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Old 09-05-12, 08:39 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 12th, '12

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"We are now likely to be in a world without SOPA and without ACTA." – Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda



































May 12th, 2012




Local Biz Mulls Effect of French Election

Socialist president Hollande has different take on piracy, windows
Elsa Keslassy

With new Socialist president Francois Hollande elected in France on Sunday evening, Gallic industryites are waiting to see how the change will the local media biz.

Hollande, the country's first Socialist leader in 17 years, succeeds Nicolas Sarkozy, a center-right politician who toughened up the country's piracy laws and reduced release windows to four months.

Despite the difference in political philosophy, the change in leadership is not likely to severely impact the film and TV biz, one of the country's most economically vibrant sectors. In the run-up to the election, Hollande's attitude about the local film-financing system seemed to be "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Items on his agenda do include unspecified alterations to Sarkozy's anti-piracy law, forcing digital players to inject coin into French production and preventing TV groups from holding a monopoly on content.

Hollande stirred controversy in March when he announced in Le Monde that, if elected, he would change Sarkozy's anti-piracy law, dubbed Hadopi (High Authority for the Diffusion of Works and Protection of Internet Rights).

Hadopi requires Internet service providers to identify users illegally downloading content and report them to a rights protection commission, which sends emails warnings to the offenders. Three-time offenders face Internet suspension.

According to Sarkozy, Hadopi caused peer-to-peer piracy to drop by 35% since its inception in June 2009.

But Hollande calls Hadopi an invasion of privacy -- in that ISPs must reveal their customers' identities -- as well as pricey and inefficient.

He said he would launch discussions with guilds, industryites, Web orgs and European leaders to discuss the issues if he was elected.

"For me, the protection of authors is a priority. We don't consider piracy a minor problem," Hollande wrote in his Le Monde piece.

Sarkozy cut France's government-regulated window between a film's theatrical run and pay VOD and DVD release from seven to four months to enhance the legal offering on the Web and reduce piracy.

Hollande is leaning toward extending the window when the July 2009 agreement comes up for review in July.

The results of the election came in too late Sunday night for French film guilds to comment but they have been highly active during the campaign.

In March, Gallic industry heavyweights Luc Besson, Alain Terzian, Patrick Sobelman, Eric Almayer, Anne-Dominique Toussaint and Marie Masmonteil launched Le Collectif des 95 (which reps about 95% of producers) and issued an open letter addressed to Hollande in which it listed its demands. These included forcing VOD platforms including Videofutur, CanalPlay, iTunes, Google TV and Amazon to pre-finance films they acquire; banning media groups from buying films for all their channels; allowing rights holders to sell film, TV and VOD rights separately; and creating a minimum fee of €4 ($5.20) on films on VOD that would go to rights holders.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118053589?refCatId=13





Pirates Gain, Merkel Loses Power in State Election
AFP/mbw

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's centre-right coalition lost power in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, first estimates showed Sunday, after a vote that could presage national elections next year.

Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) scored 30.6 percent, according to ARD public television, with her junior partners at the national level, the Free Democrats (FDP), winning 8.3 percent - not enough to retain power in the northern state.

However, the opposition - combining the centre-left Social Democrats and ecologist Greens - also failed to gain sufficient support to form a government, with 29.9 percent and 13.6 percent respectively.

This left as a strong possibility a so-called "grand coalition" between the CDU and SPD, which many believe could be the final result of the national elections due in September or October 2013.

The big winners on the night were the Pirates, an upstart party that has shaken up the staid world of German politics with a campaign based on more transparency in the political process and internet freedom.

For the third consecutive regional election, they breached the five-percent mark needed to enter the state parliament, winning 8.2 percent of the vote.

But for the FDP, although they lost more than six percent compared to the last election in 2009, it was a better-than-expected result, given that they are polling nationally at around three percent.

Turnout was low, with around 60 percent of the 2.2 million registered voters casting their ballot, compared to more than two-thirds in 2009.

The socialist Left party failed to clear the five-percent hurdle, scoring around 2.4 percent. A party representing the state's small Danish minority also fell below the threshold, with 4.5 percent.

The parties will now engage in days of horse-trading before the final make-up of the state parliament is determined.

However, the election will have little impact on the make-up of the Bundesrat, the upper house of parliament where Germany's 16 states are represented, and Merkel's personal popularity remains high.

The vote in Schleswig-Holstein is seen as a dress rehearsal for a much more significant election in the bellwether state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) on May 13.

As Germany's most populous state with 18 million people and a major industrial base, NRW's centre-left minority government fell after just 22 months over a budget dispute.

The state historically plays a big role in federal politics - in 2005, a lost vote in NRW prompted then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to call a snap federal election which he then lost to Merkel.

A poor result for the FDP there would be seen as possibly destabilising the ruling coalition nationally, around 16 months before the federal poll.

But their performance in Schleswig-Holstein will at least take some of the pressure off their leader Philipp Rösler, who is also economy minister.

"It's a turning point. We were not dead," said the FDP's parliamentary chief, Rainer Brüderle.
http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20120506-42381.html





Kroes Throws in Towel on ACTA
Ben Rooney

ACTA is effectively dead, the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda admitted Friday. An official spokesman said the “political reality” was the fight was over.

Neelie Kroes, speaking at a conference in Berlin, told delegates: “We have recently seen how many thousands of people are willing to protest against rules which they see as constraining the openness and innovation of the Internet.

“This is a strong new political voice. And as a force for openness, I welcome it, even if I do not always agree with everything it says on every subject.

“We are now likely to be in a world without SOPA and without ACTA.”

Her spokesman agreed that while Ms. Kroes never said ACTA was dead, the “political reality” is that it is.

The move is a tacit recognition that the controversial treaty, which saw thousands take to the streets in protest, is no more. The agreement requires ratification by all parties as well as the European Parliament. That now looks highly unlikely.

Three of the four main parliamentary groups have already come out against ACTA. “Acta does not provide a good balance between the protection of intellectual property rights and fundamental freedoms,” group president Guy Verhofstadt has said. With support from the socialists and greens it was unlikely that the European Parliament would back the treaty.

Parliament’s largest group, the EPP, has not taken a position.

The European Commission agreed last month to refer the treaty to European Court of Justice to establish if it posed a danger to the rights of individual European citizens.

The controversial agreement, which opponents say was conducted behind closed doors, aimed to fight against counterfeiting at international level through greater co-ordination of anti-counterfeiting measures and tougher enforcement.

Updated at 4 May 12 @16:39: added comments on political bloc views and confirmation of the comments by the official spokesman.
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/201...towel-on-acta/





Queen Unveils Draft Internet Super-Snoop Bill - with Clauses

Her Maj opens Parliamentary session with clear nod to CCDP
Kelly Fiveash

The Queen has detailed the government's upcoming programme of law-making on a grey day darkened by the gloom of a double-dip recession and plans to massively increase surveillance of the internet in the UK.

Opening the new session of Parliament, Her Majesty confirmed on Wednesday that "draft clauses" would be introduced to allow MPs to scrutinise Home Secretary Theresa May's Communications Capabilities Development Programme (CCDP) - the controversial project to allow security services in Blighty to monitor the population online.

The Queen told politicos and peers in the House of Lords:

“My government intends to bring forward measures to maintain the ability of the law enforcement and intelligence agencies to access vital communications data under strict safeguards to protect the public, subject to scrutiny of draft clauses.”

It's unclear if those "strict safeguards" mean that a warrant, for example, would be needed before spooks could access such data. The rough proposal appeared to only fuzzily indicate that such protection for British citizens would be provided, however.

The draft bill [PDF] stated that an updated framework to aid the "lawful, efficient and effective obtaining of communications data by authorised public authorities including law enforcement and intelligence agencies" would be established.

It added that safeguards such as imposing a 12-month limit on the length of time such private data could be retained by communication service providers would be proposed. The Information Commissioner Christopher Graham will be tasked with reviewing such data retention plans.

The draft communications data bill outlined the following "benefits":

• "The ability of the police and intelligence agencies to continue to access communications data which is vital in supporting their work in protecting the public."

• "An updated framework for the collection, retention and acquisition of communications data which enables a flexible response to technological change."

The proposed bill described communications data as being "information about a communication, not the communication itself".

May and her department have tried to bat aside criticism from civil liberties groups by saying that "no emails would be read in real-time".

But many have complained that the cabinet minister's reassurances are unfounded given that the net-snooping plan would involve GCHQ operatives monitoring everything an individual does online, if not snoop on the content of messages.

The time and duration of communications would be probed, as would telephone numbers or email addresses that have been contacted, and "sometimes the location of the originator of the communication".

But beyond that, very little technical detail was offered in the draft communications data bill this morning. The CCDP was originally expected to be included in the crime and courts or justice and security bills - the fact it is now standalone and in draft form will subject it to greater parliamentary scrutiny.

Lib Dem Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg may have behind the scenes forced a serious airing of May's proposals in Parliament, and MPs even within the Coalition are undoubtedly opposed to such a "snoopers' charter", but the fact remains that the Home Office - just like its previous New Labour incumbents - is determined to push its plans to hugely step up surveillance of the internet onto the nation's law books.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05...n_speech_ccdp/





Govt ‘Massively Retreating’ From Black Boxes Of Snooper’s Charter
Tom Brewster

On the day the “snooper’s charter” was announced in the Queen’s Speech, the Home Office is already moving towards killing a key part of the bill, TechWeekEurope has learned.

The original plan for the Communications Bill proposed that “black boxes” (sealed units that gather data) should be installed at ISPs like BT and Virgin, from which communications data on all online citizens would be shipped off to GCHQ for inspection. But the Home Office is now moving away from the idea of black boxes, even as the draft Bill was announced in the Queen’s Speech today, according to a source within government.

The source said the government is “retreating massively” from forcing black boxes upon ISPs. Instead the government is simply looking to make it clearer what it expects from communications providers when asked, “rather than black boxes,” the source told TechWeekEurope.
Lib Dems claim victory

Separately, Liberal Democrat MPs have been claiming success in fighting the initial plans. They had already managed to kick the proposals out of a more general crime bill, which has been described as a “massive defeat for the Home Office”.

“This is clearly not what the Home Office wanted to do and shows we have been very effective in pushing back against original proposals,” Julian Huppert, MP for Cambridge, told TechWeekEurope.

As for what happens now, the draft bill is yet to be published, but when it is put down on paper it will come in the form of draft clauses. That will not be the final version of the draft, but will “look like a full bill”, Huppert said.

“That will give all of us a chance to read it and see what it says and it will force the Home Office to say what they actually plan to do because they have been woefully unclear about what it is they want to do,” he added. “It will then go to a scrutiny committee. I don’t know yet whether or not that will be the Home Affairs Select Committee, which I serve on, or whether it would be a specially constituted committee.”

Huppert said, in theory, the draft could become law in the next year, but it would depend on how the bill looked. “It depends on the urgency and I think it also depends on how large the changes are. If it ends up being a few small tweaks, then I think we’d just say ‘OK can we get on with this and not waste anymore time on it?’” he said.

“My expectation is that by the time we get to a draft bill it will look a lot better and after it comes out of scrutiny it will look even better than that.

“The Home Office cannot play the game they’ve always played of rushing things through with no time to work out what it is they are actually talking about. That is why this draft is just so key.”

Facebook and Google are also looking for more clarity from the government, according to Huppert, who held a meeting last month with the two tech giants and others to talk about the proposals.

Although little information has been forthcoming on the technical aspects of the bill, a piece of documentation to support the announcement in the Queen’s Speech has been released. It outlines various provisos of the draft bill. That includes a 12-monthy limit on how long communications providers can hold onto data for, as well as a guarantee that the Information Commissioner’s Office will be responsible for monitoring the security of that information and its deletion at the end of the 12-month period.

The Home Office did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...ck-boxes-77206





The Lengthening Arm of Uncle Sam’s ‘Pirate’ Justice
Myles Peterson

File-sharing was firmly on the agenda when the head of the US Department of Homeland Security touched down in the Australian capital last week. The four new agreements – promptly signed before Secretary Janet Napolitano flew back out of Canberra – were less about sharing season two of Game of Thrones and more about sharing the private, government held information of Australian citizens with US authorities.

