Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 9th, '13

[JackSpratts]

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"Once you get into the kernel, no security matters any more. Then we win." – David Wang


































Early Edition



February 9th, 2013






















U.K. Judge Denies Hollywood's Demand for Money from Filesharing Site's Operators

Ruling says that to order proceeds of a copyright infringement handed over could eventually lead to a "chilling effect on innovation and creativity."
Eriq Gardner

Hollywood studios were handed a courtroom loss on Tuesday when the UK high court denied an attempt to recover money derived from copyright infringement from the operators of Newzbin2.

The indexing website, which provided download links to popular movies and music, has been a Hollywood target for years. At its height, Newzbin2 was reported by one studio executive to be pointing some 700,000 users to 75 different versions of The King's Speech. The studios attributed "several hundreds of millions of pounds a year" in lost revenue to the site.

In March 2010, studios were able to obtain a ruling that ordered the website to remove pirated material. Then the following year came legal decisions that ordered British Telecom and Sky to block access to the website. In late November, the website shuttered.

But the win streak ended today when a judge decided that it was too much to issue proprietary injunctions against several individuals and companies alleged to have links to Newzbin2.

In the ruling, Justice Guy Richard Newey presented the scenario of a landowner whose ground was trespassed.

"Suppose, say, that a market trader sells infringing DVDs, among other goods, from a stall he has set up on someone else's land without consent," writes Justice Newey.

Can the owner of the land make a proprietary claim to the proceeds of the trading?

The judge shakes his head, adding, "There is no evident reason why the owner of the copyright in the DVDs should be in a better position in this respect."

The Hollywood studios including Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, Disney and Columbia Pictures were represented by attorney Richard Spearman.

Justice Newey worries about bad precedent.

"On Mr Spearman's case, a copyright owner's claim would not even be limited to the infringer's profits," continues the judge. "In principle, the entire proceeds of sale would be held on trust for the copyright owner. That might both be unfair and stultify enterprise."

The judge says that the threat of having to pay over gross receipts would not only be disastrous for the infringer, but also for others.

"A person might be deterred from pursuing an activity if he perceived there to be even a small risk that the activity would involve a breach of copyright or other intellectual property rights... that could have a chilling effect on innovation and creativity."

Here is the full ruling.

A spokesperson for the Motion Picture Association gave us this statement:

"Newzbin has been found by the High Court to be an illegal site. The operators of the site have made a large amount of money from the unauthorized use of other peoples’ creative works. We made it clear that we would take further action against the individuals in the hope that the site would close and welcome the fact that this has finally happened. Intellectual property is a property right that creates value and stimulates investment and growth. Recognition and protection of this right underpins innovation. The court has already ordered that assets that have been acquired with the proceeds of infringement should be frozen pending a trial later this year."

"The judge’s decision applies to one particular point in the case. We do believe that the decision does not take the specific facts of this case into account and we are seeking leave to appeal. The only innovation and creativity Newzbin has shown is the way in which the site has operated outside the law to exploit what others have taken the time and money to create."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr...-demand-418225





Is Piracy a Mega Problem for Hollywood?
Alex Hudson

File-hosting site Mega has faced intense criticism about the sort of files it has been storing in the cloud, but the sharing of copyrighted content illegally is a problem far more widespread.

The launch of Mega was meant to be founder Kim Dotcom's big return.

Dotcom - originally called Kim Schmitz - is still awaiting a hearing relating to criminal charges, in part, about the "massive scale" of copyright infringement and pirated material on his original site Megaupload - charges he denies.

Megaupload became one of the most popular websites on the web before it was shut down but Mega is meant to be bigger, better and - most importantly - legally watertight.

The new site allows 50GB of free storage upon sign-up - more than twice the amount if the user is signed up for free accounts with Google, Apple, Microsoft and Dropbox put together.

It is a site advertised as being a place where lots of files can be stored securely and accessed by the user, from any computer.

The content is encrypted, so even staff at Mega need the user's key to unlock it. But the key can be shared and the files might not just be family photos or a home recording. And this is where infringing copyright could, once again, become a problem.

Anti-piracy stance

"The encryption protects Kim Dotcom. It doesn't protect the end user," says Andrew Orlowski, columnist at The Register.

"Although unless you live in France or Korea, it's frankly unlikely that someone will come knocking on your door if you do use the service to upload copyrighted content."

Piracy is a problem for a number of industries.

Richard Atkinson, head of software company Adobe's piracy unit, said that 55 million "illegal activations" of pirated versions of the photo-editing software had occurred in the last year.

And the film industry has been among the loudest of critics.

Hollywood loses close to $20.5bn (£13bn) to movie piracy in a year, according to a report published by the US Institute for Policy Innovation.

Hollywood revenues in North America for 2012 were reported at $10.8bn (£6.8bn), the highest total figure ever.

The difficulty detecting piracy is, of course, keeping on top of everything being uploaded. Mega said more than one million people used the site in its first day.

Dotcom says his new enterprise is already in the top 150 "most visited" sites in the world. A number of other sites which take an anti-piracy stance often link to content hosted by Mega - content they believe has been placed there illegally.

However, Dotcom firmly believes his site is sticking to the rules.

"Mega is now hosting almost 50 million files," he he tweeted on 31 January.

"Only 0.001% have been taken down by content owners. MASSIVE non-infringing use!"

When searching for content hosted by Mega - via a third-party site not endorsed by Mega itself - in two minutes the BBC found full versions of the films Django Unchained, The Hobbit, Skyfall and The Dark Knight Rises.

But as Mega has said from the outset, reported content is taken down. This happened to all four of these examples.

"Copyright takedown notices per day: Google 450,000 vs Mega 50," Dotcom tweeted separately.

The search engine itself - because of a code "developed by Mega to delete all files indexed on Mega-Search" - became unusable.

This included some content uploaded there that was not infringing copyright.

Despite all this attention on Mega and its activities, films under copyright are not difficult to come by elsewhere.

"It's pretty much impossible to prevent this happening, from your site being used for these illegal purposes as well," says Ernesto Van Der Sar, the name used by editor-in-chief of file-sharing news site TorrentFreak.

"There's also Dropbox and Google Drive and they're also hosting content that's not so legal. That's also searchable on Google if you know how to look for it.

"Mega are being watched so they're trying to be proactive about it. There are search engines for Dropbox, pretty similar to the ones used on Mega, it's not unique."

This content is not placed there by the hosting companies, but is made available by users. And this appears to be true, even on major search engines.

Moles and mallets

After typing in "stream Skyfall", the top free result provided more than 80 links to watch the content for free. About 50% of the top links provided a fully-working stream of the film.

There are a growing number of people who think that it is nearly, if not entirely, impossible to beat web piracy.

"Stopping online piracy is like playing the world's largest game of Whac-A-Mole," journalist Nick Bilton wrote in the New York Times.

"Hit one, countless others appear. Quickly. And the mallet is heavy and slow."

A "six-strikes" scheme, believed to be launching in the US in the coming weeks, is hoped to stem the tide of illegal content on the web.

Agreed by most major internet service providers, final details of the scheme are still to be confirmed but it will enforce a Copyright Alert System to warn those people sharing copyrighted content using BitTorrent sites - a method of obtaining files by downloading from many users at the same time - to stop.

The way it is expected to work is that five or six warnings are given to users, who will be made to watch a video about the consequences of online piracy, before having their internet speeds lowered.

This scheme will not initially affect piracy seen on file-hosting sites like Mega, so questions about its success will remain long after its launch.

The film industry is certainly worried about the amount of pirates still taking to the stormy Hollywood seas.

But if the pirates cannot be beaten, have media companies still got time to seize an opportunity?

"They should look at how they can give consumers what they want for a fair price," says Van Der Sar.

"It's already happening but that's the only way to do it - make it more convenient than the pirated alternative.

"Five years ago, you didn't have Netflix, it was hard to stream movies online, Spotify for music... but Dotcom is right. The big media companies blame piracy for everything.

"Maybe they should spend their time on being even more innovative."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21251680





Canadian ISP Fights Back Against Motion to Disclose Subscriber Information in File Sharing Case
Michael Geist

Distributel, an independent ISP with services in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and B.C., has fought back in a file sharing lawsuit launched by NGN Prima Productions, opposing a motion to disclose the names of subscribers alleged to have engaged in file sharing. It appears that NGN is using Canipre to identify alleged file sharers, the same company that has supplied information to Voltage Pictures in its case involving thousands of subscribers at TekSavvy. Distributel did not oppose a similar request in November 2012, but says in court documents filed today that several factors led to a change in position when NGN filed another request for more names.

First, Distributel was concerned with how NGN treated its subscribers, demanding a $1500 settlement in a notice claiming that subscribers could face up to $20,000 in damages. Distributel noted the lack of evidence for the claim made by NGN, relying on an expert analysis of BitTorrent to highlight the shortcomings. Moreover, Distributel says NGN is engaged in copyright trolling, citing the misrepresentation in the potential liability (the law now features a cap of $5,000 for non-commercial statutory damages) and the settlement demands that far exceed actual damages.

Second, Distributel argues that NGN failed to meet the requirements for disclosure established in the BMG Canada v. Doe case by failing to demonstrate a bona fide claim. In support of its argument, Distributel points to "numerous errors, inconsistencies, and missing links" in the evidence. Geographic information included in the evidence was often erroneous and there was little evidence about how the information on Distributel subscribers was obtained. Further, Distributel argues that significant evidence was not provided: no information on how much of the work was copied, no evidence that a substantial portion of a film was infringed, no evidence of which P2P networks were used, and no information on the subscribers' P2P pseudonyms.

