Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 19th, ’23

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August 19th, 2023





Music Labels Sue Internet Archive Over Digitized Record Collection
Blake Brittain

Universal Music Group (UMG.AS), Sony Music Entertainment (6758.T) and other record labels on Friday sued the nonprofit Internet Archive for copyright infringement over its streaming collection of digitized music from vintage records.

The labels' lawsuit filed in a federal court in Manhattan said the Archive's "Great 78 Project" functions as an "illegal record store" for songs by musicians including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday.

They named 2,749 sound-recording copyrights that the Archive allegedly infringed. The labels said their damages in the case could be as high as $412 million.

Representatives for the Internet Archive did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaint.

The San Francisco-based Internet Archive digitally archives websites, books, audio recordings and other materials. It compares itself to a library and says its mission is to "provide universal access to all knowledge."

The Internet Archive is already facing another federal lawsuit in Manhattan from leading book publishers who said its digital-book lending program launched in the pandemic violates their copyrights. A judge ruled for the publishers in March, in a decision that the Archive plans to appeal.

The Great 78 Project encourages donations of 78-rpm records -- the dominant record format from the early 1900s until the 1950s -- for the group to digitize to "ensure the survival of these cultural materials for future generations to study and enjoy." Its website says the collection includes more than 400,000 recordings.

The labels' lawsuit said the project includes thousands of their copyright-protected recordings, including Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven" and Duke Ellington's "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)".

The lawsuit said the recordings are all available on authorized streaming services and "face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed."

Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington Editing by David Bario and Diane Craft
https://www.reuters.com/legal/music-...on-2023-08-12/





Kansas Police and a Small Newspaper are at the Center of a 1st Amendment Fight after a Newsroom Raid
John Hanna And Margery A. Beck

A small newspaper and a police department in Kansas are at the center of a dispute over freedom of speech as the newspaper struggled Monday to publish its next edition, days after police raided its office and the home of its owner and publisher.

Officials with the Marion Police Department confiscated computers and cellphones from the publisher and staff of the Marion County Record in Friday’s raid. On Monday, Kansas state authorities confirmed they are also involved in a criminal probe of the newspaper over allegations that it illegally obtained and used personal information about a local business owner.

Friday’s raids have been widely condemned by press freedom watchdogs as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s protection for a free press. Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly called the raids “concerning.” An attorney for the newspaper deemed the searches and seizures illegal and said the police department’s action “offends the constitutional protections the founding fathers gave the free press.” The Society of Professional Journalists pledged $20,000 toward the newspaper’s legal defense.

But some Marion residents hold a different view, accusing the newspaper of aggressive news coverage that has driven out businesses and painted a negative picture of the town of about 1,900 people.

Newspaper publisher and co-owner Eric Meyer said he believes the newspaper’s dogged coverage of local politics and Police Chief Gideon Cody’s record are the main reason for the raids. The Record was in the midst of digging into the newly hired chief’s past as a Kansas City, Missouri, police captain when the raids were carried out, Meyer said, although the newspaper hasn’t yet published a story.

The newspaper’s attorney, Bernie Rhodes of Kansas City, sent a letter to the Cody demanding that police not review any information on the computers or cellphones seized, saying they were taken illegally and contain identities of confidential sources. He also accuses Cody of misinterpreting laws on privacy and wrongly applying them to news reporters.

“These are Hitler tactics,” Rhodes said. “I can assure you that the Record will take every step to obtain relief for the damages your heavy-handed actions have already caused my client.”

The police searches appear to have been prompted by a complaint from a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell, who accused the newspaper of invading her privacy after it obtained copies of her driving record, including a 2008 drunken driving conviction. Newell says the newspaper targeted her after she ordered Meyer and a reporter out of her restaurant earlier this month during a political event.

Meyer says a source gave the newspaper the information unsolicited and that reporters verified it through public online records. The paper eventually decided not to run a story, but it did report on Newell’s complaints about the newspaper’s investigation at a city council meeting, where she publicly confirmed she’d had a DUI conviction and that she drove after her license was suspended.

The search warrant names Newell as a victim and lists the underlying reasons for the searches as suspicion of identity theft and “unlawful acts concerning computers.”

Both Meyer and Newell have said they have fielded messages — and some threats — from as far away as London in the aftermath of the raids. Meyer worked with his staff Monday to reconstruct stories, ads and other materials for its next edition Wednesday.

Cody defended the raid on the newsroom, saying it was conducted legally, while press freedom and civil rights organizations have said that police overstepped their authority.

Jared Smith, a lifelong Marion resident, said Monday that he supports the police raid. Smith accused the newspaper of ruining his wife’s day spa business opened only a year ago by digging into her past and discovering she had appeared nude in a magazine years before. That fact was repeated in the Record more than 20 times over a six-month period, Smith said.

“The newspaper is supposed to be something that, yes, reports the news. But it’s also a community newspaper,” he said. “It’s not, ‘How can I slam this community and drive people away?’ ”

Authorities appeared unprepared for the public backlash to the raids, as involved agencies either refused to comment Monday or took pains to acknowledge the constitutional right to a free press while defending the ability of police to investigate journalists.

Cody referred questions Monday to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, saying it was leading the investigation. The state agency, in turn, refused to say it had taken over the investigation, referring instead to a statement saying it had “joined” the investigation and seemed to try to distance itself from the raids.

The state police agency said it had assigned an agent to the case at the request of Cody on Aug. 8 — three days ahead of the raids — but did not apply for the search warrants and wasn’t there when they were executed. While the agency declared freedom of the press as “a vanguard of American democracy,” it also appeared to defend the actions of local police, saying: “No one is above the law, whether a public official or a representative of the media.”

Both Meyer and Newell are contemplating lawsuits — Newell against the newspaper and Meyer against the public officials who carried out the search.

Meyer also blames the raid at his home for stressing his 98-year-old mother enough to cause her death on Saturday. Joan Meyer was the newspaper’s co-owner.

——-

Beck reported from Omaha, Nebraska.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/a...g-a-newspaper/





Kansas Newspaper Says it Investigated Local Police Chief Prior to Newsroom Raid
Danielle Kaye, David Folkenflik

The small-town Kansas newspaper raided by police officers on Friday had been looking into allegations of misconduct against the local chief just months ago, according to the paper's publisher, raising further concerns about the law enforcement officers' motives.

The Marion, Kansas police department confiscated computers, cell phones and a range of other reporting materials from the office of the Marion County Record — the sole local paper in a small city of about 2,000 residents. Officers spent hours in the newsroom. It also seized material from one of its journalist's homes. Eric Meyer, the publisher and co-owner of the newspaper, said his 98-year-old mother passed away the day after police raided her house, where Meyer was staying at the time. He said he believes the stress from the raid contributed to her death.

The raids sparked coast-to-coast outrage among journalists and advocates for freedom of speech, including a letter of protest signed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

"The U.S. Supreme Court, over the years, has said that people in authority — government officials — have to suffer a free press," says Sandy Banisky, a lawyer who taught media law at the University of Maryland's journalism school and also former senior editor at the Baltimore Sun. "Incidents like this have to be examined and exposed thoroughly to be sure that the kind of raid that happened in Marion, Kansas doesn't happen around the country."

The Marion County Record conducted "routine background checks" in the lead-up to police chief Gideon Cody's start-date, according to Meyer. When the paper published a story about Cody's candidacy for the police chief position, Meyer said it received anonymous tips from several of his former colleagues, who alleged misconduct.

Police chief "has reason to not like us"

Cody was sworn in as Marion's police chief on June 1 after retiring from the Kansas City Police Department in late April, according to the department's employee retirement website.

