me*dia*or

During the last two years, Sweden has created a number of posts with responsibility for dealing with violations of intellectual property. In 2010 the resources dedicated by the authorities to this seemingly unwinnable battle are set to increase.

In the spring a new task force will go into operation dealing with file-sharing and other intellectual property violations.

The new unit will consist of nine specially trained investigators forming three groups operating out of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, working under Paul Pinter, Stockholm County Police’s National Coordinator in the Intellectual Property Crime division.

The team will also consist of two prosecutors, Frederick Ingblad and Henrik Rasmusson who were both involved in the nine recent raids against Direct Connect users.

Pinter, who previously worked as a computer crime and forensics investigator with the Stockholm County Police, said that the idea is to streamline law enforcement in this area. His role will be to act as coordinator between the various investigators and locations.

“The idea is that groups should only focus on his own territory, but it should also be able to operate nationally. In the case of raids this may facilitate a certain degree of coordination,” he told SvD.se.

Due to the distributed nature of the Internet and its users, Pinter said that nationwide collaboration will become increasingly important.

“In the case of such fraud, so much of that takes place over the Internet. It is difficult to know where a crime will fall and it’s possible to be spread too thinly over many places,” he adds.

Swedish media are reporting that the chances of getting away with illicit file-sharing are set to decrease as a result of this new unit’s work. From a current position of virtually zero that shouldn’t be a particularly difficult task, but as pointed out this week by file-sharing researcher Daniel Westman, getting enough evidence to raid a BitTorrent user can be very tricky. Expect Direct Connect users to stay in the spotlight.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The Streaming Content Payment use case for PaySwarm encompasses the same multi-vendor music provider environment as Playdar:

Tellulah is a DJ and would like to setup a non-profit Internet radio station to stream Weekly Top 40 songs along with a mix of independent music. She would like to cover her expenses as well as the standard per-song ephemeral broadcasting fee set by the US Copyright Arbitration Panel to ensure she is legally compliant at all times. Registering and tracking royalties can be a very daunting and time consuming process. A mechanism that reduces the burden of legal compliance could drive more stations to come online.

Online radio broadcasters are also presently limited in their ability to grow their stations due to the ephemeral broadcasting royalties that must be paid on a per person/per song basis. Running these stations make it difficult to collect, track and distribute royalties in a way that makes it easy to integrate into the web browser. Often, donating or signing up to a single download provider can be more trouble than it is worth. If there was a universal mechanism to pay very small amounts for data streams on the Web, new legal avenues for distributing content legally would be enabled.

4.1 Requirements

Payment must be able to be associated with a section of a stream of data. Payment should be allowed to be associated with a particular number of bytes or temporal time frame.

Small fractions of whole currency amounts should be allowed in order to ensure accurate metering and payment recouping for content streams.

Jay Fienberg thoughts on payment protocols:

The “web” answer is more in the client / user agent than in the cloud.

Generally, payment mechanism on the web rely on someone being registered with a service, and then authenticated for each transaction.

That service handles a bunch of stuff that has to do with banking, and so is designed fundamentally as a node in the bank network rather than as a node on the WWW.

I don’t think that can be moved to the web in an open way. But, it’s possible to make that whole experience much more streamlined.

For example, someone who has a Google Checkout account can easily buy anything sold via Google Checkout. Same with PayPal and Amazon.

And, same with iTunes.

(And, on the other side: same with sellers, albeit with different restrictions about who can sell what / where through each service.)

And, that layer of web-to-banking service, theoretically, can be built on. And, I think it’d be most direct to work at the browser level, e.g. smart user agents.

In this case, an online seller would present, via a data format, a manifest of acceptable payment services, behind the scenes to the user experience. The buyer’s user agent (say, web browser) would then, behind the scenes and without hassle to the end-user, select the user’s preferred payment method and present the user with the minimal confirmation steps necessary to complete the transaction through that mechanism.

This could be akin to how Firefox handles subscription to RSS feeds, allowing the user to have a preset feed reader application that is invoked automatically when the user clicks a “subscribe to RSS” link.

However, in the case of online financial transactions, the user agent would want to allow for many services or protocols, and let the user define which is preferred for which types of transactions.

So, it’s “web” in the sense that it’s web browsers working directly banking APIs.

Flattr is a cloud service rather than a protocol.