Third, Distributel expresses concern with the targeting of smaller, independent ISPs. This particular case involves two other small ISPs (Access Communications, ACN) and the company argues that pursuing independent ISPs is unfair as it may affect consumer choice for Internet services.

Fourth, Distributel raises privacy concerns, including the lengthy delay from data collection until the time when this motion was raised. Moreover, NGN did not provide evidence that there are no other ways to obtain this information.

Fifth, Distributel cites the Voltage - TekSavvy case for the need for reasonable compensation for the expenses incurred by the ISP. Distributel says that NGN has not provided for reasonable compensation in the draft order it presented to the court.

Distributel's decision to oppose the motion points to mounting ISP frustration with file sharing lawsuits that come after the government send clear signals that such actions were unwelcome. While Bell, Cogeco, and Videotron did not oppose or challenge a case involving Voltage Pictures in 2011, more recently TekSavvy has fought for the right to notify its customers and to allow CIPPIC to intervene in a case involving thousands of subscriber names. Distributel has taken the next step of reversing a prior position by opposing a motion for disclosure of subscriber names, sending a strong message that it will carefully examine the evidence and motives of rights holders before standing aside in the quest for subscriber information and inevitable settlement demands that follow.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6781/125/





Japanese Anti-Downloads Mob Sneaks Warnings Onto Filesharing Networks

Strongly worded letters of discouragement
Dave Neal

THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT is taking a different approach to opposing online downloading by seeding letters of discouragement onto peer to peer (P2P) networks.

The government has planted the letters onto the P2P networks in a polite attempt to steer people away from the practice of downloading copyrighted files.

People will never go onto filesharing websites to look for and download letters from the Japanese government and rightsholders, of course, so the letters are disguised as things that people might want.

This means that a Japanese person searching for some Japanese pop music might actually come away with a nagging missive about how bad they are, and how bad downloading is. Think of it like one of those letters in Harry Potter that yell at you, only this is a lot more polite.

We read about this at Torrentfreak where a translation of the notice is reproduced. "Knowingly downloading and of course uploading files over the internet that are protected by copyright law without the consent of the owner is illegal copyright infringement. Please stop immediately," it says, adding a reminder that there are possible fines and jail time involved.

However, it appears that the Japanese government prefers a softly softly approach and would rather educate its people, hence the notices.

"Our copyright organisation is working to eliminate copyright infringement by file sharing software," it said. "In addition to consulting with the police to obtain the disclosure of users' identities, we want to focus on user education."

Downloading content that is legally for sale in Japan can incur a maximum two year prison sentence and/or a ¥2m or £14,000 fine.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...aring-networks





FBI Employees Download Pirated Movies and TV-Shows
Ernesto

BitTorrent is used by millions of people every day, even in places where you wouldn’t really expect. New data reveals that employees at the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division are sharing movies and TV-shows with the rest of the world. Is the FBI gathering information on BitTorrent users, or could it be that the feds harbor in-house pirates?

Online piracy is a serious crime according to the FBI.

“It’s a growing threat—especially with the rise of digital technologies and Internet file sharing networks,” they write on their website.

Over the past years the FBI has been involved in many piracy related cases. The high-profile Megaupload investigation for example, where a federal agent used an “undercover computer” to browse the file-hosting site.

In this light it is quite a surprise that some employees at the FBI appear to be sharing copyrighted material out in the open, through BitTorrent.

With help from BitTorrent monitoring company ScanEye we found several BitTorrent “pirates” linked to IP-addresses that are registered to FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division.

Below is a snapshot of some of the “hits” we found.

As can be seen above there is a particular interest in movies and TV-show downloads at the FBI’s largest division.

Some of the titles are relevant to the intelligence community such as “Homeland”, “The Girl Who played With Fire”, “The Good Wife” and “Dexter”. Other titles, including the Aussie soap opera Home and Away, are more general entertainment.

The big question is of course why these FBI IP-addresses are showing up in BitTorrent swarms.

The most likely explanation is that employees were downloading these videos for personal entertainment. This wouldn’t be much of a surprise really, as we’ve seen this before at congressional offices the Department of Justice, national parliaments, record labels and movie studios.

Another option is that the FBI is downloading the torrents as part of an ongoing investigation. However, this is less likely as ScanEye shows that the downloads are spread out over several months.

Or perhaps the IP-addresses were spoofed by Kim Dotcom to get back at the feds?
http://torrentfreak.com/fbi-employee...-shows-130209/





Sony Rootkit Redux: Canadian Business Groups Lobby For Right To Install Spyware on Your Computer
Michael Geist

The deadline for comments on Industry Canada's draft anti-spam regulations passed earlier this week with a group of 13 industry associations - including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Marketing Association, the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association and the Entertainment Software Association of Canada - submitting a lengthy document that, if adopted, would gut much of the law. The groups adopt radical interpretations of the law to argue for massive new loopholes or for the indefinite delay of several provisions. I will focus on some of the submissions shortly, but this post focuses on the return of an issue that was seemingly killed years ago: demands to permit surreptitious surveillance by the copyright owners and other groups for private enforcement purposes.

During the anti-spam law debates in 2009, copyright lobby groups promoted amendments that would have allowed for expansive surveillance of user computers. Coming on the heels of the Sony rootkit scandal, the government ultimately rejected those proposals (the Liberals had plans to propose such amendments but backed down), leaving in place an important provision that requires express consent prior to the installation of computer software. The provision states:

8. (1) A person must not, in the course of a commercial activity, install or cause to be installed a computer program on any other person's computer system or, having so installed or caused to be installed a computer program, cause an electronic message to be sent from that computer system, unless
(a) the person has obtained the express consent of the owner or an authorized user of the computer system and complies with subsection 11(5); or
(b) the person is acting in accordance with a court order.

The law adds several wrinkles to this general requirement, including the need for clear and prominent descriptions of the functionality of the software in certain circumstances (including the collection of personal information, changing user settings, or interfering with user control over their computer) and exemptions for programs such as cookies, HTML code, and javascripts.

The industry groups are now demanding that the government overhaul these requirements. Its preferred approach is to simply kill the provision altogether by referring it to a "Review Body", which it says could be a task force or another public consultation, before taking effect. In other words, despite considerable debate and approval on this specific provision by Members of Parliament from all parties, these industry groups still want it placed in legislative limbo.

Alternatively, the groups want at least ten kinds of computer programs excluded from the express consent requirement. The very first should set off alarm bells for all Canadians:

a program that is installed by or on behalf of a person to prevent, detect, investigate, or terminate activities that the person reasonably believes (i) present a risk or threatens the security, privacy, or unauthorized or fraudulent use, of a computer system, telecommunications facility, or network, or (ii) involves the contravention of any law of Canada, of a province or municipality of Canada or of a foreign state;

This provision would effectively legalize spyware in Canada on behalf of these industry groups. The potential scope of coverage is breathtaking: a software program secretly installed by an entertainment software company designed to detect or investigate alleged copyright infringement would be covered by this exception. This exception could potentially cover programs designed to block access to certain websites (preventing the contravention of a law as would have been the case with SOPA), attempts to access wireless networks without authorization, or even keylogger programs tracking unsuspecting users (detection and investigation). Ensuring compliance with the law is important, but envisioning private enforcement through spyware without the involvement of courts, lawful authorities, and due process should be a non-starter.

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce and other business groups want to ensure that the anti-spam law does not block their ability to secretly install spyware on personal computers for a wide range of purposes. In doing so, these groups are proposing to turn the law upside down by shifting from protecting consumers to protecting businesses. The comment period on the draft regulations may have closed, but it is not too late to tell Industry Minister Christian Paradis or your local Member of Parliament to reject demands that would gut the anti-spam bill and legalize spyware for private enforcement purposes.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6777/125/





European Court Of Human Rights: No, Copyright Does Not Automatically Trump Freedom Of Expression
Glyn Moody

As many know, copyright had its origins in censorship and control. But over the last few hundred years, that fact has been obscured by the rise of the powerful publishing industry and the great works it has helped bring to the public. More recently, though, laws and treaties like SOPA and ACTA have represented a return to the roots of copyright, posing very real threats to what can be said online. That's not because their intent was necessarily to crimp freedom of expression, but as a knock-on effect of turning risk-averse ISPs into the copyright industry's private police force.

And so there's a growing tension between copyright law that seeks to limit unauthorized use of works on the one hand, and freedom of expression that aims to allow the maximum scope for creativity on the other. The question then becomes: which should have precedence when they clash? The European Court of Human Rights was asked just this question, and came up with the following important ruling:

For the first time in a judgment on the merits, the European Court of Human Rights has clarified that a conviction based on copyright law for illegally reproducing or publicly communicating copyright protected material can be regarded as an interference with the right of freedom of expression and information under Article 10 of the European Convention [on Human Rights]. Such interference must be in accordance with the three conditions enshrined in the second paragraph of Article 10 of the Convention. This means that a conviction or any other judicial decision based on copyright law, restricting a person's or an organisation's freedom of expression, must be pertinently motivated as being necessary in a democratic society, apart from being prescribed by law and pursuing a legitimate aim.

However, it's worth noting that the same blog post points out:

Due to the important wide margin of appreciation available to the national authorities in this particular case, the impact of Article 10 however is very modest and minimal.

That's because there are many other factors that will need to be taken in to account for particular cases, as the rest of the blog post goes on to explore at some length. For example, one issue is whether the copyright infringement in question was for commercial or non-commercial purposes: the latter would be likely to benefit from the current ruling, while the former probably would not. Nonetheless, an important principle has been enunciated by a senior European court -- one that both reflects the evolving views on this subject, and that is also likely to help shape future decisions in this contested area.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...pression.shtml





Business Insider vs. Digiday: One Man’s Aggregation is Another Man’s Traffic Hijacking
Mathew Ingram

Summary:

Some call it aggregation, while others call it copyright infringement or even theft. In a recent Twitter debate sparked by a post on the topic, Digiday’s editor-in-chief and Business Insider founder Henry Blodget traded theories.

