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Old 22-04-20, 07:20 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 25th, ’20

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April 25th, 2020




The National Emergency Library and Its Discontents

How did a plan to "aid those that are forced to learn at home” with e-books manage to lose the moral high ground?
Noam Cohen

Storyline Online has always been a beautiful idea—short videos of brilliant actors reading children’s picture books, enhanced by modest visual and sound effects. In the age of pandemic, with families confined morning, noon and night, it is a godsend. One video, of “Someone Loves You, Mr. Hatch” as brought to life by Hector Elizondo, particularly resonated in our house in these times. I’m no Elizando, I thought, but why not add the story to our bedtime reading repertory?

Normally I would head to the branch library to get a copy. Not now, of course. And “Mr. Hatch,” which was first published in 1991, isn’t available as an eBook, either, cutting off another possibility within the library system. So I turned to the Internet Archive. I was working on a piece about the non-profit’s decision to open its collection of 1.4 million scanned print books without restrictions during this crisis, and a quick search revealed that “Mr. Hatch” was available. That night I downloaded the PDF for my almost 6-year-old daughter, who is learning to read by herself.

Here was just the sort of thing the Internet Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, might have had in mind when he declared the opening of a “national emergency library.” The Archive, he’d promised, was “coming to aid those that are forced to learn at home.”

Not everyone would be so grateful. Colson Whitehead, for one, observed on Twitter that the Archive isn’t really a library at all. “They scan books illegally and put them online,” he wrote, and pointed to a digital copy of his autobiographical novel “Sag Harbor” that was “not one bought by a library they ‘have an arrangement with.’ It’s a scan of a not-for-sale advance copy for book reviewers.” Indeed, you can see the cover of “Sag Harbor” at the Archive, which contains a note from Whitehead to that effect.

Other well-known writers echoed Whitehead’s point; as did the Authors’ Guild, which declared that the Archive “has no rights whatsoever to these books, much less to give them away indiscriminately without consent of the publisher or author.”

Storyline Online, at least, has a relationship with publishers. According to its website, the special rights that it obtains “do NOT extend to any other organizations. You do not have the right to create your own videos from the books we use unless you negotiate your own permissions with the rights holders of those books.” The Internet Archive, on the other hand, does not negotiate with publishers at all.

Digital-focused information “liberators” such as Kahle have been at odds with artists and publishers for decades. In the late 1990s, Napster tantalized us with the prospect of a universal digital musical library at our fingertips—no permission sought or granted. Then the service was shuttered after losing a legal challenge to its way of operating. More recently, there has been litigation in federal courts touching on an issue raised by the Archive’s actions: whether an owner of a digital copy of a creative work can re-sell it without permission, the way one sells used books or records. In a victory for copyright owners, a federal appeals court ruled in 2018 that transmitting the file via the Internet was tantamount to copying it, rather than shipping it, and thus infringed copyright.

The arguments here are both legalistic and thorny, balancing the interests of those who produce creative works against the interests of the public, who might benefit from greater access to those works. Impose too many copyright-based restrictions and you stifle the cultural and political conversation. Impose too few and you hinder the creation of the works that are the basis of that conversation.

In recent years, corporations have successfully lobbied Congress to vastly extend the terms of copyright, to the end of preventing icons like Mickey Mouse or Batman from ever slipping into the public domain. (The year 2024, when Mickey is set to leave Disney’s control, beckons nevertheless.) That context often seemed to give the digital liberators the higher moral ground: they were encouraging new creative efforts as opposed to greedily protecting assets.

Then the tide began to turn. As tech upstarts grew into behemoths, the word digital came to represent a different set of corporations protecting their assets. YouTube started looking less like a repository for fresh creative works and more like another cable-TV system.

The Internet Archive is based in the Bay Area, but it is certainly no behemoth. Rather, it’s a throwback to the start of the millennium, when it was still easy to believe that digital tools could make the world a better place. Think of the miracle that is the Archive’s Wayback Machine, which stores copies of Web pages so that we can still view work that has disappeared, either because the sites are defunct or because someone has made edits.

The Archive’s pitch, from the start, was to reinvent the library for the digital age. Physical books—including not-for-sale advance copies of titles such as “Sag Harbor”—arrive as donations, and then are scanned and made available for “check out” one at a time. They have a due date, too. This is “controlled digital lending,” a legally-contested framework based on the idea that owning a book entails the right to loan it out.

Controlled digital lending takes advantage of some of the magical qualities of digitized books (the potential for their near-immediate delivery via the internet, for example) while swearing off others (the ease with which they can be copied and shared indiscriminately). Until, that is, the pandemic arrived. Having declared itself an emergency library, the Archive dropped the restrictions on how many copies of a book could be checked out at once or for how long. Any borrowed volume is now due June 30, or when the national emergency has ended, whichever comes later.

The thinking was clear: traditional libraries have shut down, and emergencies don’t wait for copyright clearance. In announcing the change, Kahle couldn’t hide his pride at the groundwork his organization had laid—a strategic book reserve that he was releasing to the public. “This was our dream for the original Internet coming to life,” he wrote, “the Library at everyone’s fingertips.”

In a follow-up post on April 7, Kahle was more measured about the new library rules, almost apologetic. “We moved in ‘Internet Time’ and the speed and swiftness of our solution surprised some and caught others off guard,” he wrote, saying that the Archive would add staff members to help authors remove their books from the emergency library, as Whitehead has done. Of course, whether authors have to opt in or opt out is a central issue, and one that can’t be smoothed over with more staff members. If the Archive can’t, by default, treat its scan of your book as its own copy to loan, its collection will dwindle to almost nothing—a tiny assortment of works by authors who deliberately choose to distribute their work without compensation, out of a selfless desire to educate the world during a crisis.

The fact that so many prominent authors have lashed out against this idea speaks to the precarious times we live in. The pandemic not only threatens the economy, but also shows the dangers of the gig economy promoted by Silicon Valley. The business model of many tech companies—whether Uber, Instacart, Facebook or Amazon—is to control the digital means of assigning work and demand a cut from each transaction. We’ve seen what that means in practice: If your work for a ride-sharing service suddenly dries up, you won’t necessarily have an easy time qualifying for unemployment benefits.

The Archive’s abrupt decision to change the rules for downloading a book played into writers’ anxieties about these trends, said Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America. “Writers have been hard hit by this crisis in a whole variety of ways—many of them are in the gig economy, earning money from teaching engagements, speaking engagements, other kinds of jobs in sectors that have been very hard hit by Covid, books have been postponed, there are no book events, bookstores are closed all over the country,” she said. “In the middle of that for the Internet Archive to come along and say, ‘Hey, we’re making all of this available for free as a public good, just completely overlooks how it is that these works came to be in the first place.”

One could forgive Kahle and the Archive for feeling whipsawed by the sharp condemnations. The first reactions in the media were full of praise and gratitude. When reporting the news for The New Yorker, Jill Lepore, the Harvard professor and acclaimed author, approached the issues from the perspective of someone thirsty for knowledge: “The National Emergency Library Is a Gift to Readers Everywhere.” She encouraged those who could afford to buy books to do so, but focused on the pleasure of perusing the virtual stacks and finding hundreds of books on, say, moose; more broadly, her piece described access to books as being vital for maintaining our humanity throughout this crisis.