"It was alarming, to say the least, the number of people who came forward, and some of the allegations they made were fairly serious," Meyer said. "We were simply looking into the question."

The police chief was aware the paper was looking into his background. Meyer said a Record reporter approached Cody seeking comment on the allegations. In response, Meyer said Cody threatened to sue the paper.

NPR reached out to Cody, who declined to confirm whether he threatened to sue the paper, or whether the raid was linked to the newsroom's reporting on his background.

Meyer said the police chief "has reason to not like us," but he stressed that he didn't know if there was a connection between his paper's reporting and the raid.

Any communications between the Record's reporters and Cody are stored on the computers the officers seized during the raid, Meyer added. The newsroom currently does not have access to these documents.

"We can't consult our source material," Meyer said. "It's been taken away from us."

Erosion of police transparency

Prior to Cody's tenure as police chief, the Marion police department had upheld a decades-long practice of releasing a list of the department's routine activities each week, Meyer said. The Record would publish this list in its weekly edition, detailing the general areas where officers conducted investigations or responded to complaints.

But that practice came to an abrupt halt when Cody took the helm of the department, according to Meyer.

"He cited reasons of privacy," Meyer said. "Tracing back 60 years, it's been a regular feature of the paper."

Cody did not respond to a request for comment on this change in department policy.
Related Story: The State Of Freedom Of Press Around The World

Search warrant also raises red flags

County magistrate judge Laura Viar signed a search warrant on Friday morning, authorizing the Marion police department to raid the Record. The warrant cites suspected "identity theft" of a local restaurant owner as the reason for the raid.

On Friday, just after the raid, the Record requested access to the probable cause affidavit — the document that would outline why the judge saw reason to authorize the raid — from the Marion County District Court.

But the court's written response, reviewed by NPR, indicates that document may not exist.

"This Court is unable to respond to this request as there is not a probable cause affidavit filed," judge Viar wrote in response to the newsroom's request.
Related Story: Police Raid Of Journalist's Home In San Francisco Sets Off First Amendment Firestorm

Cody justified the raid in a statement to NPR, claiming it was legal because of an exception to the federal Privacy Protection Act, which broadly prohibits law enforcement officials from searching for or seizing information from reporters.

"It is true that in most cases, [the Privacy Protection Act] requires police to use subpoenas, rather than search warrants, to search the premises of journalists unless they themselves are suspects in the offense that is the subject of the search," Cody said.

But there's broad consensus among media lawyers that the police department's legal reasoning doesn't hold up, since the alleged crime is linked to news gathering — which is protected by federal law.
https://www.npr.org/1193813087






Joann Meyer, Longtime Editor of a Besieged Newspaper, Dies at 98

She collapsed a day after the police raided her home and the offices of The Marion County Record, a weekly paper in Kansas.
Clay Risen

Joann Meyer, who spent nearly 60 years as a reporter, columnist, editor and associate publisher at The Marion County Record in Kansas, died on Saturday at her home, a day after the police searched the newspaper’s offices. She was 98.

Her son, Eric Meyer, the newspaper’s publisher, confirmed the death. He said that the cause had not been determined, but that the coroner had concluded that the stress of the searches — at her home, which she shared with him, as well as at the paper’s offices — was a contributing factor.

The raids came after a local businesswoman accused the newspaper of illegally acquiring a letter from the local government explaining how she could reinstate her driver’s license after it had been suspended following a citation for drunken driving in 2008.

The newspaper, which said it had received the document from an anonymous source, verified the information, but Mr. Meyer decided not to publish an article about it. Nevertheless, on Friday morning a judge issued a warrant permitting the police to search the Meyer residence and the newspaper’s offices for evidence of identity theft and the “illegal use of a computer.”

An hour later, members of the town’s police department showed up at the Meyers’ house, which Mrs. Meyer and her husband had moved into in 1953, the day before Eric was born. They took computers, cellphones, documents and even Mrs. Meyer’s Alexa smart speaker.

Mr. Meyer said that his mother was in shock after the raid, and that she had trouble sleeping. On Saturday, he went to wake her after noon, and to bring her breakfast, which she refused to eat.

“She said over and over again, ‘Where are all the good people to put a stop to this?’” he said. “She felt like, how can you go through your entire life and then have something that you spent 50 years of your life doing just kind of trampled on like it’s meaningless?”

She died in midsentence, he said, at around 1:30 p.m.

Marion’s chief of police, Gideon Cody, has refused to go into detail about the case, but he has insisted that more information will be forthcoming.

Marion is a town of about 2,000 people, located amid the vast flat cornfields of central Kansas, roughly 50 miles north of Wichita.

As at most small-town papers, job titles at The Record are nominal; everyone does everything. Editors might write articles, reporters might sweep the floors. Mrs. Meyer worked as a copy editor and the social news editor, and for decades she wrote a column about local history called Memories.

“She was a walking encyclopedia of local history,” Rowena Plett, a features reporter for The Record, said in a phone interview.

The Record is a Meyer family affair. Mrs. Meyer’s husband, Bill, began working there in 1948, and she joined him in the early 1960s, once Eric was old enough to stay with her parents for a few hours.

“My father wrote and my mother read,” said Eric Meyer, who also wrote for the newspaper in high school. “They spent 24 hours a day together.”

The newspaper had a reputation for aggressive reporting alongside the sort of lighter fare often found in small-town publications. Recent coverage included an article about a thresher exhibition and an exposé of a scam involving supposedly free Covid tests.

In 1998, when the longtime owners of The Record, the Hoch family, decided to sell it, the Meyers stepped in as buyers to prevent it from going to a corporate chain. They also bought two nearby papers, The Hillsboro Star-Journal and The Peabody Gazette-Bulletin.

Joann Wight was born on May 23, 1925, in Marion and rarely ventured beyond its limits. Her father, Ollie Wight, was a town marshal, and her mother, Mercil (Thompson) Wight, ran a funeral home.

Before joining the staff of The Record, she worked in a grocery store, a hospital and an alfalfa mill.

She married William Meyer in 1949; he died in 2006. Along with her son, she is survived by a grandson and three great-grandchildren.

Mrs. Meyer set the tone for the newspaper as a punctilious editor — though she refused to let anyone, even her husband or son, touch her copy.

After her husband’s death, Mrs. Meyer stepped back from many of her daily duties at the paper. Eric, who had spent his career as a journalist in Milwaukee and later as a journalism professor at the University of Illinois, returned home to help. He eventually took over as editor and publisher.

She continued to write her column every week until last year, when a medical procedure damaged her vision. But she would still write an occasional article, with the help of her son.

Since the raids, the newspaper’s staff has struggled to put out the next issue, because of both the lack of equipment — the police took most of the computers — and the sudden worldwide attention being cast on their small town.

In addition to constant calls from the news media, Mr. Meyer said, they have been contacted by numerous well-wishers and subscribers eager to help out.

“She would feel very good about all this,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/b...eyer-dead.html





After Kansas Paper Is Raided, Officials Are Ordered to Return What They Took

The raid of the newspaper, The Marion County Record, has drawn condemnation from First Amendment advocates.
Kevin Draper and Benjamin Mullin

Kevin Draper reported from Marion, Kan., and Ben Mullin from New York.

The top prosecutor in Marion County, Kan., said on Wednesday that there was not sufficient evidence to support a raid on a local newspaper last week, and that all the devices and materials obtained in the search would be returned.

Joel Ensey, the Marion County attorney, said in a statement that, in light of the insufficient evidence, he directed local law enforcement to return the seized material.