“Because today’s threats do not recognise national boundaries, our responses must also transcend borders,” Ms Napolitano told her hosts in a speech overly dominated by assurances the US would respect the privacy of Australian citizens.

The legal reach of the US government has lengthened considerably over the past decade. Under the banner of fighting terrorism, law after law has been introduced, up to and including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security itself. Allies of the United States have signed up to bi-lateral and multi-lateral treaties giving that country enormous power over non-US citizens.

The perceived imbalance of many of these arrangements is starting to draw official protests. British Parliamentarian Dominic Raab recently stated, “Richard O’Dwyer [is] subject to US extradition orders based on [his] actions in Britain. Yet, no American has ever been extradited for alleged offences committed on US soil. It smacks of double standards, and strengthens the case for extradition reform.”

Richared O’Dwyer‘s alleged crimes involve facilitating copyright infringement via the website TVShack.net. Midway through 2010, Napolitano’s department used America’s control of the .net domain name register to extraterritoriality seize the TVShack domain.

Just under a year later the US Justice Department sought to have O’Dwyer extradited for alleged breaches of US law. O’Dwyer’s supporters have strongly questioned why a UK citizen can be sent to the US, despite having committed no crime on US soil for an offence that has generally been considered a civil, not criminal, matter.

Meanwhile in New Zealand, German celebrity hacker and internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is also fighting extradition to the United States for allegedly breaching the copyright of US corporate interests. Unlike the 23-year-old O’Dwyer, Dotcom has gained global media attention thanks to a high profile and limited access to considerable resources.

While facing extradition to Sweden from the UK, Wikileaks’ Julian Assange also fears the ever lengthening arm of US justice. Sweden holds a “special” arrangement with the United States which allows that country to temporarily surrender people into American custody. Assange and his supporters believe that should he be sent to Sweden, he will be promptly handed to the US authorities. (Although it should be asked why Assange does not fear he will be extradited by the British Government themselves.)

Should either the UK or Sweden fail to do America’s bidding, the Australia Government reportedly has a contingency plan. In March this year, the Australian federal parliament passed the Extradition and Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation Amendment Act, lowering the bar to extradite its own citizens while removing many previously held defences.

Combined with so-called “Wikileaks Amendments” and other expansions of their powers in the post 911 era, Australia’s spy agencies are now equipped to legally snoop on Australian citizens and share the information internally. Napolitano’s visit and the agreements she and Australian Attorney-General Nicola Roxon signed allow for much greater sharing of that information with the US government.

Australia’s Rama Brothers may consider themselves fortunate their copyright infringement trial began before this bilateral legal regime was expanded to its current form. Both received suspended jail sentences under the Queensland legal system, unlike Britain’s Richard O’Dwyer who faces a lengthy sentence in a foreign country. Future Rama Brothers will conceivably be shipped off to the United States for trial and punishment, with little to no ability to challenge an extradition under Australian law.

Last month the Australian High Court emphatically rejected an attempt by Hollywood studios to have local ISPs held responsible for the file-sharing activities of their customers. The legal precedent is binding in Australia and influential in countries who share a similar legal system such as India, Canada and the UK.

Through bypassing the courts and going straight to our legislators, who are arguably compromised in their ability to deal with the United States, the American Government is achieving the outcomes Hollywood lawyers and lobbyists could not. If Australian law will not deliver the results entities such as the RIAA and MPAA are pleased with, it can be circumnavigated by applying US law instead.

We have reached a point in Australia where citizens can be arrested and extradited to the United States based on information supplied by Australian spies for breaches of US law on Australian soil. Australia has effectively signed away its right to govern its own in matters of copyright infringement when those matters overlap the interests of the United States.
https://torrentfreak.com/the-lengthe...ustice-120506/





Another Judge Rules IP Addresses Can't be Used to Identify People
Jason Mick

The internet is perhaps the greatest disruptor of the twentieth century, despite only rising to relevance at its close. Today it remains a perplexing problem to politicians, justices, and business-people alike.

I. Internet Disrupts, Leads to Punitive Reactionary Efforts

Perhaps no internet controversy represents the confusion and mire of digital rights and law enforcement better than the legal precedent of equating internet proxy (IP) addresses to a human being.

For years U.S. courts allowed copyright "attack dog" organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to use this principle in threat letter schemes -- which many advocates argue were digital age extortion. The issue is that internet proxies are not people. Indeed, a large percentage of networks -- be they secured or unsecured -- have multiple users, making the RIAA's view of pinning infringement on the IP owner a problematic oversimplification.

Piracy has led to an arguably abusive response from content creators. [Image Source: RIAA]

And that's not to mention the pervasive hacking of wireless networks across the U.S. (or in many cases simple squatting on unsecured networks) -- a practice that likely has led to many of the RIAA, et al.'s more flagrant efforts, such as threat letters to dead people or the elderly. The ease with which the majority of secured private wireless networks can be penetrated further calls into question enforcing infringement on an IP basis.

The legal system is finally waking up to that reality.

II. Adult Filmmakers' Threat Letter Bid Killed

In a recent ruling in a case regarding RIAA-esque extortion efforts by a group of lawyers representing adult filmmakers, New York Eastern District federal court magistrate Judge Gary Brown blasted the idea of presenting infringing IPs as sufficient evidence to demand money from individuals or take them to court.

(To be fair not everyone in the adult film industry agrees with threatening possible pirates. Some view it as free promotion.)

III. Highlights

Judge Brown warns the plaintifffs that IPs are not sufficient evidence to prosecute, stating:

John Doe #16 has stated that he was at work at the time of the alleged download. John Doe #2 states under oath that he closed the subject Earthlink account, which had been compromised by a hacker, before the alleged download. John Doe #29’s counsel represents that his client is an octogenarian with neither the wherewithal nor the interest in using BitTorrent to download Gang Bang Virgins. John Doe #10 represents that downloading a copy of this film is contrary to her "religious, moral, ethical and personal views." Equally important, she notes that her wireless router was not secured and she lives near a municipal parking lot, thus providing access to countless neighbors and passersby.

...

While a decade ago, home wireless networks were nearly non-existent, 61% of US homes now have wireless access. As a result, a single IP address usually supports multiple computer devices – which unlike traditional telephones can be operated simultaneously by different individuals.

Different family members, or even visitors, could have performed the alleged downloads. Unless the wireless router has been appropriately secured (and in some cases, even if it has been secured), neighbors or passersby could access the Internet using the IP address assigned to a particular subscriber and download the plaintiff’s film.


He also cites a colleagues dismissal of a similar case, writing:

Plaintiff's counsel estimated that 30 percent of the names turned over by ISPs are not those of individuals who actually downloaded or shared copyrighted material. Counsel stated that the true offender is often the "teenaged son ... or the boyfriend if it's a lady." Alternatively, the perpetrator might turn out to be a neighbor in an apartment building that uses shared IP addresses or a dormitory that uses shared wireless networks. This risk of false positives gives rise to the potential for coercing unjust settlements from innocent defendants such as individuals who want to avoid the embarrassment of having their names publicly associated with allegations of illegally downloading "My Little Panties # 2."

Finally, he points out that the plaintiffs don't seem very interested in actually enforcing anti-infringement by taking the defendants to court -- rather they're seeking a quick settlement:

Upon receipt of the Complaint, I reached out to Plaintiff and spoke to a self-described “Negotiator” in an effort to see if I could prove to them (without the need for publicly tying my name to the Complaint) that I had nothing to do with the alleged copyright infringements. The Negotiator was offered unfettered access to my computer, my employment records, and any other discovery they may need to show that I was not the culpable party. Instead, the Negotiator refused and was only willing to settle the Complaint for thousands of dollars. While the Negotiator said on October 24, 2011 that he would check to see if he could come down from the thousands of dollar settlement amount, the Negotiator has not responded to two voice mails that were left on October 25, 2011. Notably, the Negotiator justified the settlement amount because, in part, I would incur legal fees in hiring an attorney.

IV. The Fallout

This remark offers a not so subtle hint that some judges are starting to view these kinds of mass-threat-letter campaigns as exactly what the majority in the public view them as -- extortion schemes.

Of course a handful of rulings -- even at the federal level -- won't be enough to stop the persistent efforts of the RIAA and other copyright extorters. But as they pile up, the legal costs of these losses may at long last force the media industry (including the adult film industry) to reevaluate its already money-losing approach with respect to copyright enforcement.

It may seem a bit sad that the digital era has enabled the public to steal media makers work, while providing them such little recourse (although many studies have indicated piracy has not effect media revenue). But it's hardly better to prop up a system of threats under which the innocent are often punitiviely punished while the the guilty often escape scott-free.

The legal system is slowly warming up to the idea that despite the painful financial implications of the internet, it is unacceptable to support such a flagrant mass violation of civil liberties.
http://www.dailytech.com/Another+Jud...ticle24614.htm





Verizon Refuses to Identify Alleged BitTorrent Pirates
Ernesto

In its lawsuits against hundreds of alleged BitTorrent users, book publisher John Wiley and Sons has met unexpected resistance from Internet provider Verizon. For a variety of reasons including privacy concerns, the ISP is refusing to comply with a subpoena which orders the company to hand over the personal details of subscribers who are accused of pirating “For Dummies” books.

Last fall, John Wiley and Sons became the first book publisher to go after BitTorrent users in the US.

By filing a mass-BitTorrent lawsuit the company became one of the many copyright holders who together have sued a quarter million people in the country since early 2010. In recent months, Wiley has continued to file yet more suits against alleged BitTorrent pirates.

Up until recently Wiley has enjoyed an easy ride in court. In several cases the New York federal court was quick to allow the book publisher to subpoena Internet providers for the personal details of account holders. With these details, Wiley can then approach the defendants and negotiate an out-of-court settlement.

But not if it’s up to Verizon.

While most Internet providers generally don’t object to a court-ordered subpoena, Verizon has refused to hand over the personal details of accused subscribers. One of the reasons given by Verizon is that Wiley is demanding the information for improper purposes, namely “to harass, cause unnecessary delay, or needlessly increase the cost of litigation.”

In addition, the Internet provider doubts whether the subpoena will lead to the discovery of “relevant information.” In other words, Verizon seems to doubt that the person who pays for the account is also the infringer.

This issue was also raised by New York Judge Gary Brown in another case last week, in which he concluded that an IP-address is not a person. In his order Brown argued that in mass-BitTorrent lawsuits it is simply unknown whether the person linked to the IP-address has anything to do with the alleged copyright infringements.

Besides the two points above Verizon makes five more objections, including concerns over privacy. The company asserts that Wiley is seeking “information that is protected from disclosure by third parties’ rights of privacy and protections guaranteed by the First Amendment.”

For its part, Wiley is not convinced by Verizon’s protest and has asked the court to compel Verizon to respond to the subpoenas. To discuss the issue, Judge Katherine Forrest has scheduled a telephone conference for early next week.

Verizon’s objection is noteworthy because the action is not borne merely out of self-interest. Previously Time Warner also objected to mass-BitTorrent subpoenas where they had to produce the details of thousands of subscribers, arguing that this process was too time consuming.

However, in this case the burden on the ISP is relatively low, as Wiley says it only asked for the details of 10 account holders for which Verizon would receive compensation of $45 each.

Should Judge Katherine Forrest agree with Verizon’s objections it would be a serious blow to Wiley’s ongoing litigation campaign against BitTorrent users in the Southern District of New York.
https://torrentfreak.com/verizon-ref...irates-120511/





Seized Hip-Hop Site Lashes Out At Feds, RIAA
David Kravets

For more than a year, and without explanation, the government redirected hip-hop site Dajaz1.com to this landing page.

The hip-hop music site the authorities shuttered for more than a year without explanation lashed out Monday at the recording industry and the federal government, likening the taking of the site to a “digital Guantanamo.”

“Seizing a blog for linking to four songs, even allegedly infringing ones, is equivalent to seizing the printing press of The New York Times because the newspaper, in its concert calendar, refers readers to four concerts where the promoters of those concerts have failed to pay ASCAP for the performance licenses,” Andre Nasib, the site’s owner, wrote in a blog post on the popular dajaz1.com site.

