The Great Geek Manual News

As we mentioned earlier in the week, EU commissioner McCreevy has been pushing for a longer copyright period for recorded performances. This proposal has now passed the commission and is on the way to the parliament. The upside however, is that the commission also aims to break music royalty monopolies.

The proposal, as we explained on Monday, is simple. Extend copyright by 45 years in order to help ’struggling session players’ earn money when they’re old. It seems a noble principle, and seems to be one that has convinced commissioners, in any case.

Perhaps the biggest incongruity that came from the announcements about it, is the feeling that session musicians, after being paid for the last 50 years for a single days work, need, all of a sudden to get another 45 years of payment.

You can bet the guy that put paper in the printer, that spat out the plans for McCreevy’s house hasn’t gotten paid for the last 50 years. I’ll bet the architect hasn’t either. However there is some reason that musicians, particularly jobbing musicians without the talent or ambition to head off on their own, should be paid for work of decades past. The press materials put out by the commission tries to spin a brave face on this, with the likes of frequently asked questions, and number 7 asks the question we all have…

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Source: Torrent Freak

A federal court on Tuesday sentenced a New York man to a 30-month prison term for sending unsolicited marketing e-mail to 1.2 million AOL subscribers, according to a Reuters report.

The court ordered Adam Vitale, 27, to also pay restitution of $180,000 to the Time Warner unit for violating federal antispam laws.

In 2005, Brooklyn resident Vitale and another man, Todd Moeller of New Jersey, cut a deal with a government informant to send junk e-mails that advertised a security computer program to nearly 1.3 million AOL subscriber addresses. Under that deal, the two men were to receive 50 percent of the product’s proceeds.

The two men avoided detection of AOL’s spam filter system through the use of several servers to relay and change the e-mail header information.

Moeller was sentenced to 27 months in jail last November.

Source: CNet

Apple has sued a Florida company which was selling Macintosh clones. Since May, Psystar has offered the computers online. In a lawsuit filed July 3, Apple asks a court to shut Psystar down and retrieve all computers already sold.

The lawsuit charges Psystar violated Apple trademark by selling altered versions of the Mac OS X operating system able to run on PCs. Apple and Psystar meet next in court Oct. 22 for a conference.

The Psystar Web site was offline Wednesday, according to the New York Times.

Source: All Headline News

Google and Viacom have reached a deal to protect the privacy of millions of YouTube watchers.

Earlier this month, a New York federal judge ordered Google to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom and other plaintiffs to help them prepare a confidential study of what they argue are vast piracy violations on the video-sharing site.

Google claims it had now agreed to provide plaintiffs’ attorneys with a version of a massive viewership database that blanks out YouTube usernames and IP addresses that could be used to identify individual video watchers.

“We have reached agreement with Viacom and the class action group [led by the English Football Assocation],” Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes claims. “They have agreed to let us anonymise YouTube user data.”

Yesterday, it was claimed that Viacom wanted details of what videos had been watched and uploaded by Google staff in a bid to prove the company’s staff were aware of illegal material being uploaded on to the site.

In a legal stipulation agreed to by attorneys for all major parties in the case, the sides agreed that the new data privacy agreement did not cover employees and that they would work out how to share this data separately in coming weeks.

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Source: PC Pro

A Southern California man who already served federal time for hacking into Lexis-Nexis has begun a state prison term for allegedly using his skills to try and extort phone sex from an internet celebrity.

Jeffrey Robert Weinberg, 23, pleaded no contest to a single count of computer intrusion in May, and was sentenced to two years in prison. He was transferred to California’s Tehachapi state prison on Thursday.
Amor

Weinberg was arrested by LAPD detectives in Southern California in January, following a weeks-long police investigation aided by victim Amor Hilton — a teenage MySpace user who had a popular video streaming show on Stickam.com.

According a blog post by Hilton prior to Weinberg’s arrest, she found herself locked out of her MySpace account on December 28, the same day she began receiving harassing phone calls from a hacker calling himself “V.I.P.” — a handle used by Weinberg in the past. The calls continued over the course of several days, and often took a threatening tone, she says.

During that time, the hacker allegedly disconnected Hilton’s cellphone account, and took over her account on Stickam. He allegedly demanded phone sex and nude photos from Hilton.

Hilton reported the harassment to the police, and recorded one of the phone calls. Weinberg was arrested after Hilton matched his mug shot to a photo the hacker had sent her.

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Source: The Wired Blog

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google’s liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

Viacom filed suit against Google in March 2007, seeking more than $1 billion in damages for allowing users to upload clips of Viacom’s copyright material. Google argues that the law provides a safe harbor for online services so long as they comply with copyright takedown requests.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling (.pdf) described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives. The judge also turned Google’s own defense of its data retention policies — that IP addresses of computers aren’t personally revealing in and of themselves, against it to justify the log dump.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has already reacted, calling the order a violation of the Video Privacy Protection act that “threatens to expose deeply private information.”