PaySwarm is a protocol, not a cloud service.

The PaySwarm web platform is an open standard that enables web browsers and web devices to perform micropayments and copyright-aware, peer-to-peer digital media distribution.

Who can implement and use the technology?

Anybody. The entire PaySwarm standard is implementable on a patent and royalty-free basis, just like HTTP, HTML 4.01 and Javascript. This means that anybody may implement any part of the system without worrying about technology licensing fees or patent suits from any of the participating W3C member companies.

Pubs win court battle over music charges Press Association
The catering trade and retailers won their court battle today over the charges they pay for playing recorded music. High Court judge Mr Justice Arnold upheld a ruling from a Copyright Tribunal which the Institute of Licensing said will mean pubs, hotels and restaurants across Britain will now receive up to £20 million in refunds. The judge dismissed an appeal by Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL), which introduced new tariffs in 2005/6. The institute claimed the tariffs meant fees were increased by more than four times.

EMI’s Owner, Lender at Odds on Breakup Wall Street Journal
Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd. boss Guy Hands three months ago proposed to break up EMI Group Ltd. in order to salvage the struggling music company, a plan that was rejected by EMI’s lender, but that could provide a blueprint to its future. Court documents filed Friday by Citigroup Inc. as part of a legal dispute with private-equity group Terra Firma include a letter Mr. Hands sent on Nov. 5 to Citigroup executive Chad Leat proposing the separation and recapitalization of EMI’s two businesses: the ailing recorded-music division, known as EMI Music, and the healthier EMI Music Publishing unit. Though Citigroup rejected the proposal, Mr. Hands wrote that “we believe that we are in agreement in relation to a number of the key components of an acceptable solution including the need to separate the two businesses.”

Author, 17, Says It’s ‘Mixing,’ Not Plagiarism New York Times
It usually takes an author decades to win fawning reviews, march up the best-seller list and become a finalist for a major book prize. Helene Hegemann, just 17, did it with her first book, all in the space of a few weeks, and despite a savaging from critics over plagiarism. The publication last month of her novel about a 16-year-old exploring Berlin’s drug and club scene after the death of her mother, called ‘Axolotl Roadkill,’ was heralded far and wide in German newspapers and magazines as a tremendous debut, particularly for such a young author. The book shot to No. 5 this week on the magazine Spiegel’s hardcover best-seller list. For the obviously gifted Ms. Hegemann, who already had a play (written and staged) and a movie (written, directed and released in theaters) to her credit, it was an early ascension to the ranks of artistic stardom. That is, until a blogger last week uncovered material in the novel taken from the less-well-known novel ‘Strobo,’ by an author writing under the nom de plume Airen. In one case, an entire page was lifted with few changes.

Adolf Hitler painting may have hung in Sigmund Freud’s surgery Telegraph
The Jewish psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud might have had a painting by Hitler hanging on the wall of his office, it has been disclosed. A watercolour by the German dictator has come to light that has an inscription on the back that bears the name of Freud’s medical practice in Vienna. While Freud was based in the Austrian city in 1910 it is possible he or one of his staff bought the picture from the struggling artist. Hitler was a jobbing painter at the time, knocking out postcards and paintings and trying to make a living. This painting, that measures 8in by 4in, shows what looks like a small church with a background of mountains and is signed “A Hitler 1910.”

Rogue antivirus program comes with tech support IDG News Service
In an effort to boost sales, sellers of a fake antivirus product known as Live PC Care are offering their victims live technical support. According to researchers at Symantec, once users have installed the program, they see a screen, falsely informing them that their PC is infected with several types of malware. That’s typical of this type of program. What’s unusual, however, is the fact that the free trial version of Live PC Care includes a big yellow “online support” button. Clicking on the button connects the victim with an agent, who will answer questions about the product via instant message. Symantec says the agent is no automated script, but in fact a live person.

GPS: A Stalker’s Best Friend PC World
Watch out for common ways that a creeper can follow you by using the same GPS devices you love so much.

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

February, 2010

p2pnet view Music | P2P:- This year’s Digital Music Forums east love-in also features several personalities linked directly to Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music efforts to turn their customers into copyright slaves.