Nasib had originally declined comment when Wired disclosed the backstory of the seizure on Thursday.

According to court records obtained by Wired, federal authorities seized the dajaz1.com site based on assertions from the Recording Industry Association of America that it was linking to four “pre-release” music tracks in November, 2010. The authorities gave it back nearly 13 months later without filing civil or criminal charges because of apparent recording industry delays in confirming infringement, according to the court records, which were unsealed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the First Amendment Coalition and Wired.

The records illustrated a secret government process in which a judge granted the government repeated time extensions to build a civil or criminal case against Dajaz1.com, one of about 750 domains the government has seized in the last two years in a program known as Operation in Our Sites.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, has the power to seize web domains engaged in infringing activity under the same forfeiture laws used to seize property like houses, cars and boats allegedly tied to illegal activity such as drug running or gambling.

The authorities seized the site in November 2010 on the word of the RIAA that four songs linked to on the site were unauthorized, the records show. Yet nearly a year later, in September 2011, the government was secretly seeking its third time extension to build its case, largely because it was still waiting for the recording industry to produce evidence, the records show.

All the while, the site’s owner and his attorney were left out of the loop, as the court record was sealed from them and the public. The Dajaz1 site was redirected to a government landing page saying it was seized by customs officials.

The site claims the four songs by Jamie Foxx, Chris Brown, Nelly and Reek Da Villian at the center of the dispute were provided to it by the recording industry.

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles where the case was handled have declined comment. The Recording Industry Association of America initially declined comment. In an e-mail to Wired late Sunday, however, the RIAA said it “made every attempt” to to assist the investigation “in a complete and prompt manner.”

The RIAA has repeatedly attacked the site for allegedly facilitating wanton copyright infringement of pre-release music, saying dajaz1.com has released “thousands” of unauthorized songs.

Dajaz1 blasted back Monday, saying the “RIAA’s grand and sweeping attacks on dajaz1.com suggest that the RIAA’s powers of demonization far exceed its ability to substantiate its malicious statements with specific, credible facts.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...p-site-lashes/





The Pirate Bay Partners With Academic Researchers to Counter Propaganda
Ernesto

The Pirate Bay has partnered with the Cybernorms research group at Sweden’s Lund University to carry out the second round of the largest file-sharing survey in history. Through the survey the researchers examine the norms of file-sharers, and how they respond to increased censorship and tougher laws. One of the main goals of the research project is to give a counterweight to entertainment industry propaganda.

The Pirate Bay renamed itself to The Research Bay today for a collaboration with the Cybernorms research group at Lund University.

The notorious BitTorrent site is encouraging visitors to take part in the survey into people’s file-sharing habits and their views on copyright enforcement. The study is a follow up to a similar survey last year, in which 75,000 people from all over the world participated.

One of the main goals of the project is to counter entertainment industry propaganda. The researchers want to document how the Internet creates new social norms in society, and to what extent these norms are, or should be, reflected in relevant legislation.

“This research is first of all aiming at creating a better base of knowledge for policy makers. Without adequate information it is impossible to adapt the legal systems in a legitimate way,” Måns Svensson, PhD in Sociology of Law at Lund and study manager told TorrentFreak.

“Further, this research is important as a counterweight to the propaganda produced by various actors. Through the follow-up survey we are able to register changes and trends; and also we have the opportunity to ask some new questions, for example related to the recent demands on UK ISPs to block The Pirate Bay.”

Svensson told TorrentFreak that the Pirate Bay is the perfect partner to carry out this type of research.

Among other things, the first study revealed that Pirate Bay users show a great interest in VPN services and other anonymizers. With this second survey the Cybernorms group wants to see how the findings of the first study developed over time.

“We are very curious of how the use of anonymity services has developed during the last year. A survey conducted earlier this year in Sweden indicated a growing use among file sharers of VPN services for anonymization. We think that we have reason to believe that intensified enforcement strategies will accelerate this development,” Svensson said.

In addition, the survey also give the researchers the opportunity to delve deeper in people’s responses to recent Pirate Bay blockades, such as the one that was ordered in the UK last week.

“We are also curious to learn more about the specific techniques used for online anonymity and the techniques for avoiding blocking. This time we are breaking down the data on a national level which means that we will be able to compare legal strategies with the actual behavioral changes.”

Svensson stresses that he and his colleagues have a responsibility as social scientists to monitor the responses to more repressive anti-piracy laws. Thus far this has resulted in a few interesting insights. For example, they found that changing the law doesn’t mean that people’s norms will change.

Instead, the gap between law and file-sharer’s morals widens.

“Our research has shown that tougher legislation actually does have an effect on the amount that people file share copyright protected media. However, this legislation has no effect on the social norms of society,” Svensson said.

“People still don’t think it is wrong to share files. What we have is a deterrent effect due to enforcement actions, but an effect that lacks societal support. This is a dangerous development that in the long run risks undermining the trust in the democratic society.”

Readers who want to help out with the research are invited to take part in the survey. Next week all results of the first survey will be published to the public.
https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-...aganda-120509/





Virgin Media Site Goes Titsup in Pirate Bay Payback Attack

Anonymous claims takedown victory
Kelly Fiveash

Virgin Media's main website dropped off the interwebs on Tuesday with hackivist collective Anonymous claiming responsibility for the DDoS attacks in response to the company's recent cut-off of The Pirate Bay.

The telco said it had to down its "customer-facing" website for about an hour last night, after it was hit by Distributed Denial of Service attacks yesterday evening.

At the time of writing the site remains offline – although VM is claiming that it is "back online" as of this morning, following "intermittent" problems overnight.

Still out of action this morning

Virgin Media gave The Register this statement:

Our website, virginmedia.com, has been the subject of denial of service attacks so we took the site offline for a short period of time. We're aware some groups are claiming the attacks are a result of the recent High Court order which requires ISPs to prevent access to The Pirate Bay.

As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders but we strongly believe that tackling the issue of copyright infringement needs compelling legal alternatives, giving consumers access to great content at the right price, to help change consumer behaviour.


It's understood that rival ISP TalkTalk, which already offers web-filtering to its punters and was ordered by a High Court judge last week to shut off access to The Pirate Bay website, has also been targeted by hackers.

TalkTalk hadn't immediately returned our request for comment at time of writing.

An Anonymous representative claimed on the group's Twitter feed that the hacktivist group had attacked Virgin Media to protest against the company's "censorship" of The Pirate Bay.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05...ite_anonymous/





Pirate Bay Scolds Anonymous Hackers For Cyberattacks On Its Behalf
Andy Greenberg

Some hackers aim to free the flow of information, while others aim to stifle it. The Pirate Bay has taken a moment to remind the hacker group Anonymous of the difference.

Anonymous has been launching a series of distributed denial of service attacks that took down the website of Virgin Media Wednesday following a court order that British internet service providers like Virgin must block access to the PirateBay.org, one of the world’s most popular source of pirated downloads.

The Pirate Bay, unexpectedly, spoke out Wednesday afternoon against the Anonymous attacks on its behalf. “We’d like to be clear about our view on this: We do NOT encourage these actions,” the Pirate Bay’s administrators wrote on its Facebook page. “We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us. So don’t fight them using their ugly methods. DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship.”

Since the order to block the Pirate Bay was announced, the site has been organizing a campaign of proxy servers it called “The Hydra Bay,” linking on its home page to instructions of how to create a proxy for the site that circumvents the British carriers’ block.

The Pirate Bay’s advice to Anonymous suggested they join that proxy effort or try something else more proactive, like supporting the artists who now advertise with the Pirate Bay under its “Promo Bay” project. ”If you want to help; start a tracker, arrange a manifestation, join or start a pirate party, teach your friends the art of bittorrent, set up a proxy, write your political representatives, develop a new p2p protocol, print some pro piracy posters and decorate your town with, support our promo bay artists or just be a nice person and give your mom a call to tell her you love her.”

One sub-group of Anonymous known as the People’s Liberation Front also attacked the branch of Anonymous attacking British ISPs, writing on that “We strongly condemn the attack on Virgin and UK ISPs as it violates the 2nd principle of Anonymous to NEVER attack infrastructure.”

A Twitter feed called Anonymous UK, which has been touting the attacks against Virgin and others, responded “Anonymous… Principles? What?”

“Virgin Media aren’t ideal targets, I agree,” the same feed wrote earlier in the day. “But I’m not the leader of Anonymous. Cry more.”

The Pirate Bay’s stance against Anonymous contrasts with that of WikiLeaks early last year, when Anonymous launched a series of website takedowns against Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Amazon and others for their payment embargo against WikiLeaks and other actions in opposition to the secret-spilling group. “We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks,” spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson wrote at the time. “We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...on-its-behalf/





Five More Dutch ISPs Given 10 Days To Censor The Pirate Bay
enigmax

Following an earlier court ruling that ordered two of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands to block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, today anti-piracy group BREIN has scored another success. The Court of The Hague has just ordered a further five ISPs to block TPB IP addresses and 20 domain names. Failure to do so within 10 days will result in fines of up to 250,000 euros.

In a case dating back to 2010, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN went to court to try and force Ziggo, the largest ISP in the Netherlands, to implement a DNS and IP address blockade of The Pirate Bay.

To avoid a negative and potentially damaging legal precedent, Ziggo was joined in the case by rival ISP XS4ALL. After legal wrangling and initial progress, during November 2011 the case went before the Court of The Hague and in January 2012 it delivered its ruling.

While the ISPs were ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay, both immediately announced they would appeal. BREIN, on the other hand, used the momentum to announce that it would sue even more ISPs to force them to censor TPB too.

Today the Court of The Hague ruled that BREIN’s latest ISP targets – UPC, KPN, Tele2, T-Mobile and Telfort – must also block The Pirate Bay.

The blocking order is broad covering 20 specific domains including ThePirateBay.org, ThePirateBay.se, ThePirateBay.com, DePiraatBaii.be and TheMusicBay.net. BREIN also asked for a total of three IP addresses to be blocked, but the Court only granted a block against two after it decided that one of addresses carried only Pirate Bay-owned content such as website images and CSS files.

A request from BREIN to be permitted to add further IP addresses and domains to the ruling was opposed by the ISPs and ultimately denied by the Court. This means that The Pirate Bay could simply add a new domain or IP-address to circumvent the block.

And that’s not the only way the blockade can be circumvented.

In a short statement welcoming the decision, BREIN said the Court’s ruling was good “for innovation and creation.”

While it’s believed that UPC, KPN, Tele2, T-Mobile and Telfort will appeal the decision, they will still have to implement the blockage in the interim period. The ISPs have 10 days to do so or face maximum fines of 250,000 euros.
https://torrentfreak.com/five-more-d...te-bay-120510/





Unblocking The Pirate Bay The Hard Way Is Fun For Geeks
enigmax

Now that The Pirate Bay is being blocked by ISPs in the UK, millions of people have a new interest in accessing the site, even if they didn’t before. The reasons for this are simple. Not only do people hate being told what they can and can’t do, people – especially geeks – love solving problems and puzzles. Unlocking The Pirate Bay with a straightforward proxy is just too boring, so just for fun let’s go the hard way round.

This week censorship of The Pirate Bay is the hot topic and inevitably online discussion has centered on the main issue – how this censorship can be circumvented.

A selection of methods were suggested by the site’s operators, all of them very easy to carry out. In fact, some of the best solutions, such as the proxy being provided by the UK Pirate Party, require absolutely no technical knowledge. Indeed, they require no thought at all.

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a brilliantly simple solutions, they are perfect for those who just want to get a job done with minimum fuss. However, to those who like to pop the hood and have a tinker, there are more interesting methods available too.

And there’s a point to making things harder than they need to be. One day – maybe next year, maybe five years on – censorship will be worse than it is now. Legislation like SOPA may have been defeated but it will be back, probably worse than ever. Preparing for the worst never hurts.

Luckily, this isn’t a tough challenge. While previous generations may have stretched their brains with a challenging crossword, the Internet generation relishes the kinds of mind-boggling puzzles thrown up by games such as Portal 2. Unblocking a website? -Yawn- Come on, that’s child’s play in comparison, so lets be a bit more obscure – just for fun.

