The Great Geek Manual News

A Swedish court handed down a guilty verdict and a year in prison on Friday to all four defendants in a copyright test case involving The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s biggest free file-sharing websites.

The verdict could be a step toward helping music and film companies seeking to recoup millions of dollars in lost revenues from filesharers, though analysts said they doubted it would stem the tide of illegal downloading.

“The Stockholm district court has today found guilty the four individuals that were charged with accessory to breaching copyright laws,” the court said in a statement. “The court has sentenced each of them to one year in prison.”

Companies including Warner Bros., MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI were also asking for damages of more than 100 million crowns ($12 million) to cover lost revenues.

The court also ordered the defendants to pay just over 30 million Swedish crowns ($3.58 million).

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Source: Reuters

The four defendants in the high-profile Pirate Bay trial face year-long jail terms if found guilty when the verdict gets announced in Stockholm, Sweden, on Friday. But even if prosecutors get their way, it’s less evident whether a legal victory would also translate to a broader deterrent against illegal file sharing.

Clearly, this case is being viewed on both sides of the Atlantic as a potentially landmark decision in the heated controversy surrounding unauthorized Internet file sharing. The prosecution accuses the four men standing trial–Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundstrom–of making copyright-protected material available through the Web site thepiratebay.org, one of the most visited BitTorrent destinations in the world.

The challenge for prosecutor Hakan Roswall has been to prove that the site actually can be legally linked to copyright infringement. He got off to a bumpy start. On the second day of the 13-day trial, which began in February, Roswall was forced to drop accusations that the defendants facilitated making illegal copies. Now the prosecution’s case hinges on whether it can prove that the four men were guilty of making the files accessible.

No actual material is stored on the Web site that features a search function for torrent files used for file sharing with the BitTorrent technology–which is legal in itself, but commonly used for illegal file sharing.

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Source: CNet

Artists in the UK complain that YouTube pays obscenely low rates for music videos and that they can actually make more from local radio. But that doesn’t mean they want their work pulled from YouTube; on the contrary, they need the exposure and simply want YouTube to pay more per play.

Google, under increasing attack for devastating the newspaper business, now finds itself pilloried in the UK for killing music. The company’s YouTube subsidiary has not renewed its music video deals in the UK and in Germany, claiming that the licenses now cost far too much money, but musicians aren’t buying it. They want Google to put their videos back up and then start paying more—a lot more.

At a recent press conference in London, the cowriter of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” said that the song had been viewed more than 154 million times on YouTube—thanks to Rickrolling—but that he had received a grand total of £11. Pete Waterman claimed that he made more cash from local radio stations in the UK than he did from YouTube, then compared the situation to migrant workers in the Middle East. “I feel like one of those workers,” he said, “because I earned less for a year’s work off Google or YouTube than they did off the Bahrain government.”

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Source: Ars Technica

Statutory damages in the US can be claimed by copyright holders in lieu of actual damages, and they range from $750 to $30,000 per infringement (or up to $150,000 when the infringement is “willful”). These huge ranges, and the lack of useful guidance on how to implement them, have led to both wildly inconsistent damage awards and huge penalties for small crimes. Here’s how two leading copyright professors sum up the problem, drawing on the Jammie Thomas P2P case in Minnesota:

Actual damages in the Thomas case were arguably about $50. Given the defendant’s lack of innocence, the jury had no choice but to award Capitol Records at least $750 per infringed work (which would have totaled $18,000). Some jurors were so outraged by Thomas’ conduct that they wanted to award Capitol Records $3.6 million for this infringement.

Recent rulings have “exacerbated the potential for excessive and arbitrary awards when skillful lawyers are able to persuade juries to become outraged about infringing conduct.”

So how do we fix the system? Pam Samuelson and Tara Wheatland, both of the University of California, Berkeley, have some suggestions.

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Source: Ars Technics

I’m betting Michael DuBose, chief of the Justice Department’s Computer Crime & Intellectual Propety Section, is a Steven Seagal fan. At a hearing held Tuesday by the US Sentencing Commission, Dubose warned that “cyber-criminals are increasingly using sophisticated technological tools like ‘proxies’ to evade detection and prosecution.” Naturally, I immediately thought of Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, in which the flabbifying action hero must track down nefarious hacker Travis Dane (playwright Eric Bogosian slumming for a paycheck), who has seized control of a government satellite weapon. Just when the grim-faced folks in the government command center think they’ve got a lock on the hijacked bird—bang!—the screens are filled with 50 “ghost” satellites Dane has created to throw them off the trail. Proxies!

In reality, of course, proxy servers and anonymous routing are not l33t haxx0r tools, but rather a feature of modern Internet use so commonplace and banal that Web surfers in corporate or university environments routinely make use of proxied connections without even knowing it. But the Justice Department is urging the Sentencing Commission to recognize proxies as “sophisticated means” automatically meriting stiffer penalties when used in the course of a computer crime.