Plagiarism. Copyright infringement. Traffic hijacking. These are all terms publishers like to use when someone excerpts their content without permission, whether it’s Google News or The Huffington Post. Some digital publishers have different words for it, however: they prefer to call it curation, or aggregation, or just old-fashioned blogging. The latest iteration of this long-standing debate came on Tuesday, when a piece at Digiday about rampant aggregation triggered a Twitter back-and-forth between editor Brian Morrissey and Business Insider founder Henry Blodget.

In his post at Digiday, entitled “Surviving the Media Aggregation Economy,” Morrissey argues that we are trapped in a digital-media environment based on boosting pageviews to draw more advertising, and that this has “taken publishers hostage.” Publishers like Business Insider, he says, have taken this approach to its logical conclusion and generate a lot of their revenue by repurposing content created by others. In one case, Business Insider posted a screenshot of a Digiday post along with a paragraph lifted from the original, and put a new headline on it. Says Morrissey:

“The result: It generated 224 pageviews for the Digiday story. Along the way, BI banked another 1,500-plus pageviews — and that many ‘welcome ad’ impressions along with multiple banners and a ‘native’ video ad. Meanwhile, Digiday’s original post — thought up and executed by our staff — got 2,500 pageviews. Is this a fair trade?”

It’s more efficient to aggregate than create

Morrissey goes on to note that Blodget likes to brag about how efficient his publishing platform is, and how his site gets an average of 180,000 pageviews per day per employee — orders of magnitude larger than many traditional media players such as the New York Times or Bloomberg. But the Digiday editor says much of this efficiency is driven by Business Insider’s repurposing of content created by others (Note: We’re going to be discussing alternate forms of monetization for content at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17). As Morrissey puts it in his post:

“Based on my experience, I can’t help but wonder if BI’s “efficiency” is bought at the expense of others. It’s like European countries bragging about low defense spending while relying on the U.S. to do the heavy lifting through NATO. It’s easy to be efficient when you draft off others.”

The debate expanded to Twitter when Blodget responded to Morrissey’s complaint, and suggested that if the Digiday editor was concerned about the screenshot of the images that appeared in the original, Business Insider would be happy to take them out. But Morrissey said his point was that the whole approach is wrong:
Business Insider argues Digiday should be grateful

Blodget argued that publishers like Digiday should be interested in exposing their content to as many different readers and potential readers as possible, and therefore Morrissey should be glad that Business Insider excerpted the post and included a link — something the Business Insider founder compared to a story that appears at Google News, or to the New York Times running a story based on a Wall Street Journal scoop:

Morrissey said that he was happy to have sites link to his content, provided they drove readers in substantial enough numbers, and that he was a big fan of the aggregation site Mediagazer as well as LinkedIn’s content portal. But in his post he noted that Business Insider had gotten close to 100,000 pageviews from content “aggregated” from Digiday, while the latter got a relatively minuscule 14,000 pageviews from Business Insider’s links.

Aggregation is a reality, whether we like it or not

It’s probably fair to say that versions of this debate have been going on for almost as long as the web has been around: questions about “link juice” and the “link economy,” in which traffic driven by an aggregator is supposed to make up for the alleged insult of excerpting their content, and so on. The Huffington Post used to be the poster child for what some have called “over-aggregation,” but now that mantle seems to have passed to Business Insider. And some believe that regardless of whether or not such behavior is legal or permitted under copyright law, it is unethical:

As I’ve tried to point out before, aggregation or curation is a fact of life in the digital age — just as record companies have had to learn to live with rampant downloading and sharing of music, publishers of all kinds are trying to get used to the idea that their content is no longer under their control. In some cases, aggregation fulfills a useful function, as it did in one notorious case involving a Forbes post by Kashmir Hill that was based on a New York Times feature. In other cases, the usefulness is debatable.

As Morrissey points out in his piece, until the financing model for online media involves something other than pure pageview-driven advertising revenue, aggregation is unlikely to stop. The only protection is to have content whose value can’t be summed up in a screenshot or a paragraph excerpt, and a relationship with your readers that is based on more than just how many pageviews you can generate. (Note: There’s a Storify of Blodget and Morrissey’s full conversation here).
http://paidcontent.org/2013/02/05/bu...fic-hijacking/





Updated: Moon+ Reader Kicked from Google Play Due to Bogus Piracy Claims
Nate Hoffelder

I’ve mentioned the Android reading app Moon+ Reader once or twice (it’s bundled into the hacked firmware for the Sony Reader T1 and T2). It’s a very popular app with excellent file management features, ebook formatting options, and support for downloading ebooks from website.

It’s one of the more popular reading apps available for Android, second only to Aldiko in terms of downloads – or at least it was before the app was removed from Google Play.

It looks like the Russian ebook distributor LitRes.ru has been watching the Samsung-Apple patent fight and taken a lesson to heart: If you can’t find a legitimate way to compete, invent a rules violation and get some authority to throw the book at your competition. That’s what has happened to Moon+ Reader this weekend. According to the developer’s blog, this reading app has been removed from Google Play because of a piracy complaint.

LitRes has just discovered that Moon+ Reader, an app that has been available for a couple years now, lets you download ebooks from websites. And *gasp* that includes pirate sites.

Like any number of other ebook apps (including Stanza,Mantano, and Aldiko), Moon+ Reader supports OPDS. This is an RSS-like protocol that enables websites to offer ebook downloads inside compatible reading apps. While at first glance it looks like a download protocol, it would be better to describe it as a catalog protocol because it also includes important metadata like title, author, file format type, and description.

Far from being a tool of pirates, OPDS is used by many legitimate ebookstores and download sites. Project Gutenberg, Baen Books, Internet Archive, and Feedbooks all use OPDS to offer ebook downloads, and the app developer Bluefire uses it to connect their reading apps for iOS and Android with partner ebookstores. There’s even a trick where you can set up your own library of legally purchased ebooks in your Dropbox account and create an OPDS catalog for it.

Now, I’m sure you’re thinking that this could be an honest mistake. Well, no. From what I can tell, this is not the first time that LatRes tried this particular trick.

The developers of a Russian text-to-speech ebook app Chitatel reported late last month that their app had been removed from iTunes for much the same reason (it’s back now). According to their announcement, LitRes accused them of piracy because it was possible for users to use the Chitatel app to download pirated content. Newsflash for Litres: You can also download pirated content with a web browser.

LitRes has a number of apps in Google Play, including both an audiobook app as well as an ebook app. Aside from the non-Russian reading app, none of the apps have all that many downloads. But one thing they do have are a lot of 1-star reviews. When this news broke on Reddit, one redditor proposed a campaign of retaliatory 1-star reviews. I’d say it’s having an effect.

As for Moon+ Reader, the developer has filed a counter notice with Google. The app is bound to be returned to Google Play, though it might take up to a month for Google to get around to it.

Until then you can download the free version of the app from the developer’s website. The paid version of the app requires a $5 registration fee which can be paid via Paypal.

Update: LitRes has responded to the story. Assuming that Google Translate did its job, they claim that both apps mentioned above “include in their applications pre-installed links to pirated library as the main source for books”. I call BS on this statement; the main sources of Moon+ Reader are sites like PG, Smashwords, Feedbooks, etc – none of which are pirate sites.

And while it is possible that Moon+ Reader could have offered a link to a pirate library via a user submitted OPDS catalog, that catalog (as well as the link to it) is not in the app so removing the app from Google Play will not remove the pirated content.

I think it far more likely that LitRes filed a piracy complaint in order to harm the competition, not fight piracy. Had that been their goal they would have communicated with the developers first.

Second update: One reader is reporting that his version of the app has an extra download site in the list that isn’t showing up in the 3 versions of the app I downloaded. He reports that TUeBL is listed alongside Smashwords, PG, and the rest. That is indeed a pirate site. But does it have ebooks which LitRes cam file valid DMCA notices? I don’t know.
http://www.the-digital-reader.com/20...piracy-claims/





Site Plagiarizes Blog Posts, then Files DMCA Takedown on Originals

All stories about a disgraced researcher get pulled by WordPress.
John Timmer

A dizzying story that involves falsified medical research, plagiarism, and legal threats came to light via a DMCA takedown notice today. Retraction Watch, a site that followed (among many other issues) the implosion of a Duke cancer researcher's career, found all of its articles on the topic pulled by WordPress, its host. The reason? A small site based in India apparently copied all of the posts, claimed them as their own, then filed a DMCA takedown notice to get the originals pulled from their source. As of now, the originals are still missing as their actual owners seek to have them restored.

Watching the retractions

The Retraction Watch blog is run by Ivan Oransky, the Executive Editor at Reuters Health, and Adam Marcus, the Managing Editor of Anesthesiology News. Working in the field of medical reporting, they began to realize cases of erroneous or falsified research were often pulled from the scientific record with little notice, leaving the research community with little idea what, if any, aspects of the original report could be relied on. So, they started to track the retraction of scientific papers on a blog they set up.

Their timing was impressive. Various studies indicated that research fraud was increasing dramatically, and the site helped chronicle some prominent cases of fraud, including the career collapse of the current record holder for making up data.