Police officers and county sheriff’s deputies searched the newspaper’s office, the home of its owner and editor and the home of a city councilwoman on Friday — collecting computers, cellphones and other materials. It is extremely rare for law enforcement authorities in the United States to search and seize the tools to produce journalism.

The searches were part of an investigation into how The Marion County Record obtained and handled a document containing information about a local restaurateur — and whether the restaurant owner’s privacy was violated in the process. The episode threw a national spotlight on Marion, a town of about 2,000 people located an hour north of Wichita.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation, an agency that aids law enforcement statewide, said in a statement that the investigation would continue.

The search generated blowback from First Amendment experts, who condemned the raid and urged local law enforcement officials to return the journalists’ equipment. On Sunday, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press sent a letter to the Marion Police Department expressing concern that the raid violated federal law. The letter was signed by more than 30 newsrooms, including The New York Times, and press advocacy organizations.

Joan Meyer, a co-owner of the paper, died on Saturday, the day after the raid on the home she lived in with her son, Eric Meyer, the newspaper’s publisher. Mr. Meyer said she was in shock after the raid, adding that she had trouble sleeping. Ms. Meyer, 98, refused food, and kept asking Mr. Meyer whether anyone would put an end to the clash with the authorities. She died midsentence.

Mr. Meyer said the coroner had concluded that the stress of the searches was a contributing factor in her death.

The Marion police chief defended the raid on Saturday, saying that “when the rest of the story is available to the public, the judicial system that is being questioned will be vindicated.” He declined to comment on Wednesday.

Mr. Ensey, the county attorney, was in court Wednesday and not available to comment.

The search of the newspaper’s office came less than a week after Kari Newell, a local restaurant owner, accused The Record of illegally obtaining a government record about steps to restore her driver’s license and then sharing it with a city councilwoman.

Mr. Meyer has said since the raid that he and his newspaper, which did not publish anything about the document it obtained, had done nothing wrong and that the newspaper did not share the document with the councilwoman.

Mr. Meyer, 69, has had a long career in journalism, working as a reporter for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a professor at the University of Illinois. The Record, which has seven employees and a circulation of about 4,000, is known for its fiery editorials about local officials and uncommonly aggressive reporting for a paper of its size. But it is also a small-town paper with small-town concerns: Last week’s top story was about a 10-year-old who is learning to play guitar at a local senior center.

On Wednesday, in an interview at The Record’s office, he said he was vindicated by the county attorney’s decision, adding that he was grateful that the paper’s devices were being returned. He criticized the county attorney and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation for releasing statements about the decision before telling him.

He proudly held up a print copy of this week’s edition, which staff members had stayed up late into the night to produce because of the missing devices. “SEIZED … but not silenced” read the top headline, in 200-point font.

“You cannot let bullies win, and eventually a bully will cross the line to the point that it becomes so egregious that other people come around and support you,” Mr. Meyer said.

Bernard J. Rhodes, a lawyer who represents The Record, called the county’s decision to withdraw its search warrant and return the seized items “a promising first step.”

“However, it does nothing to recompense the paper for the violation of its First Amendment rights when the search was conducted,” he added, “and most regrettably, does not return Joan Meyer.”

Mr. Meyer said the last 24 hours of his mother’s life was awful, but that she would have enjoyed the support The Record has received — 2,000 more people have subscribed to the paper in just the last few days — amid its ongoing dispute with law enforcement agencies.

“She would have liked to be thought of as almost a martyr for the cause,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/16/b...aper-raid.html





Judge Who Signed Kansas Newspaper Search Warrant had 2 DUI Arrests, Reports Say
Bill Chappell

Police in Kansas have returned cellphones, computers and other equipment to the Marion County Record, less than a week after a raid on the small-town newspaper was widely criticized as a likely violation of federal law.

In another development, news emerged that Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, who signed the search warrant allowing police to seize the equipment, was arrested at least twice for driving under the influence. Those 2012 arrests came months apart in two counties — and it's not clear how much information was shared between officials at the time, The Wichita Eagle reports. (See below for more on the allegations.)

The extraordinary Aug. 11 raid drew national and international headlines because it seemed to run counter to long-established press freedoms and guarantees. Such actions are nearly unheard of in the U.S.

"It's very rare because it's illegal," First Amendment attorney Lynn Oberlander told NPR. "It doesn't happen very often because most organizations understand that it's illegal."

Here's a quick recap of where things stand:

DUI records have been pivotal to the case in Marion

It was a confidential tip to the Record about the DUI history of Kari Newell, a local restaurant and catering company owner, that set incidents in motion. The paper says it confirmed Newell had lost her driver's license, using a public website.

But the Record opted not to publish the information, choosing instead to inform Marion County Sheriff Jeff Soyez and city police Chief Gideon Cody about the source's allegation that officers were aware a local resident couldn't legally drive but were ignoring issues with their license. The paper says it didn't use Newell's name.

Days later, Newell publicly accused the Record of feeding the information to a councilwoman, Ruth Herbel. The paper says the same source who made the initial allegation also sent the information to Herbel.

Police then raided the Kansas newspaper after obtaining a search warrant from Viar citing a criminal investigation into "identity theft," regarding Newell's records found online. Officers also seized devices at Herbel's home.

Newspaper staffers scrambled to cobble together enough equipment to produce its regular Wednesday edition.

Judge who signed warrant is under scrutiny

The judge was arrested twice in 2012 — once on Jan. 25 in Coffey County and again on Aug. 6 in Morris County. At the time, Viar's last name was Allen and she was working as the top prosecutor in Morris County.

In the first arrest, Viar "was charged and entered a diversion agreement — which was extended six months because she refused to get an alcohol and drug evaluation and stopped communicating with her lawyer," according to the Eagle.

She was arrested again months later, this time in her home county.

"Officials say she was driving Morris County Magistrate Judge Thomas Ball's vehicle, when she ran off the road and hit a shed near the Council Grove football field," TV station WIBW reported in 2012, adding that at the time, the prosecutor was on the Morris County Anti-Drug Task Force.

"She was charged with DUI, reckless driving and refusal to take a preliminary breathalyzer," the Emporia Gazette reported at the time.

Despite those issues, Viar was reelected as county prosecutor several times. In late 2022, she was chosen to fill a slot as a magistrate judge in the 8th Judicial District after the sitting judge retired.

Reporting on the 2012 charges this week, the Wichita Eagle said it was unclear how Viar's DUI cases were resolved or whether officials in either county were aware of her arrest in another jurisdiction.

Newspaper looked into police chief's background

Meyer said the Record looked into allegations of misconduct against Cody, who was sworn in on June 1 after retiring from the Kansas City Police Department, based on anonymous tips from several of his former colleagues.

Meyer said a Record reporter approached Cody seeking comment about the allegations and in response Cody threatened to sue the paper.

Cody declined to confirm whether he threatened to sue the paper or whether the raid was linked to the paper looking into his background.

Meyer said Cody "has reason to not like us," but said he didn't know if there was a connection between his paper's reporting and the raid.
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation took over the case

The state agency began leading the investigation into alleged identity theft on Monday. Just two days later, the KBI said it would "coordinate the prompt return of all seized items."

The equipment and devices were returned "without review or examination," the bureau said.

The Record says it reached a deal with investigators to turn the gear over to a forensic investigator to confirm whether the equipment had been reviewed or examined before it is put back into service.

Marion County Attorney Joel Ensley, who formally requested for the judge to release the newspaper's items, said in a written statement issued by the KBI that he made the decision after he "reviewed in detail" the warrant application on Monday that had led to last Friday's raid.

Ensley said he concluded that "insufficient evidence exists" to establish a link between the alleged crimes and the places that were searched and the equipment that was seized.

