Location: Electronic Resource- 

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Location: Sciences Library Library- QH501.C376 2016

Location: Engineering Library- R857.O6B54 2016

Location: Sciences Library Library- RC78.7.D53B56 2012

Location: Electronic Resource- 

"AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so," the LA Times reports. So customers will pay in added overhead and false positives, while filesharers adapt to evade the filtering (for both infringing and non-infringing traffic). Who wins? The sellers of filtering snake-oil tech, perhaps.

"We knew we were a real film when we had pirates." Samuli Torssonen, Star Wreck Studios, on the appearance and sale in Russia and China of copies of the free, CC'd online film "Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning." The film was first posted online, for free, and downloaded 5 million times, before winning a commercial contract for DVD sale.

Stephen Lee adds to the community story. The film itself had more than 300 participants in the credits; it has been fan-subtitled in 30 languages, including Klingon.

"Slow. Expensive. Unreliable. Unverifiable." Those don't sound like the specs you'd put in a procurement document for a system undergirding electoral democracy, but they're the words Jason Kitcat used repeatedly to describe what Open Rights Group found when it observed the use of e-voting in England and Scotland's pilot trial of the technologies in May 2007.

Speaking at the release of ORG's election report, Kitcat described failures that ORG's volunteer observers saw or had reported to them. In Rushmoor, a candidate reported that the online ballot mis-identified his opponent's party affiliation. In Breckland, a manual recount of non-electronic ballots initially counted by computer turned up more than 50% more votes than the e-count. At least Breckland had a non-electronic ballot to fall back upon. In fully electronic systems being adopted in other districts, a "recount" can only repeat the same tally of bits, with no certain way to detect improper recording or tampering.

ORG concludes that, given the problems observed and the questions remaining unanswered, it cannot express confidence in the results declared in areas observed. Given these findings, ORG remains opposed to the introduction of e-voting and e-counting in the United Kingdom.

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, ORG's findings mirror those of EFF and others regarding United States deployment of e-voting. In a process led by vendors, veiled in proprietary trade secrecy, with inadequate attention to the security and verification required for confidence in democratic elections, e-voting and non-transparent e-counting do not serve the American or British citizenry. ORG is taking great steps to expose the flaws and push for more accountable voting.

According to observers and civil society NGO participants, the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights will not recommend a Diplomatic Conference on the proposed WIPO Broadcasting Treaty. In non-WIPO-ese, that means broadcasters won't get the unjustified grant of copyright-plus rights they've been asking for. Instead, they'll still have copyright protection for their programs, while the public will get its fair use without an extra layer of exclusion.

From Intellectual Property Watch » WIPO Broadcasting Treaty Talks Break Down:

World Intellectual Property Organization negotiations for a treaty on rights for broadcasters broke down at the eleventh hour, according to participating government officials. A high-level final treaty negotiation scheduled for November will not take place, they said.

The SCCR, which does its work through "non-papers" and meetings in Geneva, has been pushing for a broadcasting treaty for nearly a decade. It was nearing its conclusion, sending the draft on to a Diplomatic Conference to be adopted as an international treaty, when delegates apparently finally recognized they could not reach consensus. The latest draft would have added DRM-protection, anti-circumvention, and new exclusive rights to broadcasts, threatening innovations like TiVo and SlingBox. While the United States was at most stages willing to sell out its innovators, even pushing at times for grant of new "webcasting" exclusive rights, Brazil, India, and the Africa Group took the lead in rejecting a new treaty if it lacked public rights and exceptions to balance those granted to broadcasters.

EFF and KEI, among others, have been keeping this process under scrutiny for a long time. Amazing how similar the debates look to what I first helped live-blog in 2004.

Update: Not dead yet? Jamie Love reports the "surreal" draft conclusions of the Chair, that a Diplomatic Conference should be held in 2008.

The Houston Chronicle reports that celebrity gossip site PerezHilton.com has battled ISP takedown over claimed copyright infringement. The problem is, site-owner Mario Lavanderia is already disputing those claims in federal court, where a judge refused to grant an injunction. Instead, as the judicial process properly works, Lavanderia must be proven a likely infringer before his speech is silenced.

The DMCA, however, offers copyright claimants an easy route around the niceties of judicial process -- make it too much of a nuisance for an ISP to deal with an accused infringer as a client, and get his site removed. And this underscores the precarious nature of our reliance on private infrastructure. Even though the DMCA insulates ISPs from liability once they've received counter-notification, copyright claimants can still shower them with complaints, and ISPs are still free to bow to risk aversion and refuse to do business with challenging customers -- including those who challenge powerful copyright interests.

