The Home Entertainment Business, including the TV business (which is continuing to address the challenge of enhancing profitability), will be overseen directly by the CEO, Mr. Hirai, who will also be Corporate Executive Officer in charge of these businesses.
Much more:
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201203/12-043E/index.html
Card readers that are now being built in as standard to mobile phones can be adapted to access data from these cards. Working with a mobile phone security company, Channel 4 News managed to take data with just one swipe, and then use that data to purchase multiple goods online.
This means that it would be possible to gain access to this data merely by nudging someone’s wallet, or through clothes in a crowded public space.
The new contactless credit and debit cards contain a chip, so that when the card is held next to a reader a payment is made without need of a pin, and 13 million Barclays customers currently use them.
More:
http://www.channel4.com/news/millions-of-barclays-card-users-exposed-to-fraud
Leenaars responds to the debate surrounding the fact that ISOC in the US hired MPAA’s Vice-President and Chief Technology Policy Officer Paul Brigner
Dutch language news article:
http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/109973/amerikaanse-filmbaas-krijgt-leiding-internet-society.html
A cross-party committee of MPs and peers has urged the government to consider introducing legislation that would force Google to censor its search results to block material that a court has found to be in breach of someone’s privacy.
In a report published today, the joint Commons and Lords committee said Google should proactively monitor its search results, highlighting evidence given by Max Mosley, the ex-Formula One boss who said he had spent at least £500,000 in 23 countries attempting to remove traces of a video filmed covertly by the News of the World from the internet.
Google was criticised by the committee for its “totally unconvincing” objection to requests to filter its search results. The search giant argued that such a policy could threaten the unfettered flow of information online.
A Google spokesman said: “This is a really important issue for which there are no easy answers, particularly when balancing freedom of expression and tackling unlawful content.
“Google already remove specific pages deemed unlawful by the courts. We have a number of simple tools anyone can use to report such content, which we then remove from our index.
“Requiring search engines to screen the content of their web pages would be like asking phone companies to listen in on every call made across their networks for potentially suspicious activity.”
(Well, with the difference that those phone calls typically aren’t public like those search results)
Much more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/27/google-under-fire-from-mps
So in The Netherlands, using and downloading illegally copied digital content is all fine and peachy, but the moment you make private copies of any type of content and store it on your MP3 player or Personal Video Recorder (PVR), only then artists and composers are losing money, so it seems.
A Dutch Court in The Hague has now gone and ordered the Dutch government to reinstate the temporarily frozen private copy levy regime as it feels that artists and authors are suffering great financial damages, not only when users make private copies to CDs and DVDs but also when making copies to MP3 players and PVRs.
The total damage could amount to 400 million EUR. The private copy levy requires manufacturers of MP3 players and PVRs – and the manufacturers of blank CDs and DVDs before them – to pay an additional tax when importing said devices (or discs). It is not clear whether this will also apply to smartphones any time soon.
In this day and age, it would make more sense to have any taxes or levies reflect actual (authorized or non-authorized) use of digital content, since that’s so easy to measure nowadays. But that would probably decrease the financial benefits for governments, as well as those artists and composers which have been distributing content that’s not too popular. Until that day, it won’t matter how many copies are actually being made, and whether the content was copied with or without authorization, the government will tax the storage devices regardless.
Would this incentivize end users to download and copy as much as possible (regardless whether it’s legal or illegal content), because when they bought the device, they already paid a higher price because of the private copy taxation scheme?
Dutch language news articles:
http://www.nu.nl/internet/2773514/staat-moet-thuiskopieheffing-invoeren.html
http://zoeken.rechtspraak.nl/detailpage.aspx?ljn=BV9880
Previously:
Spanish government starts adjusting their private copying levy system
Man who killed 7 people among which 3 very young children is being honored and admired both online and offline.
Dutch language news article:
http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/6849/Sylvain-Ephimenco/article/detail/3230910/2012/03/25/Veel-overeenkomsten-maar-ook-onthutsend-verschil-Merah-en-Breivik.dhtml
All work produces spill-over repercussions that usually go against the will of the work’s creator. The creator wishes to retain authorship and control the work, while those in the culture wish to use, transform, and remix it. If the work is truly successful, it will defy authorship and turn into a shared experience for everyone. Those works are the hardest to control, because they diffuse, and spread wide by permeating into the air. The become a shorthand for those who make or enjoy similar work, becoming a shared vocabulary.
They’re there to string together telecommunication systems around the globe, but also turn the bottom of the sea into an assault course for submariners. If Cameron had gotten tangled in one of those lines, he would’ve struggled to make it back to the surface.
The Internet Society is hardly a fan of the Stop Online Piracy Act or the Protect IP Act. The venerable non-profit, which acts as the umbrella organization for the Internet’s key standards bodies, bluntly warns that the pair of copyright laws would end the “viability of the Internet.”
Which is why ISOC’s decision this month to hire a senior executive from the Motion Picture Association of America — a lawyer who has championed the wildly controversial legislation that would create blacklists of off-limits Web sites — is raising eyebrows.
ISOC announced last week that it had hired Paul Brigner, the MPAA’s senior vice president and chief technology policy officer, previously of Verizon’s D.C. lobby office. Brigner now heads ISOC’s North America efforts, a role that includes working with the U.S. Congress and federal agencies on Internet-related laws.
What made that announcement especially striking is that it came mere days after the ISOC Board of Trustees adopted a resolution warning of the dangers of Protect IP, SOPA, and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), all of which have the subject of extensive lobbying efforts by the MPAA and its overseas associates.
Paul Brigner defended Web blacklist legislation as an MPAA senior vice president. Why did the anti-SOPA Internet Society hire him?
Much more:
For example, the government has alleged Megaupload scraped content from YouTube and posted it on Megaupload servers “with utter indifference to what people wanted or whether it was infringing.” Dotcom did not address those allegations.
The government also alleges Megaupload “made payments to uploaders who were known to have uploaded infringing copies of copyrighted works.” For example, one internal e-mail by a Megaupload employee said, “Our old famous number one on MU, still some illegal files but I think he deserves a payment.” New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann told Ars in January that the government has “a pretty slam-dunk case on inducement.” TorrentFreak’s interview does not discuss payments Megaupload allegedly made to infringing uploaders.
Even if Megaupload is ultimately acquitted of the charges against it, the months-long shutdown will have done irreparable damage to Megaupload’s business. We would have liked to see Dotcom get his day in court before his site was shuttered and his assets seized.
