” that the law infringes upon free expression by even criminalizing consensual sex acts that are recorded by a computer

The law defines “cybersex” as: “The willful engagement, maintenance, control, or operation, directly or indirectly, of any lascivious exhibition of sexual organs or sexual activity, with the aid of a computer system, for favor or consideration.”

The Philippines is a well known haven for human trafficking by prostitution rings that force women and girls to perform sex acts for audiences over the Internet. The law’s prohibition of “cybersex” appears to be a legislative attempt to either stamp that industry out entirely or drive it further underground.

With regards to “unsolicited commercial communications,” the law requires that all online advertisements let users clearly see who sent it and opt-out if they wish. It also prohibits “misleading information” in ads that “induce the recipients to read the message.”

It also imposed severe penalties for the commission of more traditional cyber crimes like hacking secured computer systems and obtaining private or otherwise secret information.

The EFF also warned that the new law threatens criminal sanctions against people accused of libel, which was previously a civil crime. Similarly, “cybersquatting” is also illegal under the law, especially in cases where the owner of a web domain has acquired it “in bad faith to profit, mislead, destroy reputation, and deprive others from registering the same.”

The law prescribes prison time or “a fine of at least two hundred thousand pesos” (about $4,806 U.S. dollars) for listed offenses. Individuals working full time in the Philippines averaged about 29,460 pesos (about $707 U.S. dollars) per year in 2003, according to Philippine government census figures.

The penalties are “at least double” if a corporation is found to be liable of crimes covered by the law, with a maximum fine of 10 million pesos (about $240,298 U.S. dollars).
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/09/1...laws-cybersex/





Corruption in Wikiland? Paid PR Scandal Erupts at Wikipedia

A Wikipedia trustee and a Wikipedian In Residence have been editing the online encyclopedia on behalf of PR clients. Add the discovery of an SEO business run on the side, and this tempest is out of its teapot.
Violet Blue

Concerned Wikipedians raised the alarm Monday that two trusted men -- one a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK, the other a respected Wikipedian In Residence -- are allegedly editing Wikipedia pages and facilitating front-page placement for their pay-for-play, publicity-seeking clients.

Jimmy Wales is not pleased.

It began this week when an interesting discussion started on the DYK ("Did You Know") discussion page.

Roger Bamkin, trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK, whose LinkedIn page describes him as a high-return-earning PR consultant, appeared to be using Wikipedia's main page "Did You Know" feature and the resources of Wikipedia's GLAM WikiProject (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) initiative to pimp his client's project.

Bamkin's current client is the country of Gibraltar.

In August, Gibraltar was featured as a Wikipedia DYK front page feature an astonishing seventeen times - that's an unusual frequency of every 2-3 days.

Other than the Olympics, it is the only repeated topic throughout the month.

The "Did You Know" section on Wikipedia's Main Page publicizes new or expanded articles - the publicity viewership on Wikipedia's front page is estimated in the hundreds of millions per month.

Wales: "wildly inappropriate"

When Wikipedia's founder was told about Bamkin's client in relation to Wikimedia UK, Jimmy Wales wrote:

It is wildly inappropriate for a board member of a chapter, or anyone else in an official role of any kind in a charity associated with Wikipedia, to take payment from customers in exchange for securing favorable placement on the front page of Wikipedia or anywhere else. - Jimbo Wales (talk) 00:54, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

At the same time Bamkin's consulting work as a representative of Wikimedia Foundation reared its ugly head, Wikipedia community members exposed the SEO-focused, PR-strategy Wikipedia page editing business run by respected GLAM editor Max Klein.

Both Klein and Bamkin are "Wikipedians In Residence," a role held by Wikipedia editors in high esteem who liaison with galleries, libraries, archives and museums to facilitate information between the organizations and Wikipedia community editors.

Wikipedians In Residence are not allowed to operate if there are conflicts of interest and are not allowed to edit the pages of the organization they liaison with.