NPR's Danielle Kaye and David Folkenflik contributed to this report.
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/17/11943...ts-reports-say





Wi-Fi Expert Reveals Cheeky Way Brits are Stopping Internet Theft – and how to Spot if You have a Pirate Next Door
Millie Turner

BRITS are renaming their Wi-Fi networks with cheeky titles in a bid to stop freeloading neighbours from stealing their internet, according to a new study.

Fears of Wi-Fi pinching neighbours have spiked during the cost of living crisis when broadband prices are rising, experts at cybersecurity firm ExpressVPN have revealed.

The study, which surveyed over 1,000 people, found that over half of Brits don't trust their neighbours not to nab their Wi-Fi.

While one in seven have caught a friend, family member or neighbour red-handed attempting to use their home network to access something ‘dodgy’, such as a the dark web.

“Brits are right to be concerned about the security implications - accessing someone else’s Wi-Fi, or vice versa, can lead to malware infections or even identity theft," Lauren Hendry Parsons, privacy advocate for ExpressVPN explained.

"So always think twice about who’s connecting to your Wi-Fi, and who you have handed your Wi-Fi password out to in the past."

Despite privacy concerns around neighbours using private their personal Wi-Fi, few Brits actually take steps to protect their home network.

This is mostly due to a lack of knowledge on the easy steps the average homeowner can take to secure their network, the study revealed.

As a result, some people have come up with more creative ways to deter pirating neighbours, such as changing the name of their Wi-Fi network.

Some of the unique Wi-Fi names found by ExpressVPN’s survey, include:

• 5G Test Mast
• TV Licensing Surveillance
• Virus infected Wi-Fi
• The FBI

Most are pretty innocent and clever, as '5G Test Mast' is unlikely to be questioned by a freeloader.

But masking your Wi-Fi name won't completely deter piracy, according to Parsons.

"Instead, equipping your connection with extra security precautions, such as a VPN to disguise internet traffic, and ensuring it utilises Wi-Fi encryption protocols, ideally WPA2, is essential," she said.

How do can I tell if my neighbour is stealing my Wi-Fi?

The biggest tell tale sign is if your Wi-Fi is slow without reason.

If you're home alone, you're not downloading a new game or trying to stream a movie - there's little reason for your internet connection to falter.

If you're suspicious, check your Wi-Fi router's status lights.

Turn off all your devices that are connected to the internet.

When no devices are connected to the Wi-Fi, the lights should not be flickering or flashing.

Modern routers are often accompanied by a mobile app, which can be used to scan your network for devices.

The trickiest way of checking if you're not inadvertently paying for someone else's WiFi use, is to login in to the Wi-Fi admin control panel.

You can do this by searching your IP address in a web browser.

Your IP address will look something like this: http://192.168.0.1/

Then you'll need to type in the admin username, which can often be 'admin', and the admin password.

From there you can look for a network map, user log, or client list and see which devices are on your Wi-Fi and boot off any you don't recognise.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/234414...t-how-to-spot/





How Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill 2023 can Make Film Pirates Pay Fines of Up to Rs 30 Crore
dnawebdesk

Parliament on Monday passed a bill mandating a maximum jail term of three years and a fine of up to five per cent of the production cost of the film for persons involved in film piracy and circulation of such content. The Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill 2023, which was passed by Rajya Sabha on Thursday last week, was approved by the Lok Sabha after a brief debate amid protests by the opposition demanding a statement by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Parliament on the ethnic violence in Manipur.

"We will stop film piracy through this Bill. This has been a longstanding demand of the film industry," Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur said replying to the debate in the Lok Sabha. This was the first substantial amendment to the Cinematograph Act 1953 since 1984 when the minimum punishment for an offence relating to a video film was introduced.

"If a film is made at a cost of Rs 1,000 crore, the fine for making a pirated copy would amount upto Rs 50 crore," Thakur said. The most expensive Indian film currently being made is Prabhas-starrer Kalki 2898 AD, which reportedly costs Rs 600 crore. The fine for pirating it would essentially amount to Rs 30 crore.

The Bill also empowers the state governments to block websites and URLs hosting pirated content under the Information Technology Act. Thakur said earlier pirated copies of a film were made using camcorders, but with the advent of new technologies, new methods have been found to make such copies and transmit them using different platforms.

The Bill also removes section 6.1 of the Act that granted powers to the Central government to revise the CBFC certification of a film. A senior official said this particular provision was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2000 and the Bill seeks to harmonise the law with the apex Court judgement.

The Bill passed by Parliament on Monday also has provisions to introduce three age-based certifications under the 'UA' category, namely 'UA 7+', 'UA 13+' and 'UA 16+', and to empower the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) to sanction a film with a separate certificate for its exhibition on television or other media.

A senior official said the age-based certification was more of a guidance and it was not incumbent on theatre-owners to check age proofs of persons watching a particular movie. Thakur said the Bill also removes the provisions for renewal of Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) certificates after 10 years and such documents for films will now be issued for perpetuity.

The bill also has provisions to allow for a change of category of a film which has received either 'A' or 'S' certificate to be converted to 'UA' certification after making suitable alterations to allow it to be broadcasted on television.
https://www.msn.com/en-in/entertainm...re/ar-AA1eCATG





This Malicious Google Chrome Extension Could Hijack Your Devices if You Try and Download Pirate Movies
Craig Hale

New research from HP Wolf security researchers claims a new ChromeLoader campaign has been underway since March affecting users of movie and video game pirating websites.

The browser hijacker tricks victims into installing a malicious extension called Shampoo, which then redirects users’ search queries to malicious websites.

The researchers found the malware to be re-launching itself via Task Scheduler on victims’ machines every 50 minutes, claiming that “victims are having a difficult time getting rid of this malware because it has multiple persistence mechanisms.”
ChromeLoader malware

Beyond its persistence mechanisms, HP states that its multiple evasion techniques make it hard to break down: “The extension is heavily obfuscated and contains many anti-debugging and anti-analysis traps.”

Even so, the HP Wolf team highlights the similarities between Shampoo and other ChromeLoader versions, pinpointing a specific typo in the code that leads it to believe that it could be linked to another version previously witnessed, giving some hope for justice.

Beyond the Chrome extension malware, this version of the company’s quarterly HP Wolf Security Threat Insights Report shared information about attackers bypassing macro policies by hijacking legitimate Office 365 accounts, urging potential victims to pay attention to what lurks beneath a seemingly legitimate facade.

HP’s global head of security for personal systems, Dr Ian Pratt, said: “To protect against increasingly varied attacks, organizations must follow zero trust principles to isolate and contain risky activities such as opening email attachments, clicking on links, or browser downloads. This greatly reduces the attack surface along with the risk of a breach.”

Naturally, the company is keen to push its own antivirus and cybersecurity software, but more broadly it’s common practice to install preventative tools like firewalls in order to secure systems as best as possible.

• Concerned victims may want to consider using the best identity theft protection software
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techn...es/ar-AA1cAnf5





Tape Storage Might Be Computing’s Climate Savior

Tape media generates just 3 percent of the carbon dioxide that hard disks do
Velvet Wu

Data storage has long contributed a significant portion of the computing industry’s carbon footprint, even representing as much as 1.8 percent of the United States’ total electricity consumption in 2014, according to a report by the Berkeley National Laboratory [pdf]. Brad Johns, a veteran of IBM’s data storage business and a data storage consultant in Arizona, believes that the solution to data storage sustainability, for the foreseeable future at least, lies in a piece of technology many might consider already outdated: the magnetic data tape.

