The latest round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations wrapped up yesterday in Seoul, South Korea and by all indications it has little to do with combating counterfeit goods and everything to do with forcing ISPs to become copyright cops.

Instead of focusing on customs procedures and enforcement to fight large scale commercial piracy it has delved into the area of noncommercial illegal file-sharing.

By all accounts it’s bad – very bad.

First, ISPs would have to proactively filter copyrighted material from their networks and hand over the names of those accused of illegal file-sharing.

Second, ISPs, in order to benefit from safe harbor provisions, would have to disconnect the Internet connections of illegal file-sharers for up to a year. Copyright holders would be able to sue those ISPS that fail to stop customers from illegal file-sharing.

Third, it will force countries to prohibit circumventing DRM or the manufacture of traffic of devices that allow people to do so.

Fourth, it would create a “broad” global notice-and-takedown regime where ISPs will be forced to remove copyrighted material without first weighing evidence to the contrary.

“Big music and movie interests, and other content producers, are conducting a global campaign to put their interests ahead of citizens’ rights to use the Internet and to not be subject to unreasonable and arbitrary penalties that do nothing for the public interest,” says Jordan carter, Deputy Executive Director of InternetNZ, a New Zealand-based group that promotes a free and open Internet.

He says that govt’s like his ought to focus on the real economic problems caused by commercial piracy rather trying to warp the Internet and turn into a business arm of the entertainment industry.

Worse still, it’s all being done in secret with only the entertainment industry having full access to the treaty.

It’s literally Hollywood’s dream come true.

“This is not about free trade at all,” writes Techdirt’s Michael Masnick. “This is an entertainment industry-written bill designed to recreate the internet in its image — as a broadcasting platform, rather than one used for user-generated content and communication.”

The ACTA, again, seems to have very little to do about “anti-counterfeiting” or trade and everything to do about protecting the deep-pocketed American entertainment industry. It does nothing to address the heart of the matter, which is it’s refusal to adapt to the realties of digital distribution world.

Also troubling is the secretive nature of a treaty with such broad legal implications being conducted in private under the pretext of trade negotiations.

In negotiating agreements focusing on traditional trade matters such as tariffs and trade barriers, confidentiality regarding some negotiating positions may be appropriate,” reads a letter addressed to President Obama and signed by a number of civil rights and public interest groups. “But ACTA aims to set international legal norms, potentially driving changes to substantive intellectual property legal regimes on an international basis. Attempts to force a multilateral intellectual property agreement through trade processes unsuited for it does a disservice to citizens, public policy, and the USTR alike.”

Precisely. Since when did we begin allowing laws to be debated behind closed doors?

Intellectual property laws need to maintain a careful balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of the public to access and use content they create. What the ACTA proposes would create a draconian regime that too heavily favors copyright holders, risking society’s very culture in the process.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has responded to the recent Digital Music survey conducted for Demos, a UK-based think tank, and as usual it claims the net effect of illegal file-sharing has been to reduce legitimate music sales.

It says that all the survey showed is that there is an “overlap between those people who download music illegally and those who purchase music,” that music fans typically acquire music from a variety of sources, some legal and some not.

“The net effect of illegal file-sharing in the UK and elsewhere has been to reduce legitimate sales,” it adds. “This is why spending on recorded music has fallen every year since illegal file-sharing began to become widespread.”

This is true, consumer spending on recorded music is down 6% since 2007 alone, but it belies the fact that Will Page, the Chief Economist for PRS for Music, a UK-based royalty collecting group for music writers, composers, and publishers, published a study back in July concluding that total music industry revenues are up 4.7% over the same time period.

The money’s there for artists to earn a living it’s just taking different forms as the industry evolves from analog to digital.

I’d suggest that the biggest reason why recorded music sales are down is the fact that consumers can cherry pick their selections. A formerly $20 dollar physical album has been reduced to a single 99 cents digital track. That has to be frustrating for the music industry and really has no solution unless you want to raise prices and push people back into illegal file-sharing.

The IFPI cites numerous academic studies proving its point, though the most suspect is the 2007 British Phonographic Industry (BPI)-funded study that concluded online music piracy will cost the UK music industry £1.6 billion ($2.7 billion USD) between 2001 and 2012.

What the IFPI fails to mention is the numerous other independent studies that have concluded that file-sharing actually increases legal music consumption.

The first is the “The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study For Industry Canada.” Commissioned by Industry Canada, a ministry of the Canadian federal government, back in 2007, it includes some of the most extensive surveying ever done on the music purchasing habits of the Canadian population.

Among the key findings:

• For every 12 P2P downloaded songs, music purchases increase by 0.44 CDs.
• About 50% of all P2P downloads were to preview before purchase or to avoid having to buy an entire CD.
• Roughly 25% were downloaded because they weren’t available for purchase.