One of the cases they followed was Anil Potti, a cancer researcher who, at the time, worked at Duke University. Potti first fell under scrutiny for embellishing his resume, but the investigation quickly expanded as broader questions were raised about his research. As the investigation continued, a number of Potti's papers ended up being retracted as accusations of falsified data were raised. Eventually, three clinical trials that were started based on Potti's data were stopped entirely. Although federal investigations of Potti's conduct are still in progress, he eventually resigned from Duke.

In all, Retraction Watch published 22 stories on the implosion of Potti's career. In fact, three of the top four Google results for his name all point to the Retraction Watch blog (the fourth is his Wikipedia entry). Despite the widespread attention to his misbehavior, Potti managed to get a position at the University of North Dakota (where he worked earlier in his career). Meanwhile, he hired a reputation management company, which dutifully went about creating websites with glowing things to say about the doctor.

Down go the posts

This morning, however, 10 of the Retraction Watch posts vanished. An e-mail Oransky received explained why: an individual from "Utter [sic] Pradesh" named Narendra Chatwal claimed to be a senior editor at NewsBulet.In, "a famous news firm in India." Chatwal said the site only publishes work that is "individually researched by our reporters," yet duplicates of some of the site's material appeared on Retraction Watch. Therefore, to protect his copyright, he asked that the WordPress host pull the material. It complied.

There are a large number of reasons to doubt this story. As Oransky told Ars, "WhoIs says the offending site didn't exist until after we'd posted nine of the allegedly plagiarized posts." And he noted one of the commenters at the site pointed out one of the supposedly plagiarized pieces visible on the News Bullet site refers to "Ivan’s Reuters colleagues." The style of writing and format of the stories in question should also be very familiar to regular Retraction Watch readers.

A quick look at a number of other posts on the site also shows Chatawal's claims of original reporting are bogus. Simple Google searches show sentences of the material appear at a variety of other outlets. (See, for example, this story, which is apparently a direct copy of a Indo Asian News Service article.)

This is the latest in a long line of spurious DMCA takedowns, but it's the first that Oransky and Marcus have dealt with (Oransky said they've had a single cease-and-desist letter about a copyrighted image). They've seen their own material re-posted elsewhere, but have not done anything about it. "We haven't taken any action against anyone, because that would probably take more time than just keeping up with retractions," Oransky told Ars. For now, he said he's simply talked to Quinn Heraty, a lawyer with some copyright experience. She pointed him at an automated DMCA counter-notice generator, which he's used to try to get the posts restored.

The remarkable specificity of the request, with all the material focused on a single researcher, is worrisome. "Potti has never responded to our e-mails or phone calls," Oransky said. "Neither has anyone claiming to represent him." It's possible that Potti, who was born in India, might have a special resonance for the local news. But the site looks poorly put together and contains mostly duplicated material—there's very little evidence of that level of attention being paid to details of local interest.

For his part, Oransky is wishing that it is just coincidence. "We can only hope that this isn't an attempt to keep us from reporting on retractions and scientific fraud."
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/...-on-originals/





TotalBooX Sells eBooks By The Page

An Israeli start-up wants to stop people from buying books before they read them
Max Smolaks

TotalBooX, an ambitious start-up from Tel Aviv, is attempting to disrupt the eBook market by offering audiences access to a wide range of books – but only charging customers for the pages they actually read.

The founder, serial entrepreneur Yoarv Lorch, says that “the old book business model is counter-productive,” and wants to create a new type of platform for eBook distribution and consumption to rival Amazon and Barns & Noble.

Pay-as-you-go books

Have you ever bought a book on the spur of the moment, only to discover after a few pages that it was absolutely terrible? Lorch says this experience is universal across both print and digital, and hopes TotalBooX will liberate eBooks from the flaws of older models, and enable a different culture of reading. It is is scheduled to go live this month.

“The book is going through a major evolution,” says Lorch. “The business model of ‘pay first, read later’ has its roots in the fact that books have production, distribution and warehousing costs. None of this exists in the digital book world.” Instead, he suggests that people should be able to pay for books on a per-page basis. You read a third of the latest best-seller, move to something else, and pay only a third of the cost.

With TotalBooX, the overall price of the book doesn’t change. But the users have a chance to save some money if they are not satisfied with the product. The platform already contains 10,000 eBooks, and will be available on iOS and online. First-timers are greeted with $2 worth of free pages, but from then on, the balance of the account needs to be topped up in advance.

“We are trying to rid the world from outdated, expensive ritual of buying a book before you read it,” says Lorch. On TotalBooX, sharing an interesting eBook is as easy as drag-and-dropping it into a friend’s account, and there’s no need to enter any login details or payment information. Add social media integration, the platform hopes to appeal to real book lovers.

Besides selling eBooks, TotalBooX also deals in analytics. It is in a unique position to extract data on reading patterns, and establish popularity charts based on actual pages turned, not just the number of copies sold.

The Android version of the TotalBooX app is currently in closed beta (it can be downloaded for free on Android tablets), but it should be out before the end of the month. After that, the company will start promoting its platform in earnest, and it has already scheduled meetings with several UK publishers.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...ou-read-106215





Is Telstra Trial to Slow Down Peer-To-Peer Downloaders Likely to Succeed?

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald suggests that Telstra plans to start a trial to shape Internet traffic during peak periods.
David Glance

This has been interpreted as including the possibility of slowing down traffic from peer-to-peer services that are used for the most part to illegally download video and music. Of course, peer-to-peer or BitTorrent downloads are used for legitimate purposes and opponents to ISPs shaping Internet usage have been quick to point this out. There is also an assumption that power users, who are responsible for 80% of all broadband usage are also the ones using BitTorrent and that is not necessarily the case.

The problem for Telstra and other ISPs is that Internet traffic growth is outpacing the ability of networks to carry it. More importantly has been the thorny problem of how to guarantee fair access to traffic and preventing a small number of users from dominating bandwidth. This has been at the heart of the debate around network neutrality where supporters have argued that all traffic should be treated equally and Internet providers should be prevented from discriminating users by differential charging or filtering content.

Between 2011 and 2016, global Internet traffic is expected to increase 4 times with the increased use of video and file sharing being the main drivers of that increase. Countries like Australia are investing in infrastructure, as in the NBN, to support this increase in traffic but we still face the issue of limited resources being available from our increasing use of wireless networks.

The issue with Telstra’s plans are that people will simply switch from using BitTorrent to using direct downloads of content. As fast as Telstra tries to catch up with people’s usage of the networks, users will change faster to stay at least one step ahead.

The other thing to note is that ISPs are probably already shaping some BitTorrent traffic. A study by Measurement Lab showed that many ISPs are using a technique called Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to throttle BitTorrent traffic. This includes Telstra, iiNet and other mainstream providers. Tools are available to check if your ISP is currently shaping traffic.

Despite the suggestion by the SMH that Telstra is going to clamp down on peer-to-peer users, few people, including the BitTorrenters will notice the difference. The Telstra trial will allow people to opt out and should the policy be introduced permanently, as mentioned before, there are a number of ways of getting around it.
https://theconversation.edu.au/is-te...-succeed-12016





Unlimited Broadband: BT Says ‘Goodbye’ to Fair Usage Policies
Rob Leedham

When it comes to so-called ‘unlimited’ broadband deals, disappointment has often reigned. But now BT is offering unlimited broadband without a fair usage policy, can we look forward to other providers following suit?

As of today, BT has followed in the footsteps of Sky and removed its fair usage policy, which it used to apply to its ‘unlimited’ broadband services.

This usage policy allowed BT to restrict broadband access or slow it down for those download-happy customers who were making the most of the package they had paid for. For those among you who subscribe to BT Unlimited Broadband, Unlimited Broadband Extra, Unlimited BT Infinity 1, Unlimited BT Infinity 2 or BT Total Broadband Option 3 – ‘unlimited’ will finally mean unlimited.

Unfair fair-usage policies

And that’s how it should be. Unfortunately, the Advertising Standards Agency’s rules mean that internet service providers are allowed to label a package as ‘unlimited’, just so long as the fair usage policies are mentioned somewhere in the ads. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t seem fair to me.

That’s why the Committee of Advertising Practice launched a consultation on this issue last year. Several solutions were up for consideration as part of the process, including the option to make ‘unlimited’ claims unacceptable for certain broadband services. This included services that came with a fair usage policy, which lead to extra charges or a suspended service if customers exceeded a certain usage limit.

Has a revolution begun?

The question remains whether BT jumped the gun before it was forced, but I believe credit is still due. Having launched its YouView TV service late last year, BT will be acutely aware that the way we use the internet is changing. On-demand services like BBC iPlayer mean we’re no longer a slave to the TV schedule, and our demand for downloads will increase. In addition, music streaming platforms like Spotify require a constant connection if we’re to take advantage of their vast catalogues.

Of course, there’s always the risk that some customers could get carried away trawling the internet for cat videos or perusing films on Netflix, which could negatively affect your own broadband speed.

So now BT has broken ranks with Sky to offer totally unlimited broadband, surely it’s just a matter of time until other providers follow suit? With Sky and BT offering truly unlimited broadband, will you be tempted to switch providers? Or are you concerned your service might slow down due to other, high-usage customers?
http://conversation.which.co.uk/tech...-usage-policy/





Cable Companies Make 97% Margin on Internet Services and Have No Incentive to Offer Gigabit Internet
Brian Wang

The cable distribution giants like Time Warner Cable and Comcast are already making a 97 percent margin on their “almost comically profitable” Internet services, according to Craig Moffet, an analyst at the Wall Street firm Bernstein Research. As Levin points out, “If you are making that kind of margin, it’s hard to improve it.” And most Americans have no choice but to deal with their local cable company.

Google fiber is mostly deploying in February and April of this year in Kansas. There are some areas that already have installation in progress.