So users of UK ISP Virgin Media can no longer access The Pirate Bay? Well, presuming you still have access to Google there are a few little tricks we can try. First, to access TPB paste this URL into your browser.

http://translate.google.com/translat...se&sl=es&tl=en

With this technique everything works apart from one key feature – the ability to search. Any attempt goes straight back to the piratebay.se domain directly which results in a Virgin block. But importantly it is possible to use The Pirate Bay’s most important resources – its index, magnet links and hash codes – without ever going to the site.

Tunnel

If you want to download Dan Bull’s song from TPB even if Virgin are blocking you, click here to search The Pirate Bay for “Sharing is Caring” using Google.

The same results as you would get on The Pirate Bay are now shown in Google’s results instead and if you hover over the correct link, Google will even show you a cached copy of the Pirate Bay page in question. Also, as you will have noticed, to make things more interesting we’ve added the term “info hash” to the search in order to make sure the hash code for Dan’s song is shown in Google’s results.

Sharing

Now, if we copy that hash code into the entry box on this site, it will kindly generate a magnet link for us. In my case clicking that magnet link will open uTorrent, and Dan’s song begins to download.

A similar result can be achieved by conducting a search like this, finding and copying the TPB URL (in this case https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7205038) into the clipboard, then pasting that here and generating a magnet link.

This magnet fetching site goes about the same task in a slightly different way.

The important thing to note here is how important hash codes and magnets are. Once a hash code is known it can be converted into a magnet. With the help of uTorrent that magnet can be converted into a torrent. Have torrent, will download.

After going through the silly long-winded exercises above, a couple of things should be clear. One, you can’t stop people accessing the resources of The Pirate Bay, even if it’s successfully blocked. Two, you can’t block text and if you can’t block text you can’t block this CF87CC0D6B0DB21D2221694EFFAE3758479AD4D1.

And if you can’t block that then the web blocking brigade have already lost.
https://torrentfreak.com/unblocking-...-geeks-120506/





BitTorrent Set To Rebrand Itself As Gyre?
Ernesto

When the latest alpha version of uTorrent was released earlier this week several users spotted something unusual in the ‘about’ window. For years the uTorrent client belonged to BitTorrent Inc., but all of a sudden ownership was being credited to an unknown company named Gyre Inc. The uTorrent team was quick to fix this ‘coding mistake,’ but they couldn’t wipe out a trail of evidence suggesting that BitTorrent might rebrand itself in the near future.

A few days ago the latest uTorrent alpha release saw the light.

Among other things, the new version aims to make downloads even faster for users with high bandwidth connections.

But there was something else quite unique about the release. Those who took a peek at the ‘about’ section saw the name of a new mysterious company. BitTorrent Inc. wasn’t listed there, but Gyre Inc.

So had uTorrent been quietly sold?

TorrentFreak contacted BitTorrent Inc. to find out more, and we were told that Gyre Inc. was listed there because of a “coding error.” The company didn’t want to confirm or deny the existence of a rebranding exercise, but did say that they “regularly test new brand and product names internally.”

This vagueness encouraged us to research the “Gyre” brand and to speculate about BitTorrent’s future.

Let’s start with some details on Gyre Inc. first. The company was registered in January of this year and lists BitTorrent Inc. CEO Eric Klinker as the service agent. The company address is identical to that of BitTorrent’s San Francisco offices.

One of the signs that points in the direction of a rebranding effort is the fact that BitTorrent Inc. copied all their BitTorrent trademarks for the term Gyre. These three Gyre trademarks cover devices, software and licensing and are identical to the existing BitTorrent trademarks.

And that’s not all.

There is also some evidence to suggest that Gyre is more than just a front for a new product. The company name already appears in the “Terms of Use” for the “Share” app released by BitTorrent Inc. a few months ago. In these same terms there’s also a reference to “SoShare”, another term trademarked by BitTorrent recently.

BitTorrent developers are also referencing Gyre in their code. In the new plugin.btapp.js for example we see several mentions. This is part of a yet-to-be-released product where web browsers can talk to uTorrent/BitTorrent via a plugin.

And what about the unusual fact that “Gyrecorp” is selling uTorrent stickers and shirts?

But perhaps the strongest support for a possible rebranding is that BitTorrent didn’t deny this when we specifically asked about it. We were informed that uTorrent and BitTorrent will continue to be released under BitTorrent Inc. But it wasn’t specified for how long.

BitTorrent Inc. wouldn’t be the first of its kind to change names. Several years ago Azureus changed its name to Vuze. This rebranding also covered the name of the BitTorrent client, but there is no indication that the uTorrent brand will disappear.

The ultimate question is of course why BitTorrent Inc. needs a new brand name to begin with. Could it be the pirate stigma? Are investors pushing for something new? Is there a sale on the horizon?

All speculation for now, but something is up for sure.
https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-...s-gyre-120505/





Facebook File-Sharing Could be Security, Piracy Nightmare

Users won't be able to pass along music or .exe files -- but infected PDFs and other forms of pirated content are permissible
Ted Samson

Facebook has started to roll out a new file-sharing capability -- and Dropbox shouldn't be the only worried party. The addition of a low-security file-sharing tool to the world's most popular social networking site could open a world of security pain on businesses and home users alike.

Facebook's new file-sharing feature enables members of Facebook Groups to upload and download files as large as 25MB, with only two file-type restrictions: no music files (such as MP3s) and no executables (files ending with ".exe"). Beyond that, everything is fair game. Facebook won't police the file swap either; it's entirely up to users to report content that's pirated or dangerous. Additionally, there are no security controls for permitting limited or full access, as you might find on Dropbox.

Facebook's descions to restrict the sharing of music files is curious, to say the least. Music companies may applaud the restriction, as it means Facebook users won't be able to readily swap pirated tunes. However, it also means that members of a Facebook music group won't be able to to share samples with fellow band members -- or a new track with their followers. Meanwhile, users will still be able to freely exchange other potentially pirated digital materials, such as e-books, digital comics, and videos. In other words, the restriction appears to have little to do with protecting musicians' intellectual property. It also means Facebook isn't introducing competition to its tight integration with Spotify.

Facebook's security case for restricting .exe files is easier to swallow, but it's hard to take seriously. Sure, it will keep cyber criminals from uploading executable malware files for would-be victims to download and open, but there's nothing to stop bad guys uploading a tantalizing, malware-infected PDF files or Word documents to a group for marks to download.

The fact that file-sharing is limited only to Facebook Groups isn't much of a security measure either. Facebook Groups are a snap to create and to join. In fact, the site lets users add their friends to groups without the need for consent. A cyber criminal would need only create a fake profile (perhaps one featuring a photo of a scantily clad female), join any number of groups, and upload infected PDF files with tantalizing, targeted names ("10 ways to advance in Game X" or "Newest script for TV Show Y") for users to download and open.

Organization with users who access Facebook already face potential security threats, as the site is a haven for cyber criminals to exploit end-user ignorance, duping them into clicking links to phishing and malware sites. This feature lets bad guys present infected files on a platter to the supposed safety of Facebook -- giving them a convenient means of duping users into infecting their machines via a platform over which IT admins have no real control.
https://www.infoworld.com/t/social-n...ghtmare-192959





DVDs and Blu-rays Will Now Carry Two Unskippable Government Warnings

The old FBI copyright warning gets an upgrade.
Nate Anderson

You know those FBI warning messages that appear at the beginning of DVDs and Blu-ray discs? They're getting an upgrade—and they're multiplying.

The US government yesterday rolled out not one but two copyright notices, one to "warn" and one to "educate." Six major movie studios will begin using the new notices this week.

The main change is that Immigrations & Customs Enforcement (ICE) has, in the last several years, made itself a key player in the copyright wars. The FBI has shown extremely limited interest in going after individual websites, but ICE has done so with gusto; it has so far seized more than 750 domain names after rightsholder complaints. This new prominence is reflected in the broader logos used.

ICE now appears on both notices. The first notice shows the traditional FBI seal and a warning that "the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement is investigated by federal law enforcement agencies and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000." The logo for ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit now appears beside the FBI's.

The second notice shows the logo for the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, which involves 20 different US government agencies. It features one extremely angry eagle who would probably pluck your eyeballs from your sockets if he could get those talons near you. "Piracy is not a victimless crime," says the notice. "For more information on how digital theft harms the economy, please visit www.iprcenter.gov."

Will the two screens be shown back to back? Will each screen last for 10 seconds each? Will each screen be unskippable? Yes, yes, and yes.

An ICE spokesman tells me that the two screens will "come up after the previews, once you hit the main movie/play button on the DVD. At which point the movie rating comes up, followed by the IPR Center screen shot for 10 secs and then the FBI/HSI anti-piracy warning for 10 secs as well. Neither can be skipped/fast forwarded through."

The idea isn't to deter current pirates, apparently (the new scheme requires all legal purchasers to sit through 20 seconds of warnings each time they pop in a film, but will be totally absent from pirated downloads and bootlegs). It's to educate everyone else. As ICE Director John Morton announced in a statement yesterday, "Law enforcement must continue to expand how it combats criminal activity; public awareness and education are a critical part of that effort."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ment-warnings/





What Various Studies Really Reveal About File-Sharing
Dangerous_Minds

Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid has an interesting look at file-sharing. It all started with a review of a Phoenix study that was used to promote SOPA. Wilson says that the study was long on wild claims and short on fact. While most writers would simply criticize the study and move on, Wilson took it a step further and looked in to what file-sharing studies have really been saying throughout the years. What he found was an impressive 19 of 20 studies not getting any coverage. He launched a large series detailing what these studies have to say on file-sharing. The first study suggests that file-sharing litigation was a failure. The second study said that p2p has no effect on music sales. The third study found that the RIAA suppresses innovation. The fourth study says that the MPAA has simply been trying to preserve its oligopoly. The fifth study says that even when one uses the methodology of one download means one lost sale, the losses amount to less than $2 per album. The studies, so far, are being posted on a daily basis and are certainly worth the read."
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/st...t-file-sharing





Village People Singer Wins a Legal Battle in Fight to Reclaim Song Rights
Larry Rohter

In a court ruling with significant implications for the music industry, a California judge has dismissed a suit by two song publishing companies aimed at preventing Victor Willis, former lead singer of the 1970s disco group the Village People, from exercising his right to reclaim ownership of “YMCA” and other hit songs he wrote.

Early last year, Mr. Willis invoked a provision of copyright law called “termination rights,” which gives recording artists and songwriters the ability to reacquire and administer their work themselves after 35 years have elapsed. The song publishers, Scorpio Music and Can’t Stop Productions, countered by arguing that Mr. Willis had no legal standing to take that or any other action because he had “no right, title or interest in the copyright” to the songs.

On Monday, Chief Judge Barry T. Moskowitz of Federal District Court in Los Angeles rejected the song publishers’ claim that Mr. Willis was not eligible to reclaim his share of ownership of “YMCA,” whose lyrics he wrote, and 32 other songs recorded by the Village People. The companies had initially argued that Mr. Willis had merely created “works for hire” while, in essence, an employee of the company that managed the group. They also claimed he could not reclaim his share of the song because a majority of the other copyright holders had not agreed, the issue that the judge’s ruling addressed.

“The purpose of the act was to ‘safeguard authors against unremunerative transfers’ and address ‘the unequal bargaining position of authors, resulting in part from the impossibility of determining a work’s value until it has been exploited,’ ” Judge Moskowitz wrote in his 10-page ruling. “Under plaintiffs’ interpretation, it would be more difficult to terminate an individual grant than it would be to make it in the first place.”

The termination rights provision was included in a revision of copyright law that went into effect in 1978, meaning that recording artists and songwriters can in 2013 begin to regain ownership of work whose control they signed away early in their careers, when they had little bargaining power. As a result, artists like Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, the Eagles and other big names from the 1970s will soon be eligible to reclaim ownership of recordings that have sold millions of copies and made millions of dollars for song publishers and the four major record companies. Sales of recorded music have dropped by more than half since 2000.