Maximillion Klein runs a consulting business called "untrikiwiki" whose self-description explains:

A positive Wikipedia article is invaluable SEO: it's almost guaranteed to be a top three Google hit. Surprisingly this benefit of writing for Wikipedia is underutilized, but relates exactly the lack of true expertise in the field. ... WE HAVE THE EXPERTISE NEEDED to navigate the complex maze surrounding 'conflict of interest' editing on Wikipedia. With more than eight years of experience, over 10,000 edits, and countless community connections we offer holistic Wikipedia services.

When the concerned Wikipedia editors asked Jimmy Wales about untrikiwiki (in the thread about Roger Bamkin) Wales commented:

I was unaware of this case, and haven't had time to look into it. If what you say is accurate, then of course I'm extremely unhappy about it. It's disgusting.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 00:54, 17 September 2012

No specific Wikimedia UK policy on "paid editing"

At this time, there is no Wikimedia UK policy against "paid editing" for Wikipedia pages, though Jimmy Wales has said that paid editing is against Wikipedia values and policy.

However, there's no doubt that the lack of a clear policy casts a shadow over the public's perception of Wikipedia's ethical standing.

If PR editing from Wikipedia's representatives -- paid or not -- were to be openly tolerated, Wikipedia's reputation will most certainly be harmed in a way that is different from the harm done from vandalism or covert PR editing.

In the case of Roger Bamkin, a director of Wikimedia UK is advertising himself, as a Wikimedia UK director, for paid consultancy jobs, and directs and engages in editing on Wikipedia in the service of his personal client.

Bamkin's LinkedIn page states:

Roger Bamkin's Experience

Consultant Victuallers Ltd May 2012 - Present (5 months)

I've been involved with QRpedia and Monmouthpedia which have delivered > £2m paybeack on £50K investment.

Bamkin's formal Declaration of Interests for Wikimedia UK states there is no conflict of interest (COI) with his role, access to Wikipedia resources and contract with Gibraltar as there is no official relationship between Gibraltar and Wikimedia UK.

But to the outside eye this might appear as a financial conflict of interest among the people who are handling the money donated to support Wikipedia. Not to mention how unfair it is.

You may be wondering how the country of Gibraltar ended up in the middle of a Wikipedia PR editing scandal. To answer that question, we can visit Wikipedia.

Monmouthpedia is a Wikipedia project that links Wikipedia and the town of Monmouth in South Wales by the use of smartphone scannable QR codes.

As the story is told, the idea for Monmouthpedia came when Roger Bamkin and Steve Virgin (former Wikimedia UK board member, current PR consultant and Bamkin's business partner) gave a TEDx talk about their Wikipedia QR-code project QRpedia. From the audience, Wikipedia editor Steve Cummings (also Bamkin's business partner) suggested they "do a whole town."

Wales Online wrote:

He [Bamkin] picked Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, as his next project after being flooded with invitations from places around the world hoping to be the second Wikipedia town.

Enter Gibraltarpedia. In a feature yesterday, BBC News explained Gibraltarpedia as the way in which Gibraltar is using QR codes and Wikipedia to target and attract tourists.

While not as straightforward as untrikiwiki's open offer to navigate tricky Wikipedia conflict of interest rules as a service for for paying clients, Gibraltarpedia may be a cool idea but it still comes off as little more than free advertising for tourism - setting up a walled garden of articles all with an eye to promoting tourism - and potential investment - in Gibraltar.

Seventeen features on Wikipedia's front page in one month is in equal measures strangely admirable, somewhat saddening and completely worrying.

From a 2009 statement by Jimmy Wales:

It is not ok with me that anyone ever set up a service selling their services as a Wikipedia editor, administrator, bureaucrat, etc. I will personally block any cases that I am shown. (...)

(...) Would we block a good editor if we found out after the fact is a very different question. We have traditions of forgiveness and working with people to improve their behavior and ours whenever we can - things are never so simple. Of course it is possible to imagine a situation where someone can and should be forgiven... because that's very common.

