See also:
http://www.cyberguerrilla.info/?p=2656
and
Archive for 2011/08/16
Rop Gonggrijp: As the world moves online, repression also moves online
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / AwarenessThe American music industry is threatened by a soon-effective provision in the U.S. copyright law that gives back the rights of golden oldies to their original creators
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, LegislationNow that 33 years have passed since 1978, the record companies see themselves confronted with the first notifications. Examples of songs that qualify for the termination right are for instance “52nd Street” by Billy Joel and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” by Bruce Springsteen, both from 1978. Both songs still gross thousands of dollars in royalties.
You can now report criminals via Facebook in Scotland
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / Awareness, Enforcement, New Business ModelsThe police force hopes that the use of social media and other online tools will help them to identify even more criminals. The main goal is to apprehend people who fund their lifestyles by the proceeds of crime.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/you-can-now-report-criminals-via-facebook-in-scotland/2688
LibraryPirate was founded a little over a year ago with a site mission of providing college students with an alternative to continuously rising textbook prices
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / AwarenessIn common with the music and movie industries, a relatively small group of textbook publishers have a monopoly on the market. Even congressional intervention is said to have failed in dislodging their grip.
http://torrentfreak.com/free-textbooks-for-students-will-break-greedy-monopoly-110816/
Sony will bundle its next generation e-reader with the entire series of Harry Potter stories
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / Awareness, New Business ModelsBeta testing for Pottermore opened yesterday; in time Potter e-books will be sold via the site (rather than through etailers such as Amazon) but this won’t happen until 2012. Until it does, the only way to buy digital-format wizardry will be with a Sony device.
Google passes UK Street View audit, but ‘must improve’ privacy policies
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / Awareness, Google, Privacy / Data Protection, Public PolicyGermany, which has the strongest data protection and privacy laws in Europe, went one step further and told Google to withdraw its Street View cars from the country.
The Lesson. Get online, search on your trademark, and see what pops up. There is no excuse to be lazy about this: it is just too easy to do. So do it. You never know, someone could be diverting trafffic (maybe a LOT of traffic) away from you to a competitor’s web site. If that is going on contact IP counsel immediately and have them take the wrongdoers to task. They are stealing your profits. Worse: if you don’t hold them accountable you are knowingly allowing dilution of your brand, which you will see as a defense when you next move to enforce your mark
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Online advertisingWhat does dilution mean? It’s simple. Moms have been hearing the original form of this ingenious defense for centuries, put forward as a heartfelt pleading by some of the best and brightest ten year old litigators on the planet. These little lawyers invented this defense; the modern IP bar just copied it (we know genius when we see it). It goes something like this. “Mom!! you can’t punish me for that! You let Billy do it!”
So hop to it. Go google your trademark.
Voice revenues, hit by MTA (mobile termination access fees) reduction in the short term, will in the longer term be negatively impacted by mobile VoIP, with SMS revenues also under pressure. Operators will find it difficult to counteract these negative trends
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / Awareness, Mobile tech, New Business Models, Tech EvolutionAdobe changes pricing strategy in India to beat piracy
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / Awareness, New Business ModelsAccording to data available with the company, pirated versions of its products account for nearly 64 per cent of the product usage in India
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/industry-and-economy/info-tech/article2359209.ece?homepage=true
Yahoo! India will collaborate with leading movie production houses to bring thousands of local “Bollywood” movies online to users for a piracy-free, quality entertainment experience
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models“Movieplex” (movies.yahoo.in/movieplex), a premium video destination allowing users to enjoy licensed full-length movies for free through the Internet on demand.
According to a ComScore report released in March’ 2011, the Indian audience is currently spending over 9.1 billion minutes watching online videos each month with entertainment as the leading category in online video content consumption ahead of news and sports content.
http://www.indiainfoline.com/Markets/News/Yahoo-India-launches-Movieplex/5222092183
BBC: “Twitter is a social networking platform, which is available to most people who have a computer, and therefore any content on it is not subject to copyright laws as it is already in the public domain. The BBC is aware of copyright issues and is careful to abide by these laws.”
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Copyright, Education / AwarenessThe online piracy rate in Romania, which places the country on the International Intellectual Property Alliance’s watch list for 2011, can be, in case of movie piracy, partially attributed to the lack of specialized websites which would legally offer movies on demand, for a fee. The high piracy is also the reason why many of the international websites which offer video-on-demand (such as Netflix.com) restrict the access of users from Romania
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / Awareness, New Business ModelsBut there is a silver lining and it comes from Romanian investors
The NZ Economic Development Ministry said they would not be able to use the regime to threaten or punish internet users who breached copyright – perhaps unknowingly – by watching pirated videos or listening to pirated music by accessing streaming media when surfing the web
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, Public Policy, Three StrikesWhile such copyright infringements will remain illegal, it said that in these situations rights holders would need to go through the courts to enforce their rights. Peer-to-peer file sharing, which it said would be subject to the three-strikes regime, is generally the preserve of experienced broadband users and not most “mums and dads”.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/5442501/Confusion-over-copyright
Joyent announced that it is open sourcing a version of the KVM hypervisor for SmartOS, and Hoffman hailed the project as “the first major hypervisor to show up in the past five years”, saying that the move takes the company beyond VMware and Red Hat and Microsoft – and, yes, Google too
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / Awareness, Tech EvolutionA privacy researcher has revealed the evil genius behind a for-profit web analytics service capable of following users across more than 500 sites, even when all cookie storage was disabled and sites were viewed using a browser’s privacy mode
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / Awareness, Privacy / Data ProtectionThe technique, which worked with sites including Hulu, Spotify and GigaOm, is controversial because it allowed analytics startup KISSmetrics to construct detailed browsing histories even when users went through considerable trouble to prevent tracking of the websites they viewed. It had the ability to resurrect cookies that were deleted, and could also compile a user’s browsing history across two or more different browsers.
At the heart of technique is the practice of storing a unique identifier, known as an ETag value, in a browser’s cache and metadata folders. A piece of JavaScript hosted on kissmetrics.com accesses the serial number each time one of the KISSmetrics websites is viewed.
“It’s effectively acting like a cookie because with every connection to KISSmetrics, it will send a referrer header and the ETag value,” Soltani told The Register. “The ETag is effectively acting as a cookie. It has the same exact value of the cookie as well.”
KISSmetrics analytics combined the the ETag technique with several other controversial technologies that use cookies based on Adobe Flash and HTML5 to reproduce tracking cookies even after a user had specifically deleted them. Soltani and his colleagues first documented the sneaky move in 2009 and dubbed it cookie “respawning.”
More:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/16/cookie_respawning_secrets_revealed/
MI5 asked to crack encrypted messages – especially on BlackBerry Messenger – to help police
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Privacy / Data ProtectionOne of the biggest problems for law enforcement in the digital age is the inability to get real-time access to messages sent by potential criminals
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/15/mi5-social-messaging-riot-organisers-police
For a full blocking at the http level, ISPs would have to run the equivalent of an IDS, and monitor every single page requested by their users, with the obvious privacy implications, or set up a forced proxy – some cable ISPs run Cisco CacheEngine, for instance – or put the whole country behind a firewall, like China
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Blocking, Education / Awareness, Public Policy“MPAA was putting money into supporting Dodd’s legislation in the hope of convincing him to join them as Chairman”
Posted: 2011/08/16 in Education / Awareness, Public PolicyEven today the MPAA continues to put money in supporting Dodd’s Wall Street Reform plans ($180,000 and counting), all at the expense of those poor lighting technicians and makeup artists who work in the movie business.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-lobbies-for-wall-street-reform-110815/