Los Angeles photo agency X17 Inc. sued Lavandeira in federal court last year, asking for $7.6 million in damages. The suit claimed Hilton used 51 photographs without permission, payment or credit, including images of a pregnant Katie Holmes, Kevin Federline pumping gas and Britney Spears.

A federal judge denied the company's motion for an injunction against the site, although the lawsuit continues, as does another filed on behalf of several other photo agencies. A lawsuit filed by Universal Studios claiming the site posted a stolen photo of Jennifer Aniston from the film "The Break-Up" is also pending.

X17 co-owner Brandy Navarre said the company has sent more than a dozen notices to the Australian Web hosting company Crucial Paradigm in the past two weeks, demanding that copies of copyrighted photos on the Perezhilton.com site be removed. "They quickly realized it wasn't worth taking on this liability just to host this one client who was a repeat infringer," Navarre said Thursday.

Tuesday, Crucial Paradigm sent a strongly worded letter to the company that represents Lavandeira, saying it had received numerous complaints of copyright violations and warning that one more complaint would result in the site being taken offline.

"Please note that with any other provider this would have been done a long time ago, and moving your site to another provider will not solve this issue," the letter read. "Continued abuse is leaving us more liable each day, which we can't afford."

PerezHilton.com appears to have found a new host in short order, but other critics with fewer resources often find themselves chilled well short of any judicial decision on the merits of their defenses.

ICANN's travelling circus meets in San Juan, Puerto Rico this week. One of the main subjects of discussion has been the introduction of new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs), after a GNSO Report proposed 19 "Recommendations" for criteria these new domain strings should meet -- including morality tests and "infringement" oppositions.

I spoke at a workshop on free expression. (another report) It's important to keep ICANN from being a censor, or from straying beyond its narrow technical mandate. The thick process described in the GNSO report would be expensive, open to "hecklers' vetos," and deeply political.

Instead, I recommended that, along the lines of David Isenberg's Stupid Network, ICANN should aim for a "stupid core": approve strings after a minimal test for direct or visual collision. Just as we couldn't predict what applications or content would be successful on the Internet, but benefit from the ease with which innovators can experiment with a wide range, we'll benefit if entrepreneurs can experiment with new TLDs without a lot of central pre-screening. Rather than supporting a race to the bottom to adopt restrictions on the lines of the most restrictive government views of permissible expression (no human rights, sexuality, or "hate"), we must leave it to the governments to apply those restrictions at the edges too, in their own jurisdictions if they insist, but not at the center on all.

Of course I do not support government censorship even at the local level, but between local control, which can itself be a source of experimentation, and central control, which becomes ossified and restrictive at the lowest level, I think local law poses less threat to global free expression. If you agree that ICANN should keep moral judgments out of the DNS root, sign the petition to Keep the Core Neutral.

After blogging about ICANN's new gTLD policy or lack thereof, I've had several people ask me why I care so much about ICANN and new top-level domains. Domain names barely matter in a world of search and hyperlinks, I'm told, and new domains would amount to little more than a cash transfer to new registries from those trying to protect their names and brands. While I agree that type-in site-location is less and less relevant, and we haven't yet seen much end-user focused innovation in the use of domain names, I'm not ready to throw in the towel. I think ICANN is still in a position to do affirmative harm to Internet innovation.

You see, I don't concede that we know all the things the Internet will be used for, or all the things that could be done on top of and through its domain name system. I certainly don't claim that I do, and I don't believe that the intelligence gathered in ICANN would make that claim either.

Yet that's what it's doing by bureaucratizing the addition of new domain names: Asserting that no further experiments are possible; that the "show me the code" mode that built the Internet can no longer build enhancements to it. ICANN is unnecessarily ossifying the Internet's DNS at version 1.0, setting in stone a cumbersome model of registries and registrars, a pay-per-database-listing, semantic attachments to character strings, and limited competition for the lot. This structure is fixed in place by the GNSO constituency listing: Those who have interests in the existing setup are unlikely to welcome a new set of competitors bearing disruptions to their established business models. The "PDP" in the headline, ICANN's over-complex "Policy Development Process" (not the early DEC computer), gives too easy a holdout veto.

Meanwhile, we lose the chance to see what else could be done: whether it's making domain names so abundant that every blogger could have a meaningful set on a business card and every school child one for each different face of youthful experimentation, using the DNS hierarchy to store simple data or different kinds of pointers, spawning new services with new naming conventions, or something else entirely.

