Control Freaks

The Dutch Usenet community (FTD) allows its nearly half a million members to discuss and report the location of material they find on Usenet, without explicitly linking to copyrighted content. The operators of the site see no harm in what they do, but according to Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN, online communities should not be entitled to allow these kinds of discussions on their websites.

Talking about copyrighted content on Usenet is illegal they argue, and BREIN wants FTD to be shut down for allowing this. The newsgroup community, however, is not prepared to tolerate BREIN's accusations and has decided to take action. Earlier this year FTD took BREIN to court, demanding that it should retract its numerous statements that FTD operates illegally.

In a letter to the court in this ongoing case, FTD's lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet stated yesterday that BREIN is going too far with its statements. Downloading copyrighted files and music for personal use is perfectly legal in The Netherlands, so he sees no reason why merely talking about it should be illegal.

Undeterred, BREIN maintained their stance and declared FTD a criminal operation. In a counter-claim against FTD, the anti-piracy outfit has demanded $70,000 a day in penalties if the Usenet chatter continues.

The verdict in this case is expected to be announced sometime next year.

In a ruling very similar to one handed down in Spain just last month, a French court has decreed that makers of Nintendo DS flash carts are not breaking the law.

French company Divineo was one of the defendants brought to court by Nintendo for making flash carts for the DS, which allow non-authorized games and media to be played on Nintendo's handheld game system. The court ruled that the carts are legal and extend the usefulness of the DS, states MaxConsole.net.

The court also apparently took umbrage with Nintendo for illegally protecting its system and locking out users and developers, though it should be noted that the MaxConsole site, according to various sources, is owned by Max Louran, the same individual that heads Divineo.

Google is now personalizing results even when users have not logged into its web-dominating search site.

Personalization is a euphemism for a Google-controlled practice that involves tweaking your search results according to your past web history. Mountain View was already doing this with users who had signed in to a Google account so they could use non-search services like Gmail and Google Calendar. But now it's targeting results for all users - whether they're logged in or not.

Google has always hoarded the search history of everyone visiting the site - whether they were logged in or not. But this is the first time Google has massaged results for users who haven't signed in. This is just one of the many reasons Google likes cookies.

The company's new cookie-based personalization is based on 9 months of stored data. And it's completely separate from account-based personalization.

Google does let you turn off personalization off. But it's on by default - and we all know that most people will leave it on.

Some of the biggest names on the web have written to Peter Mandelson to express grave concerns about elements of the Digital Economy Bill.

Facebook, Google, Yahoo and eBay object to a clause that they say could give government unprecedented and sweeping powers to amend copyright laws.

We urge you to remove Clause 17 from the bill, the letter read.

However, the government has said it believes the clause will future-proof online copyright laws .n The law must keep pace with technology, so that the Government can act if new ways of seriously infringing copyright develop in the future, a spokesperson for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

The consortium believe that if Clause 17, as it is known, is approved it will give any future Secretary of State the ability to amend copyright laws as they see fit. This power could be used, for example, to introduce additional technical measures or increase monitoring of user data even where no illegal practice has taken place, the letter read. This would discourage innovation and impose unnecessary costs representatives of the firms wrote.

Others have suggested that the clause could be used to tweak laws so that search engines could not publish summaries of news stories in their results. The consortium of companies say the clause is so broad ranging that it could risk legitimate consumer use of current technology as well as future developments .

While there is less will to penalize file-sharers in Spain, the same cannot be said about the sites that facilitate their downloading. New legislation is being mulled could allow them to be disconnected, without the need for a court order.

The new Sustainable Economy Law, sponsored by President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, includes draft amendments to legislation to protect intellectual property against piracy on the Internet .

It is proposed that new grounds for disconnection will be added to safeguard intellectual property rights . This will hand competent bodies the authority to require Internet service providers to supply information on customers who are deemed to be breaching copyright.

El Pais reports that there will not be an emphasis on disconnecting individual Internet users, but instead the focus will be on sites providing links to copyright works, of which there are several hundred in Spain.

In a statement, Spain's Minister for Culture, Ángeles González-Sinde, said that sites offering links to copyright works could be taken offline without a judicial order, an announcement which has met with firm opposition from activists.

This is the message we received when we played the new Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Temple Of Doom DVD.