That expanded access might even help the publishers in the long run, Lepore suggests. During the World War II, she notes, publishers made the radical decision to sell books to the Army for six cents each in the form of cheap paperbacks instead of more expensive volumes, threatening their own business model. The move turned out to be brilliant for the culture and for publishing, in that it grew a reading audience that would be primed to spend on books when peace arrived.

It might not play out that way today, however. Seventy-five years ago, publishers were actually investing in their business, expanding a niche activity to a wide audience by producing more books. Now they’re vying against a different distribution system that is entrenched in our society and only getting stronger. As writers are pointing out loudly, that new distribition system has a very poor track record when it comes to compensating the people who keep it going.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-nati...s-discontents/





Malcolm Turnbull's Book A Bigger Picture 'a Bestseller' Days After Launch

Sales figures comes as publisher Hardie Grant furious at Morrison government for not taking copyright seriously
Josh Taylor and Malcolm Farr

The former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir, A Bigger Picture, has already been branded a bestseller by his publisher as a furious book industry demands Scott Morison reaffirm his commitment to copyright protection after its pirating by a prime ministerial adviser.

The book has dominated the non-coronavirus news for the last week with Turnbull’s account of his life, and his time in politics up to the point of what he calls the 2018 coup that saw him removed from the office of prime minister.

A spokeswoman for the publisher of the memoir, Hardie Grant, said the initial print run of 45,000 copies had almost exhausted in just four days, and the publisher was in the process of doing a second run of 15,000 copies, and a third run of another 15,000 copies on top of that. It was selling well across independent retailers, bigger retailers including Kmart and Big W, as well as in digital sales, where it is top of the charts on Apple Books.

Jo Lewin, head of trade product for Booktopia, told Guardian Australia the company had sold 3,387 copies over the past few days, and was trying to get more stock in already.

“We’re rushing to get more stock into our warehouse now,” she said.

The sales figures come as publishers express their anger at the Coalition, claiming ministers trivialised the unauthorised digital distribution of the book by Morrison staffer Nico Louw before its official release Monday.

A letter by the Australian Publishers Association (APA) sent to the prime minister on Thursday, and provided to Turnbull’s publisher Hardie Grant, underlines the financial harm from copyright breaches.

It turns the prime minister’s own comments on copyright back on him.

“You were unequivocal less than a year ago, when you said in the context of Chinese policy practices: ‘Intellectual property theft cannot be justified’,” reads the letter.

“We are writing to ask you urgently to make an equally emphatic statement that you and your government will uphold the private property rights of Australian publishers and authors.”

In a striking contrast, the education minister tweeted a photo of himself deep into a book with the words, “It’s World Book and Copyright Day so to celebrate I’m reading the Hafey Years by Elliot Cartledge What are you reading?”

Hardie Grant wants to know the reading material of the 59 people Louw told the company he had sent copies of the Turnbull book.

The company asked them to respond by 10pm Wednesday to explain whether they deleted the Louw message or sent it on to others, and if so to whom.

The Hardie Grant chief executive, Sandy Grant, has declined to name the 59 recipients but told Guardian Australia on Thursday some had replied themselves while others had asked their lawyers to respond.

It is now believed the number of potential freeloading readers was around 20 times the original mailout.

“It is likely that members of your party, including members of your government and their staff, have created and distributed well over 1,000 copies of the book without either payment or permission,” said the letter signed by Australian Publishers Association president Lee Walker.

“Although the treasurer announced in the same week that ‘ ... it’s only fair that those that generate content get paid for it … ’, ministers in your government have reportedly treated this unauthorised copying as trivial.

“These actions have caused immediate harm to one Australian publisher. The muted response by your government now risks long-term damage to every copyright owner in Australia.”

In an email to the APA board and Hardie Grant, the association’s chief executive Michael Gordon-Smith described the government response to the issue as “tepid”.

The letter said the Turnbull book had been “printed in Australia and published by an Australian company forced by that (coronavirus) lockdown to make people redundant and to cut hours and salaries by 25%”.

“We seek your urgent confirmation that you will not condone or trivialise the appropriation of the property rights of Australian publishers and authors, and will take action to demonstrate that you will not tolerate it by individuals in your party, your government or your office.”

A copy was sent to communications minister Paul Fletcher.

A number of retailers have now slashed the asking price of the book, down from $55 to $29 at Kmart and Big W, but is out of stock in a number of city stores in Sydney and Melbourne, according to those store’s websites. Some stores in the west of Sydney still have stock, according to the sites.

The price on the Kindle store dropped from $17 on the date of launch down to $9.99, while the price on Apple’s bookstore remains $19.99.

Political memoirs are often not big sellers in Australia, and Turnbull’s memoir appears to be gaining ground on the lifetime sales of other political memoirs.

According to data from Neilsen Bookscan provided to the Australian in 2017, former prime minister John Howard’s 2010 memoir Lazarus Rising had sold just over 103,000 copies in seven years, while former prime minister Julia Gillard’s memoir My Story had sold 72,000 copies in three years.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott’s 2009 book, Battlelines, had sold close to 14,000 copies.

Official Bookscan data on the last week of sales of Turnbull’s memoir will be released next week.

The sales figures come despite a large number of bookshops closing their doors amid the coronavirus pandemic, with many booksellers, large and small, resorting to sending books in the mail or hand-delivering in their local area.
https://www.theguardian.com/australi...r-after-launch





WarnerMedia Sets Late May HBO Max Launch

The streaming service is set to debut amid the shutdown brought about by the novel coronavirus outbreak, bringing with it 10,000 hours of library programming from across the WarnerMedia catalog.
Natalie Jarvey, Lesley Goldberg

HBO Max will enter the streaming wars on May 27.

The streaming service is set to debut amid the shutdown brought about by the novel coronavirus outbreak, bringing with it 10,000 hours of library programming from across the WarnerMedia portfolio, including Friends and The Big Bang Theory. The $15-per-month offering will serve up the entire HBO experience supplemented with movies and TV shows from the Warner Bros. library, as well as a handful of new original series.

WarnerMedia began running social media ads on Tuesday morning announcing the date of the launch.

With HBO Max, WarnerMedia is the latest legacy entertainment company to jump into the streaming fray. Disney kicked off the so-called streaming wars on Nov. 12 with the launch of Disney+. It was followed by the soft launch of NBCUniversal's Peacock on April 15. They, and five-month-old offering Apple TV+, are all chasing Netflix and its 167 million global subscribers.

Amid the competitive landscape, WarnerMedia top brass were hoping to use a buzzed-about reunion special featuring the cast of Friends to draw attention to HBO Max, which will be the exclusive home to all 236 episodes of the sitcom classic. But the coronavirus shutdown prevented the special from being filmed in time for the launch. Instead, WarnerMedia will rely on a handful of originals — including scripted comedy Love Life with Anna Kendrick, documentary On the Record, ballroom dance competition series Legendary and Sesame Workshop late night entry The Not Too Late Show With Elmo — to lure subscribers.