Stewart L. Levy, a lawyer for the publishing companies, wrote in an e-mail Tuesday: “It should be noted at the outset that the court decision is not a ‘big victory’ for Mr. Willis,” because it “did not determine the extent of Mr. Willis’s interests in the various compositions.”

“We predict when such a determination is made there will be little change from the current status that exists today,” he said. “The case, in short, is far from over.”

In some ways, Mr. Willis and the Village People make for an unlikely test of the termination rights provision. Unlike many of the rock and soul bands of that era, the campy, gaudily costumed Village People did not come together organically, but were assembled by producers and managers, with each member assigned a specific role. Onstage, Mr. Willis usually dressed as a police or naval officer, with his band mates appearing in Indian headdresses, a sailor’s uniform or as a motorcyclist in black leather.

“This is the first case that’s interpreting the statute that deals with termination rights,” Brian D. Caplan, Mr. Willis’s lawyer, said in a telephone interview. “The significance of the ruling is that one author who gives a grant to a publishing company has the right to recapture the copyright interest he created 35 years ago regardless of what other co-authors do or don’t do, and that the author gets back that which he created regardless of the income stream he agreed to over 35 years ago.”

Lawyers for the song publishers eventually withdrew their claim that Mr. Willis had created a “work for hire,” so that issue remains to be formally adjudicated. But Judge Moskowitz was emphatic that circumstances exist in which musical creators, meaning both songwriters and recording artists, are entitled to “recapture” their interest in a musical work after 35 years even if their original contract precluded them from doing so.

In Mr. Willis’s case, that means he regains partial ownership not just of “YMCA” but also of other hits, like “In the Navy” and “Go West,” that have been used in films, games, television, ring tones and public performances, generating millions of dollars in royalties. The song publishers had argued that Mr. Willis was entitled only to a royalty rate of 12 to 20 percent in perpetuity because that was what he agreed to in the 1970s.

“I’m extremely pleased with the court’s determination,” Mr. Willis said in a written statement issued Tuesday. “And I look forward to controlling my copyright interests in 2013, as the law provides.”
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...m-song-rights/





If VLC Can Ship a Free DVD Player, Why Can't Microsoft?
Ed Bott

Summary: Microsoft’s decision to remove support for playing DVD movies in Windows 8 has caused some confusion. If the VLC media player can provide DVD support for free, why can’t Microsoft? For starters, Microsoft isn’t French.

Microsoft announced this week that Windows 8 will not support playback of DVD movies unless you explicitly add software that supports that feature.

The economic reasons for doing so are compelling (see Microsoft’s follow-up FAQ for details), but it’s also a potentially disruptive move for some Windows enthusiasts. So it’s not surprising that some of the initial reactions have been heated and even angry.

I’ll look at the big numbers and walk through the math in a follow-up post. But I wanted to interrupt the discussion here to answer a question that several people have asked.

“Microsoft says the cost of DVD playback adds up to several dollars,” the argument goes. “But I can download the VLC player for Windows and get DVD playback for free. How come VLC can do it and Microsoft can’t?”

Welcome to the wonderful world of software licensing, where today we get to see a real-world example of the differences between commercial software and free software published under an open source license.

Any commercial product—hardware or software—that plays back DVDs has to have a license to a handful of software components that are protected by patents. In particular, you need access to the following:

• An MPEG-2 decoder. The licensing rights for the MPEG-2 standard are made up of a pool of patents contributed by their inventors. The pool itself is managed by MPEG LA, which collects and distributes royalties on behalf of the patent owners, under a master license agreement. Those rights cost $2 per device. The maker of a cheap DVD player sold at Costco pays $2 per unit for the MPEG-2 rights. Microsoft pays An OEM PC maker who licenses Windows from Microsoft must pay $2 in MPEG-2 licensing fees to enable DVD playback in every copy of Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate. [Edited to clarify payment requirements]

• Dolby Digital audio support. This decoder, which is required for DVD movie playback, has to be licensed from Dolby Laboratories, Inc. The licensing schedule isn’t public, but in its annual report for 2011 Dolby revealed that it collected $124 million in licensing fees from Microsoft for the year, with most of that revenue generated from Windows 7. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that Dolby gets at least 50 cents and as much as a dollar for every Windows PC sold.

Microsoft, Apple, Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, and other companies that make DVD players (hardware and software) have to pay those license fees for every unit they deliver to a customer, which is why you don’t see very many free DVD players.

The noteworthy exception is the VLC media player, which proudly bills itself as “a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework.” It explicitly lists DVD as a supported format.

How can that be?

Well, on its “Legal concerns” page the makers of VLC open with a proud declaration: “VideoLAN is an organization based in France,” and “French law … is the only one to be applicable.”

If you skip to the bottom of the English portion of the page, you see why that matters. This is VideoLAN’s argument:

Patents and codec licenses

Neither French law nor European conventions recognize software as patentable (see French section below).

Therefore, software patents licenses do not apply on VideoLAN software.


The two software libraries that enable DVD and Blu-ray playback in VLC are libdvdcss and libaacs, both of which get their own legal justifications (the bold-faced words are in the original):

libdvdcss is a library that can find and guess keys from a DVD in order to decrypt it.

This method is authorized by a French law decision CE 10e et 9e sous#sect., 16 juillet 2008, n° 301843 on interoperability.

NB: In the USA, you should check out the US Copyright Office decision that allows circumvention in some cases.

VideoLAN is NOT a US-based organization and is therefore outside US juridiction. [sic]

[…]

libaacs is a research project and has an interoperability purpose (see above point).

Moreover, libaacs DOES NOT provide any decryption key. It is based on the official public AACS specification only.


Update: Via Twitter, VideoLAN notes that “libaacs is not yet shipped with VLC. We are waiting for remarks from the French DRM authority.” Their comments include a link to this article (English translation).

I’m sure if one were to ask a lawyer for one of the patent holders in the MPEG-2 or AACS pools, one would get a very spirited argument about the validity of those arguments. That argument would probably invoke the anti-circumvention provisions of the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But VLC can get away with it primarily because it is a nonprofit organization based outside the reach of the United States legal system and not worth pursuing.

A maker of commercial DVD playback hardware or software would be sued in a heartbeat if they tried to distribute products based on those freeware projects. They’d also run afoul of the General Public License if they tried to include the code in their closed-source, commercial products.

But the VLC project is hardly a rogue player. In fact, as I noted in a 2010 post, Microsoft has provided financial support for VLC:

Anyone can write a media player for Windows and can build in support for whatever media formats they want. No one is “required” to use Windows Media Player—exactly the opposite….

One alternative is VLC, which I have praised before…. In an e-mail to me, one of the core developers of VLC specifically praised Microsoft last year for its assistance, noting that “Microsoft … funded our Windows 7 compatibility program participation.”


Any OEM that includes a DVD player in a new Windows 8 PC will undoubtedly include a licensed DVD Player, such as the Metro version of PowerDVD that CyberLink announced at CES earlier this year. (If PowerDVD is smart, they’ll include both the Metro and desktop versions with Windows 8.) You’ll also have an assortment of commercial programs to choose from.

The good news is that as a consumer you can count on the continued availability of VLC as a free DVD (and Blu-ray) playback alternative if you don’t want to pay for the Media Center Pack. And the project continues to evolve. Earlier this week, VideoLAN boasted via its official Twitter account: “by the time Windows 8 is out, we will have even better Blu-Ray support!”
https://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/if-v...microsoft/4962





‘Avengers’ Vanquish Box-Office Rivals
Brooks Barnes

Sorry, Harry. “The Avengers” have crushed you.

In a strong start to Hollywood’s summer movie season the superhero team in “Marvel’s The Avengers” took in about $200.3 million at North American theaters over the weekend, according to Walt Disney Studios, which released the film. That No. 1 result easily smashed what the movie industry considers the record, set last summer by “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” for the biggest opening weekend of all time. Its total was $169.2 million if you don’t account for inflation, or about $172 million if you do.

“The Avengers” — about a star squad of Marvel superheroes, including Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Captain America and Black Widow — is now on track to take in over $1 billion at the global box office, analysts estimate. This 3-D picture, directed by Joss Whedon (until now best known for creating “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), has already sold about $441.5 million in tickets overseas and has yet to open in important markets like Japan.

“I’m running low on double takes,” Dave Hollis, executive vice president for distribution at Disney, said on Sunday morning. “As the numbers came in, we kept thinking, ‘Can these numbers possibly be right?’ ”

Marvel Studios, a division of the Walt Disney Company, spent about $220 million to make the film and at least another $100 million on global marketing. The film played at 4,349 locations in North America, and 52 percent of its domestic ticket sales came from 3-D showings, which cost $3 to $5 more than standard screenings. About 60 percent of the audience was male, Mr. Hollis said.

“Euphoric” was the only way to describe theater chains, some of which reported that their ticket-selling systems became overwhelmed with demand. “Imax had one big issue: We ran out of seats to sell,” Greg Foster, president of Imax Filmed Entertainment, the programming division of the large-format film company, wrote in an e-mail on Sunday morning.

No other movie came close to “The Avengers” over the weekend. “Think Like a Man” (Sony) was second, taking in about $8 million for a three-week total of $73 million, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box-office data. “The Hunger Games” (Lionsgate) took in about $5.7 million in third place, lifting its seven-week total to $380.7 million.

“The Lucky One” (Warner Brothers) was fourth, taking in $5.5 million for a three-week total of $47.9 million, and “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” (Sony) was fifth, selling about $5.4 million in tickets for a two-week total of $18.6 million.

Several factors contributed to the enormous audience interest in “The Avengers,” starting with its quality. The movie, stuffed to the brim with special effects, has been popular with most critics, with the review-aggregation site RottenTomatoes.com rating it at 94 percent on the “fresh” scale. Audiences in exit polls gave the film a rare A-plus score, an indication that word-of-mouth was strong. The Hulk, played this time by Mark Ruffalo, has received particularly high marks.

“People come to the movies to see giant spectacles, but what really makes the difference is over-delivering on expectations,” said Kevin Feige, a producer of “The Avengers” and president of Marvel Studios. “Maybe it’s delivering a movie that is funnier than people expected or one that moves them a little bit more than they expected. Joss has accomplished that.”

Marvel also expertly orchestrated one of the longest marketing teases in Hollywood history. The studio planted the seeds for an all-star “Avengers” movie in 2008 with the release of “Iron Man,” played by Robert Downey Jr. Then a thunder god with a magic hammer, Thor (Chris Hemsworth), got his own movie, followed by Captain America (Chris Evans). Iron Man arrived with a sequel. All were worldwide hits.

This strategy, largely devised by Mr. Feige and mirroring how Marvel historically approached the publication of its comics, carried enormous risk. If even one of those prior films had flopped, “The Avengers” — envisioned as a multifilm series — would have been thrown into question.

More Marvel is on the way. Sony will release “The Amazing Spider-Man” in July. (Sony holds those rights in a long-standing deal that predates Disney’s purchase of Marvel.) “Iron Man 3” is scheduled for next May, with “Thor 2” following in November of next year. A sequel to “Captain America: The First Avenger” is planned for April 2014.

The turnout for “The Avengers” is being called a record by the movie industry even though independently verified box-office data is available going back only about 30 years. That means inflation cannot be taken into account when measuring the success of old blockbusters like “Gone With the Wind.”

Still, it marks an important win for Disney, which has struggled mightily at the box office in recent months. The studio’s last major release was “John Carter,” a failed science-fiction epic that prompted Disney to take a $200 million write-down. The company fired its movie chairman last month and has not yet announced a successor.

Hollywood will now try to keep the “Avengers” momentum going by releasing blockbusters every weekend until Labor Day, a season that typically accounts for 40 percent of the industry’s annual ticket sales. It’s a summer stuffed with promising new entries, like “Snow White and the Huntsman,” and franchises: the return of Will Smith in “Men in Black III,” “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Ice Age: Continental Drift.”

One window for armchair box-office analysts to watch in particular is Aug. 3, when two major releases will go after the same audience: “The Bourne Legacy,” the first film in that series without Matt Damon, and “Total Recall.”