In order of appearance on the speakers list are, from left to right and top to bottom >>>

Rio Caraeff, president and CEO, VEVO
Universal and Sony are the two major stakeholders — along with giant online advertising company Google, of course, said p2pnet recently. According to Caraeff Vevo was “built to help advertisers and content owners”. Forget the users, people who keep them all going.

Thomas Hesse, president, global digital business, US sales and corporate strategy, Sony Music Entertainment
Sony BMG weasled DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) and rootkit spyware onto the computers of people who’d bought some of its music CDs, said p2pnet back in 2005, going on, “The software – the SunnComm version also exposed users to potentially serious security problems – was hidden on the discs and secretly installed itself when buyers played the music.” Hesse wondered at the subsequent outrage, saying, ‘Most people, I think, do not even know what a Rootkit is, so why should they care about it?’; and described the spyware issue as “slight”. He still hasn’t been fired.

Russ Crupnick, VP and senior industry analyst, NPD Group
NPD is a “market research firm which suddenly appeared out of nowhere in late 2003 and which the mainstream media immediately began quoting as an authority on music and file sharing,” said p2pnet. It’s one of Apple’s principal bulldust emitters, once actually claiming iTunes, “tied with LimeWire as the second-most-popular digital music service in March, 2005″. Oh, Rilly? When p2pnet first came across NPD, adidas International, International Flavors & Fragrance and Wrigley typified its client base, but it was nonetheless churning out ’studies’ and ‘reports’ bolstering entertainment cartel claims.

Jim Griffin, founder, Choruss / advisor, Warner Music Group
“Warner’s Choruss school licensing scheme is being touted by its main engineer, Jim Griffin as, at the least, a partial answer to the bitter and brutal anti-P2P, anti-music-lover, anti-file sharing actions launched by Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music, American, but run by Canadian Edgar Bronfman jr, against their own customers,” said p2pnet. The idea is students will pay Warner $5 a month for unlimited music downloads and already, Tens of thousands of students have signed up to pay for a legal P2P music program in US universities, set to start later this year in experimental form, said Andrew Orlowski in The Register, describing Choruss as, the incubator hatched by Jim Griffin a long-time advocate of licensing P2P sharing on networks. Tens of thousands, eh? And yet strangely, to date, neither Warner nor Griffin have followed up with what must be a substantial list of universities which’ve committed their students to using Choruss. And mentions of it in the on- or offline media are conspicuous by their absence.

What a crew.

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

February, 2010

I noticed some really neat images flowing past Jason’s computer over the last week. Whenever Jason was away from his desk, our section of the Echo Nest office would be treated to a very interesting slideshow – mostly of musicians (with an occasional NSFW image (but hey, everything is SFW here at The Echo Nest)). Since Jason is a photographer I first assumed that these were pictures that he took of friends or shows he attended – but Jason is a classical musician and the images flowing by were definitely not of classical musicians – so I was puzzled enough to ask Jason about it. Turns out, Jason did something really cool. He wrote a Python program that gets the top hotttt artists from the Echo Nest, and then collects images for all of those artists and their similars – yielding a huge collection of artist images. He then filters them to include only high res images (thumbnails don’t look great when blown up to screen saver size). He then points is Mac OS Slideshow screensaver at the image folder and voilá – a nifty music-oriented screensaver.

Jason has added his code to the pyechonest examples. So if you are interested in having a nifty screen saver, grab Pyechonest, get an Echo Nest API key if you don’t already have one and run the get_images example. Depending upon how many images you want, it may take a few hours to run. To get 100K images plan to run it over night. Once you’ve done that, point your Pictures screensaver at the image folder and you’re done.

p2pnet view Freedom | P2P:- Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music aren’t the only ones claiming when you buy something, you don’t actually buy it; you only license it, p2pnet said yesterday, going on:

“Autodesk suffers under the same delusion.

But now, “A coalition of public interest, consumer, and library groups is urging a federal appeals court … to preserve consumers’ rights and the first sale doctrine in a battle over an internet auction of used computer software”.

“It’s great to see stuff like this clarified by the court”, says a Reader’s Write.

“Imagine if everything you purchase had a piece of paper inside the box claiming you automatically agree to the terms of their license upon opening said package”, it says, going on >>>

Now imagine you’re not allowed to return it for a refund, you can only exchange your product for another identical one. On top of that, you’re not allowed to sell it without the express permission of the company that created it.

Does this sound insane? That’s because it is!

