Does the U.S. government’s shuttering of the file-sharing website Megaupload.com show that new laws are not needed to battle intellectual property piracy? Brookings’s Allan Friedman believes it does.
“Given that the U.S. authorities have just used existing law, I think the answer is a resounding yes,” Friedman says in an interview with Information Security Media Group. He’s a fellow in governance studies and research director of the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings, a Washington think tank.
Federal authorities on Thursday charged the operators of Megaupload with violations of numerous conspiracy laws for pirating copyrighted music. The charges came as Congress suspended consideration of the Senate’s Protect Intellectual Property Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act because of public objections of provisions of the bills. Opponents contend the legislation would violate Internet freedom. To protest the legislative proposals, a number of websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, staged temporary blackouts this week.
“The interesting thing is that these lockers (such as Megaupload.com), as they’re called, have been cited as reasons why we need these new laws,” Friedman says. But he points out that existing laws, such as those used by federal authorities this week, seem to be adequate.
The charges against Megaupload’s leaders provoked the hacker collective Anonymous to launch on Thursday denial-of-service attacks at Justice Department and FBI websites as well as those of the motion picture and recording industries’ trade associations (see Hackers Target DoJ, FBI Websites).
Read more…
A scrappy rebel alliance launches jury-rigged space weapons in the hope of defeating a monolithic empire that’s put the choke hold on freedom.
Sound like a space opera you might’ve seen a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away?
Actually, it’s the latest imagined scenario to arise from one of Europe’s major hacking conferences, which just wrapped up its 2011 edition in Berlin.
As the BBC’s David Meyer reports, SOPA-hating hackers at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress (or 28C3) are hatching a plan to develop a DIY satellite-communications network that could keep the Internet alive and unfettered in the face of any government effort to pull the plug.
“The first goal is an uncensorable Internet in space,” Meyer quotes hacktivist Nick Farr as saying. “Let’s take the Internet out of the control of terrestrial entities.”
Read more…
Piracy of films, music and innovative technology is stunting creativity in the UAE, experts say.
The Ministry of Economy plans to restructure the intellectual property system and bring in new copyright laws, following a study by the Abu Dhabi Technology Development Committee expected to be released this month.
The plans include streamlined licensing with reduced bureaucracy, and tougher policing, with special intellectual piracy courts.
Industry specialists say drastic changes are needed to protect intellectual property rights, particularly in music, film, technology, book publishing and television.
David Butorac, chief executive of OSN Network, the cable and satellite operator, said pay-TV piracy in the Mena region cost operators more than US$500 million (Dh1.8bn) a year in lost revenue.
Governments must recognise the true cost of piracy, which “is too often seen as a victimless crime”, he said. TV piracy affected the broadcaster’s ability to invest in expanding the local production industry, which in turn made it harder to compete with the rest of the world.
Read more…
Bloggers rejoice! No longer will the recording, movie and software industries retain exclusive rights to the FBI’s familiar anti-piracy logo.
The “FBI Anti-Piracy Warning Seal,” which has been draped on Big Content’s wares since 2004, is going to be made available for use on all copyright content. Even personal websites can proudly display the logo without violating federal law, which carries a maximum six-month sentence and other penalties for using the insignia without FBI approval.
The FBI has only allowed its use by members of the Recording Industry Association of America, Business Software Alliance, Entertainment Software Association, Software & Information Industry Association, and of course the Motion Picture Association of America, which likes to make sure you can’t fast-forward through the DVD while the warning is displayed, thus driving you to download an MPEG from the Pirate Bay.
The Justice Department is taking public comment on the proposed new rule through November 7, and the changeover will likely be approved by the attorney general soon thereafter.
The FBI, in announcing the proposal in the Federal Registrar on Wednesday, said the insignia was an important warning to “users of copyrighted media about the potential consequences of intellectual property crime, and the FBI’s role in investigating such crime. It serves as a vivid and widely recognizable reminder of the FBI’s authority and mission with respect to the protection of intellectual property rights.”