The movie industry is trying hard to reverse four consecutive summers of declining attendance. Ticket sales for the summer period last year totaled $4.38 billion; attendance was about 543 million, the lowest tally since 1997. This year has been strong so far, with ticket sales up 16 percent to $3.6 billion and attendance up 18 percent.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/07/m...ce-record.html





The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent A Box Office Record
Ernesto

Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie’s profits, it’s really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage.

A week before its premiere in US movie theaters, a camcorded version of The Avengers appeared online.

Immediately thousands of fans jumped on the release and according to figures collated by TorrentFreak, in the days that followed it was downloaded half a million times. While this may very well be a record for a “CAM” movie, it failed to exceed the download numbers of several other movies that were available in higher quality.

Record or not, the movie’s distributer Disney must have been terrified by this early release. However, this weekend the suits at the studio were able to breathe a sign of relief, or rather, start popping open the Champagne.

With more than $200 million in box office revenue, The Avengers had the most successful first weekend in movie history. It broke the record set by Harry Potter last year by more than $30 million, despite the “massive” piracy.

But is this really such a big surprise? Not when you look at the numbers.

Of all the people who downloaded a pirate copy of the film about 20% came from the US. This means that roughly 100,000 Americans have downloaded a copy online through BitTorrent. Now, IF all these people bought a movie ticket instead then box office revenue would be just 0.5% higher.

Not much of an impact, and even less when you consider that these “pirates” do not all count as a lost sale.

We don’t think that there are many movie fans who see a low quality camcorded version of a movie as a true alternative to watching a film in a movie theater. The two are totally different experiences, and not direct competition at all.

If anything, downloading a camcorded movie could be compared to downloading a low quality bootleg of a concert. People who download these are collectors, passionate fans, or just curious. But in no way do these bootlegs seriously hurt concert attendances.
The same might be said for advance leaks of games. These pre-release copies are often downloaded by tens of thousands of people, but not necessarily those who refuse to pay. The people who download these buggy and sometimes hardly playable games are often curious game fanatics who tend to buy the official game when it comes out.

The claim that camcorded films are killing the movie industry is nonsense and spending millions of dollars on anti-camcording technologies is simply not worth it.

But does this mean that piracy is not an issue for the movie industry at all? Well not so fast.

A recent study showed that the US box office is not suffering from movie piracy, but that there is a detrimental effect on international box office figures. The researchers attribute this impact to the wide release gaps, which sometimes result in a high quality DVD copy being available on pirate sites while a movie is still showing in theaters.

These high quality copies are more likely to “compete” with movie theater attendance and if a movie is not showing in local theaters at all, it definitely has the potential to impact future attendance.

This is even more true for the DVD-aftermarket and VOD sales. High quality pirated copies are direct competition and can impact revenues.

The challenge for the movie industry is to make legal offerings more appealing than pirated counterparts. Of course it may not always be able to compete with “free,” but there is still a lot of ground to make up when it comes to availability and quality of legal offerings.

But in no way are camcorded copies killing the US movie industry.
https://torrentfreak.com/the-avenger...record-120508/





Cable Fee Fight Takes Another Turn as Dish Networks Uses iTunes, Netflix and Amazon as Weapons
Peter Kafka

The basic contours of the TV programmer versus pay-TV provider fight are fundamental and unchanging: The programmer tries to get more money for his stuff, the pay-TV provider says that’s too much, and the two sides chest-bump for a while.

Eventually they settle, and you, the pay-TV customer, ends up paying more.

And that’s what’s happening in the latest dustup between Dish Networks, the satellite TV service, and AMC Networks, the programmers now best known as the guys who bring you “Mad Men,” “The Walking Dead” and “Breaking Bad.”

The slight twist here: For argument’s sake, at least, Dish is saying that because AMC is selling digital versions of those shows to other outlets, its hit shows are worth less to Dish subscribers. “It’s actually devalued,” says Dish chairman Charlie Ergen.

The fact that networks are selling or giving away their stuff online has been a minor but growing issue in carriage fights for a while now. But this is the biggest stink that a cable/pay TV provider has made about it, at least in public.*

Dish first brought this up via a press statement last week, but Ergen went on about it at length today during the Dish earnings call.

It’s worth reading. I’ve cleaned up his comments just a bit for clarity (note that AMC Networks includes multiple channels, including AMC, IFC and Sundance):

We have very, very specific viewer measurement. Much more granular than somebody like Nielsen might have. So we’re able to watch our customer base and — we realize we skew a bit more rural — between [AMC Networks] programming, they have very, very low viewership, outside of a few obviously popular [shows] on AMC.

But those particular channels are also available to our customers on a variety of other sources, like iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and so on.

One of the things that programmers have done is that they’ve devalued their programming content by making it available in many multiple outlets. So, when someone asks for price increases …

We just look at it. Our customers are not really saying “We want to pay more money,” they’re saying, “We want more flexibility in our programming, and we don’t want to pay more.”

And when you look at that from a timing perspective, that’s just a contract that we can change. And we believe that the product is actually devalued. Not that there’s not some good programs, but that they’ve been devalued, because you can get it in multiple ways. And customers are asking for more flexibility, or have more flexibility to get the programming. So it’s not quite the same as something that was exclusive.

So we look at it and say, “This is a good opportunity to make a good business judgment call.” And obviously there’s a price where an [AMC Networks] product makes sense. We just don’t think that’s where we are today.


First things first: Obviously it makes the most sense to dump all of this into the “posturing” bucket, and treat it accordingly. The easy money here is to bet that, yet again, Dish and AMC will strike a deal, which Ergen, at the end of his remarks, explicitly says is on the table.

That said, a couple of points:

• Most of the big TV programmers seem to agree with Ergen’s point when it comes to free repeats of recent shows. Which is why they have been taking stuff that they’ve been giving away via outlets like Hulu, and either pulling them off the Web entirely, or requiring that customers “authenticate” — prove that they’re paying for cable or satellite TV — in order to see them without delay. Note that Dish was the first pay-TV service to participate in the Fox authentication plan last summer. (Fox is owned by News Corp., as is this Web site.)
• TV programmers don’t seem to think that iTunes’ and Amazon’s a la carte sales of shows that aired the night before are devaluing their product. Because they’re still selling them, and by all accounts there doesn’t seem to be a ton of volume for those episodes. If there was, advertisers would squawk long before pay-TV providers would.
• The really touchy subject here is what happens to prior-season episodes of AMC hits like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” on Netflix. Netflix has been arguing that these episodes are big draws for its customers, and that this is good for networks like AMC, because people discover the old shows on Netflix and then watch the new ones as they air. There is some evidence for this, too.
• But there is also evidence that Netflix repeats hurt some cable programming — like kids’ shows — too. And that leads to speculation that Viacom and Disney will pull back their shows from the service or raise prices when their contracts expire — even though Netflix is already paying big dollars for them. Netflix will have its hands on “Mad Men” and other AMC shows for at least a couple of years more. But it will be interesting to see what Dish’s complaint means for the renegotiations.

*There is also a wrinkle involving a lawsuit between Dish and a former AMC subsidiary, but that’s par for the course, too. All of these guys sue all of these guys, all the time. No recession, ever, for TV attorneys.
https://allthingsd.com/20120507/the-...on-as-weapons/





Dish: Prime Time TV, No Ads; Can They Get Away With That?
Eric Savitz

Dish Network today announced a new feature for its satellite TV subscribers that seems destined to make it the most hated company in the television business.

The new feature, called Auto Hop, is being offered as part of the company’s Hopper whole-home HD DVR system. What it does is let you automatically skip all commercials for prime time television from the four major broadcast networks when you watch the day after the programs are first aired.

“Viewers love to skip commercials,” Vivek Khemka, vice president of DISH Product Management, said in a statement. “With the Auto Hop capability of the Hopper, watching your favorite shows commercial-free is easier than ever before. It’s a revolutionary development that no other company offers and it’s something that sets Hopper above the competition.”

Hopper, launched in mid-March, allow viewers to record up to six shows at once, while playing back HD content in up to four rooms. Auto Hop extends the company’s Hopper’s PrimeTime Anytime function, which allows users to record all prime time programming on the four major networks – ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox – with one click.

Hopper stores the shows for eight days after airing. Ergo, what you get is a running set of prime-time programming, about 100 hours of prime time TV, stored on your DVR, that you can watch commercial free. Whee!

The feature allows you to start watching the shows you’ve recorded starting at 1 a.m. Eastern Time the day after a show has been recorded. Before that, you can watch using the Hopper system’s 30-second “hop forward” feature to skip through ads. Dish notes that Auto Hop does not work on live broadcasts.

Craig Moffett, who covers the cable and telco business for Bernstein Research, concludes that Dish clearly hates all advertising. (Note that Dish recently announced that it plans to drop AMC, the network best known as the home for Mad Men, from its channel line up for cost reasons.)

“At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Dish introduced a new Prime Time Anytime service that automatically records all primetime programming from the Big Four broadcast networks with the push of a button,” he notes. “Broadcasters couldn’t have been thrilled. Today, they announced that they will go a step further. Their Auto Hop feature enables subscribers to automatically skip commercials when viewing broadcast TV shows next day. (Dish wryly observes that ‘customers love to skip commercials.’)”

Moffett notes that its going to be hard for Dish to maintain good relationships with its programming affiliates when they start offering a feature intended to cut out the bulk of the affiliates’ revenues. He points out that Auto Hop is the latest in a long line of broadcaster-unfriendly (but pro-consumer) features from Dish, including the 30-second commercial skip button, and Slinbox, which let’s you watch programming outside the intended market via the Internet.

Moffett adds that whether the auto-skip feature can withstand legal challenge “remains to be seen.” He notes that the feature looks a lot like one offered by ReplayTV, a defunct company that once competed head-to-head with TiVo. Moffett recalls that ReplayTV was sued by the networks for their commercial skipping feature, but that the company went bankrupt before the case could be decided.

“Given the already long list of industry-unfriendly features promoted by Dish, one wonders if Auto Hop will be the final straw that provokes legal action from the broadcast networks,” he writes. “While we aren’t qualified to comment on the legal specifics, it’s likely that the merits of any legal action would come down to the technical specifics of how the commercial skipping takes place. The courts generally allow consumers to manipulate content that they’ve paid for as they see fit. But distribution companies can’t do the manipulating for them. We suspect Auto Hop probably uses some sort of bookmarking insertion based on automated recognition of commercial inserts (called ‘fingerprinting’), which if true could certainly be argued to be a manipulation of the content stream by the distributor.”

Dish shares are up 56 cents, or 1.9%, to $30.85.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavi...way-with-that/





TV Broadcasters Warn of Huge Industry Shakeup If Barry Diller's Aereo Isn't Stopped

After filing a copyright lawsuit against Aereo in March, broadcasters on Wednesday detailed why a preliminary injunction is warranted.
Eriq Gardner

All of the major TV broadcasters are fighting a legal battle against Aereo, an upstart company backed by Barry Diller that seeks to distribute stations online to paying customers. If Aereo is successful in fending off the lawsuit, will cable and satellite distributors shake up their own approach to delivering TV to consumers?

On Wednesday, Matt Bond, executive vp content distribution at NBCUniversal, told a New York federal court that the answer is an unequivocal yes.

"It makes little economic sense for cable systems and satellite broadcasters to continue to pay for NBCU content on a per-subscriber basis when, with a relatively modest investment, they can simply modify their operations to mirror Aereo's 'individual antenna' scheme and retransmit, for free, over-the-air local broadcast programming," Bond says in a declaration. "I know for a fact that cable companies have already considered such a model."

Bond's declaration was one of many court filings Wednesday as broadcasters seek to persuade the judge to order a preliminary injunction against Aereo's service. If that doesn't happen, the broadcasters warn that the TV industry will be totally changed -- making it less likely that broadcasters would ever pay billions of dollars for the rights to live NFL games, that retransmission negotiations between stations and cable/satellite companies could get even more contentious and that Aereo's service would threaten advertising money and piracy protection and the growth of Internet-based video on demand market. In short, they say television would never look the same.

To succeed in attaining a preliminary injunction against Aereo, the plaintiffs have to show, among other things, a likelihood of success and the prospect of irreparable injury. If the former calls for some legal nuance, the latter requires some drama about the potential revolution.