When I sell my speakers used, Infinity could possibly loose a sale. When I sell my color printer used, Canon could possibly lose a sale. When I sell my car, Dodge could possibly lose a sale.

Just imagine what our future would be like if all companies started using the exact same money making schemes the copyright industry has foisted on everyone.

This is the true purpose of strict licenses, DRM, and product keys on software.

It’s all about getting around our pesky consumer rights and first sale doctrine. They always claim it’s to stop pirates, but we all know it doesn’t do that at all.

Hopefully common sense will prevail in the end and consumer rights will continue to be upheld for a long time to come.

Make no mistake, the harder the economy gets, the more desperate all companies become. They don’t care about you, only their bottom line. Keep hammering the message of consumer power home by voting with your wallet. Support the ones that deserve it, boycott the ones that don’t.

When they squeeze, we will squeeze back even harder.

It’s the only way they’ll ever learn, adds the comment.

And sadly, that’s the way it is.

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

p2pnet – Public interest coalition takes on Autodesk, February 12, 2010

Just a few hours after the video of the Vancouver 2010 Opening Ceremony was posted on BitTorrent, it has already been downloaded by tens of thousands of people.

In 2008 Olympic torrents were hugely popular, especially the Opening Ceremony which was downloaded by nearly 5 million people. It is doubtful that this 2008 Olympic record will be broken this year, but nonetheless, there is plenty of interest on BitTorrent for the 2010 Opening Ceremony.

As with most big sporting events there are huge commercial interests involved in the Olympics. This is one of the main reasons why the International Olympic Committee and broadcasters such as NBC have announced a piracy crackdown, trying to prevent their content from leaking online.

“Our aim is to make access to pirated material inconvenient, low quality and hard to find,” said Rick Cotton, NBC’s Executive Vice President commenting on their Olympic mission. It is needless to say that this mission has already failed miserably.

The Opening Ceremony could be watched online through dozens of illegal streams last night, and a few hours later a high quality video of the entire broadcast appeared on file-sharing networks including BitTorrent. Thus far, nearly 100,000 people have downloaded the Opening Ceremony through BitTorrent.

A quick look at the locations of the downloaders reveals that roughly a quarter are Canadians. Another 15% of the downloaders come from the United States, followed by the UK with 5% and The Netherlands and Australia both with 4%.

In the coming days many of the sporting events will also surface online illegally, but the interest for the opening and closing ceremonies tend to be the highest, based on download numbers from the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

It is expected that the International Olympic Committee will be outraged over this massive rights violation. In 2008 they urged Sweden to take action against the Pirate Bay over the Olympic torrents that they hosted, without result.

Maybe they should start offering their own sponsored downloads in 2012? There is plenty of demand for it.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

• Google Buzz Air Desktop-Client (Download) – very simple, basically just the mobile web-page
• Chrome Buzz – browser extension f. Chrome, basically just shows your feed, nothing more
• Buzzer – shares a webpage through Google Reader on your Buzz-account
• Share-Bookmarklet – does the same as above, but through a bookmarklet which works on all browsers. in both cases you have to add your Google Reader as a connected site in Buzz
• Google Buzz ER – A WordPress-plugin for displaying your Buzz-feed anywhere on your blog
• Sharing-Buttons with counter like Mashable is using – not sure how to implement these

got some more?

Today’s links of interest:

• Paying for what you get
  Remind us why content producer use DRM?
• Lost Wednesdays: Hugo Assumes Leadership
  Nice shout-out to Jim and his Lost theory.
• Amazon Wants To Give A Free Kindle To All Amazon Prime Subscribers
  The fine print: Just as soon as they can work out how to do it without losing money. Seriously TechCrunch, this qualifies as news?

Upon spelunking around for Valentine's apps in Apple's now-massive App Store, I was amazed to find that there are at least dozens of Valentine's-related applications. I probably shouldn't have been surprised, given that close to 150,000 apps are available. That means apps are just getting more and more specific and the average usefulness level is very likely dropping.

The idea of 150,000 apps is hard to conceive of for us children of the software-in-box era, when the shelves of CompUSA or Software Etc. probably held no more than a couple hundred titles at once. And even most of those were barely worth a second look.