Read more…
Graphic designer and creative coder Frederic Brodbeck has analyzed movies to create a visual “fingerprint” for them, analyzing information such as editing structure, color, speech or motion and transforming them into graphic representations that can be compared side by side.
The project, called Cinemetrics, was for Brodbeck’s thesis in generative design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Brodbeck recognized that there were already lots of infographics using metadata related to movies, such as budget, box office data and awards. However, he was keen to use the movie itself as a source of data and create visualizations that captured the movies in their entirety.
Brodbeck disassembled video files into their components — video, audio, subtitles — and then processed them frame by frame, detecting when a shot ended, how much movement there is in the scene, and the colors used within the scene. These were fed into visualizations that are much more interactive and detailed than the likes of the Moviebarcode project, which Wired.co.uk reported on a few months ago.
The resulting “fingerprints” look a little like pie charts. The size of the pie corresponds to the length of the film. The segments of the fingerprint correspond to the length of the shots within the film. You can view the overall colors used in the entire movie, and broken down by each chapter. The amount that the segments move reflects the amount of movement in that scene. You can even click on the chart to see the particular frames that have been analyzed.
Read more and watch video…
A possible landmark ruling in one of the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. may spell the end of the “pay-up-or-else-schemes” that have targeted over 100,000 Internet users in the last year. District Court Judge Harold Baker has denied a copyright holder the right to subpoena the ISPs of alleged copyright infringers, because an IP-address does not equal a person.
In the last year various copyright holders have sued well over 100,000 alleged file-sharers in the United States alone. The purpose of these lawsuits is to obtain the personal details of the alleged infringers, and use this information to negotiate a settlement offer ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.
Lawyers, the public and consumer advocacy groups have compared these practices to extortion, but nonetheless new cases are still being filed every month. This week, however, an interesting ruling was handed down by District Court Judge Harold Baker that, if adopted by other judges, may become a major roadblock for similar mass-lawsuits.
In the case VPR Internationale v. Does 1-1017, the judge denied the Canadian adult film company access to subpoena ISPs for the personal information connected to the IP-addresses of their subscribers. The reason? IP-addresses do not equal persons, and especially in ‘adult entertainment’ cases this could obstruct a ‘fair’ legal process.
Read more…
TWO hours before the NRL season kicked off, a young hacker was politely told to shut down his illegal website which had been streaming live matches – or face going to jail.
The NRLfixit.com.au website was started last season by a Rozelle youngster just out of high school.
In two days, “Liam” – as he wants to be known – had 6000 members and by the end of last season the number had grown to 12,000. He believed he would have tripled that this year.
Flushed with the success of his site, the young entrepreneur moved from amateur hacker to budding businessman and began looking for sponsors.
But NRL officials were not impressed.
“Organisations pay large sums of money for the rights to televise these matches,” NRL spokesman John Brady said. “And, like any brand, we have to protect ourselves and our clients against piracy.”
Read more…
The White House’s top intellectual property official wants stiffer prison sentences for those found guilty of crimes such as selling counterfeit goods for military or law enforcement use, and she also wants illegal streaming of online content to be made a felony level crime when appropriate.
The recommendations were among a set of 20 suggestions Victoria Espinel made to Congress on Tuesday.
Espinel called on lawmakers to pass legislation requiring tougher sentences for organized crime groups and gangs that deal in counterfeit goods or commit other IP crimes, as well as for repeat offenders.
“Because of the high profit margin and shorter prison sentence for intellectual property crimes compared to other offenses, piracy and counterfeiting are a strong lure to organized criminal enterprises, which can use infringement as a revenue source to fund their other unlawful activities,” Espinel wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
She also wants lawmakers to enact longer sentences for people who transfer trade secrets outside of the U.S. or peddle counterfeit drugs.