The most recent is the “Consumer Culture in Times of Crisis,” conducted by the the BI Norwegian School of Management, the largest business school in Norway and the second largest in all of Europe, which found that illegal file-sharers purchase the most number of legal digital downloads, and that in fact actually buy 10 times as much music as they download for free

The study looked at almost 2,000 online music users over the age of 15, and asked file-sharers to prove their legal music purchases rather then simply rely on their honesty so it can’t be argued it was bogus.

But all of this won’t matter to the IFPI. It still thinks there are 7 million file-sharers in the UK despite reports that it could be as low as 3.9 million, hardly a problem in a country of 61 million people.

The IFPI has to toe the line and I wouldn’t expect anything less.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

ISPs have long been throttling BitTorrent traffic as part of their network traffic management practices due to the constant baseline pressure that uploads represent on overall bandwidth.

Enter uTorrent v2.0 beta, currently being tested by several hundred thousand people, which incorporates uTP, an updated and improved version of the BitTorrent protocol designed to be more network friendly.

By using uTP uTorrent will become “network aware” and throttle itself when network congestion is detected, saving ISPs billions in network upgrades.

For users of the BitTorrent client, it’s mainly upload speeds that will be affected.

“The throttling that matters most is actually not so much the download but rather the upload – as bandwidth is normally much lower UP than DOWN, the up-link will almost always get congested before the down-link does,” explains Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management, to TorrentFreak. “uTP measures the time a packet takes to get sent from peer A to peer B, so in theory uTP will detect congestion anywhere on that path, although in practice the congestion most often happens somewhere on the first-mile uplink connection.”

Morris adds that the best part of it all is that uTP means ISPs will no longer be able to justify throttling BitTorrent traffic, and in fact will allow networks to handle even more of it.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

McAfee, Inc., the world’s largest dedicated security technology company, just published its third quarter Threats Report (.pdf) which claims the “Internet seas awash with pirated content after Pirate Bay shutdown.”

“Our researchers noticed 300 percent growth this quarter in websites that distribute pirated movies and software,” reads the report. “Is this increase due to the economic downturn, or is technology at a point where it is easier to download feature-length movies on the day they become available in theaters?”

I’d have to say a little of both. The magic of BitTorrent and a decent broadband connection can deliver a 700MB XVID movie to your desktop in less than twenty minutes. It also doesn’t help that ticket prices are well above ten dollars these days. Put the two together and you have a situation where people will go to the theater only when a movie is well worth the cost.

McAfee reports that the number of new file-sharing sites illegally hosting copyrighted material has skyrocketed over the last three months, in particular since a Swedish judge ordered ISP Black Internet to cut off bandwidth service to BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay until it exhausts the remaining appeals of its conviction for copyright infringement (it suffered a mere 3hrs of partial downtime and found a new ISP).

It continues:

In the days prior to the shutdown anonymizers indexed and relayed the data to users who might be blocked. Open-source code was available to anyone who wanted to help with redistribution of the bit torrents. This was a true “cloud computing” effort, as the masses stepped up to make this database of torrents (legal, infringed, and malicious) available to others. This poses certain vital questions regarding risk—as the Pirate Bay database of about two million torrents is freely redistributed across the web. What is being done to ensure the security and safety of the torrents that are available? How easy will it be to employ SEO to move a mirrored site with rogue torrents to the top of the results list?

It notes that what happened with The Pirate Bay proves just how difficult it is to remove copyrighted material from the Internet once it’s already out there. It didn’t help that a week prior to its being forced to a find a new ISP that an anonymous BitTorrent user created a searchable backup copy of the site using the OpenBitTorrent tracker. So even if The Pirate Bay magically closed this very second it’s database of content would live on in perpetuity on the HDD’s of BitTorrent users around the globe.

“The Pirate Bay example shows how difficult it is to “stop” data once it is on the web,” adds the report. “Although a website can be shut down, anyone who has accessed the content (pictures, games, text, movies, etc.) may still have some and be able to redistribute it. Plus, once traffic was shut down, the site quickly relocated and was operational again reportedly within 24 hours.”

Exactly. Copyright holders are fighting a losing battle against file-sharing sites. For each that it painstakingly manages to shutdown two or more appear in its place (OiNK anyone?).

If only they’d use all their resources to give consumers what they want.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Brooklyn Law School seems to be in need of some remedial education concerning copyright law and its obligations as spelled out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

For students there were recently greeted to this e-mail from Phil Allred, the school’s CIO.

It reads:

BROOKLYN LAW SCHOOL — MEMORANDUM — ILLEGAL DOWNLOADING

From: Phil Allred

Date: October 28, 2009 11:49 AM EDT

To: All Users

Subject: [BLS] Illegal downloading

This semester we have received several warnings from our Internet

service provider that copyrighted movies and TV shows are being

downloaded illegally via our wireless network. The Information

Technology office is now ascertaining who is doing this. Once we have

names of the individuals involved, we intend to give them to the

copyright holders for enforcement purposes.

