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According to the BBC, the Swedish courts will hand down a verdict on Friday in the copyright lawsuit filed against the torrent tracking site called The Pirate Bay. But this lawsuit isn’t just about copyright laws — it’s about how the Web functions. Throughout the trial, The Pirate Bay’s defense has been to maintain that the site doesn’t host any material under copyright. The site only tracks torrents, giving the site’s users an easy way to find files and download them. In that sense, The Pirate Bay is really just a specialized search engine.
The torrent file protocol has a bad rap because of piracy but that’s not the main reason torrents exist. Torrents make it easier to distribute large files across networks. The initial file is called a seed. Computers that contact the server hosting the seed are called peers. As peers begin to download the seed, they make the file available for others to download.
It’s an exciting time to be a tech journalist. While the recession has venture capitalists in a panic and companies struggle to be innovative, Apple lawyers are having a field day. It’s time to put a spotlight on some major Apple lawsuits (and threats of lawsuits)! Let’s get to the core of the matter.
The Recording Industry Association of America and AT&T have reached an agreement under which the enormous Internet service provider will help stop sharing music files online.
Greg Sandoval at CNET wrote about the agreement, which AT&T executive Jim Cicconi told an audience at the Leadership Music Digital Summit conference in Nashville that his company had started issuing notices to its customers to take down music files they had made available. This jibes with the new antipiracy policy of the RIAA, which was announced in December. The organization said at the time that it would stop suing people and focus on working with broadband ISPs to eliminate music file sharing. CNET had already reported that Comcast and AT&T were on board with the new program.
Sandoval said the program is probably a test run for a stricter version to come later on. It’s possible that repeat violations could prompt ISPs working with the RIAA to cancel accounts — which seems counterintuitive to ISPs, who need their customers to stick around.
I’ve been putting off reading Make magazine for two reasons. One is that I don’t have the time, money or tools to work on many of the cool projects they list every issue. The other is that I’m fairly certain that my inexperience with tools will lead me to drill a hole in something I shouldn’t. Like my hand.
That said, I was reading Cory Doctorow’s Make Free column in issue 16 in which he discusses Selectable Output Control (SOC). Don’t know what it is? I didn’t either. According to Doctorow, it’s a technology that enables tags to be embedded in the signal that essentially allow broadcasters control what people listen to and watch, depending on the type of audio and video equipment they’re using.
Doctorow said that, for example, MTV could prevent ripping songs from the video stream by disabling audio playback if you’re not using equipment with DRM enabled.
The publishing industry and technology have a love-hate relationship — there are probably still some Franciscan monks who are still bitter over the invention of the Gutenberg printing press. Lately the publishing industry has locked horns with Amazon’s Kindle 2. It’s not because the publishing industry is scared of electronic books (though I’m sure there are plenty of publishers who are terrified). It’s because the Kindle 2 has a text-to-speech feature that allows you to listen to books read (in monotone) by a computerized voice.
The Authors Guild objected to this feature. In a story featured in USA Today, Authors Guild director Paul Aiken explained that authors may grant electronic publishing rights to one entity and audio rights to another. Merging the two would make matters more complicated from a contractual standpoint.
Amazon stated in a press release that the text-to-speech function violates no copyright laws, nor does it create a derivative work or count as a performance.
Will Facebook’s blunder change the way we write contracts forever?
by Jonathan Strickland | February 27, 2009
February has been a rough month for Facebook. The social networking site implemented new terms of service (ToS) that had the Internet in a tizzy earlier this month. The ToS implied that not only would Facebook have the right to use any current content uploaded to the site in any way imaginable, but also any content that users had deleted or removed from the site. Under this ToS agreement, anything you ever put on Facebook stopped being yours from that moment on.
The ensuing uproar from Facebook members was enough for Facebook to backtrack and revert to its previous ToS agreement. Since then, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has posted a blog entry in the official Facebook blog. Zuckerberg says that from this moment on, Facebook will solicit input from its user base when making policy decisions that affect all users.
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