Other originals set to debut later in the year include thriller The Flight Attendant, starring Kaley Cuoco; documentary Expecting Amy, about comedian Amy Schumer's life on tour during a difficult pregnancy; and J.G. Quintel's adult animated comedy Close Enough. TBS comedy Search Party will also move to HBO Max, where it will return with a new season.

"Our number one goal is having extraordinary content for everyone in the family, and the HBO Max programming mix we are so excited to unveil on May 27 will bear that out," WarnerMedia Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt said in a statement. "Even in the midst of this unprecedented pandemic, the all-star teams behind every aspect of HBO Max will deliver a platform and a robust slate of content that is varied, of the highest quality, and second to none. I’m knocked out by the breadth and depth of our new offering, from the Max originals, our Warner Bros library and acquisition titles from around the world, and of course the entirety of HBO."

WarnerMedia is consolidating its library of IP under one umbrella with HBO Max. The service will feature all current and former HBO shows, including The Sopranos, The Wire and Game of Thrones, as well as current and classic WB movies like Crazy Rich Asians, A Star Is Born, Joker, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/li...launch-1291084





AT&T Misses Q1 Revenue Target, Citing COVID-19 and Declines at WarnerMedia and Pay-TV Unit
Todd Spangler

AT&T missed revenue and earnings estimates for the first quarter of 2020, with a 4.6% top-line decline driven by lower revenue at WarnerMedia and ongoing losses in its pay-TV biz, which shed 1 million subscribers in the period. The telco also blamed the current coronavirus crisis as cutting into profits.

The company reported Q1 revenue of $42.78 billion and net income of $4.58 billion (adjusted earnings of 84 cents per share). Wall Street consensus estimates pegged revenue at $44.15 billion and adjusted EPS at 85 cents.

The lower-than-expected revenue was “primarily due to declines at WarnerMedia reflecting strong theatrical carryover revenues in the first quarter of 2019,” as well as continued declines in video subscriptions and legacy services, AT&T said.

The COVID-19 pandemic reduced earnings by $433 million (or 5 cents per share) in the first quarter and cut revenue by $600 million (mostly from lower sports-related advertising and lower wireless equipment sales), according to AT&T. Backing out the impact of the coronavirus crisis, “the quarter was about what we expected — strong wireless numbers that covered the HBO Max investment, and produced stable EBITDA and EBITDA margins,” Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chairman and CEO, said in announcing earnings.

In reporting Q1 earnings, AT&T said, “Due to the lack of visibility related to COVID-19 pandemic and recovery, the company has withdrawn financial guidance at this time.” The company last month warned investors that the COVID-19 pandemic could have a material impact on the business.

For Q1, WarnerMedia had $7.4 billion in revenue, down 12.2% from $8.4 billion from a year earlier. The biggest hit to the media segment’s top line was a $540 million decline for the “eliminations and other” line item.

Turner revenue for the first quarter of 2020 was $3.2 billion, down 8.2%, driven by lower ad revenue primarily from the cancellation of the NCAA March Madness men’s basketball tournament. HBO’s revenue was $1.5 billion, down 0.9%, while operating expenses increased 13.9% to $1.1 billion mainly because of content investments for HBO Max.

AT&T said Warner Bros.’s 7.9% decline in revenue for Q1, to $3.2 billion, was attributable to “unfavorable comparisons” to the prior-year period (which included carryover revenue from the theatrical release of “Aquaman”). WB also had lower initial telecast revenues for the most recent quarter resulting from coronavirus-related TV production delays.

The telco’s pay-TV business, meanwhile, continued its downward trajectory: Video entertainment revenue dropped 8.4% year over year, to $7.4 billion.

AT&T had approximately 19.4 million video connections at the end of March — down 1.04 million sequentially and a 19% year-over-year drop. The Q1 numbers included a net loss of of 897,000 subs for DirecTV and AT&T TV, the telco’s broadband-delivered pay-TV service. Subscribers to the AT&T TV Now over-the-top video service declined by 138,000.

A day earlier, WarnerMedia announced May 27 as the launch date for HBO Max, its super-sized subscription video service engineered to battle Netflix, Hulu and others. AT&T will bundle HBO Max with its most expensive TV, wireless and internet plans and offer free trials for most other customers ranging from one to 12 months. In addition, HBO subs on DirecTV and other AT&T TV services will be automatically upgraded to HBO Max.

AT&T reported $147.2 in long-term debt at the end of March, versus $151.3 billion at the end of 2019. Cash and equivalents stood at $9.96 billion at the end of Q1, down from $12.13 billion three months prior.

Stephenson, citing AT&T’s decision to suspend stock buybacks, said in prepared remarks that the company has the ability to “continue investing in critical growth areas like 5G, broadband and HBO Max, while maintaining our dividend commitment and paying down debt.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, AT&T said it has instituted work-from-home policies, with about 50% of its employees working remotely. The telco said it has adopted “protection protocols” for those who cannot work from home.
https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/at...it-1234586971/





Telecom's Latest Dumb Claim: The Internet Only Works During A Pandemic Because We Killed Net Neutrality
Karl Bode

A few weeks ago, a new talking point popped up among telecom policy pundits opposed to net neutrality. They began claiming that the only reason the internet hasn't buckled during the pandemic was thanks to the FCC's controversial and unpopular net neutrality repeal. That repeal, you'll recall, not only killed net neutrality, but much of the FCC's ability to hold ISPs accountable for pretty much anything, including outright billing fraud.

But to hear various net neutrality opponents tell it, the repeal is the primary reason the US internet hasn't fallen apart during COVID-19 quarantine:

"We should thank our lucky stars that Title II net neutrality regulations were repealed by the FCC in 2017. In doing so, the US avoided the fate of much of Europe today, where broadband networks are strained and suffering from a lack of investment and innovation."

Except none of this is true. This entire narrative is fantasy -- built almost entirely off of the EU simply asking various streaming companies to throttle certain services in an abundance of caution. There remains no evidence that this was due to any serious problems, and, at the same time, there's been no evidence that US networks have measurably outperformed their EU counterparts (indeed, many of the companies that throttled services in the EU did so in the US as well). Investment at many US ISPs actually dropped post net neutrality repeal. And there's literally no indication that US networks are somehow "more robust" than the EU because the FCC decided to ignore the public and obliterate its own authority at the behest of the telecom lobby. It's just not a supportable claim.

In fact, networks in China and Italy, like here in the States, have (with a few exceptions) held up reasonably well under the massive load of telecommuting and home learning. Not because of net neutrality policy, but because network engineers are generally good at their jobs. While there have been some network problems, they're usually of the "last mile" variety in both the EU and US. As in, because of limited competition, your ISP never upgraded that "last mile" to your house, leaving you stuck on a DSL line from around 2007 that struggles to handle Zoom teleconferencing particularly well.