We remind everyone that copyright abuse is illegal and that use of the

Internet while at Brooklyn Law School must be in accordance with our

published Terms of Service document located at

http://www.brooklaw.edu/terms.

Phil Allred

CIO

Brooklyn Law School

That’s right. It intended to actively turn over the names of students accused of illegal downloading without so much as a court order as most schools require.

You could argue that lawyers should be held to higher standard, but the law is the law and a law school should be the first to object to such a practice. If not the CIO then at least the faculty.

After much criticism Allred then decided to revise the school’s stance and promised to only fulfill its legal obligations as spelled out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It would no longer turn over the names of accused file-sharers without a court order.

He writes:

From: Phil Allred

Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2009 12:08 PM

To: All Users

Subject: [BLS] Update on illegal downloads e-mail notice

Yesterday, I sent out an e-mail regarding the recent spate of abuse notices we have received from our Internet service provider. Under our contract, users are prohibited from downloading copyrighted works. If we knowingly allow such activity to continue without taking action, we risk losing access to the Internet.

When we can ascertain the people who are responsible for alleged illegal downloads, we will notify them to cease such activity. We will comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Outside of the legal process, we are not obligated to turn over the names of the alleged infringers to copyright holders and will not do so.

The DMCA’s so-called “safe harbor” provision clearly says that a service provider can’t be held liable for the actions of users so long as it removes infringing material when requested by copyright holders, and has no obligation to take the matter further.

You’d think the Brooklyn Law School would’ve at least done some basic research before formulating school policy, especially when it has such important legal implications for it student body.

At least it turned out well in the end I suppose.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

A new Digital Music Survey(.pdf) conducted by Ipsos Media Ct for Demos, a UK-based think tank whose goal it is to “search for and communicate ideas to give people more power to shape their own lives,” concludes once again that file-sharers do purchase music, and oftentimes in far greater quantities than their non-file-sharing counterparts.

The music industry always insists that a single illegal download equates a single lost sale and it couldn’t be further from the truth.

According to the survey, two-thirds of those who illegally download music spent an average of £75 ($123 USD) a year on music versus £44 ($72 USD) by those that don’t (10% buy a “lot more,” 16% a little more, and 47% “about the same).

It also says they are “active music buyers,” with 8 in 10 having purchased music, be it physical or digital, is the past 12 months.

“The people who file-share are the ones who are interested in music,” said Mark Mulligan of Forrester Research. “They use file-sharing as a discovery mechanism. We have a generation of young people who don’t have any concept of music as a paid-for commodity,” he continued. “You need to have it at a price point you won’t notice.”

The findings echo a number of studies that have come to the same conclusion, file-sharing actually increases legal music consumption.

The most recent was “Consumer Culture in Times of Crisis,” conducted by the the BI Norwegian School of Management, the largest business school in Norway and the second largest in all of Europe, which found that file-sharers actually buy 10 times as much music as they download for free.

Despite these findings UK Business Secretary Lord Mandelson plans to forge ahead with plans to disconnect repeat offenders, ala a “three-strikes” graduated response system, from the Internet.

In fact, a spokesman for his Department for Business, Innovation and Skills told the BBC that the survey’s report that 61% of illegal downloaders would be encouraged to stop using “unofficial services for accessing music without permission” with the threat of Internet suspension for one month proves that the plan will work.

“While surveys asking people about unlawful behavior should be treated with caution, it’s encouraging that the findings signal that the three-pronged approach set out by the Government this week – a mix of education, enforcement and attractive new commercial deals – provides the best way forward for industry and consumers,” said the spokesman.

He also alluded to the scale of the problem posing a “threat” to the “long-term sustainability” of the creative content industries, but the 7 million file-sharer myth, also oddly perpetuated by the Independent, has long since been debunked.

The estimated number of illegal file-sharers is actually 6.7 million, not 7 million (it was rounded up), and is based on a questionable proportion of the UK’s estimated online population. The actual figure is between 5.6 and 3.9 million.

“The latest approach from the Government will not help prop up an ailing music industry,” said Peter Bradwell of Demos. “Politicians and music companies need to recognize that the nature of music consumption has changed, and consumers are demanding lower prices and easier access.”

The survey was conducted online and canvassed some 1,008 adults aged 16-50yo.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Many times we see a video uploaded by a friend or family member to Facebook and would love to be able to embed it elsewhere or to simply download a copy to save for personal use.

Facebook obviously doesn’t offer either of these options and so people have to figure out a way to do it on their own.