“There’s an opportunity that many organizations have to reduce their carbon footprint and do it in a way that could reduce their costs… that’s kind of a win-win,” says Johns.

At least 60 percent of all data is “cold,” yet remains on HDDs. Which presents an opportunity to transition to a greener—and cheaper—alternative.

The need for data storage is only growing, too. International Data Corporation (IDC) estimated that the total amount of data created would increase from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 ZB in 2025, and that around 10 percent, or 17 ZB, of that data would be stored in 2025. According to estimates by IDC and Seagate cited in 2021, 62 percent of data is stored on HDDs, 9 percent on solid state drives (SSDs), and 15 percent on tape in 2021.

HDDs are more convenient for storage because information can be retrieved from them much faster than it can be retrieved from tape storage. The tradeoff is higher carbon emissions, Johns explains in an article for Motion Image Journal—HDDs have a lifespan of approximately five years, during which time they produce around 2.55 equivalent kilograms of carbon dioxide per terabyte per year (based on an estimate from Seagate for the Exos X18 HDD). In contrast, tape media has a lifespan of more than 30 years, during which time they produce just 0.07 kg CO2e/TB/year (based on an estimate from Fujifilm for the LTO 9 [pdf]), or 3 percent that of HDDs.

Tape Storage Saves Carbon

Johns points out that most of the enormous influx of information being created and stored today is “cold data,” data that is rarely accessed but still has value and cannot be discarded. According to a 2019 whitepaper by IDC [pdf], 60 percent of all data is cold, yet remains on HDDs. Johns argues that this presents an important opportunity for big data corporations to transition to an alternative, tape storage, a more sustainable form of data storage which would reduce their carbon footprint.

If organizations worldwide collectively transitioned all their cold data, a collective 60 percent of all data, to tape, the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by data storage across the globe would fall by 58 percent, a 79 million ton reduction in CO2 emissions, Johns calculates.

Reducing e-Waste

Tape Storage Saves e-Waste

Meanwhile, this graph indicates how much e-waste is also saved by switching a portion of the world’s “cold” stored data from hard drives to magnetic tape.

Transitioning cold data to be stored on modern tape media also reduces electronic waste (e-Waste). Since HDDs only have a five year lifespan, the old HDDs will need to be discarded for new ones to retain the same data. Tape storage is typically replaced every ten years, resulting in less discarded storage. As an example, if a data center needs to store 100 Petabytes of data for 10 years, storing all data on HDDs results in 7.4 metric tons of e-Waste. If 60 percent of the data is moved to tape, only 3.6 metric tons of e-Waste are generated, resulting in a 51 percent reduction.

“Tape today clearly has a compelling advantage over hard disk drives. And if you look at the roadmaps, it’s going to stay that way probably for the next decade.”
—Brad Johns, Brad Johns Consulting

Further incentive for this solution is the financial benefit, argues Johns. Using Fujifilm’s total cost of ownership (TCO) tool, he calculated that storing all 100 PB of data on HDD costs US $17,707,468, while a mix that includes 60 percent tape cuts the cost nearly in half to $9,476,339.

Many big corporations have already started shifting toward tape storage. For smaller companies, however, the process of shifting to tape has been slower. The definition of cold data is variable, and depends on individual organizations’ needs and user requirements. Thus, categorizing data as “cold” so that it can be moved to tape is tricky--and costs time, money, and effort. While large corporations may have these resources, smaller companies do not. This is one of the obstacles preventing tape storage from being widely implemented in smaller scale data centers.

The other obstacle Johns describes is the management challenge. “The technology is pretty proven. It’s just trying to get the momentum amongst all the other things that IT organizations have to do,” he says.

Regardless of whether corporations implement the solution, the question remains whether tape storage is the solution that is here to stay. “Tape today clearly has a compelling advantage over hard disk drives, and if you look at the roadmaps, it’s going to stay that way probably for the next decade,” says Johns. But there is active research into alternatives. Microsoft, for example, has invested in research for DNA-based storage options, he points out. But, “there’s still a lot of research to be done and engineering to actually turn it into something,” he says.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tape-stora...ainable-option





File Sharing Site Anonfiles Shuts Down Due to Overwhelming Abuse
Lawrence Abrams

Anonfiles, a popular service for sharing files anonymously, has shut down after saying it can no longer deal with the overwhelming abuse by its users.

Anonfiles is an anonymous file-sharing site that allows people to share files anonymously without their activity being logged.

However, it soon became one of the most popular file-sharing services used by threat actors to share samples of stolen data, stolen credentials, and copyrighted material.

Five days ago, Anonfiles users began reporting that the service would time out when attempting to upload files.

As spotted by cybersecurity researcher g0njxa, the Anonfiles operators have now shut down the service, stating that their proxy provider recently shut them down and that they can no longer deal with the overwhelming amount of abusive material uploaded to the site.

The statement shown on Anonfiles site is reproduced in its entirety below:

"After trying endlessly for two years to run a file sharing site with user anonymity we have been tired of handling the extreme volumes of people abusing it and the headaches it has created for us.
Maybe it is hard to understand but after tens of million uploads and many petabytes later all work of handling abuse was automated through all available channels to be fast as possible.
We have auto banned contents of hundreds of thousands files.
Banned file names and also banned specific usage patterns connected to abusive material to the point where we did not care if we accidental delete thousands of false positive in this process.
Even after all this the high volume of abuse will not stop.
This is not the kind of work we imagine when acquiring it and recently our proxy provider shut us down.

This can not continue.

Domain 4sale.

domain@anonfiles.com"

While Anonfiles was a useful file-sharing site for many, other users reported [1, 2, 3] that the site used shady advertisers that commonly redirected malware, tech support scams, and unwanted Google Chrome and Firefox browser extensions.

For example, when attempting to download a file from Anonfiles, users said you would often be first redirected to a site that downloaded an ISO file using the same name as the file you thought you were downloading.

However, these ISO files contained various malware, including information-stealing malware, remote access trojans, and ad clickers.

In 2021, CronUp researcher Germán Fernández warned that Anonfiles malvertising was pushing the RedLine Stealer malware, a notorious information-stealing malware that steals your credentials and cryptocurrency wallets.

A tweet

Other malvertising campaigns seen by Fernández and Malwarebytes on Anonfiles pushed search hijacking extensions, Amadey botnet, Vidar stealer, and even STOP ransomware.

The Anonfiles operators are now looking for someone to purchase their domain, likely to launch their own file sharing service.

However, in the interim, the shutdown will cause many files used by cybersecurity researchers and threat actors alike to no longer be available.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...helming-abuse/





In The Age Of Culling

Discussing the dumb thing CNET did in an effort to please the Google Gods: Don’t cull old news content to improve your SEO ranking. That’s your history!
Ernie Smith

Today in Tedium: In the past, I’ve been effusive of my praise of CNET, a news outlet that (along with Wired) pioneered digital journalism, for one specific reason: Its archives have been kept safe from meddling. It is one of the most in-depth archives of news that we have from the early years of the internet, and it is arguably of the most important flavor—day-to-day, standard issue news content. But its ownership picture has changed in recent years, with the media holding company Red Ventures purchasing it (and its subsidiaries, most notably ZDNet, which hasn’t been attached to Ziff Davis for more than 20 years) for $500 million back in 2020. Red Ventures has made some controversial moves with the CNET property, most infamously bringing AI into the mix, but the latest move was like a dagger to the heart: Gizmodo revealed that the company was actively culling its utterly massive archives for search-engine optimization reasons. I’ve talked about killing sites before, but in today’s Tedium, let’s talk culling, and why it’s often just as bad. — Ernie @ Tedium

— A description of “content pruning,” the process CNET’s archive is undergoing, in an internal memo acquired by Gizmodo reporter Thomas Germain ahead of the scoop he wrote about CNET earlier this week. Despite CNET’s claims, Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan directly refuted CNET’s claims that this was an effective strategy in a tweet he posted just ahead of Germain’s story.