The claim that the EU was suffering some kind of exceptional congestion problems appears to have originated among some EU regulators who simply urged Netflix to reduce bandwidth consumption by 25% to pre-emptively help lighten the load. There was no supporting public evidence provided of actual harm. The move was precautionary, and may not have even been necessary. Somehow this flimsy base was used as the foundation of the claim that because the EU passed some fairly basic and inconsistent net neutrality rules, it suffered more network headaches than the US.

But if you look at Ookla's data of how networks have held up around the globe, you see that the US appears to have performed at about the same level as other places. Here's the US:

There's a small dip in mid-March as a lot of the country began to shut down, but no massive problems. On that, everyone seems to agree. But to hear the various anti-net neutrality folks tell it, the EU was struggling to keep its network up and running. But... uh, the data doesn't show that at all:

In Germany, France, and Spain you see that download speeds actually jumped up before eventually doing a small dip as those countries locked down. There isn't enough evidence to make a definitive claim, but if we were to argue using the same points raised by critics of net neutrality, Looking at all that, you might even be able to make the argument that EU broadband providers handled this situation better and more quickly than the US.

None of this has stopped the telecom sector and its allies from embracing this whole flimsy argument anyway. In a speech at the Inter American Development Bank last week, FCC boss Ajit Pai made, albeit more subtly, similar claims:

"In the end, I believe trusting the markets rather than solely relying on mandates resulted in more consumer-friendly policies than we would have achieved with a more heavy-handed government intervention, and I know that we were able to make these changes more quickly. I’d also argue that the general regulatory approach that we have in the United States have applied to the broadband marketplace gave us much stronger infrastructure in the first place, as it gave companies the incentives to invest in resilient, robust networks that could withstand unprecedented consumer demands."

Again though, Pai's not telling the truth. US broadband investment didn't magically improve due to the net neutrality repeal, no matter how many times he makes the claim. In fact, AT&T and Comcast dropped overall CAPEX despite massive deregulation and billions in tax cuts. There's zero evidence any of this industry ass-kissing made US networks more resilient to a pandemic. In fact, respected former FCC advisors like Gigi Sohn have argued that gutting FCC authority over ISPs has made it harder than ever to hold them accountable for bad behavior, pandemic or otherwise.

Using a pandemic to justify regulatory capture is grotesque, especially given there's just no evidence to support the claims being made here. That didn't stop FCC General Counsel Tom Johnson, who also tweeted out his support for a new Wall Street Journal opinion column (not coincidentally) making most of the same claims:

Notice how the telecom industry doesn't even have to publicly make these false claims, because they've got think tankers and government employees now doing it for them. These arguments are rife with cherry picking and selective reasoning (for example you'll see none of these folks highlighting how EU consumers pay far less for broadband than those in the US, in part because regulators are generally more active when it comes to protecting competition and consumer welfare). The Wall Street Journal story also suggests that US networks are more resilient to COVID-19 thanks to killing net neutrality, broadband privacy rules, and other "heavy handed" US telecom consumer protections:

"In Europe, networks have struggled to meet bandwidth demand, leading officials to ask popular services such as Netflix and YouTube to degrade the quality of their streaming video from high definition to standard definition. U.S. networks have faced fewer problems adjusting to the increase in demand. Public policy explains the different outcomes. The European Union has embraced a heavy-handed regulatory scheme designed to allocate access to the existing network, while the U.S. has emphasized private investment to expand network capacity."

But again, there's no evidence that European networks have fallen apart during the COVID-19 crisis. Or that any differences in performance have anything to do with deregulation or net neutrality. Netflix's decision to throttle back its bandwidth usage by 25% was done entirely pro-actively. There was no underlying network data provided by regulators to justify the move. It was just EU regulators being cautious (perhaps overly so).

Indeed, similar steps have been taken here in the States. YouTube for example has downgraded video quality to conserve bandwidth. So has game platform Steam, which is slowing some game downloads. You can't selectively highlight the EU's efforts on this front then ignore the US ones because it supports your flimsy narrative. Well I guess you can, but you should be laughed at.

It takes a particular type of person to look at a brutal pandemic and think that it provides a wonderful opportunity to justify one of the most controversial, scandal prone, and fact-averse regulatory policy decisions in modern history. Using COVID-19 to justify mindless telecom sector coddling sets a new, even lower bar for a sector whose argumentative integrity was already at ankle height.

So why do it? It's a distraction from several things the sector would prefer you not pay attention to. One being that an estimated 42 million Americans still can't access broadband during a pandemic, and millions more can't afford service because of a lack of competition among regionally power monopolies. They'd also really like it if you forgot how the FCC ignored the public, made up a bunch of data, and ignored a whole bunch of fraud to gut oversight of one of the most problematic business sectors in America--leaving consumers and regulators alike on precarious footing in the wake of an historic global crisis.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...utrality.shtml





Stay-At-Home Orders Highlight Internet Inequality In The Rural West
Madelyn Beck

As so many telecommuters, teachers, college students and children work and learn from home, there have been fears that the Internet wouldn't be up to the task. But so far, it seems to be largely coping with the increased traffic.

And that's a relief to many of us.

"More than 9 in 10 Americans say that a major interruption in their Internet or cell phone service during the Coronavirus outbreak would be a problem for them," said Monica Anderson with the non-profit Pew Research Center.

Anderson co-authored a survey looking at our relationship with Internet access during the pandemic.

There was an interesting twist: Rural Americans were less likely to rate an interruption of service as very important.

"And that really harks to some of our other data before the coronavirus that shows that rural Americans are still less likely to say they have a smartphone or to have a high-speed Internet connection at home," Anderson said.

In other words, interruption of service is important to fewer of them because many didn't have great service in the first place.

That could also explain this survey result: "When we asked about whether or not people had used the Internet to search for information about the coronavirus, about 60% of rural Americans said that they did this – so still a majority. But when you look at people who live in the suburbs or urban areas that share is closer to 75%," Anderson said.

The reality is getting high-speed Internet connections continues to be a challenge for rural areas.

"There's no question that in rural states like Idaho and Montana and Wyoming ... there is a significant challenge there, and I would share that there is also a challenge in other states across the country," said Guy Cherp with the Internet provider Cox.

His company and several others are offering reduced-cost or temporarily free plans so kids can get online and do their homework during the pandemic. And they're giving advice on how to increase speeds when everyone is home. Of course that only works well if your area actually has the high-speed access in the first place.

Broadband is available to about 85 percent of Americans, according to Cherp.

Federal Communications Commission estimates are even higher than that – but it's not clear that either figures are accurate.

"In the past, Internet service providers have self-reported where their Internet service coverage is, and there's no way to kind of test that and go against what the FCC says is covered," said Debra Hansen, who directs Washington State University’s extension program.

Hansen points to faulty FCC data where she lives Stephens County, in northeastern Washington.

"On the FCC map, it says that we are 100% covered by 100 [megabits per second] up and 100 megabits down," she said. "And that's – we just know that's not true.”

Hansen said new technology is on the horizon that could show actual Internet speeds, and such information could allow communities to apply for grants to get better connections.