The order also requires Google to turn over copies of all videos that it has taken down for any reason. Viacom also requested YouTube’s source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google’s advertising database schema. Those requests were denied in whole, except that Google will have to turn over data about how often each private video has been watched and by how many persons.

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Source: Wired Blog

Another ex-administrator of former BitTorrent tracker Elitetorrents is facing prison time for his part in the site’s peer-to-peer sharing of copyright material.

Daniel Dove, 26, was convicted by a jury on separate counts of “conspiracy and felony copyright infringement,” the US Department of Justice announced today.

Dove helped supply pirated material to the website and recruited members who had high speed internet connections to join in uploading content.

Fellow admins, Scott McCausland, Grant Stanley, Sam Kuonen, and Scott Harvanek, all pleaded guilty to similar charges rather than take their cases to a jury. The DOJ says its the first criminal conviction after a jury trial for P2P copyright infringement.

EliteTorrents was one of the largest “private” trackers in operation between 2003 and 2005. In May, 2005, Operation D-Elite, a combined force of the FBI CyberCrime Fraud Unit and Homeland Security, shut down the site. The Motion Picture Association of America also provided “substantial assistance” to the D-Elite investigation.

Working on 10 search warrants, The Feds seized control of the EliteTorrents’ central server to obtain information about the site’s administrators. According to the DOJ, they found more than 17,800 movie titles being seeded by about 133,000 EliteTorrents members. They contend many of the movies distributed on the site, such as Star Wars Episode III, appeared there before the movies were yet released in theaters. (Star Wars II: Revenge of the Sith appears again and again on DOJ press release for Operation D-Elite as an example. Somebody is a George Lucas fan.)

Dove’s sentencing is scheduled for September 9, 2008. He faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Source: The Register

Facebook agreed to pay an undisclosed amount of cash and stock to settle a long- running legal battle over whether founder Mark Zuckerberg stole ideas for the site from fellow Harvard students, according to court documents released late on Wednesday.

The parties in the case — which pitted Zuckerberg, a shy 24-year-old entrepreneur now worth billions of dollars, against former Harvard classmates and one-time U.S. Olympic team rowing hopefuls Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss — agreed to a tentative settlement deal in February, according to the court papers.

The settlement agreement was delayed by a subsequent challenge by the Winklevosses, who argued the deal was incomplete and that Facebook had committed fraud by failing to disclose crucial documents related to Zuckerberg’s actions.

On Wednesday, Judge James Ware of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California rejected those claims and ruled the settlement is enforceable and ordered the parties to a July 2 hearing to determine how to carry out the deal.

Facebook, begun as an online version of the introductory picture book first-year students at Harvard received to get acquainted with fellow students, has exploded into a worldwide phenomenon over the past four years for allowing Web users to share private details with a select group of their friends.

The dispute centered on accusations Zuckerberg copied ideas for Facebook after being hired as a Harvard University sophomore by the Winklevoss brothers and a third partner to write code for a site called Harvard Connection.

Through the settlement, Facebook effectively agreed to buy ConnectU, the successor company to Harvard Connection founded by the Winklevoss brothers, partner Divya Narendra, for cash and common stock.

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Source: iT News

A 21-year old man was yesterday sentenced to four months in prison for shining a laser pointer at a police helicopter.

Dean Bottomley of Stockport, Greater Manchester had already pleaded guilty to endangering an aircraft.

The helicopter pilot said the £30 laser pen made him temporarily blind and unable to see instruments because the cockpit was flooded with light. The helicopter suffered a previous dazzle attack earlier in the evening.

The judge said the sentencing included a deterrent and Bottomley needed to “get out of this stupidity phase”, the BBC reports.

There have been several similar attacks this year. In New South Wales, Australia, which has seen attacks on passenger aircraft, the pointers have been classified as deadly weapons and will require a permit as if they were firearms.

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Source: The Register

A woman in her 20s was hit by a streetcar this week while listening to her iPod, prompting police to issue a stern warning to pedestrians who pay more attention to tunes than traffic.

She had just stepped off a southbound streetcar when another streetcar coming northbound pulled up and rang its warning bells. But the woman failed to stop and suffered a mangled shoulder and a bad cut to her head, said Sergeant Tim Burrows of the Toronto Police traffic services unit, all because her iPod volume masked the streetcar’s rumble.

“Your sight and your hearing, we rely on those things. Even the bell of a cyclist can save your life,” he said.

The safety alert comes as more pedestrians and cyclists listen to music, an act that should be considered a real safety concern says Brian Patterson of the Ontario Safety League. “The best way to explain it is you lessen your safety envelope around you when you lessen your sense of hearing,” he said.

Cities across the country have dealt with the phenomena experts attribute to a tech-savvy culture and a desire to block unwanted input. Vancouver police have seen a few messes where pedestrians have been distracted by music, although there is a city by-law barring cyclists from wearing headphones.