A few years ago, I wrote a piece that described the domain name system (DNS) as a system of branches built from a series of top-level domains. I think that comparison largely stands, but I do think that when you get to the website level, the comparison falls apart to some degree.

Oh sure, there are folders and directories, and those branch off in many ways akin to the world’s most complex flow chart, but in some ways, the information architecture starts to matter a little less. If you look at the tree of the domain system as branches when you finally get to the leaves, you are going to look at those leaves as disposable.

The problem is, those leaves are often not disposable. Much the opposite. They do not fall off the tree every fall after growing through the spring and summer. They in many cases, just stay there, maybe less visible than they once were, but still central to what the site represents. If they fall off, the tree is not doing its job. It’s the point where the tree metaphor to describe the internet totally breaks, if you get my drift.

If we did look at websites as trees with branches full of meaningless tiny leaves, it would be all too easy to see every website as a bonsai tree in waiting.

Yes, bonsai, the Asian art of growing miniature trees and pruning them perfectly, perhaps makes sense to some degree as a metaphor for websites that can be redesigned and restructured as necessary. But when it comes to the information architecture, the metaphor rings hollow over time, because it does not show proper deference to the information.

Now, it’s true that not every website is going to have long-term value. The term ephemera comes to mind, and sometimes, ephemeral things should be allowed to fade away with the passage of time. (Unless you’re Ted Nelson and you keep those things.) Maybe you decide that your marketing blog shouldn’t live forever, that you would prefer to class up the joint and aim for a different approach.

But there’s a real risk of looking at a website as a tree you should prune, rather than a library or archive of information intended to be analyzed and studied over time. The value of the tool is that it has been allowed to grow and build into a robust archive of information. If the leaves are allowed to fall off the tree, following the metaphor, the tree grows significantly less valuable.

Despite my well-known opinions on backlink begging, I don’t think search engine optimization is necessarily evil, or even a necessary evil. I think it’s something that can make a lot of sense in a lot of contexts. The problem is, when you are building a resource to last the test of time, it can feel diametrically opposed to the goals of why you created the resource in the first place.

But to be clear, ignore what the SEO experts say: News sites should never be trimmed with a tiny pair of clippers, because all their value is in the leaves. The branches are just a conduit.

You wanna keep the leaf metaphor? How about this: A news site is a collection of leaves laminated in books for safekeeping. If we fail to keep them safe, what was the point of collecting the leaves?

CNET, for years, was doing this right. But now, with a change in ownership, it’s throwing out its laminated leaves. And that’s a damn shame.
“This is an industry-wide best practice for large sites like ours that are primarily driven by SEO traffic.”

— CNET spokesperson Taylor Canada, speaking in the Gizmodo piece. You can see why CNET was fooled—just do a search for “content pruning” on Google, and you’ll find that basically every single SEO expert under the sun recommends content pruning as an effective strategy for removing dead weight, essentially based on perceived signals from Google. So for a top Google search expert to literally go out and say that “no, you shouldn’t do it,” as Danny Sullivan did this week, is basically throwing years of SEO “best practices” out the window with a single tweet. It’s kind of hilarious in hindsight.

To be clear, I am not a fan of CNET removing its content from its website in this way. It favors the present to the past, and removes important dots of context that future generations of researchers and journalists can use to tell important stories. And CNET owns perhaps the most complete archive of an important period of technology—the 1995 to 2005 period where the internet first took off, disrupted industries, and reshaped our relationship with the world.

But let’s be clear here. CNET is not a unique case. I am going to tell you right now that CNET is not the first website that has removed or pruned its archives, or decided to underplay them, or make them hard to access. Far from it.

Often, what I have noticed over the years is that websites will often go through major redesigns and decide not to pull certain types of content over. A lot gets lost in the process, and there are many reasons to not put in the work, including time, complexity, and resources.

Or maybe they will just not put in the work to make that information accessible without a lot of legwork.

To offer a few examples:

1. USA Today is 40 years old, and has been online for 27 of those years. Its sitemap only goes back to October of 2012, when it conducted a major redesign. While its content is archived in print from elsewhere, that means essentially half of its digital history is just not there. Older content, when accessible, appears to be buried at the subdomain usatoday30.usatoday.com, but that redirects to the main page and is hard to search via Google.
2. Newsweek is prominently celebrating its 90th anniversary this year, but its archive page only covers issues dating back to 2013, the year IBT Media bought the company from IAC, the parent company of The Daily Beast. The content from its legacy years (most famously this piece) is still there and can be searched, but it is not obviously organized.
3. PC World, unlike its longtime competitor CNET, does not offer an easily accessible sitemap for its content, but it a little digging around uncovers the fact that it once did, and many of the articles in the sitemap are no longer accessible. The oldest article in the PC World archives is from 1997, and odds are it was likely missed in the pruning process, because it is one of only three articles currently on the site from the 1990s.
4. People.com, while its archive appears to be online, does not make it easy to access said archive, because of the way the site is designed. There is no user-accessible sitemap or easy to use pagination, and its search functionality includes no visible date on the articles.
5. Pitchfork has strong historic archives at this point, in part because search is a key reason why the site works, but it has been known for removing reviews in the past, including old reviews that didn’t reflect its later editorial sensibility. It notably faced a particularly odd situation around the time of its purchase by Condé Nast: A onetime reviewer became a very loud critic of the site, at one point making legal threats, and the site responded by removing that writer’s entire body of work.

Of these examples, the most egregious is easily USA Today, which as a national newspaper, fits under the “paper of record” category. One could argue that the company has a backstop in the form of online archives, but the company has literally decades of broken links inaccessible online. Poof.

Now, to be clear, I do not blame small teams struggling to keep up with the huge tide of content for being unable to maintain the past. It’s a lot of work, even in the best of circumstances. Moving from one CMS to another takes time and money, both of which are sometimes in short supply.

But I only bring up these failings to point out that, while CNET is clearly making a mistake here, it is one that many other sites make in ways big and small every single day. The difference in the case of CNET is that it appears to be intentional and not just an oversight or the result of institutional history going away. CNET intentionally put in the work to protect its historic content in the first place, and now it’s putting in the work to bury it.

CNET’s editorial practices understandably have a laser focus on them right now, in no small part because the outlet was the first to start publishing AI-generated content. But let’s not give the rest of the media world a pass because CNET was the one in the headline.

These articles help expose the past; they were the hard work of people who spent a lot of time building them.

Five news sites that do their archives exceptionally well

1. The New York Times. I have my problems with them in part because of their handling of trans issues, but they really set the standard that the rest of the industry has followed.
2. The Washington Post. Not only are many of their articles accessible digitally (I have linked stories from them from the 1970s), but they offer their subscribers access to their print archives via ProQuest, making their content accessible at a level familiar to many academics.
3. Time Magazine. Nearly every Time Magazine cover from the start of its history until today is accessible from its vault, and many of its articles are also freely accessible.
4. The New Yorker. It not only offers full scans of its magazine archive to subscribers, it also takes time to resurface its archive content on the website.
5. The Los Angeles Times. While the newspaper’s archive site shunts off the newspapers themselves to Newspapers.com, it has a strong historic sitemap that includes full articles from 1985 on and a selection of pieces from prior years.

I think an important distinction to make here, as I close this piece out, is that we should not expect the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to save us. Sure, it certainly can, and its affiliated archive.it site has collected much of CNET’s history.