On the first point, the parties are debating the meaning of the landmark 2008 ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in content holders' fight against Cablevision over a remote-storage DVR service. That case dealt with a number of important and complex topics, including the nature of "copies" in a system that buffers, volitional control over copying and the differences between public and private performance. The appellate circuit determined that remote DVR was not a public performance and was merely acting at the behest of its users.

The broadcasters say the Cablevision decision only addressed time-shifting, not the retransmission of over-the-air broadcasts by "free-riders" like Aereo. According to the broadcasters' memorandum to support a preliminary injunction:

"Because the Second Circuit did not have before it the question of real-time streaming or whether using a buffer copy to facilitate such retransmissions has the effect of converting a public performance into a private one, there is no basis for reading Cablevision as applicable to real-time retransmissions simply because Aereo's 'device or process' employs a buffer copy and a streaming server. ... To the extent that a service provider chooses to uniquely associate a buffer with a user, Aereo's theory would allow the provider to assert that all of its obviously public performances are, therefore, 'private.' "

If that happens, the broadcasters say, it would pretty much destroy the underpinnings of the modern TV industry, including the "transmit clause" in Section 101 of the Copyright Act.

Giving his own declaration, NBCU's Bond says a victory by Aereo also would undercut another backbone of why the TV industry looks the way it does today: the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992.

This law, passed by Congress over President George H.W. Bush's veto, allowed stations to bypass "must-carry" status and elect instead to negotiate retransmission consent deals with cable and satellite operators. The 1992 law, and the 1999 follow-up for satellite companies, became the impetus behind many contentious negotiations and blackouts, most recently a dispute between Tribune and DirecTV on the opening day of Major League Baseball last month.

But Bond frames this as a good thing. Without the potential for blackouts, programmers would have no leverage to demand a portion of revenue from distributors. And he says that could influence the decisions to invest in content. As an example, he points to the $10 billion that NBCU paid to the National Football League for rights to Sunday Night Football over the next nine years, something he implies wouldn't have happened before the 1992 Act where cable systems purportedly bore no cost of productions.

"Congress recognized the inequity of that situation and that, over time, a system where television stations and networks bore the costs of production without adequate compensation would result in the end of free over-the-air television," he writes.

Bond says that if a preliminary injunction isn't handed down, it will lead to "cord cutting." And while he won't give any estimates on numbers, he says, "Once those subscribers migrate from traditional MVPDs [multichannel video programming distributors], there is no guarantee they will come back, even if Aereo's service ultimately is found to be illegal at trial."

The warnings from the broadcasters go on to wave the red flags about loss of control over new-media distribution (Aereo allegedly threatens broadcasters' licensing to Hulu or their investing in a venture to transmit signals securely to mobile platforms called DYLE), the loss of advertising revenue (the broadcasters say there is no accurate, verifiable way to measure viewership online) and the risk of piracy (as Internet transmissions are allegedly "notoriously insecure").

If cord cutting is the future of the industry, the broadcasters prefer that it be on their own pace and under their own thumb. A judge's decision on whether to grant a preliminary injunction will be coming shortly, and the stakes are pretty high.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr...casters-322989





Comcast Prioritizing Their Video Content Over Competitors Traffic, Here's The Proof
Dan Rayburn

Last year, when Comcast acquired NBC Universal they had to agree to terms as set forth by the Department Of Justice and the FCC regarding how they would treat competitive content delivered over their network. One of the points in that document says that, "Comcast shall not prioritize Defendants’ Video Programming or other content over other Persons’ Video Programming or other content." While Comcast agreed to these terms and said they would not prioritize their video traffic over someone like Netflix, that's exactly what they are doing.

Based on details I have gotten from those who have looked at how packets are marked on their home broadband connections provided by Comcast, packets are in fact being marked with Quality of Service tags. Services from MLB, Hulu and Netflix are marked with CS1 tags and Xfinity is marked as CS5. In tests, the Xfinity traffic originates from servers inside Comcast's network and the other traffic originates on Level 3 and Akamai servers outside Comcast's network. All of these QoS tags are put on by Comcast.

According to the IETF the QoS tags have the following definitions;

CS1: This service is the low class of service and effectively gets any bandwidth left after every other service has transmitted over the link. "The fundamental service offered to the Low-Priority Data service class is best-effort service with zero bandwidth assurance". This class gets any of the scraps left over after all other classes have had their packets forwarded.

CS5: This service is considered a high class of service that gets processed such that it is ensured to get forwarded: "The Signaling service class SHOULD use the Class Selector (CS) PHB, defined in [RFC2474]. This service class SHOULD be configured to provide a minimum bandwidth assurance for CS5 marked packets to ensure they get forwarded."


All Internet traffic from at least the cable modem termination system to the home cable modem shares exactly the same path. There is no "private IP network" between those points. While I don't know how the Comcast servers that deliver the Xfinity traffic connect to the cable modem termination system, and while that part could be part of a private network, I think that's unlikely.

The part of the network from the cable modem termination system to the homes is usually the most congested and that equipment in the cable modem termination system is capable of acting on those QoS tags and so could treat the traffic differently. What I don't know is if they are treating the two tags differently, but the tags are there. If they aren't making use of them why are they adding them?

And if they are using them I think you could then make a reasonable assertion that the spirit, if not the letter, of the DoJ statement is being broken by Comcast. I've put in a request to Comcast to see if they want to address this and will update the post once I hear back.
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_b...t-traffic.html





Netherlands Passes Net Neutrality Law, First Among EU Nations
Vlad Savov

People in the Netherlands have reason to celebrate today, following the expected passing into law of new net neutrality regulation. The legislation in question was agreed upon back in June last year, but it's only on Tuesday that the nation's second legislative chamber gave its blessing to the move, making everything official. Under the new law, mobile internet providers like KPN won't be able to charge for access to particular services like Skype or throttle traffic through them — both techniques that the company was intent on using to manage its mobile traffic.

Some exceptional reasons, such as network congestion and security, are allowed for slowing down users' connections, but the general thrust of the law is that operators ought to be blind to the traffic they carry and treat all of it equally. Dutch lobbying group Bits of Freedom also notes that the net neutrality law includes anti-wiretapping provisions, making it unlawful to use deep packet inspection on users' internet communications without their express consent or a legal warrant. All in all, it's a good day for privacy and internet freedom in the Netherlands, now how about we spread the good cheer throughout the whole European Union?
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/9/300...-passes-senate





Worried About Online Porn? Don't Regulate the Net – Regulate Your Kids

Once again, people are pushing for ISPs to apply filters. Such technical 'solutions' approach the problem from the wrong angle
Charles Arthur

The sight of David Cameron weighing into the "internet porn filters" debate – in a move nicely timed to distract the Conservative press from the uncomfortable news of Tory councillors losing seats by the score – isn't exactly one to fill the more web-savvy with confidence. Let's point out first that we've been here before, back in October, when Cameron proposed exactly the same idea: that people taking out new contracts with internet service providers (ISPs) should have to opt in to being able to "access porn". The idea then was that the "big four" ISPs – BT, TalkTalk, Virgin and Sky, who cover 17.6m of the more than 19m broadband users in the UK – would let people tick (or untick) a box when they got a new contract.

That time, the proposal emerged from a Cameron meeting with the Mothers' Union. This time, it came from a breakfast conference. This time, there is also the background mood music of a restive right wing in the Tory party unhappy at setbacks and compromise, and the boombox backing of Claire Perry, a Tory MP who chaired an independent inquiry into online child protection. Perry has been calling loudly for filtering of some sort, saying: "We know the current model is failing [and] we need [the ISPs] to acknowledge there is a problem, and we need to do that quickly."

She's not wrong about one thing: there is a problem with internet pornography. The problem, however, isn't that it's too easy to access. The whole idea of the internet is to make things easy to access. Just in case Perry has forgotten, the internet was originally designed as a network that would be robust against a nuclear attack; I don't think even her ire quite matches that. So as long as there is pornography online (and that's going to be forever), people will be able to access it. Furthermore: porn merchants being what they are, they'll try to get their products in front of people as much as they can. And at the other end, you have a lot of adolescent boys who might be underage, but still managed to get their teenage kicks even in the days of print. Put those two at opposite ends of the internet, and nothing short of a direct meteorite hit will stop them connecting.

The Daily Mail, which has been banging the drum for Perry increasingly loudly, may or may not know this truth. Paul Dacre, its editor, hasn't shown much inclination to engage with the internet, beyond dismissing "the Twitters". Yet even as the paper hailed Cameron's move on Friday, it did hold it in a pair of tongs, carefully putting quotes in a headline which said "Internet porn: PM steps in to 'safeguard children'".

So what is the problem with internet pornography? It's that too many parents (and by proxy MPs) think the solution is to regulate the internet, when the answer is to regulate the children – or better still the parents. I write this as a parent with children of both sexes. Frankly, I'm amazed by the tales of parents who let their children have TVs or computers in their bedroom. First of all, it's like telling them not to socialise with you; and it's by socialisation that we work out what we do and don't accept as sensual, and sexual, and pornographic (and where the line lies). Watching TV together means you can discuss what you're watching. Having computers in shared spaces (effectively banning solitary use), using the filtering systems that they have built in – these are solutions that work. They don't need legislation; they don't need complicated filters that will be routed around in a flash (try a search on "VPN filter evade"); they just need to be part of the family. You can't turn off the internet, nor make its denizens respectable (ask Louise Mensch). You can, however, turn off the computer, or explain respectability to your child.

That of course is probably too much to ask. There will be louder calls for filters, even though applying it only to those who change contract will take decades to permeate through (only 5% of people change contract per quarter, and 5 million have never changed).

And even then, once the filters are in place, there will still be a site offering endless pictures of women in bikinis, or see-through dresses, or "hooker heels", to tantalise salivating boys and offer a demeaning message for girls. No, the Daily Mail's website won't fall foul of those filters. Consider that, Claire Perry.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...e-kids-not-net





Viewing Child Porn on the Web 'Legal' in New York, State Appeals Court Finds
M. Alex Johnson

Viewing child pornography online isn't a crime, the New York Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday in the case of a college professor whose work computer was found to have stored more than a hundred illegal images in its Web cache.

The court dismissed one of the two counts of promoting a sexual performance of a child and one of the dozens of counts of possession of child pornography on which James D. Kent was convicted. The court upheld the other counts against Kent, an assistant professor of public administration at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Kent — who said at his sentencing that he "abhorred" child pornography and argued that someone else at Marist must have placed the images on his computer — was sentenced to one to three years in state prison in August 2009.

The decision rests on whether accessing and viewing something on the Internet is the same as possessing it, and whether possessing it means you had to procure it. In essence, the court said no to the first question and yes to the second.

"Merely viewing Web images of child pornography does not, absent other proof, constitute either possession or procurement within the meaning of our Penal Law," Senior Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick wrote for a majority of four of the six judges.

"Rather, some affirmative act is required (printing, saving, downloading, etc.) to show that defendant in fact exercised dominion and control over the images that were on his screen," Ciparick wrote. "To hold otherwise, would extend the reach of (state law) to conduct — viewing — that our Legislature has not deemed criminal."

Read the full appeals court ruling (.pdf)

In other words, "the purposeful viewing of child pornography on the internet is now legal in New York," Judge Victoria A. Graffeo wrote in one of two concurring opinions that agreed with the result but not with the majority's reasoning.

Kent's attorney, Nathan Z. Dershowitz, told msnbc.com that he hadn't yet had a chance to talk to his client, so he couldn't discuss what they would do next. But he agreed with Graffeo that the ruling means that "in New York, there is no crime" in simply viewing child pornography.

All of the judges agreed that child pornography is an abomination, but they disagreed whether it was necessary to "criminalize all use of child pornography to the maximum extent possible," as Ciparick wrote in the majority opinion. The majority said that was up to the Legislature, not the courts, to decide.

Judge throws out child porn charge against Washington man

The technical details revolve around copies of deleted files that remained in the cache of Kent's Web browser, which were the basis of the two counts that were dismissed. They were discovered, along with other materials, during a virus scan that Kent had requested because his computer was running slowly.