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Source: Canada’s Globe and Mail

One of the most closely-watched file-sharing cases is a step closer to an end. A federal judge has awarded exonerated RIAA defendant Tanya Andersen $107,834 in attorneys’ fees, a figure that isn’t exactly what either party wanted. Andersen, a single mother in Oregon, was accused by the RIAA in 2005 of sharing music over KaZaA. Andersen denied the charges, filed a countersuit, and the RIAA finally dismissed the lawsuit last summer. Once the RIAA dismissed the case, she sought and won an attorneys’ fees award as the prevailing party.

In a five-page opinion (PDF, found via Recording Industry vs The People), Judge James A. Redden agreed with a magistrate judge’s calculations, rejecting both Andersen’s argument for a significantly higher fee award and the RIAA’s appeal for a much lower legal bill. Andersen’s attorney, Lory Lybeck, had sought nearly $300,000—about $150,000 in fees and a multiplier of double the fee due to his “high-risk” and “successful” defense.

The RIAA countered that the $298,995 fee sought was “excessive” and that it should instead be in the neighborhood of one-tenth of that number. The labels said it was nothing more than a “straightforward” copyright infringement case, and that its independent experts thought the fees sought were excessive in many respects. In particular, the RIAA focused on the fact that Andersen occasionally had more than one attorney present at hearings, arguing that one attorney was sufficient. The problem with that reasoning is that the RIAA found it necessary to have as many as six attorneys present at a single hearing.

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Source: Ars Technica

The awkward compromise that once formed the foundation of the US broadband policy will make a return trip to the Supreme Court this fall, as the Justices have accepted a case that will allow them to further refine the role that antitrust law plays in the semiregulated market for DSL access. The case arises out of a suit filed by an ISP against what was SBC California, which has made its way through appeals in the 9th Circuit. The legal maneuvering prior to the Supreme Court’s acceptance of the case saw the Department of Justice facing off against the Federal Communications Commission in a demonstration of how awkward the politics of the US broadband market have become.

The case stems from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, as implemented by the FCC, attempted to open up the “last mile” of phone lines to competition. The implementation left phone companies in the awkward position of leasing their wiring to companies that competed with the telcos’ own ISP services. To the surprise of no one, the behavior of the phone companies was less than admirable, as they used high wholesale access prices and various forms of poor service to dissuade customers from choosing any service other than their own.

This pattern of behavior produced a number of lawsuits, one of which has already reached the Supreme Court. In Verizon v. Trinko (PDF), the court ruled that the FCC’s intervention in the market obviated some aspects of antitrust law. In the absence of the regulatory compulsion, the court ruled, Verizon really had no interest in selling broadband access to other ISPs. Since they were forced into the wholesale broadband market, that regulatory force was the controlling principle, freeing Verizon from antitrust concerns regarding its wholesale service.
FCC

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Source: Ars Technica

The Electronic Frontier Foundation weighed in this week on the Jammie Thomas file-swapping case, where the judge has asked for public comment on whether just making a file available for download on a P2P network should count as copyright infringement. In its filing (PDF), the EFF goes for the jugular, seeking to show that the RIAA’s entire approach to file-swapping cases is flawed.

Not only does the Copyright Act not grant a “making available” right, the EFF said, but trade groups also shouldn’t be allowed to claim that an actual distribution took place based solely on downloads from their own investigators. Together, this two-part theory would effectively eviscerate the RIAA’s current legal campaign by making it nearly impossible for copyright holders to show that infringing distributions to the public have taken place over P2P networks.

To tackle the first part of the equation, the so-called “making available” right, the brief makes an argument based largely on “the plain language of the Copyright Act and applicable precedents” (this was the same approach taken earlier in the week by a group of copyright scholars).

It claims that the right “to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public” granted in the Copyright Act means that an actual distribution must be proven. This is a more demanding standard of evidence than simply showing a judge that copyrighted files exist in a user’s shared file folder on a P2P network.

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Source: Ars Technica

One of the oldest contested file-sharing cases has come to an abrupt and unexpected end. In a motion filed last month, but only uncovered today by Ray Beckerman, the RIAA has dismissed a two-year-old lawsuit filed against Joan Cassin. The dismissal is without prejudice, which means the RIAA could sue Cassin once again, but Cassin’s attorney would likely argue that the label’s recent dismissal is a final adjudication on the merits; more on that below.

Cassin was sued in April 2006 for copyright infringement. The boilerplate complaint used by the RIAA at the time is light on the details, but the exhibits attached to the filing show that MediaSentry detected a user with the handle omc@KaZaA sharing 406 files on KaZaA, including tracks from Madonna, Bob Seger, Dixie Chicks, and Sade.

Instead of filing an answer, Cassin’s attorney (who works at the same law firm as Beckerman) filed a motion to dismiss in early 2007. One of the issues raised in the motion was the now-well-known argument that merely making a file available over a P2P network constitutes distribution. Indeed, Warner v. Cassin l