Read more…
Of course, it seems like this ad was placed in the wrong section. Why put it in “services offered” rather than job opportunities? It doesn’t look like Craigslist charges for job ads in San Antonio (as it does elsewhere), so it’s not to avoid the fees.
Either way, the actual website this points to, PiracySurveillanceJob.com is somewhat entertaining. Apparently, the whole thing involves a California-based company. The application page notes that any work you do will be “under the direction and license” of a California Private Investigator named Wayne & Associates, which appears to be owned by a guy named Randy Cervantes in LA.
As for how much the job pays, apparently, it’s based on how many venues you can find showing PPV events who haven’t paid up on your given night, and it works as follows:
With leads provided to you:
With a video: $100
W/out a video: $75
Self generated leads you come up with:
With a video: $175
W/out a video: $150
Also, to prove that people actually get paid, they’ve posted a pdf of checks to people, with some identifying information redacted (not very well, actually). They also list a Twitter account you can follow for “discrete notifications” of future jobs, but of course, all of the followers of that account (13 as of this posting) are listed publicly.
Read more…
Indian private investigator Rajesh Ji, who dabbles in dancing on Sundays, is the main character of a memorable documentary that offers a glimpse into the life of India’s middle class.
“The Bengali Detective,” which was presented at the 27th festival of independent cinema here by British director Philip Cox, was popular among those attending the event, which could earn it an award on Saturday night.
Cox installed his camera in Calcutta, in the office of Rajesh, one of countless private investigators working in India.
“All classes use the detective, because all classes in India are not trusting the police,” Cox told AFP.
“The rich can pay, pay bribes, but the people using the detectives, mostly are the middle class.” he continued.
Read more…
If there was ever any doubt that the war on piracy was going to escalate this year, just look at how a new study out last week from research firm MonitorMark was received.
Sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the study found that 21 billion of the 53 billion visits per year that come to sites identified as sources of copyright-infringing content were concentrated among just three companies: Rapidshare(), Megavideo and MegaUpload(). Not long after the Motion Picture Association of America issued a press release hailing the study, Rapidshare threatened to sue MonitorMark for defamation, while MegaUpload dismissed it as “overblown allegations.”
The dueling rhetoric underscores the sensitivity over a very distinct shift away from the Bittorrent sites where the rate of piracy has leveled off, to a new breed of file-hosting websites that are seeing explosive growth. That shift has necessitated a redrawing of content owners’ battle plans. Here’s a look at the likeliest new fronts in the war on piracy in 2011.
File hosting sites come in a few different flavors. There are cyberlockers, which provide cloud-based storage to consumers who pay monthly fees to store what the studios claim is an ungodly trove of copyrighted content. Companies like Rapidshare would beg to differ, depicting themselves as legitimate companies that are working on ridding their sites of what little pirated content they host.
There are also linking sites, which provide users with links to either stream or download content but don’t actually host that content. And then there are storefronts, which essentially provide both hosting and linking, sometimes with interfaces so slick they can fool unsuspecting customers into thinking they are legit.
Read more…
International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) Secretary General Jean-Guy Carrier will join French Economy, Finance and Industry Minister Christine Lagarde at the opening of the Sixth Global Congress on Combating Counterfeiting and Piracy in Paris on 2 February 2011 to address the question of building respect for intellectual property in a balanced and sustainable way.
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Director General Francis Gurry and his counterparts at INTERPOL, Ronald Noble, and the World Custom’s Organization (WCO), Kunio Mikuriya, are also billed to address delegates during the opening ceremony.
A number of ministers from around the world are expected to attend the Congress, in addition to other top government officials and corporate leaders, according to ICC.
Hosted by France’s Industrial Property Office (INPI) and chaired by WIPO, the Congress is co-convened by INTERPOL and the WCO, in co-operation with ICC through its BASCAP initiative, and the International Trademark Association (INTA). The Congress is being held under the High Patronage of the President of the French Republic.
Read more…