But we should not expect it. The Internet Archive is an important resource, but it is a fallible one and an overworked one. These companies have the money and resources. They should be the ones protecting their own work. The Internet Archive is there to clean up your mess, not excuse your failings.

Ultimately, we should encourage better standards from publishers and other players in the content ecosystem. The reason why this content dies is because not enough work has been done to properly value it.

There are at least three distinct ways I could see other sites not fall down the CNET trap in the digital era:

• Charge for your archives: Of the sites I listed as doing things right, a key theme is that most of them played up the vintage content as a subscriber benefit, or sent people to another service that requires a subscription. There is no reason that could not work for digital archives. (Side note: Do I love paying for stuff? No. But I’m used to it for this kind of content, and lots of other people are, too.)
• Lean into your past in editorial coverage. If you’re worried about SEO fading over time for content, find ways to revive that content’s value over time, so that it strengthens the platform’s authority overall. Put a reporter on the vintage research beat. (I know a guy!)
• Build a market for vintage content. Google has done wonders for past print content by supporting it through Google Books. There is a case that big tech companies could do more to emphasize rich resources with more than 15 years of history in search results. A favoritism towards recency does not always make sense, and search engines like Google and Bing should do more to ensure this content gets seen. Other monetization streams, like licensing, would also be a good idea—and not just for AI.

I think CNET is making a mistake, but they’ve also identified a serious problem for the digital news ecosystem: Old content is a burden to carry, and intentionally or not, Google isn’t making that lift any easier.

I think as researchers, journalists, and SEO heads, we need to put our heads together to figure out ways to make maintaining historic content look less like a burden and more like an opportunity.

Our history is at risk if we can’t.
https://tedium.co/2023/08/11/content...tes-is-stupid/






The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco.

In the pandemic emergency, Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive freely lent out digital scans of its library. Publishers sued. Owning a book means something different now.
David Streitfeld

Information wants to be free. That observation, first made in 1984, anticipated the internet and the world to come. It cost nothing to digitally reproduce data and words, and so we have them in numbing abundance.

Information also wants to be expensive. The right information at the right time can save a life, make a fortune, topple a government. Good information takes time and effort and money to produce.

Before it turned brutally divisive, before it alarmed librarians, even before the lawyers were unleashed, the latest battle between free and expensive information started with a charitable gesture.

Brewster Kahle runs the Internet Archive, a venerable tech nonprofit. In that miserable, frightening first month of the Covid pandemic, he had the notion to try to help students, researchers and general readers. He unveiled the National Emergency Library, a vast trove of digital books mostly unavailable elsewhere, and made access to it a breeze.

This good deed backfired spectacularly. Four publishers claimed “willful mass copyright infringement” and sued. They won. On Friday, the publishers said through their trade association that they had negotiated a deal with the archive that would remove all their copyright books from the site.

“The proposed judgment is an appropriately serious bookend to the court’s decisive finding of liability,” said Maria Pallante, chief executive of the Association of American Publishers. “We feel very good about it.”

The archive had a muted response, saying that it expected there would be changes to its lending program but that their full scope was unknown. There is also an undisclosed financial payment if the archive loses on appeal.

The case has generated a great deal of bitterness, and the deal, which was immediately approved by the judge, is likely to generate more. Each side accuses the other of bad faith, and calls its opponents well-funded zealots who won’t listen to reason and want to destroy the culture.

In the middle of this mess are writers, whose job is to produce the books that contain much of the world’s best information. Despite that central role, they are largely powerless — a familiar position for most writers. Emotions are running high.

Six thousand writers signed a petition supporting the lawsuit, and a thousand names are on a petition denouncing it. The Romance Writers of America and the Western Writers of America joined a brief in favor of the publishers, while Authors Alliance, a group of 2,300 academics whose mission is to serve the public good by widely sharing their creations, submitted a brief for the archive.

It’s rarely this nasty, but free vs. expensive is a struggle that plays out continuously against all forms of media and entertainment. Neither side has the upper hand forever, even if it sometimes seems it might.

“The more information is free, the more opportunities for it to be collected, refined, packaged and made expensive,” said Stewart Brand, the technology visionary who first developed the formulation. “The more it is expensive, the more workarounds to make it free. It’s a paradox. Each side makes the other true.”

A Cultural Tug of War

Universal access to all knowledge was a dream of the early internet. It’s an idea that Mr. Kahle (pronounced “kale”) has long championed. As the United States lurched to a halt in March 2020, he saw an opportunity. The Internet Archive would be a temporary bridge between beleaguered readers and the volumes shut away in libraries and schools.

It didn’t turn out that way, not a bit — the emergency library shut down in June 2020 — and three years later Mr. Kahle remained angry and frustrated. There was one bright spot. The Board of Supervisors of San Francisco, the capital of Silicon Valley, had just passed a resolution in support of digital libraries and the Internet Archive.

The resolution was largely symbolic, but the message was exactly the one that Mr. Kahle had been trying to get across without much success, particularly in court. It championed “the essential rights of all libraries to own, preserve and lend both digital and print books.”

“Libraries came before publishers,” the 62-year-old librarian said in a recent interview in the former Christian Science church in western San Francisco that houses the archive. “We came before copyright. But publishers now think of libraries as customer service departments for their database products.”

Librarians are custodians. Mr. Kahle has spent his career working in tech, but he wants the future to behave a little more like the past.

“If I pay you for an e-book, I should own that book,” he said. “Companies used to sell things. Media companies now rent them instead. It’s like they have tentacles. You pull the book off the shelf and say, ‘I think I’ll keep this,’ and then the tentacle yanks it back.”

Some necessary background: When a physical book is sold, the “first sale” provision of copyright law says the author and publisher have no control over that volume’s fate in the world. It can be resold, and they don’t get a cut. It can be lent out as many times as readers demand. The information in the text flows freely through society without leaving a trace. Religions and revolutions have been built on this.

Thanks to their digital nature, e-books are treated much differently. They can’t be resold or given away. A library that wants to lend e-books must buy a license from the copyright holder. These subscriptions can be limited to a number of reads, or by periods of a year or two. Everything is tracked. Libraries own nothing.

The Internet Archive’s lending program, developed long before the pandemic, involved scanning physical books and offering them to readers in its Open Library, a practice called controlled digital lending.

One reader at a time could borrow each scanned book. If the library or one of its partners had two copies, two readers at a time could borrow it. The archive defended making its own e-books by citing fair use, a broad legal concept that permits copyrighted material to be quoted and excerpted, and the first-sale doctrine: It could do what it wanted with its own books.

No dice, wrote Judge John G. Koeltl of U.S. District Court in Manhattan. His decision granting summary judgment for the publishers in March went far beyond the pandemic library. Any benefit for research and cultural participation, he said, was outweighed by harm to the publishers’ bottom line.

The Internet Archive lost its court battle at a moment of rising concern about whether tech, entertainment and media companies are up to the job of maintaining the public’s access to a wide-ranging culture. Warner Bros. Discovery, for example, wanted to scale back its Turner Classic Movies cable channel, a citadel of cinema history and art. It was stopped by an uproar.

New technology means culture is delivered on demand, but not all culture. When Netflix shipped DVDs to customers, there were about 100,000 to choose from. Streaming, which has a different economics, has reduced that to about 6,600 U.S. titles. Most are contemporary. Only a handful of movies on Netflix were made between 1940 and 1970.

Libraries have traditionally been sanctuaries for culture that could not afford to pay its own way, or that was lost or buried or didn’t fit current tastes. But that is at risk now.