Confirmation of Lazy Money Grubbing Evil

While Verizon operates the fiber network serving the largest number of home subscribers in the nation, the company is backing off from installing additional U.S. fiber connectivity. The company’s fiber service, called FiOS, offers basic service starting at 15 megabits per second (which can be upgraded in some areas to as much as 300 megabits per second).

Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said in a conference call last fall that there are no plans to expand FiOS beyond those areas. “At this point we have to capitalize on what we have invested,” he said. The basic goal is to sign up more people in the existing service areas, which adds the most revenue without increasing capital costs.

The other cable and telecom companies are focused on capitalizing on existing cable infrastructure, not emulating Google Fiber by building out fiber connections to homes and businesses. In Kansas City, Time Warner Cable in late January (likely in response to Google Fiber’s presence) boosted speeds and lowered prices, offering download speeds of 100 megabits per second for $75 a month. For $199 users can get cable bundled with TV and phone service, with two DVR.

Google Fiber, Gig.U and some City Gigabit Efforts

During an earnings call earlier this month, Google CFO Patrick Pichette said the company plans to finish building out the whole city, on both the Kansas and Missouri sides of the state line, and added that the effort “is not a hobby: we really think that we should be making good business with this opportunity, and we are going to continue to look at the possibility of expanding.”

Universities supporting the Gig.U initiative want to make sure they stay attractive to students and researchers who might want to access data and computing resources, and competitive with other institutions around the world that have such speeds. Their efforts include a deal with a private company, Gigabit Squared, to deliver one-gigabit service in Seattle and Chicago in collaboration with local governments and universities. A similar effort is taking shape among several universities and communities in North Carolina.

A final kind of special case is cities that are taking matters into their own hands. One example is Chattanooga, Tennessee. There, the local power utility in 2010 managed to score $111 million in federal stimulus money to speed up the build-out of a one-gigabit network for a smart electric grid (see “City with Superfast Internet Invites Innovators to Play”). It is now offering one-gigabit Internet access, albeit for about $300 a month, depending what TV service you get with it.

Nextbigfuture covered the google fiber rollout status in fall of 2012.

Other Screwed Up Problems

Even if costs (interest rates for competitors) and legal barriers are lowered, fiber economics won’t work for private companies everywhere—not even for Google. After all, as Levin points out, 80 percent of the cost of running fiber is in the labor, not the fiber and equipment, and not all houses are as closely spaced as the tidy bungalows on Francis Street, where the Carpenters live. “There are a lot of cities where the math wouldn’t work—areas not densely built enough or where construction costs are too high. In California, the environmental permitting provisions make it cost-prohibitive,” Levin added.

Nextbigfuture covered the problems faced by the internet provider startup Sonic.net in California in 2012.

Sonic.net is already building out gigagit fiber in Sebastopol, California.

When it comes to building out infrastructure, from broadband to roads, someone, be it environmentalists or neighbors leery of the project’s components, are bound to raise a fuss. When it comes to better broadband, the cabinets holding the electronics raise the ire of residents who would rather not have refrigerator-sized boxes on their lawns. For example, residents of San Francisco have banded together to sue to stop AT&T’s planned U-verse deployment, which requires more than 700 cabinets to hold the electronics gear be placed around the city.

Jasper says because Sonic.net is deploying fiber to the home, he will use fewer cabinets (he estimates 188) but he’s still worried that San Franciscans will step up to hold up or halt his permits. ATT originally had received its permits, but those permits were halted by the court while this suit goes forward.

Jasper is worried that the suit could take another three to six months, and will hold up his deployment, but he’s hoping that fewer cabinets and a willingness to share Sonic.net’s infrastructure with other providers might make city residents view his cabinets with a bit more favor.

FCC talks about Helping but Still Incompetent and Weak

The FCC says it wants to help. Last month, at a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called for broadband providers and state and city officials to build out at least one “gigabit community” in all 50 states by 2015. And the FCC plans to hold workshops in which broadband providers and state and municipal leaders can find and remove barriers, lower costs, and boost incentives for getting it done. Requests to the FCC for interviews went unanswered last week.

To help keep labor costs as low as possible, Google secured guarantees from the Kansas City government that it would get rapid responses on mundane but important matters like city inspections, access to rights-of-way, and even free rein to run fiber in sewers. Kansas City says it will provide the same breaks to other companies willing to provide similar service. Google also adopted a novel preregistration scheme, which had it start stringing fiber in a given neighborhood only after a certain percentage of residents—5 to 25 percent—committed to the service.

SOURCE - Technology Review, Sonic.net, Google Fiber, Gigaom, ArsTechnica, Wall Street Journal, Press Democrat
http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/02/cab...margin-on.html





The FCC Wants to Blanket the Country in Free Wi-Fi (Update)
Derek Mead

Internet access is an essential need on par with education access, but at what point do regulators recognize that? When will government officials acknowledge that widespread, guaranteed access is essential to fostering growth in the country? Somewhat surprisingly, that time is now, as the FCC is now calling for nationwide free wi-fi networks to be opened up to the public.

The FCC proposes buying back spectrum from TV stations that would allow for what the Washington Post is dubbing "super wi-fi," as the commission wants to cover the country with wide-ranging, highly-penetrative networks. Essentially, you can imagine the proposal as covering a majority of the country with open-access data networks, similar to cell networks now, that your car, tablet, or even phone could connect to. That means no one is ever disconnected, and some folks–especially light users and the poor–could likely ditch regular Internet and cell plans altogether.

As you might expect, telecom providers, as well as equipment manufacturers and even firms heavily invested in the cell phone market, like Intel, aren't interested in shaking up the current model that's securely lucrative. From the Post:

Cisco and other telecommunications equipment firms told the FCC that it needs to test the airwaves more for potential interference.

“Cisco strongly urges the commission to firmly retreat from the notion that it can predict, or should predict . . . how the unlicensed guard bands might be used,” the networking giant wrote.

Supporters of the free-WiFi plan say telecom equipment firms have long enjoyed lucrative relationships with cellular carriers and may not want to disrupt that model. [...]

“We want our policy to be more end-user-centric and not carrier-centric. That’s where there is a difference in opinion” with carriers and their partners, said a senior FCC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the proposal is still being considered by the five-member panel.

Google and Microsoft both support the proposal, largely because more internet access means more potential users. And, as Google and Microsoft have argued, opening up the wireless market to all will help spur a massive boom in innovation. Self-driving cars are nearly here, as we saw at CES, and one of the major things still holding them back is connectivity; it's not hard to teach a car to drive itself down the road, but it takes serious networking capability to teach it to drive nicely with others. Blanketing the country in wi-fi that doesn't require numerous licensing deals could allow that.

That aside, the potential benefits to citizens are immense, as discussed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in its campaign to unlock wi-fi from the user side. And beyond what the EFF is doing, the FCC could make huge strides towards closing the immense rural internet gap. Really, the FCC's plan, which would be the first of its kind in the world, would be a massive leap forward in the Internet age, where something that's a basic requirement for anyone to succeed these days is finally acknowledged as such.

Update: In an email, a FCC spokesperson clarified that the proposal in question was initially introduced as part of an incentive auction program that has the potential to open up parts of the spectrum owned by TV stations. Only if those bands open up will a nationwide network be possible, which requires the owners of those bands to sell them back to the FCC.

“The FCC’s incentive auction proposal, launched in September of last year, would unleash substantial spectrum for licensed uses like 4G LTE," wrote the spokesperson. "It would also free up unlicensed spectrum for uses including, but not limited to, next generation Wi-Fi. As the demand for mobile broadband continues to grow rapidly, we need to free up significant amounts of spectrum for commercial use, and both licensed and unlicensed spectrum must be part of the solution.”
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the...-in-free-wi-fi





Judge Sides With Wi-Fi Patent Troll Over Cisco
Chris Gonsalves

Purveyors of public Wi-Fi networks beware. The federal case that was supposed to bring a halt to patent troll Innovatio IP Ventures LLC’s ongoing shakedown of hotels, restaurants, coffee shops and the like took a strange turn this week when a federal judge threw out racketeering allegations brought by Cisco Systems Inc., Motorola Solutions Inc. and Netgear Inc.

The racketeering case brought by the technology heavyweights was seen by many as a way to end Innovatio’s two-year campaign of questionable licensing collections brought against major hotel chains such as Hyatt Corp., Marriott Hotels, Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, Ramada Inn, Best Western, Days Inn, Super 8 Hotels, and Travelodge and later expanded to include smaller businesses like Caribou Coffee, Cosí and Panera Bread Co.

Innovatio, which has rolled up a spate of decades-old patents left over from the portfolio of chip maker Broadcom Corp., claims pretty much anyone who uses Wi-Fi, including individuals and home users, owes them money for the use of technologies they control the rights to. According to the Patent Examiner blog, Innovatio is suing for royalties it claims each location owes for unlicensed use of wireless local area network (WLAN) technology features covered under a portfolio of 31 patents the company holds. So far, Innovatio’s focus has been on deep-pocketed clients of the major networking gear manufacturers.

According to Bloomberg News, U.S. District Judge James Holderman in Chicago on Tuesday dismissed the joint Cisco, Motorola and Netgear allegations that Innovation was engaging in racketeering by unlawfully demanding licensing fees from some of its biggest corporate customers. In a 34-page ruling on the matter, Judge Holderman said the tech vendors did not “establish that Innovatio’s licensing campaign alleging infringement of the Innovatio patents is a sham.”

The judge did, however leave the door open to further action by Cisco, Motorola and Netgear against Innovatio for breach of contract with regard to agreements the trio made with previous holders of the patents, some of which have already expired.