To demonstrate possession of the images in the cache, "the defendant's conduct must exceed mere viewing," Ciparick wrote, adding that "the mere existence of an image automatically stored in a cache" isn't enough.

Furthermore, the prosecution failed to prove that Kent even knew his Web browser had a cache in the first place, writing, "A defendant cannot knowingly acquire or possess that which he or she does not know exists."

Dershowitz said the "real problem here is that legislation is not keeping up with technology," arguing that federal courts also haven't fully addressed the legal standing of images stored only in a browser cache.

The federal statute outlawing possession of child pornography — 18 USC 2252A — doesn't mention browser caches. The few cases that have examined the issue at the federal level — notably a 2002 federal appeals case involving a Utah man and a 2006 federal appeals case involving a visitor to Las Vegas — generally conclude that cached images alone can establish possession if the defendant knows about the browser's caching function.

Both courts noted that it was hypothetically possible for the defendants to be innocent if they were ignorant of the cache function.

"Those statutes are probably not quite as incomprehensible, but they are anything but clear," Dershowitz said.

Kent's convictions on the other counts rested on other evidence, including a folder on his machine that stored about 13,000 saved images of girls whom investigators estimated to be 8 or 9 years old and four messages to an unidentified third party discussing a research project into the regulation of child pornography.

"I don't even think I can mail the disk to you, or anyone else, without committing a separate crime. So I'll probably just go ahead and wipe them," one of the messages said.
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20...urt-finds?lite





Nobody Seems to Understand What Jeff Bezos is Doing. Does He?
Farhad Manjoo

A couple months ago, realizing it would be futile to hold out any longer against the tsunami of pop cultural peer pressure, I decided to go ahead and read The Hunger Games. I jumped over to Amazon, searched for the Kindle edition, and I was presented, as usual, with a page infested with ugly strikethroughs. This is Amazon’s way: Jeff Bezos will never just show what you’re going to pay when you buy something from his site. He also wants to make sure you know what you’re not paying. When you buy The Hunger Games for your Kindle, you won’t pay $14.99, the publisher’s suggested digital price. You also won’t pay $8.99, the publisher’s suggested price for the paperback—which happens to be what Barnes & Noble will charge you a Nook version of The Hunger Games.

What will you pay? Either $5 or, surprisingly, $0. The zero price is one of Bezos’ newer pricing tricks. You see it pop up all over the Kindle Store and Amazon Instant Video. Not only does Bezos want to make sure you know what you’re not paying, he also wants you to see what you could be paying. For books, the free deal is part of the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, a plan that Amazon unveiled last September to criticism from the publishing industry. If you own a Kindle device and if you subscribe to Amazon’s $79-a-year Prime plan, you can get The Hunger Games and thousands of other books for no money at all. The company did not receive permission from many authors and publishers to include their books in the program; instead, when you get a “free” book under the lending program, Amazon simply pays the publisher for the book on your behalf.

This can be pretty confusing for readers—I’m a Prime member and I own a Kindle, but I wanted to read this book on my iPad, so when I went to click Buy, I really wasn’t sure what I was paying. (I think I paid $5).

But there’s something even more perplexing about Amazon selling The Hunger Games and other huge bestsellers for free. The Kindle lending program upends the conventional wisdom about Bezos’ business goals for e-readers. Most people think that Amazon is selling Kindle devices at cost in order to make a profit on the sales of books and movies. But if Amazon is also giving away a lot of media for free—4 of the Top 10 books in the Kindle Store can be had for free under the Kindle lending program—then what is its business model for Kindle?

Giving away the razor to make money on the blades is a well-known strategy. But giving away the razor and the blades in order to make money on a subscription loyalty program as a way to sell everything else? Is that Amazon’s real goal with the Kindle—is Amazon in the device business only to sell Prime subscriptions, which the company sees as a key accelerant for sales across the rest of its site? And if that’s the case, how well is that circuitous business model working out? Is the Kindle helping to sell Prime? And are those Kindle-fueled Prime subscriptions moving more sales across the rest of the company’s inventory?

To tell you the truth, I have no idea. Nobody outside Amazon does. What struck me when I saw the zero price for The Hunger Games is that I simply don’t know what Amazon is up to with the lending library. This is not a novel sensation: I am frequently flummoxed by Amazon, the most inscrutable of all the companies I cover regularly. Amazon is the one major tech firm whose operations, investments, and short- and long-term goals are completely hidden from the reporters and analysts who try to watch its every move.

It’s not just that Amazon is secretive. There are lots of secretive companies—Apple, of course, tops the list—but if you watch even the most tight-lipped firms, you can usually get a sense of the general parameters of their behavior. Everyone understands the basic way that Apple is looking to make money—sell a lot of beautiful things at a high margin—and for all its theatrical secrecy, the company usually dishes out straight and detailed answers about its core businesses. (Want Tim Cook’s perspective on carriers’ incentives to subsidize the iPhone? He spent many minutes elaborating on it in Apple’s last earnings call.)

Amazon, by comparison, is a black box. It’s got so many different businesses across so many different product types—it just opened a store that will sell you industrial supplies, it bought a company that makes robots, it’s looking to produce movies and sitcoms, and somewhere in there it also sells books and music and computers and refrigerators and server space and on and on—that it’s difficult to discern any of the company’s essential goals.

We don’t know where Amazon expects to make money from in the future. Indeed, we barely know where Amazon makes money from now. The company refuses to divulge even the most basic stats about its business. Amazon’s earnings calls are a comedy of opacity and misdirection; you’d have a better chance getting a guard at Buckingham Palace guard to crack a smile than to get an Amazon exec to accidentally tell you about the company’s business.

The firm won’t say anything about how many Kindles it sells, which models are the most popular, and whether or not the Fire has eaten into sales of the E-Ink devices. It won’t disclose anything about the number and value of Prime memberships. It won’t say anything about where its profits come from.

I sometimes wonder if Tom Skutak, Amazon’s CFO, has to practice new ways of saying no on the company’s earnings calls. Among his favorite rejections: “I can’t.” “Not a lot I can comment.” “Not a lot I can do.” “Not a lot I can help.” “Not a lot I can add.” “Stay tuned.”

For now, Amazon’s opacity seems to be working. Look at its recent earnings calls and you see that analysts have quit asking important questions about its business. Skutak wasn’t even asked about Prime subscriptions during the company’s last call—this despite a recent report from Bloomberg showing that the firm has only 3 to 5 million members, half the number that some analysts had predicted. IDC says that sales of the Kindle Fire plunged in the first quarter, and E-Ink suppliers have seen a major shortfall in their business. But because they knew Amazon had no intention of disclosing Kindle sales, analysts didn’t even ask about the numbers. How well is the Kindle Lending Library doing? Is it prompting Kindle sales, or Prime sales? Nobody wanted to know.

Jeff Bezos once famously declared that, in the service of innovation and its long-term success, Amazon is “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” He was being a bit modest there; Amazon is not merely “willing” to be misunderstood, it often tries to actively sow widespread misunderstanding. This works it its advantage; if competitors don’t know what Amazon is up to, if they can’t even figure out where and how it aims to make money, they’ll have a harder time beating it.

But all this misunderstanding can’t be an unalloyed good. Amazon is so opaque, with so many mysterious businesses and revenue streams, that you’ve got to wonder whether the people who work there even understand what it’s up to. In business, simplicity often wins. Selling me a device to get me to buy a membership in order to get a book for free. Is Bezos crazy like a fox? Or is he just plain crazy? We have no idea.
http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/05/nob...doing-does-he/





Kindle Sales Plummet, And That Sucks
Jon Mitchell

Paulo Santos (who is short AMZN) has a great post on Seeking Alpha about the nasty secret hidden in Amazon's otherwise-strong Q1 earnings. The reason Amazon's razor-thin margins look just the teensiest bit better is that sales of the break-even Kindle have fallen off a cliff. Is e-ink doomed? We sure hope not.

Amazon never, ever talks about how many Kindles it sells. That's what lots of tech companies do when their devices aren't selling. So Santos did the sensible thing and looked for clues lower down the supply chain.

Sure enough, E Ink Holdings, the world's biggest e-ink display manufacturer - with Amazon as its best customer - just reported its first quarterly loss in more than two years. Here's chairman Scott Liu, quoted by the Taipei Times:

"Our major customer was too optimistic about its sales in the fourth quarter of last year and ordered too much from us. That made the customer order almost nothing from us in the first quarter."

What went wrong? Santos says the Kindle Fire cannibalized the e-ink Kindle sales. That's possible, but it's not proven. The timing is telling, though. Amazon has had to order few if any new e-ink screens since the Fire was introduced. Two great new e-ink Kindles also were introduced at the same time. That doesn't smell good for the Kindle line.

Santos put the pieces together and calculated that Amazon averaged 7 million e-ink Kindles per quarter. According to his model, sales must have fallen by 75% or more if Amazon needed no new screens last quarter.

Santos discloses that he is short AMZN, and he wants to portray this news as the "imminent failure of Amazon.com's strategy to dominate the e-reader space." It sure doesn't look rosy. The Kindle Fire may have killed the Kindle, and now Kindle Fire sales have tanked, too.

But the failure of the Kindle would be a shame. The basic e-ink Kindle is a great device, and there's a need for it. It's light, it's inexpensive, it lasts for a month on one charge (according to my own extensive field tests), you can read it outside (unlike a smudgy glass tablet), and you don't have to worry about it, like you do an iPad, one obvious competitor to the Amazon way of reading.

It would be sad if fascination with sexy, heavy, expensive full-color iPads (and other tablets that belong in parentheses) drove out the e-ink reader. Its simplicity is its killer feature. Maybe Microsoft's new partnership with Barnes & Noble will help turn things around for the e-ink Nook, but that just doesn't look like the way the trend is going.

Then again, Amazon's walled garden of e-books isn't ideal, anyway. What we really need is the best $100, third-party, DRM-free, hackable e-ink reader imaginable.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...that-sucks.php





What is Privacy Simplified?

Privacy policies are complicated, and we believe that you should know what's happening with your data when you use a service. In order to help, we've created a set of icons which cover the core components of any policy. Welcome to Privacy Simplified.

If you are a service:
Click here to create your own icon set!

If you are a person concerned about privacy:
Click here to learn more about the icons! Or click here to see how popular websites' privacy policies rate.
http://yale.edu/self/psindex.html





File-Sharing Church Weds First Couple
Ernesto

Earlier this year the Church of Kopimism was approved by the authorities as an official religion. Since then, the movement has gathered thousands of believers across the world and two of them have now entered into a “Kopimist” marriage. The Church encourages the newlyweds to “copy and remix some DNA-cells and create a new human being.”

All around the world file-sharers are being chased by anti-piracy outfits and the authorities. But while copyright holders are often quick to label file-sharers as pirates, there is a large group of people who actually consider copying to be a sacred act.

To emphasize the holiness of copying, philosophy student Isaac Gerson started the Church of Kopimism in Sweden. After a rough start with two failed applications, the new religion was finally recognized by the authorities in January.

For a church that holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols it is no surprise that the word of this new religion spread quickly. In recent months it expanded globally, from the United States to Estonia. All followers believes that copying and sharing is the most beautiful thing in the world.

This belief in sharing is not restricted to files, code and information, but also applies to love. It was only a matter of time before the first Kopimist couple would become married, and last weekend this joyful union took place at the Share conference in Belgrade.

On stage, a Romanian woman and an Italian man were joined in a holy Kopimist act. Both promised to share the rest of their lives together and to uphold the highest sharing standards.

The Church was delighted to bring the news and commented: “We are very happy today. Love is all about sharing. A married couple share everything with each other.”

Like any other matrimony, a Kopimism marriage is bound by rules. The Church of Kopimism allows the couple to share their love with others, as long as those others don’t steal it. Most importantly, however, they have to copy and remix themselves.

“Hopefully, they will copy and remix some DNA-cells and create a new human being. That is the spirit of Kopimism. Feel the love and share that information. Copy all of its holiness.”

Or to put it in the words of another famous religion.

“Be fruitful and multiply, teem on the earth and multiply in it.”

Amen.

https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharin...couple-120507/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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