Pursuant to the Identity Theft Enforcement and Restitution Act of 2008 (which wound up passing in September as a component of the Former Vice President Protection Act—ah, Washington!), the Commission’s recommended penalties are supposed to take into account “the level of sophistication and planning” involved in a computer crime. Someone who makes use of “special skills” or “sophisticated means” to break the law gets their offense bumped by two “levels” of severity (out of a total of 43) when it comes time for sentencing. Though a complex table determines exactly what that means in a specific case, in general an increase of two levels seems to be worth an additional four to six months in prison.

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Source: Ars Technica

Those who oppose the RIAA’s lawsuit campaign against file-sharers may be tempted to see Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson as a white knight who hoists the Lance of Sheer Intellect and Harvard’s Shield of Obscene Endowments, who jousts with music industry lawyers and knocks them, one by one, from their chargers. And he may well do so.

But, in defending Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum and challenging the constitutionality of massive statutory damage awards, Nesson has also managed to infuriate the federal judge overseeing the case. Judge Nancy Gertner last night got so fed up with Nesson that she wrote in a court order, “The Court will not hesitate to impose appropriate sanctions, including potentially substantial costs, should the Defendant waste either the Plaintiffs’ time and money or scarce judicial resources by filing frivolous motions in the future.”

At issue is Nesson’s attempt to depose lawyer Matt Oppenheim, an outside lawyer who coordinates many of the RIAA’s legal cases and represents the group at settlement conferences. Music industry lawyers had already complained about this, telling the court that Nesson hadn’t followed the rules when he made his deposition request. Further, he wanted to grill Oppenheim in a large Harvard classroom, and he apparently wanted to ask about material that would almost totally be covered by attorney-client privilege.

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Source: Ars Technica

The French attempt to pass the world’s toughest “graduated response” law against P2P file-sharers has been en retard for months. But the negotiations are finally over, the “Création et Internet” bill has been drafted, and today it finally came up before the National Assembly for debate. Despite furious opposition, the bill could well pass soon, laying down severe penalties for “not securing one’s Internet connection” and forcing public WiFi operators to allow access only to a “white list” of acceptable sites. And all this for one industry.

The French law goes by many names. Officially called “Création et Internet,” it is also known as the “Loi Olivennes” after Denis Olivennes, the head of French electronics giant FNAC. Olivennes headed the group that came up with the plan, which will be implemented by a new group called HADOPI—which is why the bill is also known as HADOPI.

But whatever one calls it, the principles remain the same. When ISPs are notified about alleged file-sharing, they first send an e-mail to the customer involved. The second time, the customer gets a registered letter. The third time, the customer gets booted off the ‘Net for three months to a year. (A HADOPI blacklist will apparently keep blocked users from simply switching ISPs.)

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Source: Ars Technica

A 21 year old student faces twenty years in prison for accessing Sarah Palin’s email account and publishing what he found.

David Kernell, son of Democratic Tennessee state Representative Mike Kernell, is facing four charges of intentionally accessing the account without authorisation, fraud, unlawful electronic transmission of material outside Tennessee and attempts to conceal records to impede an FBI investigation.

If convicted he faces 20 years in prison, a fine of up to US$250,000 and five years supervised release.

Kernell is charged with using publically available data to guess the password on the then vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account. He then passed the emails on to online information site Wikileaks.

The case that Palin was using her internet email account for official government business as governor of Alaska, and she was to hand over the account details. All official business is supposed to be carried out on government accounts for oversight purposes.

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Source: iT News

The major music labels promised last year to end their sue-’em-all approach to dealing with copyright infringement online. So why is the RIAA still spearheading lawsuits against individuals in Omaha? The answer is more complicated than you might expect.

When the music labels unearth a file-sharer to prosecute, they apply the thumbscrews gently at first. The accused infringer receives a letter asking him or her to settle, usually for $3,000 to $4,000. That’s a lot, but those who don’t settle face much worse.

Now, exposing oneself to certain kinds of new music might actually be worth that outrageous fee, but the people that the RIAA fingers generally turn out to have truly execrable taste in music—or perhaps the lawyers simply pluck out horrible songs on purpose to make the legal process as embarrassing as possible.

Case in point: Shaun Adams, a resident of Nebraska, who has just been named in a file-sharing lawsuit filed in an Omaha federal court this week. Adams is accused of sharing nine songs, including “I Want Action” by 80s hair-metal band Poison, “Drug Ballad” by Eminem, and “I’m Real” from an album that someone actually had the temerity to call J To Tha L-O!: The Remixes. (And the less said about the song “Thuggish Ruggish Bone” the better.)