But the COVID crisis isn't waiting for that. And it's highlighting just how challenging limited Internet access can be for telecommuting or for kids who need it for schoolwork.

"I have a friend whose kids have Chromebooks from school, but they live in a kind of dip in a valley, so they don't have Internet or cell service, so they have to drive to school and download homework every day," Hansen said.

Community hotspots – like a parking lot where people can drive up and get WiFi – are one way to provide fast help. And internet service providers are trying to help with those, too. But they are temporary solutions. Hansen hopes the pandemic will show people just how vital high-speed Internet access is for education and even public health.

"Telehealth is so important to COVID because you don't want people going into town or driving into the city and exposing them to COVID or themselves to COVID and bringing it back," Hansen said. "It's such a transportable problem.”

And she believes there's no reason we shouldn't all be pulling together to make this happen.

"It seems like we should be able to figure this out as a country," she said.
https://www.kuer.org/post/stay-home-...-west#stream/0





Charter has 230 Infected Employees after Resisting Work-At-Home Requests

NY attorney general opens inquiry into Charter labor practices during pandemic.
Jon Brodkin

More than 230 Charter employees have tested positive for COVID-19, and at least two have died, The New York Times reported today.

New York Attorney General Letitia James' office has opened an inquiry into Charter's labor practices and management of employees during the pandemic, a spokesperson for James confirmed to Ars today.

Charter has faced numerous complaints from employees about the company's refusal to let them work from home during the pandemic. The cable company partially backed away from its strict rules on March 20, saying it would let up to 40 percent of call-center employees do remote work. But Charter's slow reaction to the pandemic—while the similarly situated Comcast moved aggressively to get employees into work-at-home situations—may have contributed to the spread of coronavirus in the company.

"Of the [Charter] Spectrum employees who tested positive for COVID-19, roughly half worked in offices or call centers... at least two Spectrum field workers have died," the Times reported, citing an anonymous source.

"Any worker who has tested positive for COVID-19 is given two weeks of paid sick leave," a Charter spokesperson said, according to the Times. Charter has 95,000 employees in 41 states, including about 40,000 in call centers and offices, and 55,000 who "deal with customers face to face as field technicians or retail employees," the Times wrote.

Charter has apparently expanded work-at-home rights since its March 20 announcement. A Charter spokesperson told Ars today that "the significant majority of our office and call-center employees are working from home." Charter declined to provide details on the number of illnesses and deaths from COVID-19 at the company, and it declined to comment on the New York attorney general's inquiry.

“Breeding ground for germs”

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge angered employees last month when he issued a memo telling them to keep coming to the office even if their jobs can be performed from home, because people "are more effective from the office." In mid-March, we talked to several Charter employees who complained that they should be able to work at home instead of in call centers; one employee described a call center as "an absolute nightmare breeding ground for germs." Several Charter office buildings were shut down temporarily to be disinfected after employees got sick. Charter also faced criticism last month for giving its cable technicians $25 restaurant gift cards instead of hazard pay for going into customer homes during the pandemic.

Charter yesterday announced that it won't do any layoffs or furloughs "for at least the next 60 days." Other previously announced concessions to workers included pay increases "for all hourly workers from $15 to $20 over the next two years with an immediate increase of $1.50 an hour for the frontline field and customer operations employees and an additional $1.50 starting March 2021." Charter is also offering "three weeks of COVID-19-related flex time" and upgraded health plans "to waive costs for diagnostic testing services and telehealth visits for 90 days."

"Employees may take those [three weeks of flex time] off, though salaried workers have been encouraged to use that time to work remotely," the Times wrote.

A month-old petition on Change.org urging Rutledge to let more employees work remotely has received about 7,800 signatures. "There are a lot of us who are in the high-risk group due to old age and you are putting us and our families at risk of getting exposed to this virus," the petition said.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...home-requests/





RIPE Opposes China's Internet Protocols Upgrade Plan

RIPE speaks out against China and Huawei's "New IP" internet upgrade plan, says internet standards should be left to the IETF, not the UN.
Catalin Cimpanu

EU-based Internet governance body RIPE is opposing a proposal to remodel core internet protocols, a proposal backed by the Chinese government, Chinese telecoms, and Chinese networking equipment vendor Huawei.

Named "New IP," this proposal[1, 2, 3] consists of a revamped version of the TCP/IP standards to accommodate new technologies, a "shutoff protocol" to cut off misbehaving parts of the internet, and a new "top-to-bottom" governance model that centralizes the internet and puts it into the hands of a few crucial node operators.

The New IP proposal was submitted last year to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and brought to the public's attention following a Financial Times report last month (paywalled, see alternative coverage here).

The proposal received immediate criticism from the general public and privacy advocates due to its obvious attempt to hide internet censorship features behind a technical redesign of the TCP/IP protocol stack.

The New IP proposal was described as the Chinese government's attempt to export and impose its autocratic views onto the rest of the internet and its infrastructure. Millions of eyebrows were raised when authoritarian countries like Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia expressed support for the proposal.
RIPE says internet standards should be left to the IETF

In a blog post this week, RIPE NCC, the regional Internet registry for Europe, West Asia, and the former USSR, formally expressed a public opinion against China New IP proposal.

"Do we need New IP? I don't think we do," said Marco Hogewoning, the current acting Manager Public Policy and Internet Governance at the RIPE NCC.

"Although certain technical challenges exist with the current Internet model, I do not believe that we need a whole new architecture to address them."

Hogewoning says that any endeavors to revamp internet protocols should be left to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the international body that has been in charge of defining internet standards for decades. Such issues should not be left to the ITU, which is the United Nation's telecommunications body, and an agency where political influence rules, rather than technically-sound arguments.

In addition, RIPE is also concerned with the attempt to change the internet's current decentralized nature.

In a document with a harsher tone RIPE sent to the ITU in February, the organization expressed its concerns about the New IP proposal.

"The RIPE NCC is deeply concerned by what has been proposed here," Hogewoning said. "We are especially concerned by the notion that this proposal represents an opportunity to steer away from the traditional 'bottom-up' decision-making model.

"We also believe the technical rationale presented is flawed and find the suggested alternative designs to be both unrealistic and unproven."

Going forward, Hogewoning urges national internet governance organizations to reach out to local decision-makers and recommend that they vote against the New IP proposal, which is set to enter into testing in 2021, and go under a vote at a later date.

"For now, what is most important is that we, as an industry, state our needs and let decision makers know that New IP is not what we need," the RIPE manager said.

"Talk to your government representatives at the ITU and elsewhere and make sure they understand that this proposal is not about a real need for new technology, but about trying to alter the governance structure of the Internet."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ripe-o...-upgrade-plan/





ICANN Delays .org Sale Again after Scathing Letter from California AG

The controversial deal would saddle the .org registry with $300 million in debt.
Timothy B. Lee

ICANN, the nonprofit that oversees the Internet's domain name system, has given itself another two weeks to decide whether to allow control of the .org domain to be sold to private equity firm Ethos Capital. The decision comes after ICANN received a blizzard of letters from people opposed to the transaction, including California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

Becerra's letter was significant because ICANN is incorporated in California. That means it's Becerra's job to make sure that ICANN is living up to the commitments in its articles of incorporation, which promise that ICANN will operate "for the benefit of the Internet community as a whole."

