Category Archives: Legal

Stop CISPA: A Video from Anonymous

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Dear citizens of the internet,

We are Anonymous.

The United States Government is again attempting to control and censor the internet. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act has just recently passed the house.

This bill would allow major internet entities such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google to voluntarily share your personal information with the U.S. Government. This will not only effect users in the United States, but also anyone with an account with these companies.

This upcoming Monday, April the 22nd, we invite you to join Anonymous in a internet blackout. We encourage all web developers and website owners to go dark on this date. Display a message as to why you are going dark, and encourage others to do the same.

We hope, just like the successful protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act, we can encourage the senate to stop this bill.

Spread the message, and inform the world.

We are Anonymous
We are the people
We are the internet

Knowledge is free

New Piracy Defense: You Didn’t Stop Me

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Ok, this guy got the shit end of the stick when the courts ordered him to pay $675k for violating copyrights. Kudos to the courts, though, for treating music piracy like the real violation it is.

Well, in a new twist, grad student Joel Tenenbaum – in hopes for getting a new trial – is putting the blame on the record labels for selling “DRM-free CD’s [that make] the proliferation of their recordings on the peer-to-peer networks trivially easy.”

Doesn’t this guy wish he settled for $5k like he was offered to begin with?

ISOHunt Guilty of Copyright Violations

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Wendy Davis at Mediapost reports this morning that IsoHunt, the popular torrent search engine, has been cited for copyright infringement and intentionally encouraging piracy.

In a similar case last year, torrent search engine TorrentSpy was ordered to pay $110 million in damages to the MPAA.

It appears to this Hobo that the “search engine defense” is no longer going to hold up when all you index is copyrighted material. The judge decided that the “safe harbor” statutes, in this case, did not apply, as they require, “passive good faith conduct aimed at operating a legitimate internet business,” which he did not see.

Comcast Settles Throttling Suit for $16 mil

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Wendy Davis at Mediapost reports that Comcast has agreed to settle the class action lawsuits regarding bandwidth throttling for up to $16 million.

The FCC had accused Comcast of violating their net neutrality principles by slowing or blocking peer-to-peer traffic on their network.

The settlement allots for a maximum of $16 credit to people affected. Frankly, I just don’t get it. $16 million isn’t much money to a company like Comcast (buying NBC for $30 BILLION…paying their COO $20 mil over 5 years), and $16 whole dollars doesn’t seem like much when my monthly cable bill is nearing $200. Is it even worth anyone’s time to go through this crap?

Comcast did not have to admit any wrongdoing, but is protected from additional lawsuits moving forward.

Fox Reviewer Canned For Wolverine Write Up

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So ridiculous. Maybe it showed bad judgment, but in this day and age of “scoop or be scooped,” I’m baffled at the firing of Fox News columnist Roger Friedman.

The friggin’ movie is available online. Sure its incomplete and lacking some special effects, but it seems that the punishment doesn’t quite fit the crime here. Glad that its OK for bloggers (for now) to point out what is floating around in cyberspace, even if the mainstream media can’t. Apparently you can only write about the fact that the movie has been stolen and is actively being distributed, but you can’t comment on whether the movie is any good.

Hell, I wrote about how many bad versions of Star Wars had been leaked. Took me at least 5-6 tries before I found a copy without a timecode, with proper Dolby Digital 5.1 and accurate color balance. Too bad the movie still sucked.

Congrats, Roger. You’ll have a job at a real media outlet soon enough. Like this one. And at least the movie was good.

Telnor Stands Up For Pirate Bay

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Telnor issued a statement regarding file-sharing haven The Pirate Bay today.

Telenor rejects the demand from the IFPI to block access to the Swedish website, The Pirate Bay, and finds there to be no legal basis for the demand for ISPs to control and/or assess the content users download. At the same time, Telenor does not condone pirating of material and illegal file sharing.

“Asking an ISP to control and assess what Internet users can and cannot download is just as wrong as asking the post office to open and read letters and decide what should and should not be delivered.”

“This is by no means a new issue, and it applies to the entire Western knowledge-based economy. Telenor sympathises with Intellectual property rights holders whose content has been illegally
distributed, but in our opinion, it is wrong to claim an ISP is liable for any illegal activity by its users on the Internet,”

The Day the Music Industry Died?

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Yesterday at Macworld, Apple announced that it may have killed the golden goose. Or pulled the ol’ bait-and-switch on the goose. And became a hero to everyone who likes to eat goose.

Enough with the goose reference, and apparently, enough with DRM for Apple. Seems the iEverything people struck a deal with the labels to set the music free…for a small price. 10 million songs from the iTunes store will be available with no DRM.

Apple marketing guy Philip Schiller announced that iTunes song prices will come in three tiers: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29. The labels get to choose the prices.

Additionally, Apple announced a “Set My Music Free” tax / fee. For $.30, Apple will replace the DRM tracks you’ve previously purchased with the restrictions for tracks without any. The upside to the charge is that a) you don’t have to pay it, and b) you’ll get a higher bit-rate track in return. Hopefully everyone has done the math and will make this model work.

Personally, as I’ve said before, I’ve never had any problems with music with DRM preventing me from doing anything that falls within “fair use.” Only when you start to do the things you aren’t supposed to do you run into trouble.

Bottom line – the solution to the DRM crisis isn’t to abandon DRM. It is to put a sensible DRM solution in place that works well enough for everyone to stay in business.