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Source: Ars Technica

Microsoft and the EU aren’t going to be exchanging love letters anytime soon, but the EU’s decision to relax the level of scrutiny it previously mandated should help ease tensions between the two behemoths. In a statement issued Wednesday, the Commission announced that it would no longer require an independent oversight committee to maintain constant vigilience over Microsoft, thanks to “changes in Microsoft’s behavior, the increased opportunity for third parties to exercise their rights directly before national courts and experience gained since the adoption of the 2004 Decision.”

That last reason is by far the most interesting, but the Commission refuses to explore exactly which experiences led it to reverse its stance. The EC’s official filing states that Microsoft has properly documented the original set of interoperability data, and adopted legal phrasing within its own licensing agreements that gives the licensee more legal options if a conflict should arise over document access. Ongoing monitoring is deemed “still necessary,” but can be handled by technical consults that can be brought in on an as-needed basis.

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Source: Ars Technica

The chief prosecutor in The Pirate Bay trial wants to see each of the four defendants spend a year in prison for running the BitTorrent tracker website.

Håkan Roswall argued that the sentences should be handed to the four men accused in the case during a closing statement he made in the Stockholm district court this morning, according to Swedish online news site The Local.

He claimed that The Pirate Bay brought in around 10m kronor ($1.1m) a year, which to him proved that it was much more than simply a “hobby site” as has been argued by its cofounders’ defence lawyers during the case.

Roswall compared Peter Sunde, Carl Lundström, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg’s involvement in The Pirate Bay’s operations with complicity in crimes like assault under Swedish law.

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Source: The Register

In a move sure to stoke debates over constitutional protections against self-incrimination in the digital age, a federal judge has ordered a child porn suspect to decrypt his hard drive so prosecutors can inspect its contents.

In a ruling issued last month, US District Judge William Sessions in Vermont ruled criminal defendant Sebastien Boucher does not have a constitutional right to keep the files encrypted. The ruling reversed an earlier decision by a federal magistrate that said forcing Boucher to enter his password into his laptop would violate his Fifth-Amendment rights against self incrimination. Boucher’s attorney is appealing Sessions’s ruling, according to CNET News, which reported the story earlier.

The case is believed to be one of the first times a court has decided whether the Fifth Amendment bars prosecutors from forcing a criminal defendant to surrender a computer password. It’s well settled that suspects must turn over keys if they’re deemed relevant to a criminal case. Compelling a defendant to turn over the combination to a safe, on the other hand, has generally been considered off limits because it would “convey the contents of one’s mind,” an act that’s tantamount to testifying, Magistrate Judge Jerome J. Niedermeier wrote in a November ruling in the case.

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Source: The Register

There has been high drama on the second day of the Pirate Bay trial. Due to serious shortcomings in the prosecution evidence, around 50% of the charges in the case are going to have to be withdrawn. The defense describes it as a ’sensation’, seeing half of the charges being dropped on the second day.

What has been shown in court today is that the prosecutor cannot prove that the .torrent files he is using as evidence actually used The Pirate Bay’s tracker. Many of the screenshots being used clearly state there is no connection to the tracker. Additionally, prosecutor Håkan Roswall didn’t adequately explain the function of DHT which allows for so called “trackerless” torrents.

The flaw in the evidence was pointed out by Fredrik Neij (TiAMO), who requested to comment on Roswall’s explanation of how BitTorrent actually works. Fredrik said that the prosecution misunderstood the technology, and told the court that the evidence doesn’t show that the Pirate Bay’s trackers are used.

This has resulted in prosecutor Håkan Roswall having to drop all charges relating to “assisting copyright infringement”, so the remaining charges are simply ‘assisting making available’. “Everything related to reproduction will be removed from the claim,” he said.

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Source: Torrent Freak

The Pirate Bay’s “spectrial” got underway in Sweden Monday morning as prosecutors laid out the charges. Appearing before a packed house of bloggers, press, and people dressed as pirates, prosecutor Hakan Roswall made his opening statement, charging The Pirate Bay with aiding in massive copyright infringement and profiting from its actions.

Three Pirate Bay defendants and Carl Lundstom, a Swedish businessman who used to run Rix Telecom and is accused of being a Pirate Bay investor, were in the dock listening. Roswall painted the group as businesspeople out to make serious money from their operations, and he detailed the site’s genesis and growth since being launched back in 2004.

Those who understand what The Pirate Bay is and how BitTorrent works won’t find much new or shocking in Roswall’s summary of the case; the question is simply whether creating a search engine and tracker service that traffics mainly in copyrighted content is illegal in Sweden or not.

The music labels did provide a bit of new information, however—specifically, the amount of money they want from The Pirate Bay. It turns out to be over $13 million (117 million kronor).

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Source: Ars Technica