I don't know if any of these individually will "add value." Historically, however, we leave that question to the market where there's someone willing to give it a shot. Amazingly, after years of delay, there are still plenty of people waiting in ICANN queues to give new gTLDs a try. The collective value in letting them experiment and new services develop is indisputably greater than that constrained by the top-down imaginings of the few on the ICANN board and councils, as by their inability to pronounce .iii.

"How do you get an answer from the web?" the joke goes: "Put your guess into Wikipedia, then wait for the edits." While Wikipedians might prefer you at least source your guess, the joke isn't far from the mark. The lesson of Web 2.0 has been one of user-driven innovation, of launching services in beta and improving them by public experimentation. When your users know more than you or the regulators, the best you can do is often to give them a platform and support their efforts. Plan for the first try to break, and be ready to learn from the experience.

To trust the market, ICANN must be willing to let new TLDs fail. Instead of insisting that every new business have a 100-year plan, we should prepare the businesses and their stakeholders for contingency. Ensuring the "stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems" should mean developing predictable responses to failure, not demanding impracticable guarantees of perpetual success. Escrow, clear consumer information, streamlined processes, and flexible responses to the expected unanticipated, can all protect the end-users better than the dubious foresight of ICANN's central regulators. These same regulators, bear in mind, didn't foresee that a five-day add-grace period would swell the ranks of domains with "tasters" gaming the loophole with ad-based parking pages.

At ten years old, we don't think of our mistakes as precedent, but as experience. Kids learn by doing; the ten-year-old ICANN needs to do the same. Instead of believing it can stabilize the Internet against change, ICANN needs to streamline for unpredictability. Expect the unexpected and be able to act quickly in response. Prepare to get some things wrong, at first, and so be ready to acknowledge mistakes and change course.

I anticipate the counter-argument here that I'm focused on the wrong level, that stasis in the core DNS enhances innovative development on top, but I don't think I'm suggesting anything that would destabilize established resources. Verisign is contractually bound to keep .com open for registrations and resolving as it has in the past, even if .foo comes along with a different model. But until Verisign has real competition for .com, stability on its terms thwarts rather than fosters development. I think we can still accommodate change on both levels.

The Internet is too young to be turned into a utility, settled against further innovation. Even for mature layers, ICANN doesn't have the regulatory competence to protect the end-user in the absence of market competition, while preventing change locks out potential competitive models. Instead, we should focus on protecting principles such as interoperability that have already proved their worth, to enhance user-focused innovation at all levels. A thin ICANN should merely coordinate, not regulate.

The NFL just doesn't know when to stop. The Washington Post reports on a new NFL policy limiting journalists' use of video online:

In a move designed to protect the Internet operations of its 32 teams, the pro football league has told news organizations that it will no longer permit them to carry unlimited online video clips of players, coaches or other officials, including video that the news organizations gather themselves on a team's premises. News organizations can post no more than 45 seconds per day of video shot at a team's facilities, including news conferences, interviews and practice-field reports.

Now this policy isn't copyright-based -- the NFL doesn't have copyright in the un-fixed statements of its players and coaches -- but good old real property law. The NFL teams own their facilities, and with them have the right to exclude people physically, as trespassers. So the NFL is telling sportswriters, who depend on physical access to gather the background for their stories, they'll be barred at the gates if they use more than 45 seconds of video online.

Houston Chronicle columnists John McClain and Anna-Megan Raley show the absurdity of this policy by trying to complete interviews in 45 seconds, stopwatch in hand. Even stopping at 45 seconds, they apparently violate the policy if the video is not removed after 24 hours and doesn't link to nfl.com!

While the football league may be within its legal rights on this one, its policy still reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium. The league depends on independent journalists to do the research that keeps people following the sport between games, and journalists have turned to the Internet to dig deeper than they could in print or time-constrained TV. Readers go to sportwriters' websites and blogs precisely for perspectives they don't get from the official NFL.com website. Limiting the richness of media available on these sites is more likely to alienate fans and journalists than to drive traffic to NFL.com. Just look where the Olympics is.

Sometimes rights to exclude are best left un-exercised. By contrast, the National Hockey League has taken a better course, striking deals with YouTube, Sling Media, and Joost to permit people to see hockey when and where they want. "We're not content fascists," Keith Ritter, president of NHL Interactive Cyber Enterprises, which represents the league's interests in new media, tells the LA Times. Perhaps it's time for the Houston Chronicle team to battle global warming and pick up hockey sticks!

Thanks Scott!

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Main Library- HV6250.4.W65N78 2011

Location: Main Library- PK6562.16.A73T8 2014

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