“Innovatio is pleased with, but not surprised by, the court’s ruling,” Matthew McAndrews, Innovatio’s lead counsel, tells Bloomberg. “Now that Cisco’s legal misdirection has hit a dead end, it will have to turn its attention to the real merits of this dispute: the defendants’ infringement of more than 350 of Innovatio’s patent claims and the appropriate measure of damages for that infringement.”

Anyone engaged in the implementation or maintenance of Wi-Fi hot spots for business clients should keep an eye on this convoluted case, which has the potential of making “free” wireless Internet access a whole lot more expensive for everyone involved.
http://channelnomics.com/2013/02/06/...t-troll-cisco/





Walden Proposes Internet Freedom Bill
Brendan Sasso

Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), chairman of the House Communications and Technology subcommittee, proposed legislation on Tuesday that would make it the official policy of the United States government to promote a free Internet.

Walden announced his draft bill during a hearing to scrutinize international efforts to regulate the Internet.

Congress approved a non-binding resolution last year that encouraged U.S. delegates to an international telecommunications treaty conference in Dubai to fight proposals that would result in global Internet regulation.

The new draft legislation would make it formal U.S. policy to "promote a global Internet free from government control and to preserve and advance the successful multi-stakeholder model that governs the Internet."

It is unclear what kind of practical impact the bill would have. A committee aide said the measure would not empower people to sue to overturn any government regulations.

"Governments’ traditional hands-off approach has enabled the Internet to grow at an astonishing pace and become perhaps the most powerful engine of social and economic freedom and job creation our world has ever known," Walden said during the hearing, which was jointly held by Walden's panel and two subcommittees of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Despite objections from U.S. officials, a majority of countries at the Dubai conference voted in December to expand the authority of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations agency, over Internet policy.

Supporters of the treaty revisions say they will help governments fight spam and improve cybersecurity.

But at Tuesday's hearing, witnesses warned that the new treaty could curtail the free flow of information around the world.

"The ITU now has unprecedented authority over the economics and content of key aspects of the Internet," said Robert McDowell, a member of the Federal Communications Commission.

He warned that the "dynamic new wonders of the early 21st century are inches away from being smothered by innovation-crushing old rules designed for a different time."

McDowell urged supporters of Internet freedom to prepare to fight further regulatory efforts at an ITU constitutional convention scheduled for next year.

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the technology subcommittee, said the United States and developing countries share many of the same goals, such as expanding Internet access and ensuring the security of communications networks. But she emphasized that "each of these goals can be addressed through the existing multi-stakeholder model for Internet governance."

Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, agreed that the ITU "has no business" regulating the Internet.

"This struggle will be a permanent one. Those seeking to control the Internet will never stop. It is too valuable," Royce said.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...t-freedom-bill





Internet ‘Under Assault’ by Censoring UN, Regulator Says
Eric Engleman

International proposals to control the Internet will continue after a United Nations conference in Dubai and the U.S. should be ready to fight such efforts, lawmakers and a regulator said.

“The Internet is quite simply under assault,” Robert McDowell, a member of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, said yesterday at a joint hearing by three House subcommittees. McDowell, a Republican, warned of “patient and persistent incrementalists who will never relent until their ends are achieved.”

The U.S. and other nations refused to sign a revised telecommunications treaty at the UN conference in December, saying new language could allow Internet regulation and censorship by governments. Technology companies including Google Inc. (GOOG), owner of the world’s largest Internet search engine, also opposed the changes.

The Dubai conference, held by the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, updated regulations related to topics such as mobile-roaming charges and access to emergency services.

The final pact also gives governments the ability to block Internet spam and inspect the content of online messages to determine if they can be blocked to solve “network congestion” issues, David Gross, a member of the U.S. delegation to the conference, said in testimony. Gross is an attorney with the law firm of Wiley Rein in Washington and a former U.S. State Department official.

House Measure

“This is likely the start, not the end, of efforts to drag the Internet within the purview of international regulatory bodies,” Representative Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican, said at the hearing.

House lawmakers are considering draft legislation making it U.S. policy to promote a “global Internet free from government control,” and advance the current decentralized model of Web governance by technical groups such as the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann. The bill is similar to a non-binding resolution that passed both houses of Congress before the Dubai conference.

“The idea that the UN ought to be controlling the Internet to me is like putting the Taliban in charge of women’s rights,” Representative Ted Poe, a Texas Republican, said at the hearing.

Countries that want the UN to regulate the Internet are led by “Putin’s Russia and our good buddies, the Chinese,” Poe said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

55 Balk

The U.K., Canada and Australia were among 55 delegations that refused to sign the telecommunications treaty or indicated they would need to check with their governments, while 89 countries signed the pact, according to a House Energy and Commerce Committee memorandum.

The treaty doesn’t take effect until January 2015, providing an opportunity to persuade other nations not to adopt the regulations, the committee said in the memorandum.

The U.S. should fight further Internet regulation efforts at future gatherings of the ITU, which plans meetings in May in Geneva and next year in South Korea, McDowell said.

“We have a lot of work ahead of us, particularly among nations who do not share our vision for maintaining the free flow of information across the Internet,” Representative Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, said at the hearing. “We have to have a strategy for engaging developing countries.”

Hamadoun Toure, the ITU’s secretary-general, said at the Dubai conference he disagreed that the new treaty would increase government control of the Internet and said there were no provisions on Web regulation in the text.

“We are pleased that so many members of Congress today voiced their support for the multi-stakeholder model, which has fostered the amazing growth and vitality of the Internet,” Brad White, a spokesman for Icann, said in an e-mail.

Icann, based in Los Angeles, manages the Internet’s domain- name system under a contract with the U.S. Commerce Department.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-0...akers-say.html





Egypt Court Suspends YouTube Over Anti-Islam Film

An Egyptian court ordered the suspension of online video service YouTube for a month on Saturday for broadcasting a film insulting the Prophet Mohammad, state media reported.

The country's administrative court ordered the ministries of communication and investment to block YouTube, owned by Google, inside Egypt because it had carried the film "Innocence of Muslims", said state news agency MENA.

The 13-minute video, billed as a film trailer and made in the United States, provoked a torrent of anti-American unrest in Egypt, Libya and dozens of other Muslim countries in September.

The video depicts the Prophet as a fool and a sexual deviant. For most Muslims, any portrayal of the Prophet is considered blasphemous.

The court said it was ruling on a case brought about the film several months ago, without going into further detail.

YouTube had "insisted on broadcasting the film insulting Islam and the Prophet, disrespecting the beliefs of millions of Egyptians and disregarding the anger of all Muslims" the court said, according to MENA.

Egypt's National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority said it would abide by the ruling as soon as it received a copy of the verdict.

No one was immediately available for comment from Google or YouTube.

(Writing by Marwa Awad; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...91804Q20130209





House Panel to Reintroduce Controversial Cyber Bill, Setting Up White House Fight
Jennifer Martinez

The leaders of the House Intelligence Committee plan to re-introduce on Wednesday a controversial cybersecurity bill that has faced pushback from the White House.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) said Friday that they plan to re-introduce the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) next week during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The bill is aimed at improving information-sharing about cyber threats between government and industry so cyberattacks can be thwarted in real time.

The bill that Rogers and Ruppersberger plan to introduce next week will be identical to the version of CISPA that passed the House last spring.

The White House issued a veto threat against CISPA before it was taken up on the House floor last year, saying the president's top advisers would recommend that he veto the bill if it came to his desk. It's unclear whether the White House would issue a similar threat this time around due to its concern over a lack of privacy protections in the bill.

A spokeswoman for the White House did not respond to a request for comment on what action it planned to take.

The bill would allow the government, namely the intelligence community, to share classified cyber threat information with the private sector so companies can protect their computer systems and networks from cyberattacks. It would also encourage companies to share anonymous cyber-threat information with one another, and provide liability protection for businesses so they don't get hit with legal action for sharing data about cyber threats.

House Intelligence Committee ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) and Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) From left to right: House Intelligence Committee ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) and Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.). The two plan to reintroduce CISPA legislation during a speech next week | File photos, Greg Nash/The Hill

In a statement, Rogers said the recent cyberattacks against U.S. banks and newspapers have highlighted the need for Congress to pass the information-sharing bill.

“American businesses are under siege," Rogers said. "We need to provide American companies the information they need to better protect their networks from these dangerous cyber threats. It is time to stop admiring this problem and deal with it immediately.”

The bill was "developed in close consultation with a broad range of private sector companies, trade groups, privacy and civil liberties advocates, and the executive branch," according to the House Intelligence Committee leaders.

Last year CISPA enjoyed support from a range of industry groups and companies, including Facebook, AT&T and Oracle. But civil-liberties groups and privacy advocates rallied hard against CISPA last year, arguing that the measure lacked sufficient privacy protections and would increase the pool of people's electronic communications flowing to the military and secretive National Security Agency.

Despite the veto threat and pushback that CISPA received, the bill boasted 112 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle and cleared the House. The bill went untouched in the Senate, largely because the upper chamber was working on its own comprehensive measure last year.

In a speech earlier this week, Rogers attempted to head off the privacy concerns raised about the bill last year.

"We're talking about exchanging packets of information, zeroes and ones, if you will, one hundred millions times a second," he said. "So some notion that this is a horrible invasion of content reading is wrong. It is not even close to that."

But privacy and civil-liberties advocates expect to revive their efforts to fight against the bill this year. Michelle Richardson, a legislative counsel in the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington office, argued that CISPA opponents have the White House veto threat on their side. Privacy advocates also backed the information-sharing section of a cybersecurity bill in the Senate last year, which the House Intelligence Committee could use as a template for their legislation, she said.