That's not the same as saying that it would ever be ok, as a matter of policy. Just imagine the disaster for our reputation.

I think many people would consider the idea of "Did You Know" - and Wikipedia's front page - being successfully used in a for-profit commercial venture by any entity to be harmful to Wikipedia, reputation or otherwise.

But then again, Wikipedia and alleged conflicts of interest are not known to be handled with practicality - or clarity. Just ask Philip Roth.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-575...-at-wikipedia/





Pandora Users: An Explanation Of The Radio Law You’re Asked To Support
Gregory Ferenstein

Pandora listeners may notice their regularly scheduled commercial breaks of Ford products and tight jeans were interrupted by a call to support a bill called, “The Internet Radio Fairness Act.” The proposed bill would reduce the royalty fees paid by Internet music-streaming services to those paid by other digital and satellite radio stations (the so-called “801(b)” standard). The Hill reports that online radio services shell out more than 55% of their revenue to pay off royalty fees, while satellite and cable companies only pay somewhere between 7 and 16 percent, according to co-sponsor Rep Jason Chaffetz’s office. Like Google and Wikipedia blacking out their websites in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act, Pandora has a captive audience of 150+ million users to broadcast their campaign, once again revealing how web giants can transform into powerful media outlets.

The irony was not lost on me that I heard this campaign while I was writing this post.

The Internet Radio Fairness Act revives an ongoing battle between the typical champions of web firms, Congressmen Issa, Wyden, and Polis, against those of the recording industry lobby, (RIAA-backed) musicFIRST, who are proposing a law to instead increase satellite radio royalties to the higher rates of Pandora. Both are arguing for equal terms, but one pays more to radio services and less to artists/record labels.

“Fourteen years ago, when online radio was in its infancy, the incumbent interests were successful at getting laws passed to discriminate against the Internet,” said Senator Wyden in a statement, who introduced a companion bill in the Senate. “This bill puts Internet radio on an even plane with its competitors, and allows the music marketplace to evolve and to expand — which will ultimately benefit artists and the Internet economy.”

Recording industry backed musicFIRST released a draft of their alternative bill, “There’s nothing fair about pampering Pandora, with its $1.8 billion market cap, at the expense of music creators,” said Ted Kalo, executive director of musicFIRST. “We support rate parity that addresses the greatest inequity of all, the lack of a performance right for terrestrial radio, and is fair to music creators.”

Unlike the recording industry, however, Pandora has that ready-made audience of a 150+ million users. Should it succeed in getting the bill passed, it will reaffirm how Internet giants can trasform from service providers into powerful media organizations.
The law is unlikely to come to a vote before the end of the year.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/22/pan...-fairness-act/





Iced Earth Criticize Label For Suing Filesharing Fans
Joseph Lee

They were not asked permission...

NME reports that Iced Earth have criticized their label Century Media, who plans to sue 7,500 fans over illegal downloading.

The label is based in Germany and includes artists like Lacuna Coil, Architects, In Flames and Napalm Death. They filed the charges in New Jersey. They accused 4,327 people of illegally downloading Iced Earth's album Dystopia and 3,136 of downloading Lacuna Coil's Dark Adrenaline.

Iced Earth's Jon Schaffer said: "It has come to my attention that Century Media is suing fans over illegal downloaded of, among others, our latest album. I felt it was important to clarify that we had no knowledge of this motion, and were, sadly, not asked permission. As much as we respect that the labels are having a harder time selling music, we feel this is a misguided effort. We want to make sure our fans know we would not have given consent if we had been asked. We have been adapting to this model by embracing legal streaming services such as Spotify, and by bringing our music to places we have never played before, touring our proverbial asses off."

All of the people accused in the lawsuit are called "John Doe", but their IP addresses are listed. If the court rules in Century Media's favor, their lawyers will have internet providers supply personal information of each person.
http://www.411mania.com/music/news/2...aring-Fans.htm

















Until next week,

- js.



















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