Becerra questioned whether ICANN was really doing that. "There is mounting concern that ICANN is no longer responsive to the needs of its stakeholders," he wrote.

A secretive buyer and a lot of debt

California's attorney general pointed to several specific concerns about the transaction. One was the shadowy nature of the proposed buyer, Ethos Capital. "Little is known about Ethos Capital and its multiple proposed subsidiaries," Becerra writes. Ethos Capital, he said, has "refused to produce responses to many critical questions posted by the public and Internet community."

Ethos Capital's plan is to buy the Public Interest Registry (PIR) from its current parent organization, the nonprofit Internet Society. To help finance the sale, Ethos will saddle PIR with $300 million in debt—a common tactic in the world of leveraged buyouts. Becerra warns that this tactic could endanger the financial viability of the PIR—especially in light of the economic uncertainty created by the coronavirus.

"If the sale goes through and PIR's business model fails to meet expectations, it may have to make significant cuts in operations," Becerra warns. "Such cuts would undoubtedly affect the stability of the .org registry."

Becerra also blasts the Internet Society for considering the sale in the first place. "ISOC purports to support the Internet, yet its actions, from the secretive nature of the transaction, to actively seeking to transfer the .org registry to an unknown entity, are contrary to its mission and potentially disruptive to the same system it claims to champion and support," he writes.

Becerra ends his letter with a warning: "This office will continue to evaluate this matter, and will take whatever action necessary to protect Californians and the nonprofit community."

“Totally inappropriate”

Becerra is far from the only critic of the .org deal. On Monday, ICANN's first CEO, Michael Roberts, and original board chair Esther Dyson penned a letter blasting the transaction and their successors at ICANN.

"We write to express our deep dismay at ICANN's rejection of its defining public-interest regulatory purpose as demonstrated in the totally inappropriate proposed sale of the .org delegation," they wrote. "ICANN has not meaningfully acted to address the likely proposed service cuts, increase in prices or trafficking of data of non-profits to obtain additional revenue."

They called for a six-month delay of the transaction to give ICANN and elected officials more time to scrutinize it.

ICANN is an unusual organization. It nominally represents the Internet community, but its governance structure doesn't give ordinary Internet users much direct influence. In the past, ICANN has been overseen by the US Department of Commerce, but the US government has been gradually relaxing its oversight of the organization in recent years.

At the same time, US policymakers have resisted efforts to bring Internet governance under the control of international bodies such as the International Telecommunications Union. They feared that this would give too much influence to autocratic regimes such as China and Russia. As a result, ICANN is effectively accountable to no one, even as it controls a resource—the Internet's domain name system—that's worth billions of dollars.

That creates an obvious temptation for ICANN insiders. As the Register has documented, several of the people involved in the Ethos Capital transaction are former ICANN officials. That might be one reason why the deal is getting a sympathetic hearing from ICANN even as it has been strongly opposed by many independent voices.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...california-ag/





Elon Musk Says Starlink Internet Private Beta to Begin in Roughly Three Months, Public Beta in Six
Darrell Etherington

SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk has shared more details about when in 2020 we can expect the company’s Starlink low-latency, high-bandwidth satellite internet service to actually be available to customers. He said on Twitter that a private beta for Starlink would begin in around three months, with a public beta to kick off roughly three months after that.

The initial beta test will apply to those located in “high latitudes,” Musk added. To date, SpaceX has said that Starlink service will initially be made available to customers in Canada and in the northern United States in 2020, with additional service expansion to follow to other parts of the world throughout 2021. On Twitter in response to a question about whether Germany counts as “high latitude,” Musk said that it does, indicating beta service at least may be available in more markets than the U.S. and Canada ahead of next year.

Late last year, Musk tweeted saying he was using a Starlink satellite connection to do so, and since then the company has launched six batches of 60 satellites each to build out its network. The small satellites work by flying around the Earth in low orbit, passing off connection between one another to ensure consistent service is provided to ground stations. They orbit lower than geostationary communications satellites, which provides latency and speed benefits, but don’t remain in a fixed position so a large number of them are required to provide consistent connectivity.

SpaceX still has other hurdles to overcome in order to make its timeline, including continuing to prepare and launch more Starlink missions despite the challenging working conditions in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company also still needs to secure authorization form Canadian internet and satellite operation regulators before service goes live in that country, and it isn’t yet listed as an authorized provider on the Canadian government’s official website.

Starlink ultimately aims to provide low-cost, high speed broadband connectivity to customers globally, with the specific goal of offering service to customers who don’t currently have reliable or quality access due to their remote location. A number of satellite and other projects aim to address this gap, including Alphabet-owned Loon, which is using stratospheric balloons to act as cell towers to provide access to hard-to-reach places.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/23/el...c-beta-in-six/





U.S. Judge Blocks Twitter's Bid to Reveal Government Surveillance Requests
Kanishka Singh

Twitter Inc will not be able to reveal surveillance requests it received from the U.S. government after a federal judge accepted government arguments that this was likely to harm national security after a near six-year long legal battle.

The social media company had sued the U.S. Department of Justice in 2014 to be allowed to reveal, as part of its “Draft Transparency Report”, the surveillance requests it received. It argued its free-speech rights were being violated by not being allowed to reveal the details.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers granted the government’s request to dismiss Twitter’s lawsuit in an eleven page order filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California.

The judge ruled on Friday that granting Twitter’s request “would be likely to lead to grave or imminent harm to the national security.”

“The Government’s motion for summary judgment is GRANTED and Twitter’s motion for summary judgment is DENIED”, the judge said in her order.

Twitter had sued the Justice Department in its battle with federal agencies as the internet industry’s self-described champion of free speech seeking the right to reveal the extent of U.S. government surveillance.

The lawsuit had followed months of fruitless negotiations with the government and had marked an escalation in the internet industry’s battle over government gag orders on the nature and number of requests for private user information.

Tech companies were seeking to clarify their relationships with U.S. law enforcement and spying agencies in the wake of revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that outlined the depth of U.S. spying capabilities.

Twitter’s legal battle spanned the tenures of four U.S. attorneys general - Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, Jeff Sessions and William Barr.

Through the use of confidential declarations, the Justice Department was able to show that revealing the exact number of national security letters from 2014, as requested by Twitter, posed a risk to national security, Friday’s order said.

Twitter did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Toby Chopra
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKBN2200CS





COVID-19’s Impact on Tor
isabela

Tor, like much of the world, has been caught up in the COVID-19 crisis. Like many other nonprofits and small businesses, the crisis has hit us hard, and we have had to make some difficult decisions.

We had to let go of 13 great people who helped make Tor available to millions of people around the world. We will move forward with a core team of 22 people, and remain dedicated to continuing our work on Tor Browser and the Tor software ecosystem.