The easiest method I’ve come across so far is by using a Firefox add-on called Facebook Video 2.1.8, and with it I’ll show you step by step how to get started downloading video from Facebook in no time at all.

STEP #1

Firstly, you must use Mozilla’s Firefox Internet browser.

STEP #2

Secondly, install the Facbook Video 2.1.8 add-on for Firefox.

STEP #3

Now find a video you want to work with. We’ll go over the three options which are to embed, download, or convert to other formats.

Notice the options available before installing Facebook Video 2.1.8.

Now notice those available afterwards.

Embedding and Customizing Video

If you want to embed the video on a another website simply select the “Embed this Video” link on the right and then copy and past the code wherever you choose. Note that you can also customize this code by selecting the “Customize Code” link and entering desired width and length dimensions.

Downloading Video

Select the “Download Video” link. The video will then open up as an .mp4 object, filling the window in its entirety. Now select “Save Page As” from the File tab in the Firefox menu and choose where you want to save it on your PC.

Converting Video

To convert the video to another format select “Convert Video.” You’ll be taken to the Zamzar free file conversion website where you can then choose the format you want to convert it to: 3gp, .avi, iPhone, .flv, .wmv, or even .flac, .mp3, or .wav if you just want the audio from the video. Enter the email address of where you want to receive the converted file and press “Convert” to complete the process.

Oftentimes the debate over the illegal use of P2P software is framed around copyrighted media like movies and music, and never about the exchange of important data like that consumed by medical professionals.

Ken Masters of ITHealthEd conducted a study recently investigating the practice of medical students sharing non-open access (NOA) journals, ones available only through payment, by uploading them to public download sites as facilitated by an unnamed file-sharing website.

He monitored the site over a six-month period which, as of January 10th of this year, had a total of 127,626 registered users whom had created 30,558 threads and 298,280 posts.

What’s of most interest is the “Databases & Journals – Requests and Enquiries” forum which allowed users to request articles from NOA journals. People with access to them would download them and make them available to the requester in either the forum or a “publicly-accessible web site.” Users could request no more than 3 articles per day.

“Although many participants on this site are students, other users have identified themselves as practicing professionals or academic staff,” writes Masters.

Nature seems to have been the most popular publication with 118 articles requested.

Gastronintest Endoscopy Clin N Am had the highest mean number of views with 12.7.

Masters says that there was no overt sense of “vindictiveness” against copyright holders in the forums, but rather “a mood of togetherness, of openness and sharing, and communal assistance.”

Unfortunately for researchers and society alike it seems that since January of this year the site has become private and has frequently been offline.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

[Via Ars]

People involved with sensitive govt information still just can’t seem to realize the importance of keeping it away from contact with file-sharing software.

Earlier this year it was reported how a US Defense contractor employee had inadvertently leaked classified military information about Marine One, President Barack Obama’s helicopter, by using a P2P program without realizing that it would allow outside access to top secret data.

Now comes word that a junior staff member of Congress accidentally leaked the 22-page “Committee on Standards Weekly Summary Report” that details ongoing ethics panel investigations of some 33 lawmakers a several staff members.

“Individual error and sloppiness is always the Trojan horse of cybersecurity,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, chairman of the ethics committee.

The staffer has since been fired, for House rules require that “employees must protect the confidentiality of sensitive information from disclosure to

unauthorized individuals or groups.”

It occurs as the House is still considering the Informed P2P User Act (HR 1319) that would “prevent the inadvertent disclosure of information on a computer through the use of certain `peer-to-peer’ file sharing software without first providing notice and obtaining consent from the owner or authorized user of the computer.”

The bill requires file-sharing programs to provide “clear and conspicuous notice of which files are to be made available to another computer.” It would also make it illegal to prevent the authorized user of a computer to block the installation of a P2P file-sharing program, disable or remove the program.

Too bad it wouldn’t prevent people from storing sensitive govt data on PCs installed with P2P software in the first place.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Google has finally rolled out its new “Discover Music” platform that I first mentioned late last week.

Done after apparent urging by the music industry, the scheme is that Google will profit from ads on the results pages while record labels could spur interest and drive music sales.

As you can see below, a search query for a given artist returns results that include: 4 free streaming track links, news links, band site, video and image results.

It’s a pretty cool new feature from Google, and perhaps more importantly, shows what the music industry can do if it only it decided that it really does want to be more creative with reaching music fans. For most of its history it’s done all it can to make sure people can only enjoy music on its terms and wondered all the while why its profits have been declining year after year.

The only downside is that it’s not very groundbreaking and lacks any sort of wow factor, especially for BitTorrent users long accustomed to the search features of Waffles.fm, What.cd and the enhancements of OiNKPlus (see pic below).

It’s a nice start, and I hope it improves, but it’ll take more than a few streaming links and YouTube videos to have any real impact with music fans.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

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Watch Google’s info video….