"I think it's a different ballgame this time," Richardson said. "I feel emboldened after what happened in the Senate last fall and [with] the veto threat."

"I don't think this sort of broad and unaccountable approach to information sharing [legislation] is going to go anywhere," she added.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...spa-next-week-





The Threat of Silence

Meet the groundbreaking new encryption app set to revolutionize privacy and freak out the feds.
Ryan Gallagher

For the past few months, some of the world’s leading cryptographers have been keeping a closely guarded secret about a pioneering new invention. Today, they’ve decided it’s time to tell all.

Back in October, the startup tech firm Silent Circle ruffled governments’ feathers with a “surveillance-proof” smartphone app to allow people to make secure phone calls and send texts easily. Now, the company is pushing things even further—with a groundbreaking encrypted data transfer app that will enable people to send files securely from a smartphone or tablet at the touch of a button. (For now, it’s just being released for iPhones and iPads, though Android versions should come soon.) That means photographs, videos, spreadsheets, you name it—sent scrambled from one person to another in a matter of seconds.

“This has never been done before,” boasts Mike Janke, Silent Circle’s CEO. “It’s going to revolutionize the ease of privacy and security.”

True, he’s businessman with a product to sell—but I think he is right.

The technology uses a sophisticated peer-to-peer encryption technique that allows users to send encrypted files of up to 60 megabytes through a “Silent Text” app. The sender of the file can set it on a timer so that it will automatically “burn”—deleting it from both devices after a set period of, say, seven minutes. Until now, sending encrypted documents has been frustratingly difficult for anyone who isn’t a sophisticated technology user, requiring knowledge of how to use and install various kinds of specialist software. What Silent Circle has done is to remove these hurdles, essentially democratizing encryption. It’s a game-changer that will almost certainly make life easier and safer for journalists, dissidents, diplomats, and companies trying to evade state surveillance or corporate espionage. Governments pushing for more snooping powers, however, will not be pleased.

By design, Silent Circle’s server infrastructure stores minimal information about its users. The company, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C., doesn’t retain metadata (such as times and dates calls are made using Silent Circle), and IP server logs showing who is visiting the Silent Circle website are currently held for only seven days. The same privacy-by-design approach will be adopted to protect the security of users’ encrypted files. When a user sends a picture or document, it will be encrypted, digitally “shredded” into thousands of pieces, and temporarily stored in a “Secure Cloud Broker” until it is transmitted to the recipient. Silent Circle, which charges $20 a month for its service, has no way of accessing the encrypted files because the “key” to open them is held on the users’ devices and then deleted after it has been used to open the files. Janke has also committed to making the source code of the new technology available publicly “as fast as we can,” which means its security can be independently audited by researchers.

The cryptographers behind this innovation may be the only ones who could have pulled it off. The team includes Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP encryption, which is still considered the standard for email security; Jon Callas, the man behind Apple’s whole-disk encryption, which is used to secure hard drives in Macs across the world; and Vincent Moscaritolo, a top cryptographic engineer who previously worked on PGP and for Apple. Together, their combined skills and expertise are setting new standards—with the results already being put to good use.

According to Janke, a handful of human rights reporters in Afghanistan, Jordan, and South Sudan have tried Silent Text’s data transfer capability out, using it to send photos, voice recordings, videos, and PDFs securely. It’s come in handy, he claims: A few weeks ago, it was used in South Sudan to transmit a video of brutality that took place at a vehicle checkpoint. Once the recording was made, it was sent encrypted to Europe using Silent Text, and within a few minutes, it was burned off of the sender’s device. Even if authorities had arrested and searched the person who transmitted it, they would never have found the footage on the phone. Meanwhile, the film, which included location data showing exactly where it was taken, was already in safe hands thousands of miles away—without having been intercepted along the way—where it can eventually be used to build a case documenting human rights abuses.

One of the few people to have tested the new Silent Circle invention is Adrian Hong, the managing director of Pegasus Strategies, a New York-based consulting firm that advises governments, corporations, and NGOs. Hong was himself ensnared by state surveillance in 2006 and thrown into a Chinese jail after getting caught helping North Korean refugees escape from the regime of the late Kim Jong Il. He believes that Silent Circle’s new product is “a huge technical advance.” In fact, he says he might not have been arrested back in 2006 “if the parties I was speaking with then had this [Silent Circle] platform when we were communicating.”

But while Silent Circle’s revolutionary technology will assist many people in difficult environments, maybe even saying lives, there’s also a dark side. Law enforcement agencies will almost certainly be seriously concerned about how it could be used to aid criminals. The FBI, for instance, wants all communications providers to build in backdoors so it can secretly spy on suspects. Silent Circle is pushing hard in the exact opposite direction—it has an explicit policy that it cannot and will not comply with law enforcement eavesdropping requests. Now, having come up with a way not only to easily communicate encrypted but to send files encrypted and without a trace, the company might be setting itself up for a serious confrontation with the feds. Some governments could even try to ban the technology.

Janke is bracing himself for some “heat” from the authorities, but he’s hopeful that they’ll eventually come round. The 45-year-old former Navy SEAL commando tells me he believes governments will eventually realize that “the advantages are far outweighing the small ‘one percent’ bad-intent user cases.” One of those advantages, he says, is that “when you try to introduce a backdoor into technology, you create a major weakness that can be exploited by foreign governments, hackers, and criminal elements.”

If governments don’t come round, though, Silent Circle’s solution is simple: The team will close up shop and move to a jurisdiction that won’t try to force them to comply with surveillance.

“We feel that every citizen has a right to communicate,” Janke says, “the right to send data without the fear of it being grabbed out of the air and used by criminals, stored by governments, and aggregated by companies that sell it.”

The new Silent Circle encrypted data transfer capability is due to launch later this week, hitting Apple’s App Store by Feb. 8. Expect controversy to follow.
http://www.slate.com/articles/techno...be.single.html





Exclusive: Microsoft and Symantec Disrupt Cyber Crime Ring
Jim Finkle

Software makers Microsoft Corp and Symantec Corp said they disrupted a global cyber crime operation by shutting down servers that controlled hundreds of thousands of PCs without the knowledge of their users.

The move made it temporarily impossible for infected PCs around the world to search the web, though the companies offered free tools to clean machines through messages that were automatically pushed out to infected computers.

Technicians working on behalf of both companies raided data centers in Weehawken, New Jersey, and Manassas, Virginia, on Wednesday, accompanied by U.S. federal marshals, under an order issued by the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia.

They seized control of one server at the New Jersey facility and persuaded the operators of the Virginia data center to take down a server at their parent company in the Netherlands, according to Richard Boscovich, assistant general counsel with Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit.

Boscovich told Reuters that he had "a high degree of confidence" that the operation had succeeded in bringing down the cyber crime operation, known as the Bamital botnet.

"We think we got everything, but time will tell," he said.

The servers that were pulled off line on Wednesday had been used to communicate with what Microsoft and Symantec estimate are between 300,000 and 1 million PCs currently infected with malicious software that enslaved them into the botnet.

HIJACKING SEARCHES

The companies said that the Bamital operation hijacked search results and engaged in other schemes that the companies said fraudulently charge businesses for online advertisement clicks.

Bamital's organizers also had the ability to take control of infected PCs, installing other types of computer viruses that could engage in identity theft, recruit PCs into networks that attack websites and conduct other types of computer crimes.

Now that the servers have been shut down, users of infected PCs will be directed to a site informing them that their machines are infected with malicious software when they attempt to search the web.

Microsoft and Symantec are offering them free tools to fix their PCs and restore access to web searches via messages automatically pushed out to victims.

The messages warn: "You have reached this website because your computer is very likely to be infected by malware that redirects the results of your search queries. You will receive this notification until you remove the malware from your computer."

It was the sixth time that Microsoft has obtained a court order to disrupt a botnet since 2010. Previous operations have targeted bigger botnets, but this is the first where infected users have received warnings and free tools to clean up their machines.

Microsoft runs a Digital Crimes Unit out of its Redmond, Washington, headquarters that is staffed by 11 attorneys, investigators and other staff who work to help law enforcement fight financial crimes and exploitation of children over the web.

Symantec approached Microsoft about a year ago, asking the maker of Windows software to collaborate in trying to take down the Bamital operation. Last week they sought a court order to seize the Bamital servers.

The two companies said they conservatively estimate that the Bamital botnet generated at least $1 million a year in profits for the organizers of the operation. They said they will learn more about the size of the operation after they analyze information from infected machines that check in to the domains once controlled by Bamital's servers.

Their complaint identified 18 "John Doe" ringleaders, scattered from Russia and Romania to Britain, the United States and Australia, who registered websites and rented servers used in the operation under fictitious names. The complaint was filed last week with a federal court in Alexandria and unsealed on Wednesday.

The complaint alleges that the ringleaders made money through a scheme known as "click fraud" in which criminals get cash from advertisers who pay websites commissions when their users click on ads.

Bamital redirected search results from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing search engines to sites with which the authors of the botnet have financial relationships, according to the complaint.

The complaint also charges that Bamital's operators profited by forcing infected computers to generate large quantities of automated ad clicks without the knowledge of PC users.

Symantec researcher Vikram Thakur said Bamital is just one of several major botnets in a complex underground "click fraud ecosystem" that he believes generates at least tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

He said that researchers at will comb the data on the servers in order to better understand how the click fraud ecosystem works and potentially identify providers of fraudulent ads and traffic brokers.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg in the world of click fraud," said Thakur.

Boscovich said he believes the botnet originated in Russia or Ukraine because affiliated sites install a small text file known as a cookie that is written in Russian on infected computers.