The world won’t be the same after this crisis, and the need for privacy and secure access to information will become more urgent. In these times, being online is critical and many people face ongoing obstacles to getting and sharing needed information. We are taking today’s difficult steps to ensure the Tor Project continues to exist and our technology stays available.

We are terribly sad to lose such valuable teammates, and we want to let all our users and supporters know that Tor will continue to provide privacy, security, and censorship circumvention services to anyone who needs them.
https://blog.torproject.org/covid19-impact-tor





Open Source platform Jitsi Plans to Start Offering a Major Security Feature that Zoom, Microsoft, and Google Lack: End-to-End Encryption for Video Conferencing. Here's How it Plans to Take on its Rivals
Rosalie Chan

• Jitsi, an open source videoconferencing app that Atlassian sold to 8x8 in 2018, is poised to introduce end-to-end encryption on its platform.
• Currently, rivals like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet do not use end-to-end encryption.
• Emil Ivov, head of video collaboration at 8x8, says that Jitsi has always been security focused, which is more important now than ever as attacks like "Zoombombing" becomes a bigger issue during the coronavirus pandemic.

Ever since the coronavirus crisis erupted, 8x8's open source video conferencing platform Jitsi has seen a major increase in demand, the company says. Now, it's taking the first steps to become more secure than any of its competitors.

Since Atlassian sold Jitsi to communications company 8x8 in 2018, the platform powers 8x8's Video Meeting product, which has customers like Comcast, Greenpeace, and WeSchool, which has connected 500,000 educators and students in Italy during the coronavirus pandemic.

Jitsi has nearly 12 million monthly active users. That's an admittedly small number compared to giants like Zoom (200 million daily active users), Microsoft Teams (44 million daily active users), and Google's video product, Meet (which said in early April that it had two million new users every day, though it has not reported its total users).

Still, there's one area where Jitsi aims to set itself apart from its larger competitors: Security.

None of its rivals currently support end-to-end encryption, the most private form of communication where only the people participating in a conversation have access to it and potential eavesdroppers aren't able to understand the data. Zoom previously said it supported end-to-end encryption, but walked back those claims and changed its wording after The Intercept reported that it was misleading users.

While Jitsi doesn't offer end-to-end encryption for its meetings yet, it's embarking on a path towards doing so using standards from the open source communication software project WebRTC. Jitsi has published its plans and called on cryptographers to look at them and provide comments and suggestions. From there, Jitsi will review those comments to help it improve its proposed process before implementing it.

Bringing end-to-end encryption to Jitsi will be a massive undertaking — it will need to build robust authentication features and encryption key management processes — but Emil Ivov, the product's founder and head of video collaboration at 8x8, says that the company is ready for the challenge.

"It's a very complex problem but we're confident we'll get it," he told Business Insider.

While Jitsi published a long post about its process, Ivov mentioned two ways it plans to implement end-to-end encryption:

First, while Jitsi is competing with Google, it's using some of the company's security tools, too. Jitsi plans to use an API called called "Insertable Streams" that Google recently launched in conjunction with other features that it's building in-house. The API scrambles up video and audio in streaming, so that no third party – including the service provider – will be able to understand it and spy on people in the meeting.

Ivov says that Jitsi also plans to use the Double Ratchet Algorithm, which is used by the encrypted messaging app Signal.

A focus on security from the beginning

Ivov started Jitsi while working on his PhD at Louis Pasteur University in France. Jitsi is an open source project, meaning that it's free for anyone to use, download, or modify. Soon enough, a community of developers started using it and building upon it.

Ivov and other teammates then started the company around the project called Blue Jimp, which Atlassian acquired in 2015. Atlassian sold Jitsi to 8x8 in 2018 when it decided to exit the videoconferencing space.

Today, Jitsi's open source code has over a million downloads and has been used for video conferencing in banking, education, and home security applications.

Ivov says that being open source is one of Jitsi's greatest strengths.

"From a security perspective, this is the only way you can truly know if you can trust something or not," Ivov said. "Unless you're open source, how else are you going to know this thing is secure?"

When software is open source, a user can peruse the code and verify themselves how secure it is, or trust that other people have already checked, he says. Misleading marketing isn't as effective with open source, since someone can more easily check the claims against the code. Also, with an open source project, there's an entire community of developers to collaborate on making the product as secure as possible.

Even before it rolls out end-to-end encryption, Jitsi has other features that make it more secure than competitors, Ivov says.

For example, a threat called Zoombombing has become popular during the coronavirus pandemic, where bad actors access meetings by correctly generating the URL and password. Jitsi is trying to mitigate the potential for these kinds of attacks in several ways: It provides a random meeting name generator that helps users pick hard-to-guess meeting names.

It also doesn't require meetings to be created in advance.

"For many platforms out there, in order to have a meeting, you have to create it first," Ivov says. "They end up being discoverable."

It can create meetings that are only active once the first person enters the meeting and deactivate when the last person leaves, giving bad actors less advance time to break in.

Finally, Ivov says that Jitsi also balances security with ease of use. Unlike Zoom or Microsoft Teams, users don't need to download anything when they want to use Jitsi.

"We specialize a lot in removing friction," Ivov said. "We want to make sure there's going to be nothing for you to download. It works in your browser."
https://www.businessinsider.com/8x8-...ryption-2020-4





In These Trying Times, Piracy Can Be Used for Good

One silver lining in the dark cloud named Covid-19: people are harnessing the power of 3D printing to manufacture well needed, often expensive and hard-to-find, medical supplies
Dov Greenbaum

Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a copyright case relating to the sunken flagship of notorious pirate Blackbeard, The Queen Anne's Revenge. The court ruled in favor of North Carolina, off the shores of which the ship sunk, allowing it to use material documenting its salvation without the photographer’s permission. Blackbeard, by the way, was killed in action, and legend has it his skull was lined in silver and used as a bowl.

And by now, many may have heard of another silver lining, also having to do with intellectual property, but this time in regard to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. Suffering under the increasing burden of life-threatening cases and running low on vital medical supplies, a small band of intrepid medical professionals and engineers in Brescia in northern Italy created a printable version of an expensive and hard to find valve for life-saving ventilators. The printed item reportedly costs 10,000 times less than the valve’s retail price.

Similarly, a couple in New York began printing face shields for medical personnel, at around $8 apiece, using 3D printers they had in their basement.

But, there is also a dark cloud lurking over this silver lining. The manufacturer of the valves, U.K.-based company Intersurgical Ltd., reportedly refused to help the 3D printers in developing the replacement valve and even threatened to sue them for patent infringement. The company later denied the allegations.

In another case of denial, earlier this month, Fortress Investment Group LLC, owned by Japan’s SoftBank Group, filed, through its subsidiary Labrador Diagnostics LLC, a lawsuit in Delaware against Biofire Diagnostics LLC, a biotech startup that was developing a coronavirus diagnostic test and its parent company Biomerieux SA. The plaintiff’s case was based on third-party patents it purchased from Theranos, a San Francisco Bay Area blood-testing company that infamously defrauded the U.S. government and its own investors.