“The permanence of library collections may become a thing of the past,” said Jason Schultz, director of New York University’s Technology Law & Policy Clinic. “If the platforms decide not to offer the e-books or publishers decide to pull them off the shelves, the reader loses out. This is similar to when songs you look for on Spotify are blanked out because the record company ended the license or when movies or television shows cycle off Netflix or Amazon.”

The triumphant publishers — HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Hachette and John Wiley & Sons — declined to comment through the Association of American Publishers. In its “reflections” on the case, the publishers’ group said it was simply protecting the rights of writers.

“In the world of publishing, authors are our heroes,” it said.

The publishers association said the archive was unrepentant and impossible to negotiate with: It “refused to halt or engage in discussions, and after being sued, it chose to accelerate its activities.”

Mr. Kahle denied refusing to negotiate. “They never approached us — they just sued,” he said.

The Authors Guild, which submitted a brief on behalf of the publishers, said Mr. Kahle and his supporters needed to recognize that rights available to owners of physical books simply did not make sense in the digital era.

“Digital is different than print because it is infinitely copyable and unprotectable,” said Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of the guild and a copyright lawyer. “If anyone could call themselves a library, set up a website and do the exact same thing the archive did, writers would have absolutely no control over their work anymore.”

Traditional libraries promote discovery, but publishers perennially worry that they cost sales.

“Most publishers are not purely profit-driven,” Ms. Rasenberger said. “If one were, you could imagine it might not allow libraries to have e-books at all.”

Writers Caught in the Middle

The Internet Archive is best known for the Wayback Machine, which allows access to web pages of the past. Mr. Kahle is a longtime fixture in digital information circles, an enthusiast whose zeal is palpable.

He was an entrepreneur of information in the 1990s, culminating in a search and web analysis engine called Alexa, after the Library of Alexandria. Amazon bought Alexa in 1999 for $250 million, years before it introduced a personal assistant with the same name. Mr. Kahle turned his full attention to the archive, which he founded in 1996 and which now employs about a hundred people. It is supported by donations, grants and the scanning it does for other libraries.

In 2021, when the archive celebrated its 25th anniversary, Mr. Kahle talked about the fate of the internet in an era of megacorporations: “Will this be our medium or will it be theirs? Will it be for a small controlling set of organizations or will it be a common good, a public resource?”

The archive had been lending book scans for years. Publishers did not like it but did not sue. What made the pandemic emergency library different was that the brakes were removed. If 10 people, or 100 people, wanted to read a particular book, they could all do so at once.

The emergency library “was as limited as a small city library’s circulation level,” Mr. Kahle insisted. “This was always under control.”

But it did not appear that way to the writers who took to Twitter to point out that the books in the library were written by human beings who were often poorly paid and not benefiting from this free information at all.

Margaret Owen, an author of popular books for young adults, wrote in a 23-post broadside on Twitter that offering up free books to an audience that could afford to pay for them was, “at this point in history, cutting into our money for hospital and/or funeral bills.”

The publishers sued over 127 titles, many by well-known writers, including J.D. Salinger, Sylvia Plath, James Patterson, John Grisham and Malcolm Gladwell. They asked damages of $150,000 a book.

Some writers had second thoughts. N.K. Jemisin and Colson Whitehead deleted their critical tweets. Ms. Owen, asked last month by The New York Times if she stood by her tweets, responded by making her account private. Chuck Wendig, a science fiction writer, tweeted in the heat of the moment that the emergency library was “piracy.” He was quoted in news reports and criticized by archive fans, and now has a post expressing regrets.

Mr. Wendig says he had no part in the lawsuit and does not support it. Three of the plaintiffs are his publishers, but they have “very little regard for me and do not listen to me at all,” he wrote in a blog post.

Some writers — ones who generally do not depend on their writing to make a living — were always against the suit.

“Authors of all types fight constantly against the risk of digital obscurity; for many readers, especially younger readers, if a book is not online, it effectively does not exist to them,” wrote Authors Alliance, which is based in Berkeley, Calif., in its brief in support of the archive. (Mr. Kahle is on the alliance’s 25-member advisory board but played no part in the brief.)

A third group of writers have continued and even deepened their opposition to the archive.

Douglas Preston, a best-selling thriller writer, pretty much single-handedly led a wing of the writing community in opposition to Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, when the bookseller was embroiled in a dispute with Hachette several years ago. Mr. Preston, a former president of the Authors Guild, now sees Mr. Kahle and his philosophy as more of a threat than Mr. Bezos.

“Capitalists may be obnoxious and selfish and in firm need of restraint, but the truly dangerous people in this world are the true believers who want to impose their utopian vision on everyone else,” Mr. Preston said.

Writers, he added, “are subjected to disparagement and online abuse whenever we defend copyright or push back on the ‘information wants to be free’ movement. On tech websites we’re told we’re selfish, we’re Luddites, we’re elitists.”

Information Wants to Be Easy

Among the many points on which the two sides disagree is how many libraries across the country were lending scans of copyrighted material. Only a few, say the publishers, who paint the Internet Archive as an outlier; many, says the archive, which argues this is a broad trend.

Karl Stutzman is the director of library services at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Ind. He recently had a request from a faculty member for excerpts from a 30-year-old theology text to use in a class in Ethiopia, where the seminary has students. No e-book was available, and a query to the publisher went nowhere.

In the past, the library would have cited fair use and provided scans to the students via secure software, but after the March court ruling, Mr. Stutzman said, it’s unclear what is allowed. One chapter? Two? How many students can see a scan? Fifty? Five?

“I’m caught between enforcing the current legal paradigms around copyright and allowing my colleagues to have academic freedom in what they assign students to read,” Mr. Stutzman said. He plans to tell teachers that they need to choose material that is easy to license, even if it is not necessarily the best, until there is more legal clarity.

That clarity would come from an appeal, which Mr. Kahle said he intended to mount. In the meantime, it’s business as usual at the archive. The National Emergency Library may be history, but the Open Library division still offers scans of many books under copyright. Loans are for one hour or for two weeks “if the book is fully borrowable,” a term that is not defined.

Some of that is likely to change soon.

The publishers said the agreement filed on Friday went far beyond dropping the 127 titles from the archive to also removing their “full book catalogs.” But the judge immediately ruled that this should be interpreted narrowly. If the publishers do not have an e-book edition of a book available, he said, the archive’s scanning is not relevant. This case is not over.

A separate deal between the publishers association and the archive will provide an incentive for the archive to take down works by any publisher that is a member of the trade group. The incentive: not getting sued again.

In the wake of the publishers’ success, other parts of the Internet Archive have become a tempting target. Universal, Sony, Arista and other music companies sued the archive in New York on Friday, saying it “unabashedly seeks to provide free and unlimited access to music for everyone, regardless of copyright.” The plaintiffs cite 2,749 violations, all recorded with an antiquated format used before 1959, for which they are asking $150,000 each.

“Now the Washington lawyers want to destroy a digital collection of scratchy 78 r.p.m. records, 70 to 120 years old, built by dedicated preservationists in 2006,” Mr. Kahle said. “Who benefits?”

In a 1996 book available through the Internet Archive, David Bunnell, an early chronicler of the personal computer revolution, said Mr. Kahle was “brilliant” but “very introspective and unsure of himself.”

“If he had Bill Gates’s confidence, he would change the world,” Mr. Bunnell said.

Mr. Kahle is more sure of himself now, and quite determined to change the world.

Asked if he had made any mistakes, he ignored the question and returned to the attack: “I wish the publishers had not sued, but it demonstrates how important it is that libraries stand firm on buying, preserving and lending the treasures that are books.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/b...g-library.html
















Until next week,

- js.



















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