That said, not everything in this world needs to be useful -- and for the price of four rides on the mechanical horse outside the supermarket, you can amuse yourself for minutes with a variety of odd and silly applications centered on just about any theme or topic. Why not?

I only ask that you wipe your phone clean after testing out these apps. It's a family holiday.

Now, then ...

 This app is a simple as can get: Simply stand in a location you have designated as, essentially, ground zero for love, and tap the small blue heart. The heart immediately comes alive and begins beating. As you move away from the locus of your love, the heart becomes smaller and smaller. Move closer again, and vice versa.

Because we humans are programmed to fall in romantic love with people rather than places, there is some question as to the usefulness of this app. But as we are learning, usefulness can be overrated.

Valentine's Countdown Pro - $0.99

 This app counts down the days until Valentine's Day. Again, you've got to wonder what type of person would need to know there are, say, another 143 days until V-day. For most of us, not thinking about it until a week before is sufficient, at which time a rough mental countdown from seven usually does the trick.

Still, if you are really looking forward to or seriously dreading Valentine's Day a whole extra lot -- perhaps a proposal is in order, or the suggestion of divorce -- you might want to have the explicit reminder built in so you don't forget to plan ahead.

Kissing Test - Free

This app is slightly brilliant, as it encourages users to kiss their phones -- a feat that could be viewed as a massive "told you so" prank on Apple fanboys everywhere. And the more so because the human lips (and tongue?) appear to be rather weak electrical conductors. That means anyone using the app will have to apply several very sloppy smackers to the iPhone's touch-sensitive screen in order to get the app to work. Punished thus, it may hit you with the unflattering label of "Saliva Factory" and suggest that "maybe you should tone it down a bit." However, it's not clear whether practice makes perfect in this instance.

Cupid at Work - $0.99

This game is sort of fun. You're Cupid, and you have to shoot arrows at passersby, timing it so whatever pair of lucky saps you select for instant love are standing close enough to be simultaneously hit by one arrow.

You've got to match up the couples: regularly dressed humans are to be paired, as are Native Americans in ceremonial garb. Same for sea monsters, superheroes, mummies, etc. The game allows love matches between same-sex individuals, as well -- so fire away!

Send eFlowers - $0.99

Let's start out with the dual slogans displayed on this app's promo page:

"Because Flowers DOES matter to her : you can now send flowers from your iPhone!"

"Be delicate and refined even when using your phone; you'll never be seen in the same way again!"

It turns out the app really does nothing more than allow you to send one of six very small, low-resolution photos of flowers via MMS text message. The way it does so is rather awkward: Once you select which bouquet you're going to send, the app saves the image to your phone's photo directory, then pops open the text-messaging interface. You are then responsible for importing the saved photo into the message.

I'm not sure that this method of valentine-giving screams "delicate and refined." That said, the idea that you'll "never be seen in the same way" after using it is, I suppose, a possibility.

Pocket Cocktails - $0.99

Now here's a pretty good deal. One dollar for 300 popular drink recipes? From martinis to Manhattans to Valentine's Day lattes (creme de cacao, creme de menthe, amaretto, milk, espresso, cinnamon), it'll keep you busy and buzzy almost until next February.

The interface on this application is somewhat rigid, and the recipes are not always standard (because it's sponsored by Grey Goose, all the vodka drinks mandate you use Grey Goose), but as a basic mixology manual, it's great for the price.

There are dozens of other Valentine's Day apps, but our budget for this experiment was lean. If anyone finds any excellent additions, please let us know in the comments. Enjoy your apps responsibly.

-- David Sarno

Pushing beyond the societal restraints of monogamy, AT&T Wireless' Valentine's Day deal gives excessive romantics four free quick messaging devices -- something with a keyboard but no Internet -- with the purchase of one smartphone.

Basically, buy yourself a cool, new smartphone and get four dinky devices to dole out to several significant others. You'll need to get calling plans and contracts for each, but you can just make each potential target pay for their own, right? They can't be that special anyway.

The promotion has flown mostly under the radar (and rightfully so). It just strikes us as a downright bizarre way to get rid of some Samsung Flights and Pantech Impacts that are lying around the stock room.

The AT&T website advertises the more savory "Valentine's savings." But a company press release doesn't beat around the bush, positioning the deal for those who "love several someones." No specific references to Tiger Woods were made.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

Image: Samsung Flight. Credit: Samsung