In response to the immediate press backlash, Fortress backtracked and withdrew the suit, claiming it was unaware that BioFire, was working on a Covid-19 test and that the suit was related to prior work done by the defendant. To further improve its now tarnished image, Fortress even offered BioFire a royalty-free license to continue using the putatively infringing technology.

Ironically, Biomerieux just lost a patent infringement lawsuit that it had brought against another company that was supposedly using its patented technology to create an HIV detection kit. Highlighting the chasm between how we treat different pandemics, no one seemed to be upset about this particular case being filed.

It is not just devices and diagnostic patents that are being infringed upon during these uncertain times. In China, a local pharmaceutical manufacturer, BrightGene Bio-Medical Technology Co. Ltd. supposedly successfully copied one of the most promising Covid-19 drugs to date, Gilead Sciences Inc.'s remdesivir, an experimental antiviral compound that is thought to be effective in treating other coronaviruses, such as SARS and MERS, as well as Ebola. Clinical trials for Covid-19 have just begun.

While the Chinese company claims it will request permission from Gilead before marketing the drug, it has already taken the unprecedented step of mass-producing it. Gilead, itself has not yet marketed the experimental drug, nor has the drug been approved for any indication anywhere in the world. Up until now, it has only been used for what is legally termed compassionate use.

For decades, in various jurisdictions worldwide, patient groups have successfully lobbied regulators to allow for expanded access or compassionate use of drugs that are still in the development stage, under certain preconditions. Under current U.S. laws, however, pharmaceutical companies cannot be compelled to provide these drugs and it must be done voluntarily. In the European Union, compassionate use was legislated in 2004.

More recently, the U.S. passed Right to Try legislation which provides an additional alternative pathway to access experimental drugs outside of the clinical trial framework. In contrast to the expanded access pathway, which requires the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to sign off on each patient, Right to Try access, does not even require the ethical approval of an institutional review board (IRB).

A similar EU law, Art. 1 of Directive 2004/27/EC, allows for an individual patient, under the observation of a healthcare professional, to use a drug that is in the early phase of development. Article 1 also allows for the temporary use of a non-approved drug in cases such as novel pathogenetic agents.

While laws in the U.S. Europe, and Israel provide desperate patients with potential Hail Marys for their disease, they can create excessive administrative burdens for drug companies intent on developing medicine for the general population. These incumbrances include developing an allocation methodology to fairly allow third parties access to the drug, with potentially thousands of patients requesting such access.

Perhaps highlighting these difficulties, Gilead, just one day after the FDA announced remdesivir would be available through the compassionate use pathway, announced it will stop accepting applications for compassionate use, given the overwhelming demand. At the same time the drug, which was developed using tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, was granted a lucrative orphan drug designation. Given the PR backlash, Gilead, like the other drug companies mentioned above, quickly requested the designation be rescinded, but has yet to reopen compassionate access. With the compassionate access path closed off, Gilead suggested that those who need it look to enrolling in clinical trials for the drug.

Compassionate use is also costly for pharmaceutical companies to comply with, as, given the dire nature of compassionate use requests, they are typically loath to recoup their extensive outlays of providing the drug or of including these patients in their trials, and thereby incur significant loses.

Compassionate uses might also confound clinical trials, as it is not yet clear how, or even whether, results from compassionate use or from Right to Try access can be legitimately included in the research data for the drug. Also, patients provided with such access might not benefit from important follow-up communication regarding the drug, its efficacy, and its side effects, information trial participants rely on in their recovery.

Much of the rules and regulations regarding the new Right to Try system have yet to be put to a test. The first drug used under the new pathway, a cancer vaccine, was only provided to the first non-trial patient a little over a year ago and the patient died soon thereafter. Some commentators fear that these drugs, which have not been thoroughly tested, will have little to no effect, and could potentially even worsen a patient’s condition. Additionally, news of compassionate use can also build up unwarranted hope in other desperate sufferers whose ear catches unvetted anecdotal information about its putative efficacy.

Prior to that initial Right to Try patient, an Israel-linked biotech company, BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics Ltd., decided in 2018 not to offer its experimental drug for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, under the Right To Try rules, due to ethical, legal, and practical hurdles in providing the drug outside of the clinical trial context.

Keeping in mind that Right to Try laws relate to drugs in the early phases of clinical trials, and that the vast majority of drugs at this juncture never hit the shelves after failing the demanding and daunting regulatory gauntlet of multiple tests, there are non-trivial social and ethical considerations in requesting and providing them to patients.

Healthcare providers who request these drugs for their patients will need to carefully and objectively reflect on their moral obligations to heal and to do no harm, as spelled out in the Helsinki Declaration —a non-binding instrument outlining ethical principles relating to research on human subjects given the many unknown variables regarding these early phase drugs. The last paragraph of the Helsinki Declaration does, however, allow for the use of untested therapies in times of great need.

Some of the abovementioned ethical concerns also relate to proper informed consent in light of unknown risks and benefits associated with the use of an as-of-yet unauthorized drug. The legitimacy of the informed consent is further suspect when considering the likely state of desperation the patient is in.

The use of these alternative access pathways might also undermine the slow-but-tested reliable standard drug approval process. Notably, unlike official drug trials, the Right to Try and compassionate use laws do not typically follow standard inclusion and exclusion guidelines, nor do they incorporate rules to limit the biases of healthcare providers and regulators in deciding who can and cannot gain access to the drug. There are serious concerns regarding the ability to fairly distribute a limited supply of a drug that has yet to go into full production.

The Right to Try is not the only way to access limited drugs in times of necessity. Most nations have compulsory licensing laws under which they grant themselves the right to willfully infringe their own government-granted patent on a drug. Still, most governments are loath to use these provisions because of potential threats from the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), the government office that recommends, conducts and coordinates U.S. trade policies.

Back to Covid-19, Israel recently used the threat of its compulsory license law to get pharmaceutical company AbbVie Inc. to allow an infringing generic version of its anti-viral drug Kaletra to be imported to Israel. The threat came as the drug, still protected by patents in Israel but not in India, could not be provided in sufficient quantities to fill the projected need during the pandemic. AbbVie caved and will not enforce its patent rights on Kaletra worldwide as long as it is used as an antiviral for SARS-CoV-2, the scientific name of the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Other industries are also facing infringements of intellectual property rights during these trying times. Last week, pirate media streaming website Popcorn Time resurfaced to help many of those that are home-bound, pass the time with infringing content. Notably, the 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion has become a favorite of many copyright-infringing pirates that are currently unable to leave their homes due to the pandemic.

As many places around the world are currently facing partial or complete lockdowns, perhaps our time at home could be better spent not pirating movies, but rather pirating medical supplies, like the above-mentioned ventilator valve, through 3D Printing. In fact, residents at the Massachusetts General Hospital recently announced a global online hackathon to come up with new ideas employing 3D printing to deal with the equipment shortages plaguing the world’s overburdened healthcare systems.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/a...803834,00.html
















Until next week,

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