The cookie file contains the Russian phrase "yatutuzebil," according to the court filing. That can loosely be translated as "I was here," he said.

Microsoft provided details on the takedown operation on its blog: here

(Reporting By Jim Finkle; Editing by Claudia Parsons and Leslie Gevirtz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...91515K20130206





Inside Evasi0n, The Most Elaborate Jailbreak To Ever Hack Your iPhone
Andy Greeberg

In Apple’s eternal cat and mouse game to control what you can and can’t run on your iOS device, score another one for the mice.

On Monday a team of hackers that calls themselves the evad3rs released evasi0n, the first jailbreak program that works for the iPhone 5, as well as the iPad 3, the iPad mini, and the most modern version of every other iOS device, and allows users to remove all of Apple’s installation restrictions on their phone or tablet in minutes.

In its first six hours online, the crack had already been used at least 800,000 times, according to Jay Freeman, administrator of the Cydia appstore for jailbreakers, and he says that’s a conservative estimate–his count was fouled up when the tsunami of traffic knocked his server offline several times over the course of the jailbreak’s first day online. By Tuesday his count was up to 1.7 million.

With every new Apple device and every upgrade to its mobile operating system, the maze of anti-hacking measures built into the iPhone and iPad become more tortuous, and the game of defeating them becomes more elaborate. Evasi0n is no exception: According to David Wang, one of the evad3rs’ four developers, the program takes advantage of at least five distinct, new bugs in iOS’s code. (For reference, that’s one more than Stuxnet, the malware built by the NSA to destroy centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities.)

I asked Wang to walk me through how evasi0n works, step by step. Here’s what he told me.

• Evasi0n begins by running libimobiledevice, a program that substitutes for iTunes to communicate with iOS devices via the same protocol as Apple’s program. Using that tool, Evasi0n exploits a bug in iOS’s mobile backup system to gain access to certain settings that it normally shouldn’t be able to access, namely a file that indicates the device’s time zone.

• The jailbreak program inserts a “symbolic link” in that time zone file, a shortcut from one place in an operating system to another. In this case the link leads to a certain “socket,” a restricted communications channel between different programs that Wang describes as a kind of “red telephone to Moscow.” Evasi0n alters the socket that allows programs to communicate with a program called Launch Daemon, abbreviated launchd, a master process that loads first whenever an iOS device boots up and can launch applications that require “root” privileges, a step beyond the control of the OS than users are granted by default. That means that whenever an iPhone or iPad’s mobile backup runs, it automatically grants all programs access to the time zone file and, thanks to the symbolic link trick, access to launchd.

• iOS has another safeguard that would normally prevent any rogue application from gaining access to launchd: Code-signing. That restriction requires that all code run on a device is approved with an unforgeable signature from Apple. So Evasi0n launches a new app that appears to have no code at all–signed or unsigned. But when a user is prompted and taps the app’s icon, it uses a Unix trick called a “shebang” that can summon up code from another, signed application. In this case, it summons up launchd–which it can only access thanks to the socket change it made earlier–and uses it to run a “remount” command that changes the memory settings of the read-only root file system to make it writable.

• Now that the root file system is writable, evasi0n changes a file called launchd.conf that alters the configuration of launchd so that the changes evasi0n makes to it are repeated every time it runs. That’s what will make the jailbreak “persistent”: The user won’t need to re-run the program over a USB cable every time the device boots.

• Even after all those contortions, a device isn’t jailbroken until its restrictions are removed at the “kernel” layer–the deepest part of the operating system that performs the code-signing checks to prevent running unapproved apps using a process called the Apple Mobile File Integrity Daemon. (AMFID) So evasi0n uses launchd to load a library of functions into AMFID every time a program launches that somehow swaps out the function that checks for a code signature for one that always returns an “approved” answer. Wang won’t say exactly how that AMFID-defeating part of the jailbreak works. “Apple can figure that one out for themselves,” he says.

• iOS has yet another safeguard to prevent hackers from altering memory in the operating system kernel: Address Space Layout Randomization, or ASLR. That defensive trick moves the location of device’s code in its flash memory a certain, random distance every time it boots up to stymie anyone who would write over a particular part of the code. But evasi0n uses a memory allocation trick to locate one spot in memory that’s harder to hide in ARM-chip-based devices, known as the ARM exception vector. That part of the kernel handles application crashes, reporting on where in memory they happened. So evasi0n simulates a crash and checks the ARM exception vector to see where the crash occurred, providing just enough information to map out the rest of the kernel in the device’s memory.

• Once it’s beaten ASLR, the jailbreak uses one final bug in iOS’s USB interface that passes an address in the kernel’s memory to a program and “naively expects the user to pass it back unmolested,” according to Wang. That allows evasi0n to write to any part of the kernel it wants. The first place it writes is to the part of the kernel that restricts changes to its code–the hacker equivalent of wishing for more wishes. ”Once you get into the kernel, no security matters any more,” says Wang. “Then we win.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...k-your-iphone/





Four Years in the Pirate Bay: Director Simon Klose on Why File-Sharing is Still Political
Russell Brandom

Filmmaker Simon Klose has spent the last four years following the founders of The Pirate Bay through its legal struggles, technical issues, and ongoing battle with some of the most powerful corporations on Earth. Tomorrow, he’s releasing his documentary on the subject, TPB-AFK, distributed free under a Creative Commons license. The Verge caught up with Klose to talk about file-sharing, Kim Dotcom, and the decision to give away his movie for free.

You’ve been working on this film for four years, starting with the Pirate Bay trial in 2009. How have people’s attitudes towards piracy changed in that time?

It’s funny, a lot of Swedish reporters are already asking me, is it time to do a film about the rise and fall of the piracy movement? This debate was really furious in 2007, ‘08, ‘09, climaxing with the Pirate Bay trial in 2009, and now it’s cooled off a little. I think some of the reason is that there are more legal options today. But at the same time, a couple of years later there's something like 60 pirate parties around the world. One of the reasons that the Swedish Pirate Party became so powerful in 2009 was that the Pirate Bay was convicted in such a draconian way. So when bad things happen to the Pirate Bay, good things happen to Sweden. That has been the logic.

Do you think the pirate parties are winning in the long term?

I'm an optimist by birth. The worry is that very few, very big companies will take control of the entire internet and close it down and make it like cable TV, but I don't think that will happen. I think that in the long run, the internet will stay free. Even though pirate parties aren’t that visible in the debates anymore, there is a general knowledge about piracy, surveillance, file-sharing that there wasn’t before. So it's good that pirate parties are out there. I don't vote for them myself but it's good that they're out there creating debate and raising awareness of these new problems.

What's your take on Kim Dotcom's Mega? Is it the next step in the Pirate Bay fight?

Well, I don't know the guy and I haven't totally followed the story, but it strikes me that Kim Dotcom has always been a businessman. He seems to have been driven by financial motivations largely and the Pirate Bay guys don't seem to have been motivated by the same things.

A lot of the movie is a call to reform the international copyright system. How would you like to see this happen?

Well, copyright was created as an incentive for musicians and artists to create. To get this limited monopoly and make money off their cultural works. It was meant as an incentive to create more, and I support that idea.

But I think that the way copyright is being used today is mostly really large corporations that sit on these large swaths of rights and they are using this copyright to protect those rights, not to create more music. So copyright does need to be reformed. The basic dilemma is that the ability to share with culture is out of sync with the right to share culture. We need to find new tools, new ways for artists to share their stuff and still make money. And one of those tools is Creative Commons, which I'm using for my own film, which actually makes it easier for my film to spread and will make it easier for me to make money.

So making the film Creative Commons is partly a business move?

Sure. I'm not saying that the future for every filmmaker is to give out their film for free and ask for donations. But every film needs their own strategy, and for a Pirate Bay film to go out with the normal copyright and say, "this film will not be for free," I think that would be a stupid strategy. Any businessman would realize that. It would be perceived by the core audience, by the fans, by the online community as inauthentic. And that filmmaker would make less money than somebody who gave it away for free and tried to make an example of how this powerful distribution system we know as the internet could be. So yeah, I think it's a business move. But then again I also believe in this, and I want to prove that it can be a viable business idea to give away a film for free.

The Pirate Bay had legal struggles in Sweden, but in many ways, this seems like an international issue because so much of the pressure is coming from American content industry. Is copyright something that needs to be addressed internationally?

It all ties together, right? Copyright is part of this huge legal framework, and it's really complicated. When it came out that it the MPAA, via the White House, had pressured the Swedish government to take measures against this Swedish pirate site, The Pirate Bay, a lot of Swedes were really upset. We felt that this is Sweden and we have our laws here and why should our government be pressured into this? The content industry is driving these laws all over the world and bullying governments into stronger, more restrictive copyright laws all over the world. It's problematic because a lot of the politicians just buy the stuff that the content industry is saying. It's like, when the Green Party came up against the oil industry in the 70s, they really had to teach politicians not to take these people at their word. Politicians should be aware that these are extremely wealthy, profit-driven organizations and they are not necessarily always thinking about society's best interests.

Do you think sites like the Pirate Bay have to be run by outlaws, or will we get to a point where these services are legal?

I don't know. Some people see the Pirate Bay as digital civil disobedience. This power shift has given three young dudes the power to run one of the internet's largest sites for a decade, having some of the wealthiest corporations and governments against them. The sort of power shift where that's possible, it's really interesting. How can you run the 70th biggest site on the internet when you're hunted by every government in the western world? That sort of power shift that the internet has enabled… that has to be there before there can be any legal change. Once we can see a society where something like the Pirate Bay can exist, only then can we take on those legal battles and try to change these systems.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/7/39...paa-kim-dotcom

















bUntil next week,

- js.



















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