All BBC and some film companies seem to limit the output of their DVD's.

If high definition output appears from and old DVD player, made say 2 or 3 years ago, then this resolution is prohibited.

The BBC and some film companies like Paramount, will not let you see the high output.

In other words if you want to watch HD you must pay for the companies exorbitantly priced HD disc's even if you have a high output DVD disc already,

The Pirate Bay team has announced that the world's largest BitTorrent tracker is shutting down for good. Although the site will remain operational for now, millions of BitTorrent users will lose the use of its tracker and will instead have to rely on DHT and alternative trackers to continue downloading.

In the fall of 2003, a group of friends from Sweden decided to launch a BitTorrent tracker named The Pirate Bay . It soon became one of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet, coordinating the downloads of more than 25 million peers at its height.

Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It's the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well, the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.

Microsoft has once again taken out its ban stick, this time in an effort to prevent modified Xbox 360s from accessing Xbox Live.

A story on GamesIndustry.biz estimates the total number of banned accounts at around 600,000. Total Xbox Live accounts number over 20 million.

Modded console owners will still be able to use their 360s offline.

The German Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe recently upheld provision 53 of that country's copyright law against a legal challenge by the record industry who oppose the provision for allowing digital copying of CDs for private use.

The court dismissed the claim on technical grounds because the provision was part of the copyright law of 2003, and a claim has to be filed within one year of it taking effect.

The record industry had been trying to argue that it could challenge the provision based on the fact that the country's copyright law was later revised again in 2008, resetting the clock for a potential challenge.

What's sad is that the music industry would even try to fight the ability of music fans to make backup copies of purchased CDs. It's emblematic of its long history of doing all it can to enrage its customers in the pursuit of maximizing profits. But, it's worth mentioning the music industry's not alone. The MPAA has also argued that making even one copy of a DVD is illegal.

Norwegian ISP Telenor and other ISPs shouldn't be forced to decide which sites or services should be blocked, that only authorities can make that determination.

A Norwegian District Court ruled in favor of ISP Telenor recently in its battle with International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the Norwegian videogram association (Norsk Videogramforening) and the Norwegian Film Distributors Association over demands that it prevent customers from accessing Swedish BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay.

The Court ruled that Telenor is not illegally contributing to any copyright violations by The Pirate Bay and that there is subsequently no legal basis for forcing it to block the site.

Telenor and other Internet providers, including private companies, may have to do an evaluation on whether an Internet page or service shall be blocked or not, reads the ruling. This is an evaluation normally assigned to the authorities, and in the court's view, today's situation makes it unnatural to assign such responsibility to private companies.

Telenor believes that the best way of ensuring sustainable revenues for copyright holders is to develop business models and services that make websites like The Pirate Bay less attractive.

Europe is set to get a major facelift of its telecommunications regulation after negotiators reached an agreement to pass a raft of new laws, addressing an array of topics from net neutrality to online piracy.

The negotiators, representing the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of Ministers compromised on aspects of the Telecoms Reform Package, which will now become part of national legislation in every EU country, with a deadline of May 2011.

The Telecoms Reform Package had dragged on for six months because of the debate over a provision relative to the three strikes laws targeting Internet users suspected of unlawful file-sharing of copyrighted material. Under the newly minted compromise, any decision to sever Internet access to clamp down on digital copying of music and movies must be subject to a legal review.

The promotion of legal offers, including across borders, should become a priority for policy-makers, said Viviane Reding, the EU Telecoms Commissioner: Three-strikes -laws, which could cut off Internet access without a prior fair and impartial procedure or without effective and timely judicial review, will certainly not become part of European law.

With the piracy sanctions issue resolved, the European Parliament and Council of Ministers are expected this month to adopt the telecommunications package, which among other provisions will create a new EU telecommunications regulator, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications.

A vote is on the reforms is due by the end of the year.

The Stockholm District Court has taken action against two founder members of The Pirate Bay. Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij are now banned from operating the site and will have to pay fines of $71,000 each if they continue.

This, despite the fact that they nor the site remain in Sweden.

In August the bandwidth supplier to The Pirate Bay was ordered by a court to disconnect the world's largest BitTorrent tracker from the Internet. Within hours the site had relocated to a new host, which immediately received similar threats. After periods of downtime, the Pirate Bay eventually regained stability in recent days. Although these attempts failed, the authorities weren't about to give up in their quest to shut down the site.

Ex-Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, who appears to be excluded from the decision, is notably annoyed, noting that neither the founders nor the site are located in Sweden. He argues that the Swedish court has no jurisdiction in this case: Frederick and Godfrid live outside Sweden, even outside the EU. The Pirate Bay is outside the EU, he told SR earlier today: How then can the Stockholm District Court, Sweden, get to decide that people abroad must not work on a site in another country?

Another issue that complicates the ruling is that it is pretty much impossible to check whether or not Fredrik and Gottfrid are complying to the demands. Thus far the Pirate Bay website is still up and running and the two founders are not essential to keep it that way.

The results of a new poll reveal the extent of opposition to Peter Mandelson's proposals for tough sanctions against alleged file-sharers. The survey, commissioned by the Open Rights Group, shows that not only is the public in favor of due process, but a third would be much less likely to vote for political parties supporting these proposals.

Driven largely by the big-label international music business, proposals for disconnecting alleged file-sharers are now common in many countries. Having achieved some kind of momentum in France, the lobbying shifted focus to the UK, with Mandelson advocating harsh punishment for persistent infringers, or more accurately, those that are persistently accused.

Opposition to such plans are widespread, but until recently, public opinion hadn't been tested in a measurable way. Today we have a much clearer idea, as results from a YouGov poll commissioned by the Open Rights Group have been released.

A significant 68% of those surveyed felt that individuals accused of illicit file-sharing should have the right to a fair trial before their accounts were disconnected or otherwise interfered with as punishment. Just 16% of respondents said they would be happy for Internet users to have their accounts automatically suspended once their ISP had received a number of accusations.

While 44% said the proposals would not influence their vote, just under a third of respondents (31%) said they would be much less likely to vote for a political party that endorsed disconnection from the Internet without a trial. Just 7% said they were more likely to support a party bringing in such sanctions.

Jim Killock, executive director at the Open Rights Group, feels that the government is out of step. Our conclusion must be that this is a politically unwise move, that will be unpopular and a vote loser for its architects, he said, noting that such measures will fail to meet their objectives. [They] won't make a single penny for artists, or help online music businesses get off the ground, he added.

Americans do not want to be given tailored advertising based on monitoring of their online behaviour, according to what its authors call the first independent, academically rigorous survey of consumers' views.

Research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and the Berkeley Centre for Law and Technology has found that 66% of adult US citizens do not want advertising to be tailored to what advertisers think are their interests.

Publishers keen to increase advertising revenue and advertisers have claimed that tracking that does not identify users by name is acceptable to most people, because of the benefits that accrue from being shown more relevant ads. To marketers, it is self-evident that consumers want customized commercial messages, the academics' report says. The survey's data appear to refute that argument.

Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests, said the study. We conducted this survey to determine which view Americans hold. In high%ages, they stand on the side of privacy advocates. That is the case even among young adults whom advertisers often portray as caring little about information privacy, it said. Our survey did find that younger American adults are less likely to say no to tailored advertising than are older ones.

This survey's findings support the proposition that consumers should have a substantive right to reject behavioural targeting and its underlying practices, said the report.

The Pirate Party has opened up a branch in Australia and plans to contest the next federal election.

The party, which will campaign on a platform of anti-internet censorship and the decriminalisation of non-commercial file sharing, has already signed up 550 members, enough for it to register as a party with the Australian Electoral Commission.

It plans to hold internal elections for leadership positions - president, general secretary, treasurer and their deputies - on October 7.

But party spokesman Brendan Molloy was quick to point out that free file sharing was only one aspect of the overall mission, which was to bolster our nation's Democratic conventions . We've here to actively change the landscape of Australian politics forever, by advocating freer copyright and protection of our civil liberties, especially against [Communications Minister Stephen] Conroy's censorship regime, which is not welcome in Australia.

We also have a strong stance for the reform of the patent system to be much fairer, especially in regards to pharmaceuticals and software.

The party has branches in 35 countries and they all co-operate via a collective called Pirate Party International.

The Australian branch is headed by a University of Sydney law student, Rodney Sarkowsky.